Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Persons in relation to God
- Part II Social relations
- Part III Interpersonal relations
- 4 The redemptive transformation of relations: dialogue
- 5 Personal integrity: centredness and orientation on others
- 6 Ethical resistance: testing the validity of disagreements
- Part IV Political relations
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Glossary
- Index
5 - Personal integrity: centredness and orientation on others
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Persons in relation to God
- Part II Social relations
- Part III Interpersonal relations
- 4 The redemptive transformation of relations: dialogue
- 5 Personal integrity: centredness and orientation on others
- 6 Ethical resistance: testing the validity of disagreements
- Part IV Political relations
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
The locus of fidelity
My argument so far has constructed a relational understanding of personal identity as the form of punctuation operating between oneself and others. Our personal identity is the way we relate to others. We are the way we are for others. For who and what we are as persons is immediately evidenced in the formation of a ‘boundary’ between our ‘selves’ and the world. This ‘boundary’ is organised and deployed by our own individual spirit of communication which has, in its turn, been laid down and moulded through past relationships of some significance. Crucial to the formation of personhood is the centring of one's experience, consciousness and activity on oneself so that one may interact and communicate in an autonomous way. It has been a major part of the burden of my argument that we learn to become personally integrated and centred subjects only through our interaction with others who regard us as and expect us to be such. Furthermore, I have offered a normative conception of the structure of personhood as well as relation according to the pattern of dialogue. Basic to this is the understanding that we are properly centred as persons only by being directed towards the true reality of other personal centres: we become truly ourselves when we are truly for others. Self-interested and self-seeking individuals who, in relation, are only there in, for and with themselves are destructive of the possibilities of genuine relation and identity.
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- Information
- The Call to PersonhoodA Christian Theory of the Individual in Social Relationships, pp. 151 - 161Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990