When "I" Might Be, Where "We" Are, or What You Will
Concerning: Multiversal Personkinds and 'Self-Conscious' Semantic Sort
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As the son of a Protestant pastor, my religious inclinations struggle to maintain the idea that the body is only a carnal repository (forma corporeitatis) for a supernatural soul for which one has moral responsibility. Nevertheless, I have sometimes blasphemously defended the apparently scientistic idea that soulful “selves” arise, in petto, from the very workings of nature. Moreover, I’ve entertained the shameful notion that the cosmos is sensitive to the way that it is “lived in”, becomes observed, is known or is spoken about. Although a sinful admission, I must admit that I can even dare to imagine that the Catholic Pope, himself, might be mistaken to insist that the sanctity of life obliges any expectant mother to endanger herself, or obliges us to breach her self-possession, unmercifully strain her answerability or to remove her from the safety/privacy of her private (psychological) operative “space” - where and/or when her choices are to be made or become - in order to arbitrarily award that space to a troublingly impersonal sub-letter. I don’t doubt that sometime after ‘conception’ the precious bionomic bud must, at a confidential psychological turn, be granted autonomy within the phrenic fracturing of its caretaker’s pregnancy. I suspect that, in this way, a woman’s private choices can be daysprings from which the deep stream of personkind-ness flows and upon which private (fudaetal) experiences will float.
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About the Book
Rudolph McNair is a National Merit Scholar who focused on philosophy and became convinced that a clear understanding of what the concept of “person” and of the “self” is meant to stand for is essential to the settling of many contemporary arguments about notions like social posture, civil and reproductive rights of persons, or political identity. He undertakes this study with a particular attention given to the jazziness of dialogue (as engaged in by about personkinds), and confronts the problem with the supposed “literal” standing of some avowed ideas, depending upon the language group attending to them. He suggests that there are many streams of figurative meaning, with strong currents, into which people engaged in any language group might wade, and he asks whether there can be a solid literal ground upon which any societal “identity” might stand (as might regard expressions like “minority,” “patriot,” “watchman” or “police officer,” and such like). The reader should beware that this is a collection of essays that might present a dangerous course to follow. For instance, McNair insists that an awakened/enlivened personkindness and, necessarily, the process of socioemotional integration essential to it, has substance only at the event horizon surrounding selves (or souls, if you will) where we sort out all aspects of real life-time phenomena—in which case we cannot know when or whether “selves” occur (are born) at all, in the way we track person-being. A concentrated collection of mostly basic annotation and the author hopes, witty explanation, that the reader might find an intriguing train of thought.
About the Author
Born in Topeka, Kansas, Rudolph McNair grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of a prominent local Baptist minister and theologian (also named Rudolph McNair). In Omaha, Rudolph, the younger, attended Creighton Preparatory Jesuit High School, receiving second honors. He then also went to board at Campion Jesuit Preparatory High School, in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin where, in his third (junior) year, he achieved an early merit entrance scholarship to Morehouse College in 1970–71. Transferred to Webster College, in Webster Groves (a suburb of St. Louis) Missouri (1972–1974), Rudolph was an undergraduate philosophy major, reading topics in problems of philosophy and history of major philosophical systems (including reading courses in epistemology, antimetaphysics, Wittgenstein, phenomenology, Husserl, the philosophy of self-consciousness, and reading courses in Merleau-Ponty and Popper). He also attended graduate courses in philosophy at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, by special permission (1975). After college, Rudolph contributed to research at the VA Hospitals (psychopharmacology labs of Dr. Bernard Korol, PhD, 1976) behavioral and immunological studies, where he designed an accurate measurement of the relationship between metabolism and specific gravity. Mr. McNair also worked as a research assistant to Afreda Brown, at the Black Studies Institute at St. Louis University, and as an EEO Officer for the Office of Manpower-Human Development (1976). By the late ’70s he moved to Los Angeles, California, and worked as a psychology tech and medical clinician (certified nursing assistant, 1978) at VA Hospitals. He was awarded a civil service commission (GS4) in 1979–80. But his career continued in the secretarial and administrative services for thirty years thereafter, from which he has retired after a ten year stint as a deputized court clerk and administrative assistant with the Los Angeles County family law facilities.