Christopher M. Wojtulewicz

Being born into a family structure—being born of a mother—is key to being human. It is, for Jacques Lacan, essential to the formation of human desire. It is also part of the structure of analogy in the Thomistic thought of Erich Przywara. AI may well increase exponentially in sophistication, and even achieve human-like qualities; but it will only ever form an imaginary mirroring of genuine human persons—an imitation that is in fact morbid and dehumanising. Taking Lacan and Przywara at a point of convergence on this topic offers important insight into human exceptionalism.

Truth is a locus of guilt for the Christian, according to Jacques Lacan. The religious person, he argues, punitively defers truth eschatologically. Yet Lacan’s own view dissolves eschatological deferral to the world, as the “Real”. The metaphysics of Erich Przywara SJ helps highlight that this mirrors Lacan’s view of the religious person. Przywara’s Christian metaphysics and Lacanian psychoanalysis converge on the immanence of truth to history. But Przywaran analogy corrects Lacan’s position on the religious person, which by implication calls for an adjustment to Lacan’s worldview. In the final analysis, Lacan’s dialectical nihilism should yield to a Christian’s hopeful relation to the truth.

Being born into a family structure—being born of a mother—is key to being human. It is, for Jacques Lacan, essential to the formation of human desire. It is also part of the structure of analogy in the Thomistic thought of Erich Przywara. AI may well increase exponentially in sophistication, and even achieve human-like qualities; but it will only ever form an imaginary mirroring of genuine human persons—an imitation that is in fact morbid and dehumanising. Taking Lacan and Przywara at a point of convergence on this topic offers important insight into human exceptionalism.

This paper considers the number of speeches which treat central topics in the House of Lords second reading of the ‘Assisted Dying Bill’ (October 22, 2021). It summarizes some of the principal arguments for and against the Bill according to the main categories of discussion. These were compassion; palliative care; autonomy, choice and control; legal and social effects. In summarizing the arguments thematically, it is possible to see the current state of the debate and how concerns are shared on either side, even if approaches to and proposed solutions for those problems are different. The paper concludes that the essential source of disagreement lies outside of the arguments raised, and therefore that any change in the law is not likely to arise from political consensus.