5.5 When the Forgetting Shows Itself in Actions
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 5.5 Wenn sich das Vergessen in Handlungen zeigt
The most visible form of this forgetting is actions. For concrete doing shows most clearly whether someone sees the other as a person or not.
What is meant by this? A person-forgetting action is an action in which a human being treats himself or another human being as if he were not a person — as if he were a thing, an object, a means to an end. The other is not seen as someone, but used as a something.
Imagine the following scene: a caregiver in a nursing home enters the room of a very elderly woman. The woman is demented; she hardly recognizes anyone anymore. The caregiver can now treat her as a person: he can speak to her, look her in the eyes, handle her gently — even if she perhaps does not understand his words. Or he can treat her like an object: wash her, feed her, reposition her without so much as speaking to her, as if she were a thing that has to be managed. In the first case he sees the person, even though her capacities have all but faded away. In the second case he has forgotten who is lying before him.
Examples of person-forgetting actions range from the outermost extremes into everyday life: from murder, torture, rape, displacement, and exploitation all the way to indifference toward the suffering of another, to the lie that disregards the other’s capacity for truth, or to the instrumentalization of human beings for economic or political ends. In all these cases the same basic pattern is present: the human being, who by rights should be affirmed and loved for his own sake, is treated as if he were less than what he is.
5.5.1 Actions That Are Evil in Themselves
In this context there is an important distinction that helps us understand. Not all bad actions are bad in the same way. There is a fundamental difference between two kinds:
There are actions that are evil in themselves — always and everywhere, regardless of why someone does them and under what circumstances they occur. Murder, torture, rape: these actions are not bad because the circumstances are unfortunate or because the intention was wrong. They are bad through what they are — through what the agent consciously and willingly does. No end, however good, can justify them. No circumstances can turn them into something good. They are evil in themselves because they violate what the human being is at his core.
Let us take a concrete example: torture. Someone could argue that torture is justified in certain situations — say, in order to save the lives of many people. But this argument overlooks something decisive: in the moment one human being tortures another, he treats him as a thing — as a body on which pain can be inflicted in order to reach a goal. The dignity of the tortured person is then not merely violated but denied. And no end, however good, can undo this denial. That is why torture is evil in itself — not because of the circumstances, but because of the action itself.
5.5.2 Actions That Become Bad Through Circumstances
And there are actions that become bad only through the circumstances or the intention. An action can be bad in a particular situation because, under the given circumstances, it does not take the person of the other seriously — although the same action would be appropriate under other circumstances. Here context, motive, and consequences play a role. The circumstances do not make the action evil in itself, but they can make it morally bad.
An example that goes back to the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand1: someone treats his canary as if it were his own child. That is an inappropriate action — but not necessarily a morally bad one. If, however, someone treats his own child as if it were a canary — or, worse still, like a purely material thing — then that is an action that fails to do justice to the dignity of the child as a person. It is a person-forgetting action that is morally bad in every case.
Where does the difference between the two kinds of bad action lie? In an action that is evil in itself, the badness lies in the object of the action itself — in what is consciously and willingly done. No intention and no circumstance can change that. In an action that becomes bad through the circumstances, one must consider object, intention, and circumstances together in order to make a moral judgment.
Why is this distinction important? Because it shows that there are limits that may never be crossed. There are things that one may never do to a human being — not under any particular circumstances, not for any particular purposes, not on the basis of any particular considerations. Never. This limit is not arbitrarily set. It follows from what the human being is: a someone who possesses an inalienable dignity.
5.5.3 What Constitutes Personal Actions
It is also important here to understand what makes an action a personal action at all — in contrast to a mere movement or a reflex. Only the person is capable of real actions. Only a being with reason and free will can set a genuine beginning, begin something new, give a value-response — an expression coined by the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand.2 A machine or an instinct-driven animal does not act personally in this sense. Only spiritual persons — and not anything purely material — can create entirely new actions and set a first beginning of action. That is why person-forgetting actions can exist only where persons act. And that is why this forgetting weighs so heavily: whoever acts in forgetfulness of the person denies, in a certain sense, the very thing that enables him to perform this action — his own personhood.
5.5.4 The Personalistic Norm
But what is the essence of person-forgetting actions? It is always the violation of a principle that follows from personhood itself: the human person is to be affirmed and loved for her own sake. The philosopher Karol Wojtyła called this principle the personalistic norm — persona est affirmanda propter se ipsam.3 It is not an arbitrary demand, but the only appropriate response to what the human being is. Whoever instrumentalizes a human being — whoever uses him as a mere means, as a tool, as a thing — violates this norm. And he does so because he has forgotten — or never really recognized — who the other is.
The value of the person — as the philosopher Max Scheler has expressly stated4 — is higher than the value of any thing. The person stands above all organizations, above all communities, above all things. Not because she is more useful than they are, but because she is what she is: a someone who deserves to be affirmed for her own sake. Whoever disregards this principle disregards the person herself. And whoever disregards the person opens the door to her reification — to a human being becoming, in the minds of others, a thing that can be disposed of.
The personalistic norm corresponds in content to what Kant, too, demanded: never to treat the human being merely as a means, but always also as an end.5 But the justification is different — and this difference is decisive, as the philosophers Hans-Eduard Hengstenberg and Max Scheler have shown.6 For Kant, respect for the human being is ultimately grounded in the moral law, in a duty, in a general moral law. The personalistic norm, by contrast, is grounded in the being of the person herself: because the human being is what he is — a someone with inalienable dignity — he is owed affirmation and love. Not out of duty, but as the appropriate response to reality.
This difference may at first seem like a philosophical subtlety. But it has far-reaching consequences. If respect for the human being is grounded only in a duty, then the person is ultimately not affirmed as a person, but for the sake of the law. The person is not really affirmed and loved; rather, the duty is merely fulfilled. The person is not addressed as a unique Thou, but treated as a case under a general law. If, however, respect for the human being is grounded in his being — in what he is — then the appropriate response is not the fulfillment of duty, but affirmation: the recognition of the other as the one he is, and love for him for his own sake.
Wherever the personalistic norm is violated — whether in great things or in small — the forgetting of who the human being is shows itself. It shows itself in murder and in torture, but also in the everyday indifference toward the worth of the other. It shows itself where human beings are used as means for economic ends without their dignity being respected. It shows itself where a state administers its citizens as a mass instead of treating them as persons. It shows itself where the unborn human being is treated as something that can be disposed of. It shows itself where — as the political scientist Kelly Greenhill has shown7 — mass migration of human beings is deployed by a state as a geostrategic weapon in order to destabilize the population of another country.
And often enough it shows itself in hidden ways: in how we think about others, in how we speak about them, in the attitudes we take so much for granted that we no longer even question them.
See also:
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Fußnoten
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von Hildebrand, Ethik (Ethics, 1973), in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. II, Regensburg: Habbel, 1973. Cf. also idem, Was ist Philosophie? (What Is Philosophy?), in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. I, Regensburg: Habbel, 1976. ↩
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von Hildebrand, op. cit. The expression „Wertantwort” (value-response) is a central concept in Hildebrand’s ethics. ↩
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Wojtyła, Liebe und Verantwortung (Love and Responsibility, 1979), Munich: Kösel, 1979. The Latin formulation reads: „persona est affirmanda propter se ipsam.” Cf. also Seifert, Leib und Seele (Body and Soul, 1973), Salzburg: Pustet, 1973; idem, Essere e persona (1989), Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1989. ↩
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Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, 1913), in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, ed. Maria Scheler, Bonn: Bouvier, preface. Scheler states “that the value of the person is higher than all value of things, organizations, and communities” (German original: „dass Personwert höher ist als aller Sach-, Organisations-, Gemeinschaftswert”). ↩
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Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785), AA IV, p. 429. ↩
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Hengstenberg, Die geistigen Ursachen unseres Zusammenbruches und ihre Überwindung (The Spiritual Causes of Our Collapse and How to Overcome Them, 1947), Heidelberg: Kemper, 1947, p. 20. Following Max Scheler’s critique of Kant (cf. Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik, op. cit.), Hengstenberg argues that Kant’s concept of personality is grounded “merely in the general (autonomous) moral law, not in an ontological (substantial) determination of the person” (German original: „lediglich auf das allgemeine (autonome) moralische Gesetz, nicht auf eine seinsmäßige (substantielle) Bestimmung der Person”). ↩
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Greenhill, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. ↩