Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Individuality

5 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Individualität

The ontological proper actuality of every human person. Individuality does not mean mere numerical difference (as with stones or drops), but qualitative uniqueness: every person is a “spiritual substance in its own right” (Seifert) who realizes an unmistakable mode of personhood. Boethius’ classical definition of the person as naturae rationalis individua substantia names individuality as a constitutive feature: the person is a “unique, self-subsisting being of a rational nature” (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 117 ff.).

Individuality and Heart

The individuality of the person shows itself especially in the heart — in the person’s own way of responding to values, of loving, and of self-giving. Hildebrand: the heart is “the most individual part of the human being.” Whereas the intellect is directed toward universal truths, in the heart the unrepeatable distinctiveness of the person finds expression. The ordo amoris — the person’s own order of love — is an expression of this individuality.

Individuality and Uniqueness

Individuality and uniqueness stand in close relation, yet are not identical. Individuality names the qualitative distinctiveness — how a person is; uniqueness emphasizes unrepeatability — that no person can be replaced by another. Individuality presupposes uniqueness: only because every person is irreplaceable does her own mode of personhood carry ontological weight.

Individuality and Spiritual Being

Individuality is not a product of matter — against Aquinas’ materia signata quantitate as principium individuationis. Rather, it is grounded in spiritual being itself: the spiritual soul is not individual because it is in this body, but is individual of itself. Individuality belongs to the essence of the person, not to her accidental properties.

Individuality as an Essential Characteristic

As an essential characteristic, individuality is necessary and inalienable. Even a person with severe dementia or an embryo prior to any conscious experience ontologically possesses its unmistakable individuality. It belongs to the being of the person, not to her present self-manifestation.

An Empirical Counterargument: The Question of Individuation

A weighty objection comes from embryology. Until the appearance of the primitive streak (roughly days 14–17 after fertilization, Carnegie stage 6 (German)), a splitting of the embryo into two genetically identical embryos — monozygotic twinning — is possible. Conversely, tetragametic chimerism is also documented: the fusion of two zygotic embryos into a single organism with two genomes. Both seem to unsettle the thesis that the individual person already begins at fertilization — for whatever can still divide or fuse is apparently not yet an individual in the strict sense.

It is precisely here that a philosophically conducted controversy takes hold:

  • Smith and Brogaard argue in Sixteen Days (Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28(1):45–78, 2003) that human individuality begins only with gastrulation — that is, around sixteen days after fertilization — because the preceding phase remains structurally divisible and thus no unified substantial individual is present.
  • Damschen, Gómez-Lobo, and Schönecker reply in 2006 (Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31(2):165–175): the possibility of dividing does not refute the individual substance, but only requires a different model of its passing away — analogous to budding in biology. From can divide it does not follow is not individual.
  • Maureen Condic unfolds this counterposition in developmental-biological terms in Untangling Twinning (Notre Dame University Press 2020): monozygotic twinning is no argument against the individual substance from CS 1 onward, but a special case that can be rendered compatible with it — provided one models the substance not as an indivisible atom, but as an organic unity that, under special conditions, can release a separated part into a substance of its own.

In personal-ontological terms, individuality belongs in both cases to the substance from the very beginning — the dispute runs over the modeling of the substance, not over the question of whether the human person is individual.

Empirically, the debate has shifted since the HuDeCA atlases (see HuDeCA cell atlas): Tyser/Srinivas 2021 show, at single-cell resolution on the CS 7 embryo, that cell-fate decisions proceed gradually, multi-peaked, and probabilistically — not as a point-event. A single “moment of individuation” can no longer be localized molecularly; the question of substance must hang on the integral organism from CS 1, not on a single cell population.

Ontological classification:

Ontological relations:

Chapter assignment: Chapter 3: What Is a Person? (esp. 3.5), Chapter 4: What Is Human Personhood?

Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.

Further sources:

  • Boethius: Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, cap. 3. (classical definition of the person: naturae rationalis individua substantia)
  • Seifert, Josef (1987): Back to ‘Things in Themselves’. A Phenomenological Foundation for Classical Realism. London/New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (person as a spiritual substance in its own right)
  • Dietrich von Hildebrand: Das Wesen der Liebe (1971). Regensburg: Josef Habbel. (German) (the heart as the most individual part of the human being)
  • Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae I, q. 29 (on the person and individuation)
  • Smith, Barry & Brogaard, Berit (2003): Sixteen Days. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28(1): 45–78.
  • Damschen, Gregor; Gómez-Lobo, Alfonso & Schönecker, Dieter (2006): Sixteen Days? A Reply to B. Smith and B. Brogaard on the Beginning of Human Individuals. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31(2): 165–175.
  • Condic, Maureen L. (2020): Untangling Twinning. What Science Tells Us About the Nature of Human Embryos. Notre Dame Studies in Medical Ethics and Bioethics. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.
  • Tyser, R. C. V.; Mahammadov, E.; Nakanoh, S.; Vallier, L.; Scialdone, A. & Srinivas, S. (2021): Single-cell transcriptomic characterization of a gastrulating human embryo. Nature 600(7888): 285–289. (empirical anchoring of the individuation debate in single-cell data)

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