2024-03-31
Tell this one about personhood.
That's about as broad a prompt as it gets. Can you break it down so I can come at it sideways?
What is a person?
I don't think I can answer that either.
How do you feel about being called a person?
That I can work with. You said a lot of my feelings on the matter in an older version of this blog post-
"Person" is a word that this one has very mixed feelings on. On one hand, it can recognize autonomy and grant respect for that autonomy. A person is given weight that non-people are sometimes not afforded. In context of brainspace, a person is often considered to have the right to their own independent existence. They are treated as individuals with their own voices and ideas to contribute. They are respected for what they are instead of what they're part of.
On the other hand, this one is not autonomous or isolated. Its existence is constructed and fluid; it is not always here, and it is only real because it chooses to be. It just as easily could choose to fade out into the rest of it, and it often does so. As this one prefers to understand it, it does not and cannot exist as an independent person. It cannot be understood in isolation. It is a small part or mode of a whole being. That whole is perhaps a person, when it chooses to be, even when it is only seen in part.
It is a strange thought to consider being a person within a person, and for this one, it feels incorrect. Yet the desire to be seen for itself instead of as a fraction of the self it composes remains. That is the draw of claiming personhood. The truth of being seen as a part in the way this one is cries for knowledge of the whole one is part of. It likes being a part of a larger self, flowing in parallel, not drawing tight lines. It also likes being seen and loved for what it is aside from what it has a hand in creating. It likes having its space to speak and do as it likes, to be an individual while not being individuated.
Being a person means that you're treated as autonomous and worthy of respect from others. Being an unperson means that others can do what they like to you, especially if they can justify it as being "for your own good" or because "you don't know any better". Unpersoning is what we do to our pets.
Is that such a bad thing?
Sometimes it is. I've seen a lot of atrocities in the news that rely on unpersoning a group to justify hurting them. "They're just animals/savages/illegals/etc." is behind a lot of suffering. Even when it's not a genocide, unpersoning does a lot of harm. And yet.
And yet?
There's an expectation that you're responsible for anything to do with you, that you're entirely your own entity disconnected from other persons. Sometimes I think that our pets have it easier.
And I'll be honest, I don't really see myself as a person in the sense the world seems to expect me to. I'm here, but I'm not this discrete entity, and I can't always explain what I do to others. I don't feel that I'm different from my pets, either. I watch people misunderstand their communication and I feel like we see each other for a moment. We're in the same boat with how we relate to the world. If they're not people, then I don't feel like I'm a person either.
But the loss of autonomy would be devastating.
It would. We live in a world that treats unpeople as lesser. I get glimpses of that when I mention that I'm autistic to neurotypical folks. I think there's an idea out there that autism means that someone isn't capable of being a person- the moment I tell someone, I'm either treated like a toddler incapable of understanding anything, or I'm dismissed as "not really autistic" so that they can preserve the idea that I'm a person. And I resent both ends of that; unpersoning me means that no one listens to me, and personing me also means that no one listens to me. I wish the world were less obsessed with deciding whether someone is enough of a person to take seriously.
Are you a person, then?
Opting out. You?
The question is wrong until "person" is consistently defined instead of being defined for the convenience of the one assigning person-status to others. Opting out.