Generational Knowledge, Part One: Man’s Original Solitude

Over the course of three papers, I will discuss the family as the means of handing down knowledge from generation to generation, and demonstrate the role of the family as a school for humanity.  This is part one.

Recently, I was given the opportunity to watch a remarkable docu-series entitled Quiet on the Set: the dark side of Kid TV.  The series follows the child stars involved in many of the Nickelodeon series from the turn of the century onwards, and outlines many of the trials they underwent as child actors.  Though it cannot be denied that some of these children were subject to horrendous experiences and workplace environments, what was most striking to me were the backgrounds of some of the children’s parents, interviewed for their involvement in getting the children onto the screen.  At least one of the parents attested to their own total initial willingness to involve her child in an acting career, specifically because her parents would never allow her to have any exposure to life as a Hollywood star.  As it turns out, the reason this parent was never allowed to pursue her own childhood stardom is because her parents (for clarity, the grandparents of the child star) were involved in Hollywood themselves, and knew many of the abuses and dangers that went along with it firsthand.  In what I felt was a final bit of irony within this series finale, the child actors of Nickelodeon were asked if they would let their own children pursue an acting career.  Unilaterally, they all answered a resounding no.  

The emphatic no that these child stars all anticipated presenting to their own children rings of familiarity from the beginning of the show, I must confess.  The knowledge of the atrocities of Hollywood - especially upon children - was knowledge their own family already had, and it was lost in one generation.  In fact, it became part of the very identity of the bridge generation (the child star’s parents) to remember that my own dream was crushed - so my children’s won’t be.  How do these children, tragically exposed to the harshness of the world as they were, expect to pass along this information from their generation to the next without actually creating the very environment which results in the perpetuation of the abuse, as did their own grandparents and parents?  This is a futile task, if the importance and true understanding of the family unit as the first society among humans and the educator of human flourishing is not understood as the primary way in which humans are taught and enter the world as fully formed human beings.   Children receive their identities from their families - or lack thereof - through the environment their parents create for them.  The family as a unit and as a school for humanity flows from the parents, forming the identities of the both the parents and their children, allowing them in turn to learn what the most defines the person and their freedom as it truly is: the ability to discern and choose that which truly makes them happy in the unique way God wishes to be known by each individual.

The first thing man becomes aware of is his own consciousness: that he is a thinking, feeling being, apart from everything which he perceives through his body.  Because he is a body-soul composite, man is drawn towards that which is spiritual through his powers of reason, but only acts as fully man when he achieves an integration of his human body with the actions and knowledge of his spiritual faculties.  This much to say: without our bodies, we are not fully human.   In that moment of original cognition of himself, man at once sees that his body, joined together with his spiritual consciousness, “by which man shares in the visible created world, makes him at the same time aware of being ‘alone’” (Man and Woman He Created Them).  He sees himself as a body among bodies, set apart and different from the rest of Creation because his own being as unique subject is incommunicable in his original solitude.  This solitude is not insurmountable, however: in His goodness, God designed and created two genders within Human Nature, which together complete and make the species (and therefore Man as homo) whole: male and female.  In creating one species with two genders, man is able to surmount this initial solitude of himself as a body among bodies: the dichotomy and experience of the masculine and feminine, “expresses itself as an overcoming of the frontier of solitude and at the same time [is] an affirmation - for both human beings - of everything in solitude that constitutes ‘man’” (Man and Woman He Created Them).  The physical body makes no sense and is absurd outside of the context of the oppositeness of the sexes, and in the context of his search for communion within a relationship based on an I-thou beholding of another subject through love and self gift, man is forced to admit that sexuality and fertility is an integral part of the human person.  A total gift of self presupposes a complementary sexual being who can receive the sexuality and fertility of myself.  I cannot give something to someone who cannot receive it, for then it would not be a gift, nor would it be for the person I am trying to give it to.  Adam would have remained in one sense still alone in the garden, if instead of Eve, let’s say Benjamin was created, for Benjamin would not have been truly outside of Adam - intrinsically they would have been the same.  Eve is the only possible new creation which completes Man, bringing Adam outside of himself through an encounter with a person who is intrinsically other.  Man from the beginning of time, was created as a complete whole by the creation of male and female.  Because God created man and woman together as one whole species with, “the capacity and responsibility [of] love and communion,” this love and communion, “which includes the human body [as a] sharer in spiritual love… is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being” (Familiaris Consortio).  

That Man as homo is incomplete without the creation of both male and female is not to say that the individual person is fractional - an incomplete subject without a relationship with another human - however.  For Pope Saint John Paul II, individual identity of personhood itself is intricately tied in with the concept of conscience, which Ratzinger would later call Anamnesis: that inclination at the core of man’s being where he is alone with God and called to seek and recognize God, the Chief Good, to choose to act according to what brings the human person closer to God wherever He can be encountered.  Without a sense of God and a hearkening to the voice of conscience which brings man to fuller knowledge of the Creator through encounter with Him, “Man is no longer able to see himself as "mysteriously different" from other earthly creatures; he regards himself merely as one more living being, as an organism which, at most, has reached a very high stage of perfection” (Evangelium Vitae).  Understanding this as the starting point of of subjectivity for JPII is paramount and central to an understanding of his encyclicals and essays, since John Paul II holds that the “capacity to command what is good and to forbid evil, placed in man by the Creator, is the main characteristic of the personal subject”(Dominum Et Vivificantem). 

In light of this, we can say that man knows himself ever more completely only by acknowledging that his heart’s desire is true communion with God: that man is in a constant quest to become more himself by pursuing God in the specific unique ways which he most recognizes Him through his own life.  Because man and wife join together, accepting and completing that original solitude of the other I and thereby becoming truly “one flesh” in mutual knowledge and love of the other, a new identity is formed wherein there is no longer simply an I-thou but an us, one complete unit indissoluble which itself in the natural course of things brings forth children as a reflection and testimony of the original union between the parents.  There is truly creation of something new, “a complex of interpersonal relationships is set up - married life, fatherhood and motherhood, filiation and fraternity ” (Familiaris Consortio).   This is again not to say that man and woman are fractional persons: they simply create a new identity for each other because through fidelity and the fulfillment of their vows to each other they are now the way in which each other recognizes God.  New identity comes from a new way of recognizing God (the true source of happiness) as developed through vocation, and family members as part of this new identity find themselves with a calling and identity as unique as their own love for each other: an identity, summons, and inclination found, “within itself… that cannot be ignored, and that specifies both its dignity and its responsibility” (Familiaris Consortio).  The creation of a new unit, a new oneness encapsulating multiple I’s creates within itself an entire new inclination towards God within itself, distinct from the individual inclinations of the spouses as individuals, and yet not intelligible without them.  This new Anamnesis (which is simply the recognition of God through conscience) calls the family towards the same end of self discovery that individuals have within themselves: to, as a, “family, become what you are”, requiring each individual family member to no longer seek God by oneself but to rather become “a community of life and love, in an effort to find fulfillment… in the Kingdom of God”, that Chief Good (happiness) towards which every natural inclination leads.  A new identity, based on a new specific way to encounter God, requires new education and lifestyle within the members in order to prepare and inform them in the proper search for God according to this newness of life they are now a part of.  Thus, the family itself has rights and freedoms proper to itself, in order to search for its own happiness and remain a functioning member of society.