In ordinary usage one often distinguishes between “biological life” (the bodily life-processes) and “personal life” (conscious, thinking, feeling existence). Some thinkers use this distinction to claim that the embryo is indeed biologically a human being but not yet a person — that personal life begins only once certain capacities emerge (the sensation of pain, consciousness, self-consciousness).
This distinction does not withstand closer examination. The biological life of the human being is borne by its spiritual principle of life — the spiritual soul. The soul is not an “extra ingredient” that is added to the body at some point. It is that which 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 (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 176—182).
Every activity of the human body — even the seemingly “merely biological” processes — is, in the human being, always also shaped by personhood. Human eating is not the same as animal feeding; human sleep is not the same as a bear’s hibernation. Even breathing takes place in the body of a person and is therefore always the breathing of a person. Spaemann criticized the “ontological splitting” of the human being into one who merely lives biologically and one who lives personally as a consequence of the Lockean concept of person. Where there is human life, there is a human person — from the first instant to the last.
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: What is human personhood? (esp. 4.6.5)
Biological Process
A biological process is a process that takes place in the biological body of the person: cell division, organogenesis, brain maturation, and other bodily processes. Since the body is not a mere physical object but the ensouled human body suffused by its form, biological processes are always processes of a person — not processes occurring in a thing.
In the Personhood ontology, the biological process stands alongside the developmental process and the personal act as a subclass of process. The biological processes of the embryonic and fetal phase are processes that an already existing person undergoes. They are not processes through which a person first comes into being.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: process
Biological Life
Biological life designates the organic-bodily life of the human being. The central thesis of the dissertation is: in the case of the human person, biological life cannot be distinguished, either realiter or formaliter, from personal life. Human life is always personal life (cf. Bexten 2017, ch. 4.6.5.1).
This identity thesis opposes any distinction between a “merely biological” and a “properly personal” life of the human being. Whoever lives humanly lives personally — from the moment of conception onward. Biological life is not a lower mode of life that would become personal life only through the supervening of consciousness or rationality. As rational life it is always already constituted as personal.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: Life; Equivalent: Personal Life; Chapter reference: ch. 4.6.5.1
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Spaemann, Robert: Persons. The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’ (1996), transl. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. (on the critique of the “ontological splitting” of the human being)
- Locke, John: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Book II, ch. 27. (on the empiricist concept of person as a counterposition)