David Walsh, Woolman Lecture II: "Rights as an Epiphany of the Person"

2600 Cleveland Avenue Northwest,Canton OH 44709

18 March, 2021

Description

Against the idea that we must have an understanding of human nature before talk of human dignity and human rights, the order is reversed. To demonstrate how our understanding of the person emerges more in the realm of practice than in theory, Prof. Walsh continues his Woolman Lectures by revisiting the last chapter of his book Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being. Contrary to the usual idea that we must have an understanding of human nature before we can talk of human dignity and human rights, he argues that the order is more properly reversed. It is through respecting the rights of one another that we gain a glimpse the inexhaustibility of each one. We regard persons as flashes of transcendence in a finite world. They cannot reach a point where their worth has been used up. In many ways this is the paradigmatic case of the refraction of the Christian perspective within political reality. There remain of course many issues to be sorted out in the understanding of dignity and rights but its purpose is no longer in dispute. Biography: David Walsh is Professor of Politics with teaching and research interests in the field of political theory broadly conceived. His focus has been on the question that the modern world poses for itself at its deepest level. Does our civilization possess the moral and spiritual resources to survive? In response to that question Walsh has traced the modern retrieval order in a trilogy of works. First, is the catharsis evoked by the totalitarian crisis that called forth an affirmation of truth beyond the abyss. This is explored in After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom (1990). Second, there is the emergence of a minimal order within the abbreviations that became the liberal democratic form. The Growth of the Liberal Soul (1997) tracks both the contemporary debates and the historical unfolding of the principles that maximize individual liberty while also sustaining civic virtue. Finally, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (2008) reflects on the overarching philosophical horizon of modernity. It finds that the narrative is best characterized as a re-founding of the classical and Christian understanding rather than a radical departure from it. One of the results of these studies has been a renewed interest in the centrality of the person from whom order radiates into social and political existence. The first phase of this new direction has appeared in Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being (2016), and a companion volume, The Priority of the Person (2020).