1.2 The Danger of the Oblivion of the Person
If this is true — if every human being is, from the very beginning, a person with inalienable dignity — then a pressing question arises: Why is this so often forgotten? Why are there theories that deny the embryo its personhood? Why are there schools of thought that reduce the human being to his brain functions, as though he were nothing more than a particularly complex machine? Why are there social practices that treat human beings like things?
There is a term for this forgetting: the oblivion of the person. This expression, which goes back to Robert Spaemann,1 describes a phenomenon in which the reality of the human person falls wholly or partly out of view. One could also say: it is a refusal to accept — or a loss of the ability to see — what the human being in truth is.
The oblivion of the person can occur in two ways.
First, as theoretical oblivion of the person. What this means is that a philosophical or scientific theory describes the human being in such a way that his true essence is reduced, reinterpreted, or explained away altogether. This happens, for example, when someone claims that the human being is nothing but a complex biological mechanism, an interplay of chemical reactions, a survival vehicle for his genes. Or when someone ties personhood to the presence of certain brain functions and concludes from this that embryos, infants, or severely brain-damaged human beings are not persons. Such theories do not forget the human being as a biological being — but they forget him as a person. They see the body, but not the someone that this body is.
Second, as practical oblivion of the person. What this means is that in our concrete dealings with human beings, their personhood is disregarded. This happens wherever human beings are treated like things — wherever their dignity is trampled underfoot, wherever they are used, exploited, instrumentalized, or thrown away. Practical oblivion of the person shows itself writ large: in inhuman systems, ideologies, and political orders that turn the individual into a mere means. And it shows itself writ small: in everyday life between individual human beings, in indifference toward one’s neighbor, in the readiness to use others for one’s own purposes.
Both forms of the oblivion of the person are connected. Anyone who thinks wrongly about the human being will find it easier to treat him wrongly. And anyone who treats human beings badly will often concoct a theory to justify it. The theory and the practice of the oblivion of the person reinforce each other.
What is distinctive about the oblivion of the person is that it often does its work unseen. It is a latent phenomenon of privation — it can set in gradually, without our noticing it right away. A society can forget, step by step, what a person is, without anyone crying “Stop!” One need not deny the value of the human being loudly and aggressively in order to be oblivious of the person. It is enough to pass over the subject in silence, to declare the question of the essence of the human being outdated, to dismiss reflection on it as unscientific. That is precisely what makes the oblivion of the person so dangerous: it comes quietly.
This book aims to counter this. It aims to remind us what the human being is — not in order to set up a theory for its own sake, but because knowing what the human being is has consequences. Consequences for every single human being, for how we treat one another, for the shaping of society. Every variety of the oblivion of the person — whether in theory or in practice — constitutes a violation of the appropriate response to the being of the person. And every reminder of what the person really is marks a step toward overcoming this oblivion.
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Fußnoten
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Spaemann, Personen (1998), p. 106. Zaborowski (2010), pp. 213 f. Zaborowski there discusses the concept of the oblivion of the person in Robert Spaemann. ↩