Mystery of the Human Person

Since the first day of this class, I have been fascinated by the worldviews represented by the theories that we will be studying. Although we are specifically interested in understanding literature on a deeper level, each of these theories are based on beliefs about the world and who we are as human persons.
One striking difference between Marxist critical theory and liberal humanism is their approach to the human person. This difference has pretty far-reaching consequences. Bear with me while I try to unravel this and see how it applies to our study of literature….
According to Barry, one of the tenets of liberal humanism is that each human person possesses a unique individual essence that transcends his/her material environment. In other words, we are not determined by our surroundings. We are able to grow, evolve, and mature—although we can’t radically change who we are, since this is rooted in our essence. From a literary perspective, this reinforces liberal humanism’s view of literature as presenting timeless truths about human nature.
Marxism differs from this by holding that human persons are formed by their environment. This is based on the concept of “materialism,” in which reality consists of our tangible surroundings. Whereas, in liberal humanism, we are determined by our individual essences, in Marxism we are determined by the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Literature, then, is inescapably conditioned by the political and social reality in which it was created.
Marxist literary theory does succeed in acknowledging something that liberal humanism misses: the influence that our physical realities and material circumstances inevitably have on literature. These influences necessarily affect our worldviews, values, etc., and being aware of this adds another layer of meaning to any text. Marxist literary theory also helps us to see the ways in which the material environment is at work within a text and how social position and power play out.
At the same time, it seems to me that Marxist literary theory sees only one aspect of the complexity of literature, and thus, of the human person. In offering hope to the oppressed only through the possibility of revolution (cf. The German Ideology), Marx does not allow for the possibility that human persons are able to transcend—or go beyond—their limited circumstances. While I agree that we are influenced and formed by our social positions and material circumstances, this seems to explain only a piece of our realities.
I am reminded of the work of Viktor Frankl, who studied (during World War II) the ways people made meaning out of unthinkable circumstances. Their ability to find purpose and meaning beyond their surroundings and the extreme oppression they experienced played a large part, he discovered, in their survival. The following is a great quote from Frankl: “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a [person] but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”