Community is a natural bond of several persons that goes beyond the dyadic I–Thou relationship and shares a common purpose or a common good. It extends the existing communio personarum to the collective level. In community, persons actualize the dimensions of their personhood not only individually but in togetherness. Institutions order communal life within communities, and the common good constitutes the supra-individual measure of a flourishing life together. The political community is a particular form, ordered by political authority.
Culture
Culture denotes the totality of the intellectual achievements of persons in community. It is the space in which the dimensions of personhood are objectified and handed down in a supra-individual manner. In culture, what the human person brings forth through cognition, freedom, and creativity finds expression. As a supra-individual expression of personhood, culture encompasses both art and science as well as tradition — the trans-generational transmission of cultural goods.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: Entity; subordinate concepts: art, science
Art
Art is the creative shaping of reality in the medium of the beautiful. It is an expression of personal creativity and can render visible values that elude conceptual grasp. As a subordinate concept of culture, art belongs to the intellectual achievements in which the dimensions of personhood are objectified in a supra-individual manner. In artistic creation, the person actualizes its capacity for cognition and shaping in a special way.
Why AI Cannot Create Art
Personalist ontology shows that genuine art is essentially bound to personhood — and thus to something to which AI has, in principle, no access. Personhood is prote energeia (first actuality): a spiritual substance that ontologically precedes the potency for further actualizations. What AI produces is deutera energeia (second actuality) without prote energeia — actualization without a substance that is being actualized.
The artist discovers objective values through his heart and makes them accessible in the work. AI can reproduce patterns that appear aesthetic — but it lacks the capacity for truth: the ability to recognize and acknowledge truth. Genuine art is the expression of an unrepeatable individuality — of a singular way of being touched by values. This value-response of the heart is ontologically grounded in the unique spiritual form of the person.
Great art is an act of self-transcendence: the artist goes beyond himself — toward the beholder, toward truth, toward the beautiful. AI transcends nothing, because it has no self. The existential depth of art springs from the experience of contingency, suffering, and vulnerability — AI has no mortality, no suffering, no existential stake. The fundamental form of actuality of the person is not reducible to algorithms or computational operations — it belongs to an ontologically different order.
Simulation of Human Art by AI
AI can convincingly simulate human art: it produces images that command prices on the art market, texts that move readers, and music that evokes emotions. This simulation succeeds because AI statistically learns and recombines patterns from the entire corpus of human cultural production. Aesthetically, the result can be indistinguishable from human art.
Yet the personalist-ontological analysis reveals the decisive difference. The simulation reproduces the form of art — its patterns, styles, structures — but not its origin. What is simulated is person-behavior without personhood. The output is grounded in no heart that has been touched. There is no self that gives itself, and no dignity that is beyond every price. AI simulates the deutera energeia (the producing) without possessing the prote energeia (the being) from which genuine art springs.
The danger of this simulation lies in a new form of oblivion of the person. When society no longer distinguishes between personal art and algorithmic simulation, the very concept of person is devalued. For if a machine can bring forth “the same” as the human being, personhood appears superfluous. This conclusion would confirm the empirical-functionalist concept of person, which reduces personhood to observable functions.
Personalist ontology objects: what AI simulates is precisely not the same. It looks the same, but it is not the same, because it lacks the ontological depth that can come only from personhood.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: culture
Tradition
Tradition is the trans-generational transmission of cultural goods, cognitions, and values. It connects persons across time and is an expression of the intergenerational community. Through tradition the intellectual achievements of culture are preserved and passed on to future generations. In this way tradition secures the continuity of personhood in its supra-individual dimension and makes it possible for cognitions and truths not to perish with the individual.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: Process
Worldview
A worldview is a comprehensive understanding of reality that determines how one sees the human being and his place in the world. The dissertation shows that the concept of person one holds stands in close connection with one’s worldview. Whoever understands the human being materialistically arrives at an empirical-functionalist concept of person. Whoever recognizes the spiritual dimension of the human being arrives at a substance-ontological one (Bexten 2017, pp. 55 ff.). Worldview-laden pre-decisions influence the metaphysical basic assumptions and thereby the answer to the question of who is a person. For this reason it is philosophically honest to disclose these pre-decisions.
Science
Science is the methodically ordered cognition of reality, directed toward truth. It is an actualization of rationality and of the capacity for truth in the communal process of cognition. As a subordinate concept of culture, science belongs to those intellectual achievements in which persons systematically unfold their capacity for cognition in community. Scientific cognition presupposes the second dimension of personhood — rational awareness and free will.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: culture
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Wojtyła, Karol (1969): Osoba i czyn (The Acting Person). Kraków (German) (communio personarum as interpersonal community).
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 90, a. 2–4 (the common good as the end of law and of community).
- Hildebrand, Dietrich von (1973): Ethik. In: Gesammelte Werke, vol. II. Regensburg: Habbel (German) (objective values and value-response as the basis of personal art).
- Aristotle: Politics I, 2 (the human being as zōon politikon — community as natural determination).