Persons in a posthuman world

ABSTRACT

Are we becoming ‘posthuman’, and, if so, what does that mean for our understanding of ourselves as persons? In this paper, I argue that we have good reasons to retain a notion of personhood despite posthuman claims, but that the science of psychology, which ought to be well-equipped to study and defend human personhood, has – with some notable exceptions – failed to develop illuminating ideas of what persons are and how they come into the world phylogenetically, ontogenetically, and sociogenetically. First, I articulate a short history of the concept of the person from antiquity and to the Enlightenment. Second, I describe four current challenges to these modern approaches to personhood. Third, I argue that personhood is inescapable in psychology and human life as such, and that a qualitative psychology should try to find a way of preserving the insights of posthuman thinking and its critiques without thereby abandoning personhood.

Keywords:

• Posthuman
• personhood
• qualitative
• postqualitative
• psychology

Introduction

These are both challenging and exciting times for researchers within the humanities and social sciences. Just as qualitative research is finally gaining more widespread acceptance in a discipline such as psychology – which was for a long time very conservative and reluctant to embrace qualitative studies of human lives and experiences – we see a growing movement beyond the qualitative, which is now known as post qualitative research. Calls for humanism are now increasingly perceived not as progressive and ethically sound, but as part of the problems of the world, at least according to advocates of posthumanist philosophies.

A few years ago, I entered this discussion with a paper that explored a possible role of humanism after posthumanism, and of qualitative research after the postqualitative critique (Brinkmann 2017). I argued that everyone ought to listen to and learn from this critique, as it has uncovered many significant and problematic ways in which the experiencing and acting self has been privileged. Posthuman and new materialist philosophies of thinkers such as Karen Barad (2007), Donna Haraway (1991) and Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) among many others (including, not least, the whole oeuvre of Michel Foucault) should be taken seriously, but I argued that we could and should maintain a space in which to advocate for ethical humanism where conventional qualitative research can play a role in giving voice to people and articulating injustices. I argued that this was in many ways the radical project of pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey 100 years ago, as they were committed to an ontology of flux much like the post thinkers, but at the same time insisted on the need for human solidarity and construction of stable communities if we are to be able to live reasonably well together.

I am thrilled to see the discussion continue in this special issue. Its papers move in different important directions: One defends a postphenomenology with implications for qualitative research; another discusses ethnographic work from a posthuman perspective; yet another one explores the implications of Barad’s work for qualitative psychology; and finally, there is a critical assessment of posthumanism and postqualitative inquiry as such. It is wonderful that these scholarly discussions can now take place in a journal of psychological research. I will try to provide a perspective on these discussions with an outset in my own work, which has increasingly centered on the concept of the person. Although this concept has become rather unfashionable in most corners of the human and social sciences, I believe it has an important role to play in this posthumanist and postqualitative moment.

I am not the only one to return to discussions of the person. In a recent paper, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose argue ‘against posthumanism’ and defend the notion of the person (Osborne and Rose 2023). While acknowledging some of the posthuman arguments against the uniqueness of ‘the human’, they maintain that we remain fundamentally persons and need a concept of personhood for ethical and political reasons. Rather than embracing posthumanism as a theoretical and ethical stance, Osborne and Rose argue that this way of posing the question of the human today ‘forecloses crucial social, ethical and political debates, and that these debates are better framed in terms of the ethopolitics of personhood.’ (p. 2) As a sympathetic and interested reader of many significant scholars that identify as posthumanist, I will explore a similar line of argument below.

It should be noted first that posthumanism is not a precise term. However, proponents such as Braidotti (2013) have argued that the idea of the human has been formulated on the background of male, white, heterosexual exemplars – and we could add able-bodied and adult to that list– and she therefore rightly calls for studies based on more heterogenous and complex categories and entanglements of humans, animals, and sociomaterial life (Braidotti 2018). From this perspective, the recognition that humans are ‘nothing special’ is conceived as emancipatory, both for those humans who differ from the white, heterosexual males, and also for the rest of the planet with all its non-human lifeforms. Other posthumanists counter human exceptionalism exactly from the perspective of such other lifeforms (Ritvo 2007), or from an understanding of the cyborg nature of human life, which in some cases lead to an advocacy of transhumanism, i.e., the technological enhancement of human powers that might lead us to become more than human.

Such diverse streams of thought represent in different ways – more or less radically – a posthumanist sensibility that is not at all alien to me – or to Osborne and Rose (2023), I could add. The latter do accept some of its insights but wish at the same time to maintain a conception of personhood. For without it, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to understand the kinds of responsiveness and responsibility that is characteristic of human beings, and it becomes difficult to defend a robust notion of human rights. However, in spite of the exciting discussions they ignite in their paper, Osborne and Rose do not go very far in articulating a viable conception of personhood for posthuman and postqualitative times, so this is something I attempt in the present paper.

Among the sciences, psychology ought to be particularly well-equipped to study and defend a notion of personhood, but it has – with some notable exceptions – failed to develop illuminating ideas of what persons are and how they come into the world phylogenetically, ontogenetically, and sociogenetically. Historian of psychology Kurt Danziger (2013) has remarked on the irony that ‘psychology was about the last of the human sciences to make room for the person’ (p. 76), even though the discipline should have been centrally placed to study personhood had it succeeded in focusing on persons as its subject-matter. Instead of personhood, concepts such as mind, self, personality, and identity have been used much more frequently in psychology to denote the central concerns of the discipline. As Martin and Bickhard (2013) observe, within psychology the study of persons is ‘seemingly new, yet in some ways long-standing’ (p. 1). It is long-standing for the simple reason that mind, self, personality, identity, and all the other terms that are used to refer to basic features of human beings can arguably be seen as properties of persons. So, the person should be approached as the more fundamental term to which the others can be applied. After all, it is the person who has a mind, a self, a personality etc. and not the other way around. But it is also seemingly new, because the term has so often escaped notice, perhaps because of its foundational character.

The rest of the paper is structured in three parts: First, I articulate a short history of the concept of the person from antiquity and to the Enlightenment notions that ground modern approaches, e.g., as seen in liberal democracies, jurisprudence, and human rights. Second, I all-too briefly describe four current challenges to these modern approaches to personhood, which are referred to as the cultural, animal, technological, and philosophical challenges, of which the latter two are particularly relevant in a posthuman world. Third, I argue that personhood is inescapable in psychology and human life as such, and that we should try a find a way of preserving the insights of posthuman thinking and its critiques without abandoning personhood. I believe that qualitative as well as postqualitative research can be helpful in this regard.

A short history of the category of the person

In accounts of the history of the concept, it is common to trace the category of the person to ancient Greece and Rome. It is well-known that the word itself comes from the Latin persona, but most scholars today believe that it was appropriated from the Etruscan word phersu (Brouwer 2019). This word referred to a ritualistic figure ‘participating in games of more or less violent sorts that honor the deceased, with a bearded mask as his most conspicuous attribute.’ (p. 20). This was taken over by the Romans who used masks to represent their ancestors in funeral rites. Thus, originally, the persona was a mask worn during burial rituals. Another source of the use of persona is the Greek word prosopon, which comes from the word for face, but which was used in the context of Greek theatre to name theatrical masks. The Romans were influenced by Greek theatrical traditions and took over the use of masks, and, according to Brouwer, the terms persona and prosopon were gradually transformed to acquire the senses of ‘role’ and ‘character’ (p. 25). Like masks in rituals and theatre, where one performs scripted acts, so the person for the Romans became a term used to describe the public role and appearance of the individual rather than something ‘inner’, having to do with personality traits or the like.

Stoic philosophers in the Roman world used the word persona in a similar way to describe the roles of human beings, not just in rituals and on the stage, but in life as such. In his On Duties, Cicero invoked a distinction from the older stoic philosopher, Panaetius, between two roles (duabus personis), viz. the common role of a human being as a creature of reason that elevates humans over ‘brute creatures’, and the specific role of the individual arising from particular talents and abilities (Brouwer 2019, 31). Here, the category of the person acquired ethical significance since human beings in the Stoic perspective have a duty to live up to their roles as humans and as individuals. The theatrical perspective on persons was maintained, but in a way extended to life itself. For example, Seneca criticized those who keep changing their mask (persona) in life and urged humans to ‘keep up the part you have begun to play, right until you leave the stage. See to it that you can be praised; or if not that, at least make sure you can be recognized’ (Seneca, quoted from Brouwer 2019, 41). The question about the permanence of personal identity across time and place continues to be important to this day.

In Roman law, there was a significant distinction between persons, things, and actions (de personis, de rebus, de actionibus) (Danziger 2013, 62). The criterion of personhood was ‘the capacity to enter into obligations in such a way that one could be held legally responsible for fulfilling those obligations.’ (p. 62). The Romans excluded children and women from the category of personhood and saw them as ‘minors’ under the guardianship of adult males, and slaves were not even minors, but things on a par with domestic animals. However, (male) slaves could be granted personhood simply if their owner decided to free them. This underlines the fact that at this time, personhood was what we would today refer to as a social construct. A category that can be granted and taken away through a social process.

This would change with the advent of modern philosophy, which in this case can be said to begin in the 17^th century with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. For Hobbes, a person is a man who is the owner of the words and actions that belong to him (also Hobbes excluded women) (Danziger 2013, 68). A person may thus enter into contracts with other persons, and for Hobbes the contract therefore became the basis for all non-antagonistic relations between people. The image of human beings as competitive individuals, who owns their capacities that may be used when entering into contracts with other persons, survives to this day, also across the human and social sciences, e.g., in the shape of homo economicus (the model of humans as rational, calculating, and self-interested creatures).

While accepting the fundamental separateness of persons, Locke, however, added inner complexity to the concept. He famously argued that what makes someone a specific person is the ability to consciously recall one’s past: ‘as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action of thought, so far reaches the identity of that person’ (Locke, quoted from Danziger 2013, 70). Locke believed that ‘person’ was a forensic concept, i.e., something concerned with actions and their merit, but personhood was clearly constituted by the inner, private being of the individual, and not – as it had been in earlier times – by social roles and relationships. For Locke, a person is a thinking, intelligent being, which is the same thinking being in different contexts due to the consciousness of the person (Lolorda 2019b, 160). So, the Lockean concept of the person has two sides: One is inner and psychological, constituted by conscious memory of one’s past, and the other is moral, given that one has certain duties in virtue of being capable of acting intelligently.

With Immanuel Kant, arguably the most important Enlightenment philosopher, the emphasis shifted somewhat from the person’s moral duties to the equal worth of all persons (Lolorda 2019b, 161). Needless to say, Kant put much emphasis on the human capacity for moral action, but he tied the concept of the person closer to the idea that persons are categorically different from things, and because of this they should always be treated as ends in themselves and never as mere means (Ware 2019). In the Kantian perspective, persons are autonomous beings that are not just subject to the laws of nature, but who may use their powers of reason to decide on the laws of which they are to act. This capacity provides them with inherent dignity and worth, which is value of a wholly different kind than that of objects and things. In his Groundwork, Kant famously claimed that in what he called the kingdom of ends, ‘everything has either a price or a dignity. What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is raised above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity’ (Kant 1785, 42). Persons are unique in having dignity, which means that they are irreplaceable and resist commodification, and even though persons can in practice be captured, enslaved, and sold, it does not mean that they thereby lose their dignity, but rather that their intrinsic value in such cases is violated. This, of course, was an important philosophical underpinning to the modern idea of human rights.

Persons in the 20^th century

With this long development of the idea of personhood from antiquity to the Enlightenment, the concept has undergone several transformations. From originally referring to the masks worn in rituals and theatre (Greece and Rome), it became an ethical concept designating the bearer of public duties (Stoicism), and then the free and intelligent individual, who can recall one’s own past (Locke). This was a transformation from the person as a performative notion over an ethical and legal notion to a psychological notion with Locke. Although this historical trajectory gradually leads to a conception of human rights, it also leads to human exceptionalism and the Enlightenment notion of a ‘bounded self’, which is often rightly criticized by posthuman thinkers. When Kant entered the picture in the 18^th century, personhood finally came to refer to humans not as a ‘substance’, but rather as the abilities that ground their status as autonomous, dignified beings (Tissaw 2013). A major question in the philosophy of personhood since has been what these abilities are. And what about humans, who lack them, such as infants or people suffering from dementia? If these individuals are not persons in the Kantian sense, does that mean that they lack full moral status? Jaworska and Tannenbaum (2019) argue (convincingly, in my view) that if someone’s moral status is justified by a possession of sophisticated abilities, then an incompletely realized version of these abilities will also elevate a being’s moral status (p. 361). Humans are not rights-bearing persons because of high intelligence or something like that, but because of both abilities and vulnerabilities (I return to this below).

In the 20^th century, personhood was discussed by many different philosophers, but surprisingly few psychologists. A school of ‘personalism’ was developed by Christian and Kantian thinkers such as Emmanuel Mounier, Max Scheler, and Borden Parker Bowne, whose influence was greater on cultural and political figures like Martin Luther King and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights than on academic philosophy (Preston 2019). In psychology, personalism was represented in the work of William Stern, who argued that persons – unlike things – are unitary, self-activated, and goal-oriented beings (Lamiell 2013). The central theme in scientific personalism is what Stern referred to as Ganzheitsbezogenheit, which is a kind of ‘whole-relatedness’ in the sense with which I began this article: The person is a whole who has thoughts, emotions, personality, identity, and all the other psychological properties. A psychological science must begin with the whole rather than specific variables in isolation, but this is not the general direction that was taken by the science as it progressed in the 20^th century.

In addition to the relatively marginal schools of personalism, personhood was in the 20th century discussed quite intensively by influential philosophers such as P.F. Strawson and Derek Parfit. In an influential essay simply entitled ‘Persons’, Strawson argued that whatever else a person may be, it is necessarily a subject of experiences (Strawson 1958). Unlike things that we describe as material objects, persons have two aspects – bodily and mental. Strawson argued that although a person has two aspects, the concept of a person is a primitive one that cannot be broken down into parts. When someone is experiencing something or performing a given act, it is irreducibly the person who is experiencing and acting and not any part of the person (say, the body, the brain, or the mind). This remains a significant point about how the concept of the person is used in our language, and I return to it below.

Strawson opposed what he called the ‘no-ownership’ view of experience that had emerged from British empiricism especially with David Hume, who famously argued that the self is nothing over and above a constantly varying bundle of experiences. We do not experience a self, Hume had argued, but only specific tastes, smells, sights etc., which for the consistent empiricist means that there is no such self. Before Hume, Locke had arrived at a similar position, as we have seen, emphasizing continuity in experience as significant for personhood at the expense of any substantial concept of the self. In their eyes, there is no ‘owner’ of experience, except in the sense that experiences are causally dependent on a particular body. Strawson argued that this theory is self-refuting, since it has to make use of the idea of ownership in rejecting it. We cannot eliminate the ‘my’ in talking about ‘my headache’ without eliminating the headache.

In the twentieth century, philosopher Derek Parfit became famous for reviving the Lockean idea that it is psychological continuity (and nothing else) that guarantees what we call personal identity (Parfit 1984). This is normally seen as a reductive account because it takes the form that personhood as personal identity is ‘nothing but’ a continuity of memories. The brain, the body, the soul etc. are in principle unimportant and do not guarantee personal identity. That a person first exists at a certain point in time and later at another point in time is all there is, and if these two individuals share the same memories, then we rightly think of them as the same person, according to Parfit. This also applies even if a set of memories from one person could be inserted into the brain of another individual, or if the body could be teleported to Mars (Parfit excelled in developing such science fiction thought experiments). We see that Parfit’s view in a way psychologizes what it means to be a person and have personal identity, and his views have of course been met with criticism. Hacker (2007) argues from a Wittgensteinian view that Parfit violates the basic grammar of how we use the concept of the person. If one could somehow transfer all the memories of person A into the brain of person B (so that there would be psychological continuity between them), it would not show what Parfit believes (that B would be A), but rather that B would suddenly and strangely seem to remember everything that A had done (p. 298).

Personhood was mainly discussed by analytic philosophers in the twentieth century. Phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, and poststructuralism did not revolve around the concept of the person to the same extent. Here, terms such as subjectivity, subjectification, identity, interpellation, affect etc. were used instead, but in some ways, it seems that conclusions similar to those of Parfit’s were reached by several thinkers: Foucault famously ended The Order of Things with the claim that the human being (‘man’, as he said) is a recent invention that is now perhaps drawing to a close (‘erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’) (Foucault 1966, 422). This form of anti-humanism constitutes a springboard for the subsequent posthuman philosophies and movements that are now unfolding, which look with suspicion at any essential, universal properties of what we call persons. Although Parfit’s reductionism proceeded very differently from the poststructuralist deconstruction of the person, they share the perspective that the person is ‘nothing but’ psychological continuity, an effect of discourse, circulating affect etc.

This reduction or deconstruction goes against some of the main strands that have historically gone into weaving the concept of the person, as articulated by Lolorda (2019a). She summarizes the long historical development of the concept by stating that persons are thought of as particulars (things that cannot be multiply instantiated), roles, entities with moral significance, rational beings, and selves (pp. 2–3). Especially the strands of particularity and rationality are challenged by ‘post-thinkers’ such as postmodernists, poststructuralists, and posthumanists who argue in different ways for distributed, contradictory, and affective understandings of subjectivity. The problem from which this article began is that psychologists, who might want to retain an idea of personhood, have few resources to do so when faced with posthumanist critiques, because the discipline has been reluctant to think through what it means to be a person. In the final part of this paper, I present some thoughts about how to think about personhood in psychology, but before that we need to look more closely at some of the current challenges to the historical strands of personhood that have been in focus so far. I will focus on four such challenges all-too briefly and am aware, of course, that the discussion contains many more nuances.

Challenging personhood

One of the first challenges to meet the understanding of persons that emerged from the line of development articulated above (from antiquity to the Enlightenment) came from non-Western cultures. When explorers from the (so-called) West met people from other parts of the world with different worldviews and conceptual schemes, they began to wonder about the universality of their own ideas. Throughout the history of anthropology, this has been a recurrent theme, and various writers have attempted to order the different ideas of personhood that are prevalent around the world. In a classic paper, Shweder and Bourne (1982) looked at conceptions of the person among Americans, the Oriya of India, the Gahuku-Gama of New Guinea, and the Balinese and showed that different cultures embody different worldviews, which they discuss in terms of sociocentric and egocentric notions of personhood. In this case, the discussion seems to concern a matter of degree, where some cultures conceive of persons as relational and extending into the social ties to a greater extent than others, where persons are seen more as bounded wholes. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously observed that:

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures. (Geertz 1983, 59)

Such anthropological challenges to ‘the Western conception of the person’ are still debated and critiqued today (see e.g., Zahavi 2022), and it is not possible here to do justice to the enormous literature on the person in social and cultural anthropology. It seems fair to conclude, however, that everywhere around the world, people think of themselves as people, draw distinctions between different individuals and also between human persons and animals, and typically also think of visitors who come from the imagined hemisphere of the West to study them as people. Cultures may be more or less individualistic/collectivist, and local conceptions of persons may be more or less egocentric/sociocentric, but across such differences there seems to be a minimal agreement on the fact that people are different from one another, different from animals, and different from natural and cultural objects. In some cultures, it is not easy to say where someone’s personhood stops, and where the world of non-persons begins – and the line may be drawn in quite different ways – but everyone everywhere seems to agree that a line needs to be drawn somewhere.

Somewhat related to the cultural challenge – but also sometimes different from it – we find what may be called the animal challenge. It can be related to the cultural challenge, since numerous cultures have different and sometimes more blurry distinctions between people and animals than most Western cultures, but it is also an independent challenge arising from animal rights movements and critiques of speciesism and anthropocentrism. Some scholars talk about an ‘animal turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, typically as a stream within the posthumanist movement. It began already in the late 1980s with Donna Haraway’s (1989) Primate Vision. In her subsequent cyborg manifesto she pushed to collapse the borders between not only humans and animals, but also between organisms and machines and even between the physical and non-physical as such (Haraway 1991). Although Haraway rejects the term posthumanism, her ideas nevertheless paved the way for many of the thinkers that now identify as posthumanist, seeking to undermine modernist notions of the person. In an interview with Nicholas Gane centered on the question ‘when we have never been human, what is to be done?’, she has said that ‘the posthuman’ is much too easily appropriated by those looking for ‘our next teleological evolutionary stage in some kind of transhumanist techno-enhancement’, and for that reason she prefers to talk about ‘companion species’ instead of posthumanism (Gane 2006). The answer to Gane’s question, which I explore in this article is that we can try to be persons (if we have never been human in the essentialist sense).

In additional to the cultural and animal challenges, we have what may be called the technological and philosophical challenges. Arguing for a dissolution of the strict borders separating living organisms from things, Haraway already articulated the idea of humans as cyborgs, e.g., assemblages of bodies and technological artifacts. A host of new materialisms have since appeared ranging from Latour’s (2005) Actor-Network-Theory to Barad’s (2007) agential realism and much else. The concept of the person does not really play a role in discussions based on these perspectives, which is not strange, since they are united in criticizing the image of humans as bounded, rational, self-reflective centers of action and experience.

Looking at the consequences of the post-philosophies for methodology and the human and social sciences, St Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei (2016) have summarized the main philosophical ideas along three lines: First, matter (or nature) is understood as agentic and always changing. In a way, this is an ancient idea in philosophy, going back to pre-Socratic philosophers of flux such as Heraclitus, who depicted the world as a constant flow of becoming. Matter is not simply cold and dead, to be studied by mechanical sciences, but a warm and vibrant process that acts and develops, and there is an ‘entanglement’ of the material and the semiotic – human living, thinking, and acting is always also material, just as the material is always also semiotic. Second, there is ‘a heightened curiosity and accompanying experimentation’ concerning existence among post-researchers (St Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei 2016, 102). This means that thinking in the post-movement goes on not just about ‘what there is’, but more so about what may become (or, to put it in more post qualitative terms: ‘what there is’ is just a process of becoming). Third, and following from the other points, there is a general critique and rejection of the philosophy of representation. The ‘posts’, argues St. Pierre, ‘announce a radical break with the humanist, modernist, imperialist, representationalist, objectivist, rationalist, epistemological, ontological, and methodological assumptions of Western Enlightenment thought and practice’ (St Pierre 2011, 615). The concept of personhood is often associated with this of assumptions, which is why a posthumanist approach tends to break away from such a notion.

A minimalist theory of personhood

After these accounts of the historical background and challenges to contemporary ideas of personhood, I will try to articulate a brief sketch of a minimalist theory of personhood that I hope is useful for psychology in the posthuman moment in which we live. The ambition is to develop a notion of the person that is sufficiently robust to survive after the posthumanist critique, but at the same time open enough to accommodate the challenges that have been spelled out above. A minimalist account can begin with the basic attitude we humans have in encounters with other human beings. When meeting other human beings, we do not experience them first as animals, bodies, brains, minds, or organisms, but as persons. All things being equal, we understand others as accountable, rational beings who can articulate their reasons for action in most cases.

The Norwegian philosopher Hans Skjervheim depicted this as the participant attitude (Skjervheim 1996). He did not discuss historical or cultural differences, but it seems to me to be helpful as a springboard for a minimalist account of personhood across such differences. In his most famous essay, entitled ‘Participant and spectator’, Skjervheim finds that there are (at least) three kinds of attitudes human beings may have towards one another. If someone says something (his example is ‘The cost of living is bound to increase even more’), an interlocutor may turn her attention to the subject raised and become engaged in the problem itself (will the cost of living in fact increase, and what does this imply for people today?). This, Skjervheim says, is an attitude of participation in which there is a triangular relationship between the two persons and the subject matter. One considers the other as a person, who is an author of their own words and actions. Human communication would likely be impossible without this as a primordial stance. If we normally began by mistrusting the other, or by considering her as mechanically driven by causal powers or other forces, we could not take her words at face value. Of course, there is also the possibility of quite another attitude in which the interlocutor simply registers that the other refers to the specific subject matter. What the other says then becomes a report, a fact, or a datum, perhaps to be analyzed sociologically (along the lines of ‘the subject stated that x’). Thirdly, there is the possibility of simply listening to the sounds produced by the other, thus ‘rendering the alter a purely physical object in his world’, which, Skjervheim says, is the project of behaviorism (1996, p. 128). With the second and third kinds of attitudes, the interlocutor in fact stops being an interlocutor, in the sense of participating in the conversation, and instead becomes a spectator, able to register the fact that someone is saying something, or even simply recording the physical properties of the sounds.

The point of introducing these distinctions is of course to claim that we can only have full participant attitudes to others if we conceive of them as persons. We certainly respond differently to animals than we do to dead objects, and there is no doubt that we can communicate with animals, share and exchange emotions with them, but there seems to be a further aspect in the relations that exist between persons, related to the fact that we normally consider persons as accountable subjects or moral agents. Skjervheim’s essay was a critical commentary on the objectifying tendencies in the sociologies and psychologies of his day (which, alas, remain with us today). These sciences, he said, consider themselves as sciences about facts, and thus treat human opinions and utterances as facts (e.g., in psychoanalysis as discussed by Skjervheim as a school of thought that sometimes takes objectification to its extreme) rather than as propositions or invitations to further conversation, making it possible to ‘participate in people’s judgments’ (Skjervheim 1996, 133). The objectifying attitude is ‘essentially offensive’ (p. 130), according to Skjervheim, because it essentially represents an attack on the freedom of the other – on her very personhood. Skjervheim makes the interesting observation that one cannot objectify oneself: “I can rightly enough regard myself as a fact, but it is not denoted in the fact I register and ascertain, that I register and ascertain. I may in the next instance correctly ascertain my ascertaining, but this ascertaining, which is often grasped by reflection, is something other than what I live in the moment (Skjervheim 1996, 129). There is an ‘I’ that objectifies, but which always itself escapes objectification. This is the subjective, agentive side of the human being (close to the phase of the self process called ‘I’ by George Herbert Mead, and which the phenomenologists sometimes call the transcendental ego). This is where freedom lies, but not as a fact, Skjervheim says (for with facts we are in the realm of observation rather than participation), but as a possibility enjoyed by persons.

The question then becomes: What are the abilities of human beings that make us relate to them as persons? We can approach an answer by first understanding the difference between abilities and vulnerabilities. To make a long story short, not only persons have vulnerabilities, which is why it makes sense to talk about animal rights even in absence of personhood. For a creature has rights in virtue of its vulnerabilities, whereas it has duties in virtue of its powers and abilities. Rom Harré was one theorist who delved deeper into these issues and argued that the bases for attributing rights and duties are vulnerabilities and powers respectively (Harré 2005). What he meant was that rights are derived from vulnerabilities and duties are derived from powers. To begin with the latter: We can only meaningfully be said to have duties because we have the power to do certain things. As Kant famously said: an ‘ought’ presupposes a ‘can’, i.e., a power to act and make a difference. In principle, we are only responsible when we can act (this does not mean that those in less powerful positions are without personal responsibility, but it does mean that their responsibility is limited to what is within the range of their power). Harré noted that the issue of what constitute powers and vulnerabilities is context dependent. For example, the grandmother who looks after her grandchild has a duty to take care of the child, and the child has a corresponding right to be taken care of. But suppose the grandmother is going blind, and they are about to cross a road together, then the child has a duty of guiding them safely across the road, and the grandmother has a right to ask for help. This is context bound. As the philosopher Løgstrup (1956) said, the ethical demand to take care of that of the other person’s life that is in my power is given in virtue of human interdependency, but how to live up to this demand in concrete situations is based on a qualitative judgment that cannot be codified or summarized into universal rules or quantitative calculations. Analogously, when the human world is studied by qualitative and postqualitative scholars, we often need to leave our rules and calculations behind and instead engage in what has recently been terms ‘unmethod’ (Monforte, Netherway, and Smith 2023).

Conversely, we have rights because we have vulnerabilities. Invulnerable beings could not have rights, for rights are only conceivable for creatures that have something that can be taken away from them. We cling to what we value, but we cling (both logically and psychologically) only to what can be taken away from us (Jonas 1992). The hungry have a right to be fed, because without food, they will die. Human beings, on this ontological account, are ‘members of a community of suffering from which they cannot escape’ (Turner 1993, 503). This is the basic source of human rights and human solidarity across cultures and tribes. This position is connected to the view that ‘while human happiness is notable for its cultural diversity, misery is characterised by its unity.’ (p. 504). Not every vulnerability, however, but only those that are tied to substantive interests, engender a right. Harré and Robinson (1995) define an interest as follows: ‘For an entity to have an interest is for it to be constituted in such a way that, where the interest is acknowledged and honoured, the entity more fully realizes whatever potentialities it possesses.’ (p. 520). Thus, it is senseless to claim that I have a right to become a millionaire, because there is nothing about being a millionaire that in itself helps me realize my potentialities. However, I do have a right to express myself through words and deeds, for denied of these possibilities I could not become the sort of creature that I otherwise could.

The issue of how powers and vulnerabilities are constituted is context dependent and historically relative. What is not relative, however, is the fact that there is a basis for the possibility of duties and rights in associated human living. It is a misconception to think that rights talk in this sense is particularly ‘Western’. A Huron Indian of Canada expressed the Huron notion of (what we call) rights to Baron de Lahontan, a Frenchman who lived with the Huron from 1683 to 1694, long before the American and French revolutions, by saying:

We are born free and united brothers, each as much a great lord as the other, while you are all the slaves of one sole man [the king]. I am the master of my body, I dispose of myself, I do what I wish, I am the first and last of my nation … subject only to the great Spirit. (Fields 2003, 165)

We should think about the rights and duties in terms of practices that protect vulnerable persons and their interests against domination. Some of the core-practices that uphold a moral order of a community and protect participants’ rights are for example giving others their due as contributors to conversations, and also respect for those rituals that constitute and sustain the central practices of communities. Those vulnerabilities that arise from life within a community are the ground for ‘civil’ rights, just as individual human rights are grounded in individual vulnerabilities (Harré and Robinson 1995, 532).

Concluding comments

I began this paper in the current moment of posthumanism before going back in time to trace the historical development of the notion of personhood. After introducing some of the challenges to the concept of the person, I sketched an account of personhood, where the concept is tied to vulnerabilities and abilities – and corresponding rights and duties – of living creatures. Like Osborne and Rose (2023), I believe there is a need to retain the concept of the person in an epoch of posthumanism. Much of the posthumanist critique of human essentialism is certainly warranted, since ‘the human’ has been modelled on white, European, adult, able-bodied males to a great extent. But with the concept of the person, we can leave essentialist accounts behind and search for more local vulnerabilities and abilities – and the social practices that constitute and protect them – in order to understand the existence of living persons. Practices of promising and forgiving are central in this regard (Brinkmann, 2024).

As Harré has argued, a person is not a substance with properties or parts, but a ‘being to which an ensemble of dispositions can be ascribed to a moving locus in space and time’ (Harré 2016, 537). Some of these dispositions seem unique to human persons, such as the abilities related to moral responsibility, but this does not represent a problematic ‘human exceptionalism’ any more than the ability of bats to use echolocation represents ‘bat exceptionalism’. Bats live in an Umwelt in virtue of this ability and others, just as the Umwelt of persons is constituted by powers and vulnerabilities of other persons, including the powers to promise and forgive.

In order to understand such particular aspects of the lives of persons, we need research approaches that have traditionally been conceived as qualitative. We need to engage with what Skjervheim called the participant attitude in order to understand other persons. I believe that qualitative research is unique in its project of trying to understand others as persons in the sense of approaching them as accountable beings that may articulate their reasons for actions. All postqualitative interventions are welcome as they contribute to the exaggerated sense of human self-assuredness, but this should not make us throw away the powers of listening, observing, interacting with others that qualitative researchers embody and refine. Qualitative researchers do not reduce the lives of others to chains of causes and effects, but act as participants in the lives of others in order to understand them. This understanding often involves awareness of the rights and duties with which people live.

We should listen carefully to the postqualitative and posthumanist critiques of essentialist philosophies of ‘the human’, but we should not therefore – in my view – embrace a ‘postperson’ approach. Posthumanism is a significant correction to the ontology of a fixed and static humanism, but if we want to advocate human rights, for example, we need a notion of personhood as constituted by powers and vulnerabilities. Whether one refers to oneself as a qualitative or postqualitative researcher, I believe we need to unite in the struggle for improving the lives of persons, uncovering social injustice and discrimination, and listening to stories of people in all walks of life. These concerns are too important to be drowned in semantic issues of qualitative versus postqualitative work.

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Svend Brinkmann

Svend Brinkmann, PhD, is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Communication and Psychology at the University of Aalborg, Denmark. His research has in particularly been concerned with philosophical, moral, and methodological issues in psychology and other human and social sciences. In recent years, he has been studying the impact of psychiatric diagnoses on individuals and society and the current culture of grief.