6.1 The Results at a Glance
What the preceding chapters worked out step by step can be summarized in five core insights. Each one is significant in itself. Together they yield a picture of the human being that does justice to his reality.
6.1.1 First Insight: The Human Being Is a Person
The human being is not just some thing among things. He is a someone, not a something. That sounds simple, but this simple statement contains everything.
What does it mean to be a person? It means to be an independent spiritual being that lives in a body and is by its essence related to other persons. The human person is spiritual substance in the body in relation.1 This is not a philosophical formula for initiates, but an attempt to put into words what, at bottom, we all know: every human being is someone — a unique, unrepeatable being with an inner life, with the innate capacity for thinking, for willing, for loving. And this being does not exist for itself alone. It is by its essence ordered toward other human beings — toward a Thou.
To understand what “person” really means, it is not enough merely to reflect on the concept. We must look at the reality to which the concept points. A concept is a unit of meaning through which the human being can intellectually point to something in reality. When we say “human person,” we are pointing to a real being — not to an idea, not to a social ascription, but to someone who is there, whether or not we acknowledge him as a person.
In philosophy there are many different views of what a person is. Some see the person above all as a relational being — it is who it is only in relation to others. Others define the person by its capacities: a person is whoever can think, feel, and decide. Still others emphasize the independence of the person as a being that stands in itself.
The understanding that has proved adequate in this book unites two of these sides: the person is something independent (not merely a function, not merely a bundle of properties), and at the same time it is essentially ordered toward relation. Both sides belong to the essence of the person: that it stands in itself — and that it is directed from within toward the Thou. The one is not added to the other; they are two sides of the same reality. To think the one without the other is to diminish the human being. We have called this the substance-ontological-relational concept of person. It best captures what the human person really is in its authentic being.
All human beings are persons. That is the fundamental insight that carries everything else. Not only some human beings, not only the healthy, the conscious, the capable — all.
6.1.2 Second Insight: Personhood Is Not Determined by Capacities
This is perhaps the most important distinction of the entire book: what someone is and what someone does are two fundamentally different things.
Personhood and person-behavior must be clearly distinguished. By person-behavior we mean everything a person does and experiences: thinking, feeling, willing, deciding, acting, loving. But all of this presupposes that someone is there who does it. Existence comes before doing. Personhood precedes person-behavior, not the other way around.
This means: person-behavior cannot bring forth personhood. A human being does not become a person by being able to exercise certain capacities. He is already a person — and that is why he can develop and exercise these capacities. The person is, as the philosophical tradition puts it, first actuality: it is the precondition for all further realizations, not their result. As Robert Spaemann put it precisely: “There are no potential persons.”2 A something does not become a someone. Either someone is there — or not.
A simple example makes this difference clear: a sleeping person is not thinking at the moment, not consciously feeling, not deciding anything. Yet no one would claim that he is not a person while asleep. His person-behavior is merely not actual for the time being — but his personhood remains. The same holds for someone briefly unconscious: the fact that he is not currently showing any person-behavior does not mean that he has none. He has the capacity for it; it is simply not active at the moment.
But what about a being that has never yet shown conscious behavior — like a human embryo? Or a human being who will never show it again — like a person with irreversible brain damage? Here too: personhood does not depend on behavior. In the embryo there is a deep disposition, proper to its essence, to develop person-behavior if its normal development is not prevented. And in the irreversibly brain-damaged human being who is kept alive by technological support, personhood remains, because it never depended on the exercise of capacities.
Whoever denies this — whoever holds, that is, that personhood only arises through certain capacities such as consciousness, reason, or sentience — must ultimately say: once enough capacities are lacking, someone ceases to be a person. Being human would then be something one can acquire and lose. That is not knowledge but a presumption — and a dangerous one at that.
6.1.3 Third Insight: Human Life Is Always Personal Life
In some debates a distinction is drawn between human life that is “merely” biological and human life that is “really” personal. This distinction cannot be sustained — neither in reality nor in thought.
The biological life of a human being is always already the life of a person. Where there is human life, there is a human person. This holds from the first moment — from the fusion of egg and sperm cell3 — to the last. There is no human life that is not personal life, and no personal life that is not also bodily life. In the human person the two are one.
Why is this so? Because human life is always the life of a being with a rational nature — even when the conditions for expressing this rationality through behavior are not yet, or no longer, in place. The human embryo does not live “merely” biologically. Its life is from the very beginning the life of a being with a spiritual nature. Its biology cannot be separated from its personhood — it is the bodily side of one and the same life.
This insight has far-reaching consequences. It means: there is no point in human life at which someone is biologically alive but not yet, or no longer, a person. The embryo is not a something that develops into a someone. It is from the very beginning a someone who unfolds.
The same holds at the other end of life. The human being with severe dementia, the human being who through severe brain damage has irretrievably lost his consciousness and is kept alive only by technological support — this human being, too, is a person. His human life is personal life. There are no potential persons, and there are no former persons.
6.1.4 Fourth Insight: Every Human Person Possesses Inalienable Dignity
The dignity of the human being is not a distinction one has to earn. It is not a title that society confers and could revoke. It belongs to the essence of every human person — inalienable, inviolable, from conception to death.
Why? Because the person is the most perfect being of all. It surpasses all other kinds of beings in rank of being and perfection of being. Thomas Aquinas expressed it this way: “The person signifies that which is most perfect in the whole of nature.”4 This being — not particular capacities, not particular achievements, not recognition by others — is the ground of its dignity.
The dignity of the person is a archphenomenon. That means: it cannot be derived from anything else, cannot be traced back to anything else. It is an ultimate reality behind which one cannot go. One can recognize it if one looks attentively — but one cannot prove it by deriving it from something else. It shows itself to whoever is ready to perceive it.
From this dignity follows a demand that is not negotiable: every human person is to be affirmed and loved for its own sake. That is not mere opinion, but the only adequate response to what the human being is. We call this — following the philosopher Karol Wojtyła — the Personalistic Norm:5 the human being may never be treated merely as a means, but must always be respected as an end in itself. And the ground of this norm is not a decree, not an agreement, not a convention — but the being of the person itself. Because the person is the most perfect being, affirmation and love for its own sake are its due.
This dignity is ontological — it belongs to the being of the person, not to what it has, what it can do, or what it achieves. Illness, disability, age, suffering, guilt — none of this can touch the dignity of the human being. It is inalienable, because the person is inalienably a person.
6.1.5 Fifth Insight: Oblivion of the Person Is the Root of Many Erroneous Judgments
When the essence of the human being falls wholly or partly into oblivion, a phenomenon arises that we have called oblivion of the person. It is the silent, often unnoticed cause of many erroneous judgments about the human being.
Oblivion of the person can show itself in different ways. It can occur theoretically: in philosophical theories that reduce the being of the person to something else — to brain functions, to social ascriptions, to observable behavior. Whatever cannot be measured or observed is then declared unreal. The person is reinterpreted or interpreted away. This happens, for example, wherever it is claimed that the human being is “nothing but” a complex organism, “nothing but” a bundle of neuronal processes, “nothing but” a product of evolution. Such sentences diminish the human being by denying his spiritual being or declaring it irrelevant.
But oblivion of the person can also show itself practically: in the concrete treatment of human beings. Wherever a human being is no longer seen as a someone, but as a something — as a case, as a cost factor, as material — oblivion of the person is at work. It shows itself in how the beginning and the end of human life are spoken about and decided upon. It shows itself when a human being, because of his weakness, his illness, or his age, is no longer treated as a full person.
Oblivion of the person is not a harmless oversight. It is a morally relevant deficiency phenomenon. It violates the Personalistic Norm, for where the human being is forgotten, he is no longer affirmed and loved for his own sake. And it has real consequences — for society, for law, for medicine, for how we treat one another.
To deny a human being personhood, for whatever reason, is wrong under all circumstances — and therefore must never be done. That is the clear result of this investigation.
6.1.6 The Three Dimensions of Personhood
These five insights rest on an understanding of personhood that describes its inner unfolding in three dimensions. These three dimensions are not three different things, but three sides of the one fundamental reality of human personhood — of spiritual substantial being in the body.
The first dimension is not-yet-conscious personhood. It concerns the human being before his consciousness awakens — above all the embryo and the fetus, but also the newborn in its earliest moments. Here the person already exists as a spiritual substance in the body, with an active disposition to unfold all its personal possibilities if its normal development is not prevented. In this phase the human being is no less a person than later — he has simply not yet realized his possibilities. The decisive point is that he is already someone.
Recognizing this first dimension is decisive. It is what makes intelligible why the human embryo is a person and possesses, from conception on, the inalienable dignity of the person. This dignity is not acquired when consciousness awakens. It is there because the person is there.
The second dimension is conscious, rational, free personhood. It presupposes the first and unfolds when consciousness awakens and the human being begins to exercise his spiritual capacities: to think, to feel, to will, to decide freely. This is the dimension we perceive most strongly in everyday life, because it shows itself in behavior. But it is not the foundation of personhood — it is its unfolding. It belongs to the normally developed, healthy human person. Whoever loses this dimension through illness or injury does not thereby lose his personhood — for personhood is grounded more deeply, in the fundamental reality that precedes all dimensions.
The third dimension is the moral perfection or failure of the person. As soon as the human being can act consciously and freely, he faces the task of corresponding to his own truth — to what he is by his essence. Through his fundamental attitudes, his thoughts, his words, and his deeds he can perfect himself in a qualitative sense or fail himself. Here the human being becomes a moral being. He can answer the call of values — or ignore it. He can correspond to his authenticity — or fail to correspond to it.
What matters is this: the third dimension concerns the qualitative level, not the ontological one. A human being who fails morally does not thereby lose his personhood or his dignity. He remains a person. But he falls short of what he could be — of his own ontological truth.
In this third dimension the deep relatedness of the person to others also shows itself: only one who is capable of truth can transcend himself. Only one who can transcend himself can truly encounter another human being — in an encounter that founds community. “Persons exist only in the plural,” Robert Spaemann wrote6 — and this sentence becomes truly intelligible only when one grasps how deeply the relation to the other is anchored in the essence of the person. The person is not a solitary being that only subsequently relates to others. It is by its essence ordered toward others — toward a Thou that it can affirm, encounter, and love.
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Fußnoten
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Cf. Seifert, Essere e Persona, op. cit., p. 120. The formulation “spiritual substance in the body” builds on Seifert’s analysis. ↩
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Spaemann, Personen (Persons, 1998), Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998, p. 261f.: “There are no potential persons. Persons possess capacities, potencies. Persons can develop. Something does not become someone.” German original: „Es gibt keine potentiellen Personen. Personen besitzen Fähigkeiten, Potenzen. Personen können sich entwickeln. Aus etwas wird nicht jemand.” ↩
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Against this thesis the objection of monozygotic multiple formation (identical twins) is sometimes raised: because the embryo can still divide in the first days, it is said not to be an individual being before that point and therefore not a person. This objection is unfounded. The mere possibility of division is no argument against actual individuality: in the undivided cell cluster the cells are parts of one unified biological whole, not independent beings. If multiple formation actually occurs, then either the original person continues to exist and a new one comes into being, or the original person ceases to exist and two new persons come into being. In no case does it follow that no person was there before the division. The person is first actuality — not the result of a change, but of a coming-into-being. See Chapter 4, Section 4.4.3. ↩
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Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia q. 29 a. 3 co.: “Persona significat id quod est perfectissimum in tota Natura, scilicet subsistens in rationali Natura.” ↩
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Wojtyła, Liebe und Verantwortung (Love and Responsibility) (1979), Munich: Kösel, 1979. Cf. also Styczeń, “Der Person gebührt Liebe” (“Love Is Due to the Person”) (1998), in: Menschenwürde – Metaphysik und Ethik (Human Dignity – Metaphysics and Ethics), ed. Mariano Crespo and G. E. M. Anscombe, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, p. 166. ↩
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Spaemann, Personen (Persons, 1998), Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998, pp. 87, 248. German original: „Personen gibt es nur im Plural.” ↩