1.1 Why This Question Concerns Everyone
There are questions that at first glance seem purely theoretical. Whether the human being is a person or only becomes one, whether dignity is something given or something acquired — that may sound like rarefied scholarship, like a problem for the ivory tower. Yet the opposite is the case. Max Scheler once said that, in a certain sense, all the central problems of philosophy can be traced back to the question of what the human being is.1 And one may add: not only the problems of philosophy, but also those of society, of politics, and of our everyday life with one another.
How we think about the human being determines how we treat him. That is true always and everywhere. Anyone who takes the human being to be nothing more than a particularly intelligent ape will treat him differently from someone who sees in him a being with a unique dignity. Anyone who believes that personhood is tied to certain capacities — to thinking, feeling, self-consciousness — must explain what happens to those who lack these capacities or no longer have them.
What about the embryo, who cannot yet think? What about the infant, who does not yet have self-consciousness? What about the human being in a deep coma, who may never wake up again? What about the human being with severe dementia, who will never again be able to think clearly and coherently, even though his inner experience, his feelings, and even moments of surprising lucidity remain to the very end? What about the human being after irreversible loss of brain function, who is kept alive by a heart-lung machine and will never feel again?
If personhood depends on capacities, then there are human beings who are not persons. Then there are human beings without dignity. Then there is human life that is worth less than other human life. One would have to say: beyond a certain loss of capacities, someone ceases to be a person. Being human would then be something that can be earned and lost. That would not be knowledge — it would be presumption.
And it does not stop at theory. Wherever people begin to distinguish between “worthy” and “unworthy” life, deeds follow. The history of the twentieth century has shown where it leads when certain human beings are denied personhood. The consequences are not abstract. They are very real and terrible.
Anyone who recognizes, by contrast, that personhood depends not on capacities but on what someone is of himself — on his essence, not on his performance — arrives at a fundamentally different conclusion. And it is this other conclusion that this book aims to establish step by step.
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