The human being is not composed of two separate parts — a body here and a mind there — somehow joined to one another. Rather, the human being is a single reality, in which the spiritual and the bodily form an inseparable unity. The body is not the prison of the soul, nor is the soul the passenger of the body. The human being is his body, and he is his soul — he is both at once, inseparably, as one.
From the book
“The human person is a spiritual substance in the body in relation. Each single element of this formula is essential. If one omits one of them, one truncates the understanding of the person.”
— Three Fundamental Views of the Person, Chapter 3
This unity differs fundamentally from the dualism that has been widespread since Descartes. According to Spaemann’s analysis, Descartes’ bifurcation of the world into res cogitans (thinking thing) and res extensa (extended thing) leads to the reification of the human being: once the human being is understood merely as a composite, the oblivion of the person becomes the inevitable consequence (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 165—175). Against this, the hylomorphic tradition (Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas) shows that the soul pervades matter from within as its essential form and makes it what it is.
Neither the body as such nor the spiritual life-principle on its own is a human person. Only the unity of the two constitutes human personhood as spiritual substantial being in the body. This unity exists from the very beginning: the embryo is not matter awaiting a soul, but an ensouled body-soul unity — a person from the fusion of the germ cells onward.
When the spiritual life-principle is separated from the body by death, it is no longer an ontologically self-standing human person. From this it also follows that the separation between “merely biological” and “properly personal” life is philosophically untenable.
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: What Is Human Personhood? (esp. 4.3, 4.6.5, 4.7.3), Chapter 1
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, I, q. 76 (on the unity of soul and body)
- Aristotle: De anima, Book II (on the soul as the form of the body)
- Spaemann, Robert: Persons. The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, transl. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. (on the critique of Cartesian dualism)
Ontological assignment: Body-soul unity is (according to the ontology) the hylomorphic unity of form (spiritual soul) and matter (body). It constitutes human personhood as spiritual substantial being in the body.