3.4 Three Fundamental Views of the Person
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 3.4 Drei grundlegende Sichtweisen auf die Person
The dispute over the concept of person is, as the bioethicist Dieter Birnbacher aptly remarked, “no mere dispute over conceptual contents, but a dispute between thoroughly antithetical normative-ethical doctrines.”1 This is not, then, a quarrel over words, but a clash between fundamentally different views of the human being and of reality. What is at stake is real being, which is apprehended differently depending on one’s philosophical worldview.
Out of the wealth of concepts of person proposed over the history of philosophy — one could easily collect dozens of different definitions — three fundamental types can be distinguished: three “basal concepts of person”. The conceptual intension — the conceptual content — determines each concept of person. What first distinguishes one concept of person from another (logically speaking) is thus the conceptual content: what it asserts about the person.
The three basal concepts of person are: the ontological concept of person (here called the substance-ontological concept of person), the empirical-functionalist concept of person, and the relational concept of person. What distinguishes them from one another is, above all, the question: what makes a being a person?
One can picture the three basal concepts of person as three circles that partially overlap. At their center — where all three circles meet — lies the dignity of the person: what all three views acknowledge in common. Yet how this dignity is grounded differs fundamentally from one concept of person to the next (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 93—98).
It is important to grasp the full weight of this distinction. These are not three equally valid “opinions” among which one may choose at will. They are three fundamentally different conceptions of what the person is in reality. At least two of them must be false — for they contradict one another on essential points. The question, then, is not: which view do I like best? But: which view gets reality right?
3.4.1 View 1: “Person Only Through Capacities”
The empirical-functionalist concept of person
According to this view, a being is a person exactly when it actually possesses or can exercise certain capacities: consciousness, self-consciousness, rationality, the ability to have desires and to anticipate the future. The core of this concept of person can be summed up as follows: an entity is a person exactly when it possesses the capacity of rationality — where rationality may be taken to comprise various component capacities.
John Locke (1632—1704) decisively shaped this view. He defined the person as a thinking, intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself — as the same thinking being at different times and in different places.2 For Locke, personal identity consists in consciousness alone: “Since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes everyone what he calls his self, in this alone consists personal identity.” Without consciousness there is, for Locke, no person.
The consequences of this view are far-reaching and grave. If personhood is tied to the actual presence of certain capacities, then there are “becoming persons” — beings that are not yet persons but can become persons. There are also “ceasing persons” — beings that were persons but no longer are, because they have irretrievably lost the decisive capacities. And there are human beings that never were and never will be persons, because they never developed the required capacities.
On Locke’s concept of person, then, there can be human beings that are “potential persons”. Such “potential persons” are accordingly not persons, and therefore possess no dignity grounded in personhood either. Thought through to its conclusion, Locke’s concept of person thus leads to an “ontological splitting” of the human being: on one side, the human being who is merely biologically alive; on the other, the human being who lives personally. Robert Spaemann identified this rupture plainly: “If life is not the being of the living, then the being of the person cannot be identical with the life of a human being.” Spaemann presses the analysis further: in Locke, the person “is not determined from action; rather, action [is determined] from motion, and motion from the fiction of objective discrete sense data. In this way he dissolves the unity into a sequence of infinitely many instantaneous individual events.”3
David Wiggins has modified and improved Locke’s approach.4 He proposes to determine a person as a being that exhibits physical similarities to normal adult beings and that most probably belongs to the same biological species. That is a step away from making everything depend on consciousness alone, yet at its core it still belongs to the functionalist family.
Derek Parfit has thought the functionalist approach through to its conclusion more consistently than anyone. For Parfit, the person is not a archphenomenon, but at most a temporarily undetermined epiphenomenon of matter or of the psyche. For Parfit, the human being we call a “person” is ultimately superfluous, a nullity: “Personal identity is not what matters.”5
Peter Singer, a proponent of preference utilitarianism, likewise holds an empirical-functionalist concept of person. By “person” he understands “a rational and self-conscious being” that is aware of itself as a distinct entity with a past and a future. Singer therefore proposes, consistently enough: “Just as we regard brain death as the end of a person, so we should regard brain life as the beginning of the person.”6 Spaemann comments aptly on where this line of thought leads: “Parfit’s strategy outdoes even Singer’s. It is more consistent than Singer’s position. For Parfit, too, there is no someone, no bearer of states of consciousness, nothing that appears in the face of a human being. So for him there is no continuous Thou either.”7
What unites all these positions: personhood is determined by doing, not by being. Whoever does not or cannot do certain things is not a person, or ceases to be one. The person is, to put it pointedly, defined by performance. The empirical-functionalist concept of person is essentially marked by a materialist actualism: with the person’s substantial being gone, the abiding identity of the human person becomes a problem that calls for some philosophical solution or other.
There are weighty reasons against this view.
First, it draws its boundaries arbitrarily: at what degree of rationality or self-consciousness does personhood begin? Who sets that standard? If personhood is tied to certain cognitive performances, then a line must be drawn somewhere. But every such line is arbitrary. Why should personhood begin with the first thought? Why not with the first dream? Why not with the first coordinated movement? Every criterion one sets up can be called into question — which shows that the line rests not on the nature of the matter, but on the decision of whoever draws it.
Second, it contradicts everyday experience: anyone who visits a severely demented relative experiences him as someone — as the same person he always was, even if there is much he can no longer do. The daughter who visits her demented mother in the nursing home does not say: “There lies a former human being.” She says: “That is my mother.” She recognizes in her the same person who held her, comforted her, and loved her as a child. This experience is not sentimental; it is a genuine cognitive good: we recognize in the face of the other his personal being, even when it can no longer find full functional expression.
Third, it implies that personhood could be a matter of degree — one would then be more or less of a person, depending on how many capacities one possesses. But personhood is not a physical state that can be present to a greater or lesser degree. Either someone is a person or he is not. One cannot be “half a person”, any more than one can be “half pregnant”. If personhood came in degrees, one would have to ask: what percentage of a person am I today? And who determines that? The absurdity of the question exposes the absurdity of the premise.
Fourth, it leaves no room for the distinction between personhood and person-behavior: it confuses what someone is with what someone does or can do. Personhood is the being of a being; person-behavior is the doing of this being. Doing presupposes being, not the other way around. A human being must first exist before he can think, love, or act. Whoever makes personhood dependent on person-behavior gets the order backwards.
Fifth: the empirical-functionalist concept of person cannot explain the abiding identity of the person. If personhood is constituted by actual capacities, then the person of today is not necessarily the same as the person of yesterday — for the capacities may have changed. Parfit saw this consequence most clearly and embraced it: personal identity is “not what matters”. But this profoundly contradicts what we know about ourselves: I am the same human being I was yesterday, even if my mood, my thoughts, and my capacities have changed.
This has grave consequences for the human being, and they become apparent above all in bioethics: the debate over the question “What is the real death of the human being?” brings to light where the empirical-functionalist understanding of the person can lead. Singer has said so openly: if brain life marks the beginning of the person, then there can be no personhood before brain functions set in or after they are extinguished. The human being in the womb would then no more be a person than the human being after so-called brain death. Both would be human organisms, but not persons — and would thus have no claim to the protection owed to persons.
This consequence is not a misunderstanding of the functionalist approach; it is its logical result. Whoever ties personhood to capacities must accept that there are human beings who are not persons. Whether one is prepared to bear this consequence is a question everyone must answer for himself. But one should be clear about the consequences before settling on a concept of person.
3.4.2 View 2: “The Person as an Independent Being”
The substance-ontological concept of person
According to this view, the person is a living substance with a rational nature. Personhood is not something one acquires or loses, but something one is. It belongs to the essence of the human being to be a person. And it cannot be lost. What essentially distinguishes the person as a subject is a being that is simple, absolutely indivisible, and above all spiritual and rational.
Boethius (c. 480—525 AD) formulated the classical definition: “Persona est naturae rationabilis individua substantia” — the person is the indivisible substance of a rational nature.8
Stephen Schwarz sums up this concept of person for our time with clarity and precision: in its full meaning, “human being” designates a being whose nature it is to be a person. A person is a being with the fundamental, inherent capacity for person-behavior, regardless of whether this capacity is developed or blocked. […] Every human being is a person, even if he can no longer behave as one [… (as in advanced dementia)] or cannot at present do so (in deep sleep, under general anesthesia, or in a coma). The theory […, which counts only the actually acting human being as a person, overlooks] that every human being is a person. The human being is a form of existence of the person. Therefore we should respect every human being as a fully valid person — every human being, regardless [… of origin], of level of intelligence, of state of health or stage of development — for he is a person.9
Robert Spaemann also holds this concept of person: the human being is “essentially” a person — that is, being a person belongs to being human. The ground of knowledge for this is the normal adult human being who actually displays person-behavior. But personhood does not depend on whether the human being can yet, or can still, display this behavior. There is no human being whose human nature is not ontologically possessed by something underlying it.
Josef Seifert deepens this approach by stressing that the person is an archphenomenon — something that cannot be traced back to anything simpler. The person is not the sum of its parts, not the result of a composition, but an original unity and wholeness. Personhood is “the most perfect thing in the whole of nature” (perfectissimum in tota Natura), as Thomas Aquinas called it.10
What does it mean to say that personhood is a “archphenomenon”? It means you cannot explain it any further by tracing it back to something else. You cannot say: “Personhood is really nothing other than…” — for it is always more than any description given of it. It is like light: you can describe its wavelength, the effects it produces, how fast it travels. But what light is in its innermost essence can only be experienced by seeing it. So it is with personhood too: you recognize it in the face of the other, in encounter, in the gaze — but you cannot dissolve it without remainder into other categories.
Søren Kierkegaard described the independence of the person with the formula that the self is “a relation that relates itself to itself”.11 The person is thus not simply a thing among things, but a being that stands in relation to itself — that knows itself, possesses itself, can affirm or deny itself. This self-relation is not an incidental feature; it belongs to the essence of personhood.
The substance-ontological concept of person thus says: every human being always already is a person. There are no “becoming” persons and no “potential” persons. Persons are always actual. Nor does personal being develop. Rather, it is personal being that gives a particular human development its specific character.
A strict distinction must therefore be drawn between personhood, which either obtains or does not, and certain empirically ascertainable actual capacities of the person, such as the activity of reason. This distinction is the key to understanding the substance-ontological concept of person. Personhood is like the foundation of a house: it is there even if no one lives in the house, even if all the windows are shut and all the doors locked. The capacities of the person — thinking, willing, loving — are like the house’s inhabitants: they can come and go, but the house remains. Personhood precedes person-behavior, not the other way around.
3.4.3 View 3: “The Person as an Independent Being in Relation”
The substance-ontological-relational concept of person
This third view unites the strengths of the second view with an essential addition: the person is an independent spiritual substance — and by its very essence it is at the same time ordered toward the Thou. Both belong to it, not one after the other and not side by side, but as one nature.
This is the view advocated and grounded in this book. This concept of person is of particular interest, since it represents a special mode of both the relational and the substance-ontological concepts of person. It could therefore be called the substance-ontological-relational concept of person.
Being ordered toward the Thou is not an addition that arrives once the person is complete. It belongs to the person’s essence, just as its independence does. But it is a disposition, not a condition: the embryo, the sleeping human being, the hermit remain persons, even when their capacity for relation is not being exercised at the moment. The person can become fully itself, in the full sense, only by entering into relation — but it does not first have to enter into relation in order to be a person.
Picture the connection this way: the substance-ontological concept of person is the foundation and frame of a house. The relational concept of person is the roof. The substance-ontological-relational concept of person is the whole house. Without the foundation, the roof would not stand — without the independence of the person, the relation would have no bearer. Without the roof, the house would be incomplete — without the relation, the understanding of the person would remain one-sided.
This concept of person has the power to grasp human personhood most accurately in its archphenomenal being-in-itself. It preserves the inalienable dignity of the person (because personhood does not depend on capacities), while taking seriously that the person is essentially ordered toward community, toward love, toward the Thou.
Love is a key concept here. Only a being that is in full possession of its own nature and possesses itself can give itself to another being. Love in the proper sense — the love of friendship, parental love, spousal love — always presupposes at least two persons directed toward one another.
The core formula of this book therefore reads: the human person is a spiritual substance in the body, by its essence ordered toward the Thou.
This formula captures everything essential. “Spiritual substance” — the person is not a mere bundle of properties, but an independent being with a spiritual nature. “In the body” — the person is not a pure spirit, but a bodily-spiritual being; the body belongs to it essentially. “By its essence ordered toward the Thou” — community and love are not add-ons; they belong to what the person is. Every single element of this formula is essential. Leave one out, and the understanding of the person is cut short.
3.4.4 Why the Third View Is the Most Accurate
The substance-ontological-relational concept of person is the most accurate, because it comes closest to the essence of the human person. The main part of this book grounds it in detail. Here, by way of preview, the most important reasons can be sketched.
First: it avoids the weaknesses of the purely functionalist approach. If personhood is tied to capacities, then one must explain why a sleeping human being is still a person, why a human being in a coma does not cease to be a person, and why an embryo — ordered from within toward thinking, willing, and loving — should not count as a mere thing. The functionalist approach cannot explain this satisfactorily. Thought through to its conclusion, it leads to the “break with the classical understanding of the person”, as Spaemann calls it — to the “atomization of motion and thus also of the idea of life and the idea of thinking”.12 The substance-ontological-relational approach can explain it: personhood is tied not to the exercise of capacities, but to the being of the being itself.
Second: it avoids the weaknesses of the purely relational approach. A purely relational concept of person — that is, the idea that a being becomes a person only through the recognition of others — leads to a logical contradiction. For what is it that the act of recognition recognizes? Recognition presupposes the very personhood it supposedly produces in the first place. One cannot confer on a being by recognition what it is not already of itself.
Third: it takes the wholeness of being human seriously. The human being is neither mere substance (like a stone) nor mere relation (like a mirror image). He is a being that stands in itself and at the same time is directed toward the other. He has intellect, will, and heart — and by his very essence he is ordered toward community.
3.4.5 Three Objections and Three Arguments
The three reasons just given can be put more sharply still. For the decision between the three views is not a matter of taste. It emerges from a systematic conversation between argument and objection, between thesis and antithesis. Three objections tell against the first view, and three arguments, conversely, support the third. Both triads are briefly anticipated here — not to replace what the following chapters set out, but so that the reader can see the line the book takes.
The three objections against the functionalist concept of person
The first objection is the exclusion objection. Whoever ties personhood to actual capacities must deny certain human beings personal status: the embryo, the newborn, the sleeper, the human being in a coma, the severely demented human being. That contradicts the experience and the moral knowledge we already possess in our dealings with these human beings. A theory that forces us to stop regarding a severely demented human being as a person is no longer our theory — it is an error in the theory.
The second objection is the objection of diachronic identity. Whoever ties personhood to psychological continuity — to memory, consciousness, and expectation of the future — must explain what carries this continuity. The one who remembers is the one who experienced it. Memory already presupposes the person who remembers. It cannot produce the person. That I am the same today as I was yesterday is not the consequence of my memory; my memory is the consequence of my being the same.
The third objection is the performative contradiction — a distinctive further development in the 2026 book project, which carries Karl-Otto Apel’s transcendental-pragmatic argumentative figure over into the ontology of the person, closing a systematic gap in Spaemann. Whoever holds the first view argues as a philosopher. He advances reasons, refutes objections, lays claim to truth. In doing so he enacts, in his own speaking, precisely what he wants to restrict in theory: personhood as a rational, truth-capable, responsible counterpart. His theory refutes itself not in the content of its sentences, but in the performance of saying them. It saws off the branch it is sitting on.
The three positive arguments for the substance-ontological concept of person
The three objections are matched by three positive arguments. They support the third view and are unfolded in the main part of the book.
The first is called: nature is the ground. Whoever has the rational nature is a person. It does not matter whether the capacities that grow from this nature are yet, still, or ever actually unfolded. Robert Spaemann sharpened this argument into a single sentence: there are no potential persons. Either a being has a rational nature — then it is a person. Or it does not — then it is not a potential person either. The embryo is not a becoming person. It is a person in becoming. It is not thinking that makes it a person. It is the one who will think.
The second is called: the person is an archphenomenon. It cannot be derived from anything more fundamental — not from neural processes, not from behavioral patterns, not from social ascriptions. We encounter the person immediately as person. A child recognizes its mother as mother before it has any concept of person. In every gaze, in every word, the person itself stands before us — not as an interpretation of data, but as an original givenness. Whoever tries to derive the person loses it. The person can only be seen, not constructed.
The third is called: every person is unique. We do not count persons like things. Two identical chairs are two chairs; two identical persons would be a contradiction in terms. Even identical twins are two persons, because they are two unique existences, not two specimens of the same individual. This uniqueness is not statistical; it belongs to the being of the person itself. Richard of St. Victor expressed this in his definition by replacing the word substantia in the classical formula of Boethius with existentia. Every person is a unique bringing-forth into being — not one more instance of a kind.
Why these six topoi belong together
Together, these three objections and three arguments carry what is unfolded in the pages that follow. They show why the third view is the most accurate — and why the first view, plausible as it seems at first glance, does not hold up under closer inspection. The reader will meet most of these thoughts again, in various forms, in the chapters that follow. Here they are gathered in advance, so that the line becomes visible.
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Fußnoten
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Birnbacher, „Das Dilemma des Personenbegriffs” (“The Dilemma of the Concept of Person”, 1997), in: Beginn, Personalität und Würde des Menschen, ed. Günter Rager, p. 9. German original: „kein bloßer Streit um Begriffsinhalte, sondern ein Streit zwischen durchweg antithetischen normativ-ethischen Doktrinen.” ↩
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Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Book II, ch. 27, §§9—26. ↩
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Spaemann, Personen (Persons, 1998), Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998, p. 31. On the analysis of Locke’s position. German originals: „Wenn Leben nicht das Sein des Lebendigen ist, dann kann das Sein der Person nicht identisch sein mit dem Leben eines Menschen.”; „nicht von der Handlung [her bestimmt], sondern die Handlung von der Bewegung, Bewegung aber von der Fiktion objektiver diskreter Sinnesdaten her. Damit löst er die Einheit in eine Folge unendlich vieler instantaner Einzelereignisse auf.” ↩
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Wiggins, Sameness and Substance Renewed (2001), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ↩
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Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1987), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987, Part III. ↩
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Singer, Practical Ethics (1993), 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 83. ↩
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Wiggins, Sameness and Substance Renewed (2001), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. German original of the Spaemann quotation: „Parfits Strategie übertrifft noch diejenige Singers. Sie ist konsequenter als die Singersche Position. Auch Parfit kennt nicht jemanden, nicht einen Träger von Bewusstseinszuständen, nicht etwas, was im Antlitz eines Menschen erscheint. So kennt er auch kein kontinuierliches Du.” ↩
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Boethius, Die theologischen Traktate (The Theological Tractates, 1988), Hamburg: Meiner, 1988, cap. 3. ↩
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Schwarz, Die verratene Menschenwürde (Human Dignity Betrayed, 1992), Cologne: Communio, 1992, pp. 123f. German original: „‚Mensch’ bezeichnet in seiner vollen Bedeutung ein Wesen, dessen Natur es ist, Person zu sein. Eine Person ist ein Wesen mit der grundlegenden, ihm innewohnenden Fähigkeit des Personverhaltens, gleichgültig, ob diese Fähigkeit entwickelt oder blockiert ist. […] Jeder Mensch ist Person […]. Der Mensch ist eine Daseinsform der Person. Also sollten wir jeden Menschen als vollgültige Person achten […] – denn er ist Person.” ↩
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Singer, Praktische Ethik (Practical Ethics, 1994), Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994, p. 197. ↩
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Kierkegaard, Die Krankheit zum Tode (The Sickness unto Death, 1959), Frankfurt a.M.; Hamburg: Fischer Bücherei, 1959, p. 11. German original: „ein Verhältnis, das sich zu sich selbst verhält”. ↩
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Spaemann, Personen, op. cit., p. 34. On the analysis of the consequences of Parfit’s position. German originals: „Bruch mit dem klassischen Personverständnis”; „Atomisierung der Bewegung und damit auch der Idee des Lebens und der Idee des Denkens”. ↩