2.16 Why This Method for the Question of Personhood
is decisive
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 2.16 Warum diese Methode für die Frage nach dem Personsein
What does all this have to do with the question of the essence of the human being? A great deal.
If it is true that by careful looking we can come to know the necessary essential properties of things, then we can also come to know the necessary essential properties of the human person. We can ask: what belongs to the essence of the human being — not contingently, but necessarily? What makes the human being what he is? What can one not take from him without destroying him as a human being?
And we can find answers to these questions that are not mere opinions, but insights — knowledge that is necessarily true and that anyone who looks honestly and attentively enough can follow for themselves.
That is exactly what we will do in the following chapters. We will examine the various meanings of the word “person” and ask which of them is adequate to the being-in-itself of the human person. We will bring the so-being of the human person into view — its necessary essential properties, its essence, its nature. And we will see what happens when this essence is forgotten or denied.
In doing so it will become clear: the question of personhood is not just any academic question. The answer determines how we treat human beings — from conception to death. If the human being is a person by his essence, then he possesses a dignity that no one can give him and no one can take from him. If he is not, then his dignity is up for negotiation. The method of careful looking is therefore no mere preliminary question. It is the foundation for everything that follows.
That is the claim behind the question “What is human personhood?” The point is not to set up a theory that one may accept or reject. The point is to bring the essence of the human being into view in such a way that its necessary essential properties become recognizable.
For this one needs no laboratory equipment. One needs the will to look carefully. One needs the readiness to set prejudices aside. And one needs the humility to be taught by the things themselves — instead of dictating to them what they are supposed to be.