On the Question of What a Person Is
Robert Spaemann: Personen. Versuche über den Unterschied zwischen „etwas” und „jemand” (Klett-Cotta, 1998). English edition: Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’ (Oxford University Press, 2006).
This book is arguably the most important contemporary contribution to the philosophy of the person. In clear, compelling language, Spaemann shows that the difference between a person and a mere something is not one of degree but a fundamental one. Persons are not a special sort of object — they are someones. Spaemann brings together the substance-ontological tradition and the idea of relationality: personhood always means standing in relation. If you want to read only a single book on this subject, it should be this one.
Josef Seifert: Sein und Wesen (Winter, 1996) (Being and Essence).
Seifert’s main philosophical work asks about the fundamental structures of that which is. What does it mean for something to be at all? What does it mean to have an essence? These questions sound abstract, but their answers bear directly on our understanding of the human person. For anyone who wants to know what the human being is must first understand what “being” and “essence” actually mean. The book is demanding, but indispensable for anyone who wants to go deeper.
Josef Seifert: Leib und Seele. Ein Beitrag zur philosophischen Anthropologie (Pustet, 1973) (Body and Soul: A Contribution to Philosophical Anthropology).
An investigation of the unity of body and soul that avoids both extremes: it neither dissolves the human being into mere matter nor treats the body as an inessential appendage. Seifert shows that the human being is a bodily-spiritual being whose embodiment is essential to personhood. Worth reading for anyone who wants to think seriously through the question “Am I my body?”
John F. Crosby: The Selfhood of the Human Person (Catholic University of America Press, 1996).
Crosby pursues the question of what makes each individual person distinctively her own: her unrepeatability, her non-interchangeability, her unmistakable selfhood. The book is written in English and combines personalist philosophy with a sensitivity to what is unique and irreplaceable in every human person.
Karol Wojtyła: Person und Tat (Herder, 1981). English edition: The Acting Person.
Wojtyła — the later Pope John Paul II — examines the relation between person and action and shows that it is in acting that the person comes to know herself. The human being discovers who he is by acting. The book brings together the phenomenological tradition and the thought of Thomas Aquinas, opening an approach to human personhood that starts from concrete experience. Also recommended as a companion is Wojtyła’s Liebe und Verantwortung (Kösel, 1979; English edition: Love and Responsibility) — a profound study of personal love between man and woman that goes far beyond a mere “ethics of relationships.”
Max Scheler: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (1913/16). English edition: Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values.
Scheler’s main work contains one of the most penetrating analyses of the person ever written. Scheler shows that the person is the performer of all acts — not a thing behind the acts, but the concrete being that lives wholly in every act. The work is long and presupposes a great deal, but the sections on the person and on the Ordo Amoris — the objective rank order of values — belong to what endures in philosophy.
Full bibliographic details in the Bibliography.
Further reading: On the Method of Careful Looking →