An essential characteristic is a necessary, inalienable ontological property of every Person. The essential characteristics arise from the intellectual contemplation of the necessary essence of the person — they are that which the Essential Intuition grasps as indispensably belonging to personhood. Whoever denies even one of these essential characteristics fails to grasp the essence of the person as such (cf. Bexten 2017, ch. 4.7).
The essential characteristics are not empirically observable features that a person possesses contingently, but ontological determinations that belong to its Personhood. They thus stand on the level of essence (essentia), not on the level of accidents. Every person — whether born or unborn, conscious or unconscious, healthy or sick — possesses all of the essential characteristics, because they belong to the being of the person as person.
The Eight Essential Characteristics
The dissertation identifies eight essential characteristics that describe the essence of the person in its entirety:
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Spiritual Being — There can be no person that is not a spiritual Substance. Spiritual Being grounds the irreducibility of the person to the merely material.
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I — The person is a self, an I, which distinguishes itself from everything else and stands in relation to itself. The self is the bearer of all personal acts.
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Rationality — The ontological endowment with reason, which is present as rational form even in the not-yet-conscious human being. Rationality grounds the right to education and the right to freedom of conscience.
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Capacity for Truth — The capacity to recognise and acknowledge Truth. It is the foundation of Self-Transcendence and grounds the right to freedom of conscience.
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Free Will — The ontological freedom of the will, the presupposition of the moral life and of personal love. Free will grounds the right to freedom.
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Capacity for Love — The ontological capacity for personal love and self-transcendence, which finds its most perfect expression in interpersonal love. The capacity for love grounds the right to community.
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Ontological Dignity — The inviolable, non-gradable dignity of the person, which is grounded in its being as a person and does not depend on achievement, consciousness, or abilities.
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Affectivity — The fundamental capacity of the person to be affectively touched and moved — an autonomous organ of the apprehension of value, not a mere concomitant of rationality.
These eight essential characteristics are not a mere enumeration but an inner structure: they refer to one another and mutually condition one another. Thus the capacity for love, for example, presupposes free will, and the capacity for truth is inconceivable without rationality — yet none is reducible to another.
Necessary and Inalienable
Two central properties characterise every essential characteristic: it is necessary and inalienable.
Necessary means: it belongs to the essence of the person, such that there can be no person that does not possess an essential characteristic. The necessity here is not a logical but an ontological one — it concerns the being of the person itself. Were one of the essential characteristics to be removed, the being in question would no longer be a person.
Inalienable means: the person cannot lose its essential characteristic — neither through illness, nor through unconsciousness, nor through a disability, nor through age. A human being in a coma possesses rationality, even if he does not actually exercise it. An unborn child possesses free will, even if it has not yet exercised it. Inalienability protects the person from any functionalist reduction. Personhood does not depend on whether an ability is actually exercised.
This insight is of the greatest significance for Bioethics and for the doctrine of human rights: because the essential characteristics are inalienable, there are no “not-yet-persons” and no “no-longer-persons”. Every human being is a person in the full sense from conception until death.
Essential Characteristics and the Oblivion of the Person
The dissertation warns emphatically against the Oblivion of the Person, the forgetting or denial of the personal being of the human being. Technology, and in particular Artificial Intelligence, endangers the essential characteristics by suggesting a confusion between person and machine. When one ascribes “intelligence”, “decision-making capacity”, or even “creativity” to an algorithm, one blurs the categorial difference between person and thing.
The Essential Intuition is the philosophical method by which the essential characteristics are recognised. In its intellectual gaze upon the essence of the person, it grasps that which necessarily belongs to it. Empirical observation, by contrast, establishes only the factual. The endangerment of the essential characteristics through technology is therefore also an endangerment of the philosophical gaze upon the person. Where the Essential Intuition is replaced by functionalist or scientistic reduction, the essential characteristics drop out of view.
Ontological Classification
The essential characteristics belong to the essential level of the person — they are not accidents but determine the what of the person. In Thomistic terminology they stand on the side of essentia, not of existentia. At the same time they are real — they are not mere abstractions but ontological determinations of concrete personal being.
The relation Person has essential characteristic essential characteristic expresses this belonging. At the same time, the human rights are grounded in the essential characteristics: each essential characteristic grounds a corresponding right (is grounded in).
Ontological relations:
- Every Person has every essential characteristic
- Technology endangers essential characteristics
- Essential Intuition captures the essential characteristics
- Essential characteristics ground human rights
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: Personhood (German) (ch. 4.7)
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae I, q. 29, a. 1–3 (the person as subsistens in natura rationali — the essential determination of the person).
- Seifert, Josef (1987): Back to ‘Things in Themselves’. A Phenomenological Foundation for Classical Realism. London/New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul (essential intuition and necessary essential characteristics).
- Husserl, Edmund (1913): Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Halle: Niemeyer (German) (essential intuition as method).
See also
Person, Personhood, Spiritual Being, I, Rationality, Capacity for Truth, Free Will, Capacity for Love, Ontological Dignity, Affectivity, Heart, Individuality, Uniqueness, Essential Intuition, Oblivion of the Person, Human Rights, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Substance, Bioethics