Inherent Human Dignity: A Philosophical Meditation (The Beginning and the Beyond of Politics) - Softcover

Hughes, Glenn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0268209952 ISBN 13: 9780268209957

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025

Synopsis

Inherent Human Dignity explores the philosophical and existential foundations of what it means to be human.

Inherent Human Dignity is a philosophical meditation and defense of the value of being human. Glenn Hughes explores the existential foundations of these concepts in this structured and accessible study about the experience of being human.

Hughes locates human dignity within the philosophical, political, and historical horizons of human culture. Guided by Eric Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan, literary and artistic examples, key moments of our modern era, and his own scholarship on the religions of the world, Hughes unfolds and accounts for human dignity’s place in our world. He additionally utilizes key moments of our modern era to frame our understanding of human dignity, paying close attention to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was created by the United Nations following World War II. Ultimately, Hughes’s meditation is concerned both with exploring the maximally differentiated set of insights into the meaning of being human and with articulating why the discovery of the inherent equal dignity of every person―without exception―is a profound and unique achievement.

About this title

About the Authors

Glenn Hughes (1951–2024) was professor emeritus at St. Mary’s University. He was the inaugural holder of the St. Mary’s Chair in Catholic Philosophy. He is the author of several books including From Dickinson to Dylan: Visions of Transcendence in Modernist Literature and Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity.

James Greenaway is the San José-Lonergan Chair in Catholic Philosophy at St. Mary’s University. He is the author of The Differentiation of Authority: The Medieval Turn Toward Existence.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Questioning finds satisfaction in the discovery of meanings and the identification of values, with values understood as moral meanings: meanings understood and affirmed to be genuine “goods.” For the present, let meanings stand for: all that is intelligible; all that has being; and all that is truly good.

Through my ongoing, and self-correcting, discovery of many types of meaning―concerning objects, persons, emotions, events, relationships, cause and effect, social practices, tools, institutions, obligations, etc.―I have enjoyed (and at times been frightened by) an ever-expanding horizon of understanding. That horizon of understanding is mainly constituted by inherited meanings. Language both oral and written, the behaviors of others, tools, and much else have conveyed to me an enormous treasure of human insights and ingenuities; and these inherited meanings and values have been supplemented by the results of my efforts to make sense of my own experiences, feelings, encounters, and behavior.

Early on, I came to recognize that my questions about reality extend far beyond my capacities to understand. In fact, in its full scope, my questioning―like all human questioning―intends absolutely all meanings. My desire to know, in other words, is unrestricted. It is a desire to know everything about everything (and, finally, to love everything that is good).

As Bernard Lonergan remarks, the reason why I don’t effectively will to know everything about everything is because I discovered soon in life that it is so troublesome to reach even a few answers that the prospect of seeking all answers to all questions became thoroughly disheartening.

Nevertheless, it is because my desire to know is unrestricted that I still wonder: what is the whole process of reality?

I find that, from my perspective of participation, I am capable only of some kind of heuristic answer. Whatever reality as a whole is, it is in its totality the completeness of all intelligible meanings in their being and their value: all the meanings that have been, are, and will be.

When I consider such a completeness of meaning, and wonder about my role in its process, I take into account the fact that being a person (me) has its own peculiar kind of meaning and value. I have been “me” through all the adventures of my personal growth. If a teacher asks me, “What did you do last summer?”, he means by “you” the person I have been, am now, and will be as long as I exist: a unity-identity who has developed through time while remaining myself through all my changes and growth.

What kind of meaning and value is this? What happens when I try to explain who I am to a new friend?

(excerpted from chapter 2)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0268209952
• ISBN 13: 9780268209957
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 152