5.4 When a False Theory Misjudges the Human Being
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 5.4 Wenn eine falsche Theorie den Menschen verkennt
The forgetting of who the human being is need not always become visible in actions. It can also take another, subtler form: the form of a false theory about the human being.
What is meant by this? There are philosophies, worldviews, and ideologies that fundamentally misunderstand the human being. Not in this or that detail, but in what essentially constitutes him. They misjudge, curtail, or deny his personhood — and they do so in a way that appears theoretically well thought out and internally consistent.
Such theories can look very different, but they have one thing in common: they fail to do justice to what the human being really is. They do not grasp the actual being of the person — that which constitutes her in her fundamental reality. The person is curtailed, reinterpreted, or simply denied.
Let us consider some of these paths of thought more closely.
Naturalism
Naturalism claims that everything that exists is nature — and that natural science is the only reliable source of knowledge. On this view there is no room for anything that goes beyond the measurable, material world. The human being becomes a natural object among natural objects. His personhood — his spiritual self, his free will, his dignity — appears as an illusion, a beautiful self-deception that science will one day unmask. That the human being is entirely a natural being need not be disputed at all — on the contrary. It becomes dangerous — as the philosopher Hans Jonas warned1 — only when one concludes from this that the human being is nothing but nature and that there is no room for what points beyond mere nature.
The empirical-functionalist concept of person
The empirical-functionalist concept of person makes personhood dependent on the exercise of certain capacities: consciousness, self-consciousness, rational thinking, communication. Whoever cannot exercise these capacities, or can no longer do so — the severely demented person, the comatose person, the unborn child — is, on this view, not a person, or at least not a “full” person. We have already seen in an earlier chapter why this is wrong: because personhood consists not in doing but in being. First someone must be there — only then can he act. Whoever makes being dependent on capacities confuses cause and effect.
The dialectical conception of the person
The dialectical conception of the person — as it appears, for instance, in the tradition of Hegel, and which Robert Spaemann has described as a “dynamization of the concept of person”2 — understands the human being not as an enduring being but as a process. Personhood, accordingly, is not a state but a becoming: one is not a person, one becomes one — in an ongoing process of self-appropriation. On this view there is no unchangeable essence of the human being, no abiding identity, no fixed core. The human being is what he makes of himself. One can describe this as an essential transformation of the human being: the human being has no fixed being but finds himself in constant dialectical change.
What is problematic about this conception? If there is no abiding being that underlies the becoming, then there is nothing that could change either. Change presupposes something that changes — something underlying that remains the same throughout the change. Without such an abiding being there would be no change, but only a succession of unrelated states. Applied to the human being, this means: without an enduring self there is no person, no I, no identity. And with that there is no responsibility, no promise that can be kept, no love that outlasts the moment. The unchangeability of the person’s essence is precisely what makes it possible for the person to unfold, develop, and change. For if there is nothing that changes, then nothing changes.
The abolition of the concept of person
And finally there is also the attempt to abolish the concept of the person altogether. Some thinkers hold that ethics could dispense with the concept of person — that it would suffice to speak of human beings or living beings without ascribing personhood to them. But this very renunciation is itself a form of forgetting. For whoever gives up the concept of person also gives up the claim to understand the human being as someone — as a being with its own dignity, its own worth, its own inviolability. What remains is the human being as a specimen of a biological species — and thus as a something, not as a someone.
All these theories — different as they are — have one common effect: they reify the human being. They turn a someone into a something. And that is precisely where their danger lies. For a theory that misunderstands the human being rarely remains a mere theory. It shapes thinking, and thinking shapes action.
If a society understands the human being only as a biological organism, it will sooner or later treat him accordingly. If a philosophy teaches that personhood depends on capacities, someone will eventually draw the conclusion that human beings without these capacities have no rights. If a worldview conceives of the human being as mere becoming without abiding being, then talk of human dignity loses its ground.
The connection between false theory and bad practice is no mere possibility — it is a historical experience. The great catastrophes of the twentieth century — totalitarianism, mass murder, the systematic stripping of rights from entire groups of human beings — always had a theoretical foundation as well: a worldview that misunderstood the human being and derived from this the right to dispose of him.
But the connection is at work beneath these extremes as well. Where a society is intellectually convinced that the human being is only a higher animal, it will also shape its treatment of the human being accordingly. Where a culture makes personhood dependent on the capacity to perform, those who perform poorly are pushed to the margins. And where a philosophy gives up the concept of the person, ethics loses its firm ground.
The theoretical misjudgment of the human being and the practical violation of his dignity are thus not separate phenomena. They belong together. Whoever reifies the human being in thought will sooner or later also reify him in action. And whoever wants to reify him in action will seek out a theory that permits him to do so. The forgetting of who the human being is can therefore also be described as an error in thinking that sooner or later leads to errors in action — and vice versa.
This interplay of theory and practice is what makes the forgetting of who the human being is so dangerous. It is not merely an intellectual error — it is an error with consequences. An error that costs human lives.
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