The Question That Never Lets Go
During my student years I encountered thinkers who had devoted themselves to this question with great seriousness. One of them demanded that everything that darkens our view of the essence of the human being be uncovered and cleared away. That the person must become visible again in her true essence and value. He called this the great task of our time.1 A rehabilitation of the person — not because the person has changed, but because our view of her has become clouded.
Another drew a disquieting connection: whoever truly wants to know the other — as the one he is — must first know himself. Whoever fails to do this, whoever denies the truth he finds within himself, cannot truly see the other either. Self-knowledge and the knowledge of the other belong together.2 This has far-reaching consequences. It means: the question “What is the human being?” is not merely an academic exercise. It is a question addressed to me.
And then there is this story, which has never let go of me: a man who lay in the street, overlooked by everyone, given up on by society, is picked up and brought to a house of mercy. There, shortly before his death, he says: I have lived like an animal in the street, but I am going to die like an angel, loved and cared for.3 This sentence contains the whole truth about the human being: his worth does not depend on how he lives, what he achieves, or how others treat him. It is there, independent of everything external. The dying man in the street was no less a person than the healthy man who passed him by. His being-a-someone was just as real, just as inalienable.
These three thoughts — the forgetting of the person, the duty of self-knowledge, the inalienable dignity even in the deepest misery — have never let go of me. They are the reason I decided one day to investigate them thoroughly. Not as a theorist working on an interesting problem, but as someone who wanted to understand what the human being really is. And what it means when we forget it.
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Fußnoten
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von Hildebrand, Das Wesen der Liebe (The Nature of Love) (1994), in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. III, Regensburg: Habbel, 1994, p. 197. ↩
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Tadeusz Styczeń, „Der Person gebührt Liebe: Zum Epistemologischen Triftigen und Methodologischen Gültigen Ausgangspunkt der Ethik oder: Von der Erfahrung des sittlich Gesollten zum ethischen Grundprinzip” (Love Is Due to the Person: On the Epistemologically Sound and Methodologically Valid Starting Point of Ethics, or: From the Experience of the Morally Obligatory to the Fundamental Principle of Ethics) (1998), in: Menschenwürde – Metaphysik und Ethik (Human Dignity – Metaphysics and Ethics), ed. Mariano Crespo and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Herbert Ulrich, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, p. 166. ↩
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Handed down in: Mutter Teresa (1985). ↩