3.2 What Is a Concept?
3.2.1 Word and Concept Are Not the Same
One of the greatest stumbling blocks in thinking about the person is the confusion of word and concept. The word “Person” belongs to a particular language. In German it consists of six letters of the Latin alphabet. Different letters, each standing for something, are combined in a certain way so that they can form a word. The written word is designated by the concept that intentionally aims at something. The word is composed of various sounds. Across the different languages, then, there are different words that designate particular concepts. The German word “Person,” the English “person,” the Latin “persona,” the Greek “prosopon” — these are different words. But they can designate the same concept.
What, then, is a concept? A concept is neither a collection of letters nor a sequence of sounds. Nor is it an image in the head or a feeling. A concept is a unit of meaning — that which someone grasps mentally when thinking about something.
An example makes this clear: suppose a German speaker and a Chinese speaker both think about what a person is. They both arrive at the same insight: that the person is a unique being with inalienable dignity. The two use different words (and different writing systems), but they have the same concept. Their thinking aims at the same thing. The word is only the tool; the concept is the thought-content.
But this also means: two people can use the same word and still mean something completely different. If one means by “person” only robots (machine humans) while the other means God or pure spiritual beings, then both are using the same word “person” but attaching fundamentally different concepts to it. The same word, but an entirely different thought-content.
So when two people argue about the person, the first question is: do they even mean the same thing by the word “person”? Only if they are working from the same concept are they actually talking about the same thing. Otherwise they talk past each other.
3.2.2 Thinking and Conceiving
What happens when we form a concept? Here two things must be carefully distinguished: thinking as a process and what is thought as content. One could also say: the act of conceiving and the conceptual content (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 68—72).
The thinking process — the act of reflection, the act of conceiving — is something entirely personal and individual. It takes place in a particular human being, at a particular time, in a particular place. When I think about the person this evening, that is my individual thinking process, and it differs from your thinking process when you too think about it. My thinking process is my psychic experience; your thinking process is yours.
But the thought-content — the conceptual content, that which is thought — can be the same. If you and I both see that personal responsibility presupposes the freedom of the human will, then there are two different thinking processes (mine and yours), but we have grasped the same content. Whether I feel physically unwell while doing so or enjoy the best of health does not in the least diminish the insight gained. Thought-contents consist of concepts, and concepts can be thought by different people. That is what makes it possible for us to communicate with one another at all.
This distinction between act of conceiving and conceptual content is fundamental. The act of conceiving is my psychic experience — it takes place in me, it has a certain duration, it can cost me effort or come easily. The conceptual content, by contrast, is that which I grasp through the act: a unit of meaning that is not my private possession but can equally be grasped by others. The act of conceiving is subjective and unique; the conceptual content can be intersubjective and universal.
This can also be illustrated the other way around: the same person can at different times perform different acts of conceiving that grasp the same conceptual content. If today I see that the person is a being with inalienable dignity, and tomorrow I think about it again, then the two thinking processes are different (they are two different psychic experiences, on different days, perhaps in different moods), but the content that I grasp is the same. The truth about the person does not change because I think it again on Tuesday.
An example: when a student in Munich and a student in Tokyo both understand the Pythagorean theorem, each has performed a different act of conceiving — at a different time, in a different place, under different circumstances. But the conceptual content they have grasped is the same. The theorem remains true regardless of who thinks it and when. It is exactly the same with the concept of person: the act in which I think it is mine. But the content — that which I see about the person — can be grasped by every thinking being.
Language serves to communicate thought-contents that are grasped by concepts. The language spoken by a human being is a goal-directed process, since there can be no meaningful, meaning-bearing language without the underlying concepts, which in turn presuppose a spiritual consciousness. Conceiving is thus also a goal-directed event — it presupposes a spiritual being that is conscious of what it conceives. And of what it intentionally aims at through the concept in question.
Something important follows from this: the concept as such is not something material. It has no weight, no extension, no color. One cannot touch it, smell it, taste it, or cut it with a knife. The unit of meaning is consequently nothing material; it has no extension and therefore cannot be cut up with a kitchen knife. The printed word, however, which is composed of many letters, can be cut up into its individual letters with a sharp kitchen knife.
It would be downright absurd for a surgeon, in the middle of an operation, to take it into his head to search for his patient’s concept of person. For the concept does not exist in the brain like an organ or a cell. It exists as a spiritual entity that is fundamentally different from the material realm.
This means: conceiving is more than a mere brain process. Of course thinking is accompanied by brain activity — nobody denies that. But the conceptual content is not identical with the neuronal process. The neuronal process has a certain duration, a certain localization in the brain, a certain energy consumption. The conceptual content has none of these. That has no weight and no place. One can think it — and the thinking happens in the brain. But what is thought is not in the brain, just as the image of a landscape is not in the camera but appears in the photograph.
This insight is of great importance for the question of the person. For if conceiving is more than a brain process, then the human being who conceives is also more than his brain. The human being is not merely a highly complex nervous system, but a being that can grasp spiritual contents — and that means: a spiritual being. The capacity for conceiving points to a dimension of being human that goes beyond the purely material.
3.2.3 What Is an Apt Concept?
Now the decisive question arises: can a concept aptly grasp the thing at which it aims — or is every concept merely an arbitrary stipulation that could be swapped out at will?
The answer can be illustrated by a simple example. If someone says: “A triangle is a figure with three sides,” then he has an apt concept of the triangle. The concept agrees with the thing. Someone who says instead: “A triangle is a round figure” has a false concept. The concept does aim at the triangle, but it does not grasp it correctly. It is contradictory and therefore not an apt concept.
There is thus a difference between an apt and an inapt concept. An apt concept — one can also call it an “adequate” concept — is a unit of meaning by which one unambiguously and intentionally aims at a particular real being, a particular real state of affairs. It agrees with what is the case in reality (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 72—75).
An inapt — inadequate — concept, by contrast, has a different matter from the basic characteristics of the really existing being at which it intentionally aims. It misses the thing. An example: if someone understands by “person” nothing more than “a being that is currently thinking,” then he has an inapt concept of person — for a sleeping human being is not thinking at that moment and is nevertheless a person.
Another example: anyone who defines “water” as “a flammable liquid” has an inadequate concept of water — the concept aims at water, but it does not hit its essential constitution. Someone who says instead: “Water is HO,” has an adequate concept, because he grasps the essence of the thing. It is exactly the same with the concept of person: an adequate concept of person must grasp what the person really is in its essence — not merely an external property or an incidental feature.
The decisive point is: an adequate concept must hit the thing. It must, figuratively speaking, hit the bull’s-eye — not merely come close. It must conceptually grasp the essential features of the intended being. A concept that hits only what is incidental is not yet an adequate concept, even if it is not outright false. Anyone who defines “person” as “a being that walks upright” has a concept that is not false but completely insufficient — for walking upright does not belong to the essence of personhood.
The adequate concept must therefore penetrate, as it were, to the core of the thing. It must not stop at external, incidental, or changing features. It must grasp that which makes the thing what it is — its essential constitution. For the concept of person this means: an adequate concept of person must conceptually grasp the relevant real essential characteristics of the intended being. It must not content itself with empirically observable behaviors, for these can change without the essence of the being changing. A human being who sleeps shows no person-behavior — and is nevertheless a person. So person-behavior cannot be the essence of personhood, but only its outward appearance.
This is comparable to the difference between the essence of a tree and its changing appearances: in autumn the oak loses its leaves, in winter it stands bare, in spring it sprouts anew. The appearance changes, but the essence of the oak remains. Anyone who judges the oak only by its leaves will conclude in winter that it is no longer an oak. It is much the same with a human being who loses his capacities: the appearance changes, but the essence remains.
An apt concept of person is therefore not simply a useful convention or a mere label to be swapped at will. It is a genuine cognition — a mental grasping of what really constitutes the person in its essence. Through the apt concept, the intended thing at which the thinker intentionally aims is actually disclosed.
This has far-reaching consequences. For if there is an apt concept of person, then the question “What is a person?” is not a question about our preferences or social agreements. It is a question about truth. And when two persons have formed an apt concept of the same thing, the identity of the concept is thereby also affirmed: two people can, independently of one another, recognize the same truth about the person.
3.2.4 The Concept of Person Is Not the Person Itself
There is one more point that is easily overlooked but of great importance: the concept of the person is not the person itself. The concept of person is a mental unit of meaning — something that exists in thinking. The real person, by contrast, is a living being of flesh and blood that loves, thinks, acts, and suffers.
One can love a real human person as a friend. But one cannot love the concept of the human person as a friend, for love in a narrower and proper sense presupposes a real person — a being that possesses itself and can give itself. The concept is neither an image of the person nor a substitute for it. It is that by which the thinking being intentionally aims at the person. An image resembles its original; the concept, by contrast, bears no resemblance to the intended being as such. Nor does it take on any representative function; it does not stand in for the real thing.
What the concept intends — in the case of the concept of person, the person — can be called the “correlate” of the concept. It is of great importance not to confuse or identify this correlate with consciousness. The individual psychic act of consciousness that is directed at something is thus never itself the thing aimed at, any more than the act of cognition itself cognizes anything, or possesses certain properties of the object of cognition. What consciousness intends always stands over against it.
Why is this important? Because the question of whether all human beings are persons is not decided by agreeing on a particular concept of person. The concept of person as such does not decide whether all human beings are persons or not. Nevertheless, the differing — and possibly even contradictorily opposed — philosophical conceptions of reality are reflected in the different concepts of person. It has thus been indicated that neither the necessary essence of the person nor the essence of this real person can be arbitrarily constructed, arbitrarily posited by definition, or stipulated. Rather, the apt concept of person can only be philosophically penetrated and grasped, in intuitive beholding, by going back to the thing itself — that is, the human person as spiritual person.
Here the difference between two fundamentally different approaches becomes apparent: either one tries, by going back to the thing itself, to recognize what the person really is — or one arbitrarily stipulates what is to count as a “person.” The first approach seeks the truth. The second constructs a definition. Only the first can lead to an adequate concept of person.
A comparison makes this vivid: a biologist who wants to know what a particular plant is goes to the plant, examines it, looks at its leaves, its blossoms, its roots. He forms his concept of the plant by going back to the thing itself. If instead he were to stipulate at his desk what is to count as a “plant” without ever having examined a plant, he would arrive at an arbitrary concept that need have nothing to do with reality. It is exactly the same with the concept of person: anyone who wants to recognize the person in its essence must turn to the reality of the person — to the concrete, living human being that thinks, loves, suffers, and acts. Only in this way can a concept arise that hits the thing.