Dying is a temporally extended process that ends with the event of death. It is not a point but a phase — clinically differentiated into the pre-final, terminal, and actively dying phase.
The central ontological statement of the personal ontology advocated here is: even in dying, the person remains a person. Personhood is inalienable. The dying human being is not “less human” or “less of a person” — until the last moment of his bodily existence he is a person with inalienable dignity.
This insight has immediate consequences for the ethical assessment of how the dying are treated and for the application of the Personalist Norm at the end of life.
Dying as a process
In dying, the actualization of the dimensions of personhood changes without personhood itself being affected. Concretely this means:
- The First Dimension (personhood as such) remains untouched.
- The Second Dimension (person-behavior in its actualization) becomes increasingly restricted — the dying human being can often no longer express himself, communicate, or consciously perceive.
- The Third Dimension (free self-realization) recedes into the background — dying is an undergoing, not an active doing.
That the actualization changes is not a loss of personhood, but a transformation of its mode of appearance. Whoever equates dying with the extinction of personhood holds — consciously or unconsciously — an empirical-functionalist concept of person and misjudges what the person is.
Practical consequences
From the statement “even in dying, the person remains a person” follow several practical prohibitions and imperatives:
- No abandoning of the person as “beyond therapy,” “non-functional,” or “no longer worth living.”
- Affirmation until the last breath — concretely embodied in the hospice movement and in palliative care.
- Total-pain treatment — the person suffers as a whole person, not only somatically (cf. Total Pain).
- Prohibition of premature killing — euthanasia and assisted suicide violate the Personalist Norm because they tie personhood to functional capacity.
Ontological classification
Superordinate concept: Process
Ontological relations:
- ends with: Death (event)
- structured into: Phases of Dying (pre-final, terminal, actively dying, clinical death)
- preserves: personhood and dignity
- invokes: Personalist Norm
- accompanied by: Palliative Care, Hospice, total-pain treatment
- rejected are: euthanasia, assisted suicide
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: What Is Human Personhood? (German)
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology. Bexten 2017, pp. 197 ff. (dying and personhood).
Further sources:
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa theologiae I, q. 76, a. 1 — the soul as form of the body and its separation in death.
- Saunders, Cicely (1958): Dying of cancer. St Thomas’s Hospital Gazette 56(2): 37—47. — early account of the multidimensional reality of dying.
See also
- Phases of Dying
- Death
- Total Pain
- Hospice
- Palliative Care
- Euthanasia
- Personhood
- Personalist Norm
- Cicely Saunders