2.17 Summary
Let us sum up what has been established so far:
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Philosophy is not a matter of opinion. There are true and false statements about reality — including about the essence of the human being. Aristotle called philosophy the science of truth.
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The difference between opinion and knowledge lies in insight: the intellectual grasping of a state of affairs that really is so and cannot be otherwise. Whoever denies the possibility of truth contradicts himself.
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The philosophical method consists in careful looking: directing the mind to the thing itself, without prejudices, without premature theories. “Back to the things themselves!”
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There are different kinds of experience: sensory experience, which shows us individual facts, and spiritual experience, which discloses to us the essence of things. Both are genuine experiences.
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Things have a so-being — a “what-being” that makes them what they are. Some essential properties are necessary: they cannot be otherwise. The essential laws rest on them.
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Necessary truths have their ground not in our thinking, but in the things themselves. Psychologism — the confusion of laws of thought with laws of things — stands refuted.
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Reality obtains independently of our consciousness. Idealism, which makes the world a product of consciousness, founders on the distinction between dream and reality.
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Philosophy differs from the natural sciences in its object: it asks about the essence of things, about that which is necessarily so — not about empirical regularities.
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There is something spiritually ultimate — the archphenomena — that cannot be derived from anything more fundamental, but can only be recognized or denied.
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To know philosophically, one must be ready to set prejudices aside: sweeping arguments, tacit pre-decisions, and reductionisms.
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This method is decisive for the question of the essence of the human being: it makes it possible to know the necessary essential properties of the human person — not as opinion, but as insight.
With these methodological considerations in the background, we can now turn to the question that is the real subject of this book: What is a person? And what is human personhood?