Abstract
This book is an effort to provide “a phenomenology of the fully human.” It is not a book that looks at the various stages of human development over the course of a person’s life, but instead presents a picture of the end stage of the process, what “human development is in its fullness” (xi). Shea, a retired professor of psychology at Fordham and then Boston College, writes with the clarity of a fine teacher, explaining his terms as he introduces them and building his case in a coherent and readily understood manner.
S. divides his book into two major parts, the first carefully laying out his schema of a person as a fully developed adult and morally responsible being. In the second part of the work, he then uses his schema to look at the realms of education, psychotherapy, and spirituality. S. both borrows wisdom from these realms and contributes insights into how a view of the fully human person helps enrich these other disciplines.
At the foundation of the fully developed person are integrity and mutuality. By integrity S. means “a self in which all the ‘Inner pieces’—whether thought of as aspects, or components, or elements, or parts—function together as a whole” (10). Mutuality entails “a basic respect and appreciation of one for the other . . . an empowering exchange . . . that tends to further the other even as it furthers the self” (17).
Following a more detailed and nuanced treatment of integrity and mutuality as the foundational structure of the developed adult, S. then turns to examine care and justice as the means to act upon the structure. “Being caring and just—together as one—is the best description we have of an integral and mutual self in action” (76). S. provides an argument for uniting care and justice, rather than seeing them as separate moral theories. For S. caring “is to attend to the needs, rights, and freedoms of the self and the other for wholeness,” while justice entails being “respectful, fair, and equitable as we do that” (81).
The final piece of S.’s treatment of the fully human is his argument that the action of care and justice beget peace, which is the “epitome of human development” (124). Attaining peace is the positive path to human development, while violence is the negative path to human disintegration.
From the perspective of moral theology, I found S. offers a wise and readily understandable argument for an anthropology that would be helpful in a foundational ethics course, and for an understanding of moral obligation and responsibility that avoids extrinsicism and subjectivism.