1.5 What This Book Is Not — and What It Aims to Be
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 1.5 Was dieses Buch nicht ist — und was es sein will
Before we begin, it is helpful to clear up a few misunderstandings.
This book is not a philosophy textbook. It presupposes no prior knowledge and strives for a language that anyone willing to read attentively can understand. Where technical terms are unavoidable, they are explained. The underlying investigation does have the character of a scholarly work, but this book translates its results into a language accessible not only to specialists.
Nor is this book a historical survey of the various opinions about the human being. The primary concern is not who said what and when, but what is true. Of course the investigation draws on great thinkers of the past and the present — on Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, Robert Spaemann, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, and others.1 But the goal is not to present their positions; the goal is the matter itself: What is the human being?
And this book is not a religious tract. The arguments put forward here rest on natural reason and on looking attentively at reality. One need not believe anything in order to follow them. One need only be willing to think — honestly and without prejudice. The work stands in a particular tradition of thought, but its arguments rely not on revelation or articles of faith, but on what is accessible to human reason on its own.
What this book does aim to be, however, is twofold.
First, it aims to be an invitation. An invitation to take the question “What am I, really?” seriously. Not as an abstract philosophical exercise, but as a question that concerns one’s own life and one’s life together with others from the ground up. It is the invitation to enter into a movement of thought that begins with the question of the human being and arrives, in the end, at his inalienable dignity.
Second, this book aims to be a reminder. A reminder of something that at bottom everyone knows, but that can fall into oblivion: that the human being is not a something, but a someone. That he must not be measured by his usefulness, but is owed respect and love — every human being, without exception, without precondition, from the first to the last moment of his life.
For if it is true that every human being is a person — from the very beginning, without precondition, without merit — then something tremendous follows: then every human being has a dignity that no one may touch. Then the human being is a someone who is owed affirmation and love for his own sake. And then every forgetting of this state of affairs — every oblivion of the person, be it theoretical or practical — is an injustice. Not a small omission, not a pardonable error, but an offense against what is due to the human being.
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Fußnoten
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Boethius, Die theologischen Traktate (1988) (The Theological Tractates), ch. 3; Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (1888), Ia, q. 29, a. 3; Spaemann, Personen (1998); Conrad-Martius (1921). ↩