3.1 What Does the Word “Person” Mean?
When we speak of a “person” in everyday life, we can mean quite different things. Sometimes we say: “There are three persons in this room” — and simply mean: three human beings. Another time we say: “He is an impressive personality” — and mean the character, the bearing, the inner greatness of a human being. Yet another time we speak of a “legal person” — and mean a company, which is not a human being at all, but a legal construct.
This variety of usage is not accidental. It reflects the extraordinary breadth of meaning of the word “person.” A lawyer uses the word differently than a theologian, a theologian differently than a physician, a physician differently than a philosopher. In the courtroom a stock corporation can count as a “person.” In theology there is talk of the three “persons” of God — God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. In medicine the question is whether a human being is still “responsive as a person.” And in everyday life we say things like “she is a warm-hearted person” or “three persons were injured.”
These are all fundamentally different ways of using the same word. Behind the everyday use of the word lie fundamentally different meanings, which as a rule we tacitly run together. If we want to think more clearly, we must keep them apart. That is not pedantry but necessity. For most philosophical controversies about the person arise because the two sides mean completely different things by the same word — without ever noticing it.
We can distinguish at least the following meanings:
(a) “Person” as a printed or spoken word — that is, the sequence of characters P-e-r-s-o-n, which consists of letters and, depending on the language, sounds and looks different. In this meaning, “person” is nothing more than a sound or a string of printer’s ink.
(b) “Person” as a name for someone — like an absolute name that expresses the standing-for-itself of a being, in contrast to relative designations such as “I” and “you.” In this sense Max Scheler understood the word “person”: as something that points to a whole that is sufficient unto itself.1
(c) “Person” in the sense of a social role — derived from the mask worn by actors in antiquity, the Greek prosopon (face, countenance, mask). In this way, “person” can also be used to designate a social role. In the theater, the persona was the mask through which the actor spoke and which assigned him a particular role.
(d) “Person” as an idea — as that which we imagine a person to be in general, apart from any particular real person.
(e) “Person” as a unique being — as an individual, unrepeatable entity that by virtue of its so-being is not something but someone. In this meaning, “person” does not mean a property or a role, but a concrete, real being that is not interchangeable with any other.
(f) “Person” as spiritual substance — as a being that possesses self-consciousness, reason, free will, memory, and the capacity for love, and that therefore, as a responsible moral subject, answers for its own free actions. It is either wholly and entirely a person or it is no person at all — being merely “half a person” is as impossible as being “half pregnant.”
(g) “Person” as a concept of dignity — as an expression of the fact that someone possesses an inalienable value that is significant in itself. In this meaning, “person” does not merely say what a being does, but what it is and what value resides in it.
(h) “Person” as a being that has certain capacities — such as reason, self-consciousness, or the ability to have desires for the future. In this meaning, “person” is a state or a property that one can have or not have.
(i) “Person” as a mental content, a concept — that is, a unit of meaning through which our thinking aims at the essence of the person.
This list could be extended further. There is also the meaning of “person” as a mere counting word (“three persons in the room”), as purely relational being (“person only in relation to others”), as a unity of temporal phases (a kind of personal identity over time), as a theological technical term (in the trinitarian sense), and others besides. The dissertation on which this book is based distinguishes no fewer than eighteen different meanings of the word “person” (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 61—65).
This variety of meanings is evident in everyday usage as well. When a hotelier asks: “For how many persons?” he means something different from a judge who says: “The accused person has the right to remain silent.” And both mean something different from the theologian who speaks of the three divine persons. The word is the same. But what it means is fundamentally different.
Why is this distinction so important? Because it lays bare the core of almost all misunderstandings. When one person says: “The embryo is not a person,” he may mean: “It does not yet have self-consciousness” (meaning h). When the other says: “Yes, it is a person,” he means: “It is an independent human being with dignity” (meanings e, f, and g). Both use the same word, but they talk past each other.
Another example: when someone says “My grandfather is no longer a person, he doesn’t recognize me,” he is using “person” in the sense of meaning (h) — as someone who can currently exercise certain capacities. Someone who replies: “Your grandfather is and remains a person, no matter what he can or can no longer do,” understands “person” in the sense of (e), (f), and (g) — as a being that does not forfeit its dignity through the loss of capacities. Both are talking about the same grandfather. But by “person” they mean completely different things.
It is therefore worth looking more closely at what a “concept” actually is — and what it means to have an apt concept of the person.
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