Abstract
The nature of the finite person and his relation to Reality remains, as it has been for ages in both Eastern and Western thought, a problem for empirical and speculative thought. Nobody, in the East or in the West, denies that the human person stands in an enigmatic relation to the rest of being, for there are dimensions to his nature that seem to link him with the rest of being. A microcosm somehow related to a macrocosm that includes many dimensions of non-personal being, the personal self has tended to be considered some sort of example of some other dimension of being, sub-human or superhuman; man is a created, imperfect image of God, or a focus of God, or a higher animal, or a complicated matrix of electrical energy, or ... The tendency has been to study him as a good sample of something else to which he clearly seems related.
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References
For our purpose here we may also neglect the question whether the whole person is conscious or unconscious. Yet, I should want to insist that what we know about unconscious activities we can know only by analogy with the conscious.
See Free Will, Responsibility, and Grace, Abingden, New York, 1958, and “The Moral Structure of the Person,” Review of Metaphysics, 1962, and also Chapter 8 in Personality and the Good, co-author R. M. Millard, David McKay, New York, 1963.
“The Psychological Self, the Ego, and Personality” in Psychological Review, 1945, 52, 91–99; and “Foundations of Personalistic Psychology” in Scientific Psychology, ed. B. B Wolman, Basic Books, New York, 1965.
Wilmon H. Sheldon, Rational Religion, Philosophical Library, New York, 1962, pp. 16, 8.
Ibid., P. 18.
On other metaphysical grounds I would prefer the hypothesis that what we know as the space-time world of sense-perception is integral to the activity of God, and not “outsie” of His being. But such a personalistic, idealistic, view of the space-time world aside, I would urge in any case that the space-time world, insofar as it manifests related order of change, may well be expressing the purpose of God’s inner nature, including his capacity to create again. And for God to create either for an independent space-time world, or to be involved in the graded, orderly interrelated levels of changes as aspects of his own being is for our purposes here not critical.
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© 1968 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Bertocci, P.A. (1968). Free Will, the Creativity of God, and Order. In: Raju, P.T., Castell, A. (eds) East-West Studies on the Problem of the Self. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0615-1_4
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