5.6 Why This Concerns Us All
Perhaps at this point you are thinking: these are all important reflections, but very fundamental ones. What does any of this have to do with my everyday life?
The answer is: everything.
The forgetting of who the human being is, after all, is not a problem that concerns only philosophers in their seminars. It concerns every individual, every family, every community, every society. It concerns the way we think about the beginning and the end of life. It concerns the way we deal with the sick, the old, and the weak. It concerns the way we shape our economy, conduct our politics, raise our children.
Wherever a human being is no longer seen as someone — as a person with inalienable dignity who is to be respected and loved for her own sake — this forgetting is at work. And wherever it is at work, it has consequences: consequences for the concrete human being who is no longer treated as a person; consequences for the community, which loses its moral standard; consequences for the whole of society, which loses the ground beneath its feet — the only ground on which a just life together is possible.
For the forgetting of personhood is, as we have seen, always a morally wrong attitude as well. It is not only an error — it is an injustice. It always means the dehumanization of the human being who is denied his humanity, his personhood, his dignity — whether in theory or in practice, whether consciously or unconsciously. And this dehumanization is never justified, because it contradicts what the human being really is.
One of the tendencies of our time is that the various forms of this forgetting are growing stronger. Technology places ever more powerful tools in our hands — tools that can be magnificent when they serve the person, and devastating when they turn the person into an object. Bioethics wrestles with questions unknown to earlier generations: When does the human being begin? When may he die? Who is to decide? All these questions can be answered only if one knows who the human being is. And they are answered wrongly when this knowledge has been lost.
But there is also good news. This forgetting is, as we have seen, a privation — an absence of something that ought to be there. And a privation can be remedied. The insight that has been lost can be regained. The gaze that has gone blind can open again.
For the truth about the human being is not hidden. It lies in plain view — for anyone who is willing to look. It shows itself in the face of every human being we encounter. It shows itself in the experience that we cannot be indifferent to one another. It shows itself in the horror we feel when a human being is treated like a thing. It shows itself in the reverence we feel toward the other when we truly perceive him — not as a function, not as a means, but as the one he is.
The human being is a someone. He always has been, and he always will be — from conception to death and beyond. No theory can change that, no action can undo it. The dignity of the human being is so firmly anchored in his being that even the deepest forgetting cannot touch it.
The first step against the forgetting is therefore simple — and yet infinitely demanding: to see the other as the one he is. Not as a function, not as a means, not as a case, not as a number. But as a person. As someone. As a being that possesses a dignity greater than anything we could give it or take from it.
Whoever has once truly looked in this way — whoever has once truly recognized that every human being he encounters is a someone — can never go back. He sees the world with different eyes. And he sees himself with different eyes, too: as a person who is called to encounter the other as a person.
For the right attitude toward the person — that attitude which corresponds to the personalistic norm — is not only a duty. It is a joy. Whoever truly recognizes the other as a person experiences something that goes beyond mere fulfillment of duty: reverence, wonder, respect — and ultimately love. It is the experience of standing before a being that is infinitely more than anything one can say about it or do with it. A being that to respect, to affirm, and to love as such is a response that corresponds to reality.
In the final chapter that follows, we will summarize everything we have come to recognize along this path — and ask what follows from it. For each individual and for us all.