ABSTRACT
The philosophical fragmentation of human subjectivity from myriad directions, whether from the social sciences, psychology, or philosophy itself, signals the need and possibility for a new ontology of the subject. Recent advances are moving us away from Taylor’s detached self (what I call “the self-referring subject”), which has its roots in a certain reading of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Modern Orthodox personalism has been helpful in this regard, emphasizing the connection of personalism with Christology and Trinitarian theology, as well as ecclesiology and the sacraments. Yet it often does not capture the full concept of the person as it was developed in early Byzantine theology, particularly in its blindness to the importance of the category of nature or essence, the loving consubstantiality of persons in communion. Modern Orthodox personalism needs to be supplemented with the category of free natural dialogical reciprocity, or reciprocal intergivenness between persons, which might take the form of a kind of Eucharistic ontology of selfhood based on participation-in-distribution, where we have so much distribution, so much participation. Such an approach can yield important insights when put into dialogue with major currents of psychology and phenomenology.
