4.7 The Human Being as an Independent Being in Relation
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 4.7 Der Mensch als eigenständiges Wesen in Beziehung
Now we approach the core of our investigation.
4.7.1 The Essential Form of the Human Being
Every thing has an essential form — a nature that makes it what it is. The nature of the human being is to be a living being endowed with reason. Aristotle recognized this long ago1. Boethius, a thinker of the sixth century, formulated what is probably the most famous definition of the person: “A person is a unique independent being with a rational nature.”2
The human being is not merely a particularly intelligent animal. He is a being of a different order of being. His rational nature raises him above the animal kingdom not by degree but by essence.
Robert Spaemann put it this way: “When is someone a person? [Here we get into grammatical turbulence.] If someone is someone, that means: he is a person. If something is someone, it is a person — even this cannot properly be said, for someone is not something that at some point begins to be someone. Whoever is someone always was.”3 That is a clear statement: personhood is not a state that one attains. It is what one is from the very beginning, if one is someone. And the human being is “someone” from the first moment of his existence.
4.7.2 Being-a-Person and Behaving-as-a-Person
Here we must draw a distinction that is decisive for everything that follows: the distinction between personhood and person-behavior.
Personhood is what the human being fundamentally is: a spiritual, reason-endowed independent being in the body. It is the first actuality — that which underlies.
Person-behavior, by contrast, is what the human being does insofar as he is a person: he thinks, judges, feels, chooses, acts, loves, forgives. Person-behavior is the actualization (the “second actuality”) of the potentialities that are laid out in the first actuality, in personhood.
The relation between the two is not symmetrical. Personhood ontologically precedes person-behavior. This means that someone must first be there — then he can act. Doing presupposes being, not the other way around.
Classical philosophy — in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas — expresses this in a memorable principle: Agere sequitur esse — acting follows being.4 Not the other way around. Acting is the expression of being, not its cause. A being acts according to what it is. And it is not by acting that it first comes to be.
4.7.3 Why the Purely Empirical View Falls Short
There is a widespread view today that may be called the empirical-functionalist view. It holds that a person is a being that exercises certain functions. Whoever currently possesses these functions is a person. Whoever does not possess them is not.
At first glance there is something plausible about this view. But it has a grave flaw: it confuses the expression of personhood with personhood itself.
It is as if someone said: “A lamp is an object that gives light. If it is not giving light, it is not a lamp.” But that is obviously false. A lamp that is switched off is still a lamp.
The empirical-functionalist view makes personhood into something that can be acquired and lost. But if that were so, then human dignity would not be inalienable. Whenever human beings have denied other human beings their personhood, crimes have been the result.
The correct view is different. Personhood is not a function that one has or does not have. Personhood is that which underlies — that which makes all functions possible in the first place. It is the first actuality, not the second. It is the fire, not the smoke.
4.7.4 Rational Life Constitutes Personhood
What, then, concretely makes the human being a person? Answer: his rational life. This does not mean that the human being is actually thinking rationally. It means that he is a being whose principle of life is a spiritual one — a principle of life ordered toward cognition, freedom, and love.
This rational principle of life — the spiritual soul — informs the whole human being, his whole body, his whole being. And this principle of life is there as soon as the human being is there. That is, from the fusion of egg and sperm cell. The zygote that emerges from this fusion is not a mere heap of cells that only later receives a soul. It is an ensouled being from the very beginning.5
Spaemann makes an important point here: the species membership of the human being is something different from that of every other being. Individual human beings are not mere specimens of a species, not mere interchangeable representatives of a genus. They are beings who stand in a relationship of kinship to one another.6
It also follows from this that human nature is designed to be realized in a personal way. The human being never becomes an animal. A human being with a severe mental disability is not an animal — he is a sick human being. “What there are, are human beings who do not have full personal properties at their disposal. They are not something other than persons; rather, they are either ill or they are not yet so far along in their development. There are no potential persons.”7
4.7.5 Biological and Personal Life
Here a further important insight emerges: in the human being, biological life and personal life are the same. There is no stretch of time during which a human being lives biologically but does not yet live personally. There is no human being who exists “merely” biologically but not personally.
Why? Because the biological life of the human being is sustained by his spiritual principle of life. The human soul is not an “extra ingredient” that gets added to the body at some point. It is what makes the body alive. Where there is human life, there is a human soul. And where there is a human soul, there is a human person.
The distinction between “merely biological” and “properly personal” life is a philosophical fiction. In reality it does not exist.
4.7.6 What “Nature” Means
The word “nature” has a quite specific meaning in philosophy, one that differs from everyday usage. When in philosophy we speak of the “nature” of the human being, we mean the essence of the human being — that which makes him what he is.
The nature of the human being is his rational nature: that by virtue of which he is a being endowed with reason, free, and capable of love. That is why Boethius’s famous sentence is so profound: a person is a unique independent being with a rational nature. This means that a person is whoever has such a nature — not whoever currently exercises it. It is the having of the nature, not its exercise, that constitutes personhood.
There is an important connection between nature, form, and actuality: the nature of the human being is his essential form, and this essential form is the first actuality, the actual being of the human being. Everything that makes the human being human thus lies enclosed, as it were, in his nature. That is why Thomas Aquinas can say: “The person signifies what is most perfect in the whole of nature.”8
See also:
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Fußnoten
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Aristotle, Politics (1994), Book I, ch. 2 (1253a 9—10). For Aristotle the human being is the zoon logon echon — the living being that possesses reason (logos). ↩
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Boethius, loc. cit. In the Latin original: “naturae rationalis individua substantia” — a unique independent being (individua substantia) with a rational nature (naturae rationalis). ↩
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Spaemann, Personen (1998), Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998, p. 47. German original: “Wann ist jemand Person? [Hier kommen wir in grammatische Turbulenz.] Wenn jemand jemand ist, dann heißt das: er ist Person. Wenn etwas jemand ist, ist es Person — das kann man schon nicht sagen, denn jemand ist nicht etwas, das irgendwann beginnt, jemand zu sein. Wer jemand ist, war es immer.” ↩
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The principle “Agere sequitur esse” (acting follows being) belongs to the philosophical tradition of Thomas Aquinas. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, II, c. 59; De Potentia, q. 7, a. 10. ↩
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On the objection from monozygotic multiple formation against this thesis, cf. the endnote in section 4.4.3. ↩
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Spaemann, Personen (1998), Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998. ↩
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Spaemann, Personen (1998), Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998, p. 261f. German original: “Was es gibt, sind menschliche Wesen, die nicht über volle personale Eigenschaften verfügen. Sie sind nicht etwas anderes als Personen, sondern sie sind entweder krank oder sie sind noch nicht so weit in ihrer Entwicklung. Es gibt keine potentiellen Personen.” ↩
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Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (1888), Ia q. 29 a. 3 co.: “Persona significat id quod est perfectissimum in tota Natura.” ↩