Creaturely Freedom: Human and Non-Human

Thinking theologically across the human/non-human boundary often generates surprising results. Considering the topic of freedom in human and more-than-human contexts fits this pattern. This paper engages a number of striking complexities in what it might mean to take freedom for non-human animals seriously. For example, some accounts of animal liberation would require the abolition of all human control, but human accounts of freedom usually justify  human control over humans in certain circumstances. Setting aside implausible demands for full separation between humans and non-human animals, a more complex account is required. This paper argues that a liberation theology for non-human animals does not necessarily mean the abolition of all human use of non-human animals, but that it does have radical implications for what forms of co-existence and collaboration are legitimate.

My paper argues that the phenomenon of shared intentionality can serve both as an analogue for God as Trinity and as an explanatory concept for speaking about human freedom as participation in the life of the triune God. My paper has three parts. First, I summarize some recent findings of comparative and developmental psychologists, who have argued human beings are unique due to a capacity to share intentions with conspecifics. Second, I show how shared intentionality can serve as an analogue for God as Trinity. Finally, I argue that human freedom consists in being conformed to the shared intentionality of the triune God.

This paper engages Kathryn Tanner’s account of human nature in Christ the Key, where she re-interprets the common identification of freedom as imago Dei to be the plasticity of human nature. Drawing from disability theology the paper demonstrates the value of Tanner’s creative proposal for its potential inclusion of a vast range of human body/minds and the insistence that the body is an essential aspect of humanity’s plasticity. Lastly, the paper considers whether freedom as malleability is limited to a uniquely human nature. Drawing from indigenous and eco-theologies and disabled ecological advocates, the paper considers the interconnection of all creation, such that the “inputs” of which Tanner speaks go both ways: from environment to human and human to environment so as to shape not only human body/minds but all aspects of nature. The paper moves against the trend to theorize humanity isolated from land and all nature.

Dionysius depicts the divine Logos as the center of a circle, the many logoi of creation its radii.  This image offers resources for resisting the axiological hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being with which it is often wrongly equated. Organizational hierarchies are not value hierarchies: complex organisms are “higher” only in the sense that their possibility is predicated on the existence of simpler forms of organization. A multispecies analysis of freedom offers a fruitful context of application. The possibility of complex forms of freedom is predicated on the prior existence of simpler forms of freedom; the emergence of the former arrives together with heightened modes of interdependence and vulnerability.  Unpacking this dialectic of freedom and dependency, which this paper undertakes in conversation with Helmut Plessner, Hans Jonas, and Peter Godfrey-Smith, can correct human exceptionalism without obscuring the distinctive forms of freedom and agency that are possible for language-using animals.