🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Einleitung — Worum es in diesem Buch geht
Imagine someone asks you: What are you, really? Not what you do for a living, not where you come from, not what you can do or accomplish — but what you are at your deepest core. What makes you the person you are? And when, exactly, did you begin to be that person?
This question catches most people off guard. In everyday life we rarely think about what we are. We know that we are human beings, that we are persons — but we give no thought to what exactly that means. It seems self-evident.
Yet this self-evidence is deceptive. Look more closely, and things get complicated. What exactly is a person? Is every human being a person? Is one always a person — or only when one has certain capacities? Is a human being with severe dementia still a person? Is an embryo already a person? And what follows from the answer?
These are not questions that interest only philosophers. They concern every single one of us, for the answer determines how we treat one another. It determines what value we accord the newborn, the gravely ill, the dying, the unborn. It determines whether the dignity of the human being is truly something inalienable — or merely a fine turn of phrase that holds only as long as it is convenient.
This book attempts to give a clear and well-founded answer to the question “What is the human being?” Not an arbitrary one, but one that can be justified before reason. The answer unfolded here step by step can be put in a single sentence: The human being is, from the very beginning and for as long as he lives, a person with inalienable dignity.
That sounds simple. But behind this sentence stands an edifice of thought that must be built up with care. For people today give starkly different answers to the question of what a person is — and many of these answers have far-reaching consequences for the lives of real human beings.
Sections
- Why This Question Concerns Everyone
- The Danger of the Oblivion of the Person
- What This Book Aims to Show — Three Basic Ideas
- How This Book Proceeds
- What This Book Is Not — and What It Aims to Be
- An Invitation to Think Along