5.1 What It Means to Forget the Essence of the Human Being
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 5.1 Was es heißt, das Wesen des Menschen zu vergessen
There is a forgetting that has nothing to do with memory. It is not a forgetting of names, dates, or events. It is, rather, a kind of blindness: you see the other human being, but you no longer see who he is. You know that a human being is standing there — but you have lost sight of what makes this human being who he is, of his deepest essence.
At first this sounds strange. How can you forget what a human being is when you deal with human beings every day? But that is precisely the point: this forgetting happens not despite our daily dealings with one another, but in the very midst of them. It happens wherever we treat human beings like things. It happens wherever we overlook the personhood of the other, as if it were not there.
What exactly falls into oblivion here? Not the concept “person” — almost everyone knows the word today, and human rights are recognized worldwide as never before in history. What falls into oblivion is something deeper: the actual being of the person, that which constitutes the person at her innermost core. Her dignity, her independence, her worth, which depends on nothing and no one.
Picture it this way: you may know the difference between knowing that stars exist and the wonder you feel when, on a clear night, you actually look up at the starry sky. One is a word, a concept. The other is an insight, a real act of cognition. It is similar with personhood: you can know the word “person” and still not have truly recognized what it means that every human being is a person.
This forgetting has far-reaching consequences. It affects not only our thinking about the human being, but also our treatment of him. When the essence of the person falls into oblivion, the result is false conceptions of the human being — and from false conceptions follow false actions. Whoever misunderstands the human being will sooner or later also mistreat him.
It is important not to confuse this forgetting with other forms of disregard. Of course, in every age there have been people who have wronged others. But the forgetting we are speaking of here goes deeper. It concerns not individual deeds, but a fundamental attitude. It concerns not what someone does, but what someone sees — or fails to see. It is a loss of insight, and this loss underlies all the individual forms of disregard.
The philosopher Robert Spaemann — echoing Heidegger’s “oblivion of being” — called this forgetting the oblivion of the person.1 One can regard it as a kind of archphenomenon: a fundamental disturbance in the human being’s relationship to himself and to others. Where this fundamental disturbance is present, even the best intentions can go astray — because what is missing is the foundation that alone makes a just way of dealing with one another possible.
And the forgetting always has two sides. You can forget the person of the other — and you can forget your own person. Whoever forgets that the other is a someone also forgets, in a certain way, who he himself is. For one’s own personhood and the personhood of the other belong together: we recognize ourselves as persons only in the encounter with other persons. Whoever turns the other into a thing turns himself into one as well — even if he does not notice it.
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Fußnoten
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Spaemann, Personen (Persons) (1998), Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998, p. 106. Spaemann coins the term “Personvergessenheit” (“oblivion of the person”) echoing Martin Heidegger’s “Seinsvergessenheit” (“oblivion of being”). Cf. also Holger Zaborowski, Robert Spaemann’s Philosophy of the Human Person. Nature, Freedom, and the Critique of Modernity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 213f. ↩