Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Interpersonality

2 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Interpersonalität

Interpersonality denotes the essential relatedness of the person to other persons. The human person is not to be understood as an isolated monad. The person is a being that, by virtue of its spiritual nature, is constitutively ordered toward self-transcendence. It can go out of itself, recognize the other as a person, and turn toward the other in love.

This capacity for self-transcendence presupposes precisely the substantiality of the person. Only one who is in possession of itself can truly give itself to another. Interpersonality unfolds especially in the third dimension of personhood, where the person, in loving turning toward the Thou, attains its highest realization (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 185—200).

Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: Interpersonal Relation

Ontological relations:

  • is presupposed by: Communio Personarum
  • is co-original with: Spiritual Being (Interpersonal Relation)

Interpersonal Relation

The relational being of the person, which is co-original together with spiritual substantial being. “Persons exist only in the plural” (Spaemann, 1998, pp. 87, 248). The interpersonal relation is not a subsequent addition to the substantial being of the person, but belongs co-originally to its essence.

The interpersonal relation is ontologically an accident — but an accident of a particular kind: it belongs necessarily to the essence of the person to be relational, even though the individual relation is accidental. The person is by its essence opened toward a Thou. The various forms of interpersonal relations — Personal Love, friendship, marriage, parenthood, responsibility, Communio Personarum — are concretizations of this fundamental relation (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 193–210).

Ontological classification:

Ontological relations:

Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: Personhood

Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.

Further sources:

  • Robert Spaemann: Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, transl. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. (“Persons exist only in the plural” — relationality as an essential characteristic)

See also

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