A Man is not just an individual - a big chunk of him is actually the herd itself.
How it relates to Catholicism: How ought we to understand the human person?
Such a big question. I’ve recently been sharing my thoughts on this in
another thread.
Even if we start considering humans from the very beginning, everything a zygote is at conception, it derives
from others - the mother and father. Everything the zygote receives in order to cell-split and grow and mature, it gathers
from the mother. So, even in a human’s most primordial state, she begins an intermingled, interconnected existence. You could say that this is just biology. But, even the newborn baby can do little besides drink, pass waste and express discomfort and/or the need for physical connection with the mother. Fetuses and newborns have their identities wrapped-up entirely with “the mother” who intentionally forms the child and ushers it into personhood.
So mother-fetus or mother-newborn is a community of persons. It’s a bonding and not accidentally. Without such bondings, research is fairly clear that newborns suffer. Without taking care of all the basic needs of the newborn it will die quickly. But even if you merely meet its food/cleaning needs, it will suffer from lack of being nurtured. It will be deprived of natural human connections and bonding. So it cannot be said to be “individuated.” Its identity is only understood (initially) with reference to “the mother,” and later to a wider community of persons (eg, the family, friends, schoolmates etc). From conception, through birth and into early childhood, humans are interconnected, entangled, co-identified with each other: humans are, most fundamentally,
persons-in-relation , as the Scottish philosopher John MacMurray said.
And the attachments of humans are real, they’re not fictions. What explains them? At some level, it must be co-identification and intermingling of personhood. As John Donne said, “No man is an island.” So, parents see themselves in their children and their children in themselves. On some level, they contribute to the development
of each other. These are real relations, not imaginary. Humans exist as persons-in-relation. It’s what we are at our core—designed for and fully actualized
only in community.
As for Catholicism, all of the above sits very well. At least, humanity understood
in its beginnings is consistent with the above. It’s only when Catholics start talking about “salvation” that they suddenly become hyper-individualistic and would deny everything they’ve previously admitted about the unity of the human race and the communal entanglement of persons.
