1.3 What This Book Aims to Show — Three Basic Ideas
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 1.3 Was dieses Buch zeigen will — drei Grundgedanken
The investigation underlying this book revolves around a single question: What is human personhood? In the attempt to answer this question, three closely interconnected basic ideas have crystallized. Taken together, they form the answer this book gives.
1.3.1 The First Basic Idea: There Is an Adequate Concept of the Person
Over the centuries, philosophers, theologians, and scientists have tried to determine what a person is. Very different answers have emerged — so different that one may wonder whether they are all even talking about the same thing.
Some take a person to be a being that can actually think and reflect on itself. Anyone who loses consciousness would, on this view, no longer be a person — at least not in the full sense. This view goes back to the English philosopher John Locke, who tied personhood to memory and self-consciousness.1
Others hold that “person” is merely a way in which we recognize one another — a social status, not an essential property. Still others see in the person only a bundle of experiences, an interplay of brain functions that constantly changes and has no stable core.
All these views have one thing in common: they make personhood depend on something that can come and go. On capacities, on performances of consciousness, on recognition by others. And this gives them a common problem: they cannot explain why every human being is a person under all circumstances.
This book takes a different view. There is a concept of person that best captures reality. This concept understands the person as a spiritual being that at the same time stands in relation. It thus joins two sides that are often separated.
“Spiritual being” here means: the person is not merely a body, not merely an interplay of nerve cells, not merely a biological organism. It is a someone — an independent, unique, unrepeatable being that stands in itself and possesses an inner core that goes beyond everything merely bodily. The person has an interiority, a self, an I. And this I is not the product of its brain processes — it is what makes these processes possible in the first place.
“In relation” means: this being is, from the ground up, ordered toward others. Not as an afterthought, as an additional property, but from its innermost core. The human being is ordered toward knowledge, toward encounter, toward love. He is by his very essence a being of relation.
This concept of person thus joins two insights that are often separated: that the person is something independent, standing in itself — and that it is at the same time essentially related to others. Both belong together and cannot be separated from each other. The person is not an isolated I, but neither is it a mere node in a network of relations. It is a someone that can open itself toward others — and can do so precisely because it stands in itself.
Why is it so important to find the right concept of person? Because a false concept of person leads to a false understanding of the human being. And anyone who misunderstands the human being will not do him justice. A concept of person that ties personhood to performances of consciousness inevitably excludes those who cannot deliver these performances. A concept of person that takes the person to be a mere bundle of properties cannot explain why the person has an absolute, inalienable value. Only a concept of person that grasps the person in its being — not in its doing — does justice to reality.
1.3.2 The Second Basic Idea: Human Personhood Has a Definite Shape
What, then, is special about human personhood? The human being is a spiritual person — but one that lives in the body. His personhood is not detached from the body, and his body is not detached from his personhood. Each pervades the other. The human being is no spirit that happens to inhabit a body, and no body that happens to be able to think. He is a bodily-spiritual being, all of one piece. His personhood is, to put it in technical terms, spiritual substantial being in the body.
What does that mean? It means that the human being does not consist of two separate parts — a body here and a spirit there — somehow joined together. Rather, the human being is one single reality in which the spiritual and the bodily form an inseparable unity. The body is not the prison of the soul, and the soul is not the passenger of the body. The human being is his body, and he is his soul — he is both at once and inseparably.
This bodily-spiritual personhood has a definite shape, which can be described in three layers or dimensions. The important point is that these are not three separate parts, but three stages in the unfolding of one and the same reality — just as a flower in bud, in blossom, and in fruit is always the same plant.
The first layer is the fundamental existence of the person. At issue here is the simple being-there of a human person — even before it opens its eyes for the first time, even before it thinks or feels. A human embryo is in this layer. It is already a person, even though it has not yet unfolded its personal capacities. It is not a possible person, not a person in the making, not a potential person — it is a real person that will unfold. It has everything it takes to be a person. For personhood does not depend on the unfolding of capacities, but on being itself. The embryo is a spiritual substance in the body — from the very first second. It unfolds what it already is. It does not first become a human being through development. It is a human being — from the very beginning.
The second layer is the conscious, thinking, feeling, and freely acting life of the person. Here the human being unfolds what is latent within him: he thinks, knows, feels, loves, decides, acts. This is what most people have in mind when they think of “personhood” — the active, conscious life of a person. This doing of the person can be called person-behavior: everything a person actually does, or possesses as a capacity and could in principle exercise.
But — and this is the decisive point — this second layer presupposes the first. First someone must be there; then he can act. First a person must exist; then it can think, feel, and love. The doing does not bring forth the being-there. The acting presupposes the one who acts. Personhood and person-behavior are fundamentally different things: personhood is what someone is; person-behavior is what someone does. The one precedes the other. To confuse them is to confuse the ground with the consequence.
The third layer concerns the moral unfolding of the person. Through his decisions, basic attitudes, thoughts, words, and deeds, the human being forms himself in qualitative respects. He can act well or badly, he can grow in character or wither, he can increase in virtue or in vice. His moral being — what the medieval thinkers called ens morale2 — is the result of his free decisions.
But here too: this moral worth concerns the quality of his life, not his fundamental existence as a person. Even a human being who has incurred grave guilt remains a person. Even a human being whose character has withered possesses inalienable dignity. The third layer cannot annul the first.
The decisive point is this: these three layers are not three different things, but three sides of the same reality. And the later layer presupposes the earlier — always and without exception. Conscious personhood presupposes fundamental existence. Moral unfolding presupposes conscious personhood. But the converse never holds: fundamental existence does not depend on whether someone already lives consciously or has unfolded morally. The person who does not yet live consciously — like the embryo — is no less a person than the person who is fully unfolded. The person who no longer lives consciously — like the human being after irreversible loss of brain function — has not lost its personhood. For personhood lies in the first layer, not in the second or third.
1.3.3 The Third Basic Idea: Human Life Is Always the Life of a Person
This idea may sound self-evident at first glance, but it has considerable explosive force. It says: there is no human life that is not at the same time the life of a person. The distinction between “merely” biological human life and “genuine” personal life cannot be upheld either in reality or in thought.
Some thinkers distinguish between human biological life and human personal life. They say: at the beginning, the embryo is biologically a human being, but not yet a person. Only when certain capacities appear — such as the sensation of pain, consciousness, or self-consciousness — does personal life begin. Before that, there is only “human biological life,” not yet “personal” life.
This distinction sounds plausible at first glance, but it does not stand up to closer examination. Why? Because what makes the human being a human being — his spiritual nature, his personhood — is not added at some later point in the course of development. It is there from the very beginning. The human embryo does not first have biological life to which personhood is later “added” like an extra building block. Its biological life is, from the very first second, the life of a person — a person still living in the first layer of its existence, but a real, complete person.
Where there is human life, there is a human person. This is no mere assertion, but an insight that follows from the understanding of what the human being is.
Taken together, these three basic ideas yield something of fundamental importance: every human being is a person from the fusion of the germ cells until death.3 Not all persons are human beings — for there could be persons that are not bodily-spiritual beings. But all human beings are persons. And as persons they possess a dignity that no one can give and no one can take away — an inalienable dignity that belongs to the essence of the person itself.
This dignity is not something the state confers or society grants. It is not something one earns through achievement. It is not something one loses through illness, age, or disability. It belongs to the essence of every human person — from the first to the last moment of its life. Illness, disability, and suffering do nothing to alter it. And it is not something relative — not a value that counts for more or less depending on one’s standpoint — but an objective, inalienable value.
Why? Because the person is the most perfect thing in all of nature. There is nothing in the visible world that stands above the person in rank and dignity. Thomas Aquinas summed this up in a famous sentence: “The person signifies that which is most perfect in the whole of nature.”4 Anyone who has recognized this understands why the person is owed a special respect — a respect that is not negotiable.
And from this dignity follows a norm that determines how human beings are to be treated: the human person is to be affirmed and loved for its own sake. This is not a mere duty, nor a law imposed from outside. It is the only appropriate response to what the human being is of himself. This norm — which the philosopher Karol Wojtyła called the Personalistic Norm5 — is not an arbitrary stipulation; it follows from the essence of the person itself. Whoever recognizes the person also recognizes that affirmation and love are its due.
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Fußnoten
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Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Book II, ch. 27. ↩
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On the concept of ens morale in medieval philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (1888), Ia-IIae, q. 18. ↩
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Against this thesis, the objection of monozygotic twinning is sometimes raised: until about the 14th day after fertilization, the cells of the embryo can divide and become identical twins. From this it is concluded that before this point the embryo cannot yet be an individual being — and therefore not a person. This objection is unfounded: the possibility of division does not tell against actual individuality. Within the undivided cluster of cells, the individual cells are not independent beings but mutually ordered parts of a unified biological whole. Only when they are separated from one another do they gain independence. In an actual case of twinning, two possibilities are conceivable: either the original person continues to exist and a new, second person comes into being — or the original person ceases to exist and two new persons come into being. In neither case does it follow that no person was there before the division. A detailed discussion can be found in Chapter 4, Section 4.4.3. ↩
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Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia q. 29 a. 3 co.: “Respondeo dicendum quod persona significat id quod est perfectissimum in tota Natura, scilicet subsistens in rationali Natura.” ↩
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Wojtyła, Liebe und Verantwortung (Love and Responsibility) (1979), Munich: Kösel, 1979. There Wojtyła formulates the “Personalistic Norm”: the person is to be affirmed and loved for its own sake. ↩