God and the Concept of Self-Determination
"It seems quite clear that when human beings determine themselves to be some person or some identity, self-determination is not the basic action involved in being the person or identity. By this I mean that human beings do things in order to determine themselves. For example, in order to become--determine oneself--the person who picks up this coin in front of me, I will have to pick up this coin in front of me. I will have do [sic] something in order to become this person, this identity. Similarly suppose I determine myself to be the winner of the Olympic hundred metres. I dont just determine myself as this as in a thought or as in a dream. Self determination is not the basic action involved in my being the hundreed metres Olympic gold medal winner. Winning the race is. This is what I do directly. I determine myself as the winner through winning the race. Self-determination is indirect....In contrast God's self determining of himself is basic in the sense of being irreducible. God's self-determining self is basic in this sense. There is a fundamental disanalogy between divine self-determination and mere human self determination. In divine self-determination God does not do anything as a condition of self-determination (what he does is determine himself). In other word, God does not create the world in order for it to be the case that he determines himself as creator. God determines himself as the creator of the world; therefore he is the creator of the world."
--Neil B. MacDonald. Metaphysics and the God of Israel. (Grand Rapids, Baker Academic 2006) p.30-31.
--Neil B. MacDonald. Metaphysics and the God of Israel. (Grand Rapids, Baker Academic 2006) p.30-31.
Comments
Yes I agree that "appropriateness," is an important concept to deal with when talking about the "self-developement," of the human person! Certainly we don't have the ability to will (or act) to become birds, or whatever. There seems to be a basic identity that remains, or at least appears to remain, that "is" the limit-concept of whatever permutations of identity we go through. This is probably, at its root, one of the primary motivations of Idealism, or Kant's transcendental unity of apperception, namely that it appears there is "something," that appropriates new experiences to nonetheless be "my," identity despite the variegated material forms of the experienced phenomena (even the various experiences of myself seem to be appropriated by a self which is a "myself," above the experiences of myself--what Sartre and Robert Jenson would label simply as the 'focus' of consciousness).
The only caveat to the limit-concept of "appropriateness," would have to be, I believe, that it is not in fact a "transcendental unity," of my own consciousness or being which exists. Rather the wholeness or identity of the identity that perdures is based both on the embeddedness of myself in the greater totality of the world-as-whole (Pannenberg) and ultimately that my identity is given to me (and hence the what-I-am or what-I-could-be) via my embeddedness in a communal narrative that presents me with myself (Robert Jenson). So to speak, the "appropriateness," should not in my opinion be spoken of as an "essentialized" principle we "possess," but, going the way of Zizioulas, attributes and potential are themselves "themselves" as referents in a relational ontology. This implies that there is not a frozen form or an autarchic subjectivity of "mine" that is simply appropriating experiences; rather the "transcendental unity," is itself established in an exteriority of relationships that present me with myself, and I understand myself as related in a manner that is mediated through these relations.
This dovetails nicely, I believe, into MacDonald's concept of God's self-actualization vs. man's self-actualization. Indeed, strictly speaking (and this is something I think pop-psychology misses) is that, for finite human agents there cannot be "self-actualization," because this would demand that from the beginning of the action the acting "I" would be identical in the full sense with the determination which is to be the result of the action. The "self" can only be "actualized," if "self" is a fore-given concept-totality that then acts--but this is precisely against the "appropriateness," concept of the human, whose identity is time bound and contingent. So whereas God determines himself to be creator--and so is creator--man can act upon an object to attempt to determine himself without ability to gaurantee and control the course of the action. Hence there is (at least) a double discontinuity between man and God in this sense: God determines himself as something, say Creator, and so acts indirectly on things "exterior" which are precisely because God has determined himself creator of them (at least according to MacDonald's idiosyncratic Voluntarism); but this also means that God's identity in relation to the world is a true self-actualizing, because God is Gods-self wholly in the self-determination of himself in this relation. Hence His entrance into the world (and I am conjecturing here, as I have only begun MacDonald's book) is AS Himself, and so is the unfolding of Himself as He determined Himself wholly to be.
Anyway, hopefully that made sense. Im kind of typing on the fly. Anyway, thanks for the good observations!
P.S. congrats on the baby!
That said, I have a couple of things to say. First, thank you for the congratulations! Second, I began to write a response to this, but I think that I'm going to hold off for now. I hope that you are well!