3.7 Summary and Outlook
In this chapter we have laid the foundations for the main question of this book: What is human personhood?
We have seen:
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The word “person” has many meanings, which must be carefully distinguished. Most misunderstandings in the debate over the person arise because different people mean different things by the same word.
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A concept is not a mere verbal definition, but a spiritual unit of meaning through which we grasp reality. Some concepts are apt; others are not.
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The word “human being” is ambiguous: it can designate the essence of the human being or merely his biological classification. For the question of whether all human beings are persons, what matters is the essential concept of the human being.
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There are exactly five possible relations between the concept “human being” and the concept “person.” The position defended in this book is: all human beings are persons, but not all persons need be human beings.
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The concept of person is always also a dignity concept. Whoever says “person” says something about the inalienable worth of a being.
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There are three fundamental views of the person: “person only through capacities” (empirical-functionalist), “person as an independent being” (substance-ontological), and “person as an independent being in relation” (substance-ontological-relational). The third view is defended in this book as the most apt.
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The concept of person has Christian roots, but it is philosophically viable even without religious presuppositions.
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There is a close connection between the concept of person and one’s worldview.
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The oblivion of the person — the forgetting of personhood in its peculiarity and truth — is not primarily the forgetting of a particular concept, but the forgetting of the person herself.
What has been outlined so far must now be grounded in greater depth. In the next chapter we therefore turn to the main question: What is human personhood? What distinguishes the being of the human person in its various dimensions? And what follows from this for the dignity and rights of every human being?
It will become apparent that the human person possesses a fundamental form of reality that comprises three dimensions. These three dimensions are not lined up side by side like three separate domains; rather, they interpenetrate one another and form an indivisible unity. The human being is not partly spirit, partly body, partly relation, but always all of these at once — as an inseparable whole.
The answers to these questions will show: the human being is not a something, but a someone — from the very beginning, without condition, without gradation. And this being-someone has consequences that reach far beyond philosophy. For in the end this is not about concepts, but about human beings. About real human beings of flesh and blood, who want to be loved, respected, and protected — and who have a right to be.