Oblivion of the person is a term coined by Robert Spaemann (in analogy to Heidegger’s “oblivion of being”) for forgetting the reality of the human person. It is not a forgetting of names or dates, but a loss of insight into that which constitutes the human being in his innermost core: his personhood, his dignity, his standing as a someone.
From the book
“There is a forgetting that has nothing to do with memory. It is not a forgetting of names, dates, or events. It is rather a kind of blindness: one sees the other human being, but one no longer sees who he is.”
— What It Means to Forget the Essence of the Human Being, Chapter 5
Oblivion of the person occurs in two forms. Theoretical oblivion of the person is present when a philosophical or scientific theory describes the human being in such a way that his proper essence is curtailed or explained away. Examples are the empirical-functionalist concept of person of John Locke, Derek Parfit, or Peter Singer. Practical oblivion of the person shows itself in the concrete treatment of human beings whose personhood is disregarded — wherever human beings are treated like things. Both forms reinforce one another: whoever thinks wrongly about the human being will more easily treat him wrongly (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 218–254).
What is distinctive about oblivion of the person is that it is a latent phenomenon of privation. It works in concealment, creeps in imperceptibly, and arrives quietly. It is an absence of something that ought to be present — comparable to blindness as the loss of a capacity that properly belongs to a being.
Only a person can forget what a person is. Precisely thereby even the person-forgetting act still reveals something of what has been forgotten. Spaemann names as the essential ground the modern bifurcation of the world into consciousness and matter since Descartes.
Concrete Forms of Oblivion of the Person
Practical oblivion of the person shows itself in manifold guises: War is its most radical form — the organized negation of the dignity of the other. Power without responsibility subjects the person to one’s own will. The reduction of the human being to his monetary value through money as the sole measure turns the person into a commodity. Modern technology — in particular Artificial Intelligence and surveillance technology — can carry oblivion of the person over into new, subtler forms, by simulating personhood or hollowing out the interiority of the person (cf. AI Ethics). The Turing Test, when its logic becomes action-guiding, produces a double oblivion of the person: on the one hand, machines are treated like persons — rights and a moral status are ascribed to them that belong only to a someone. On the other hand — and this is the deeper danger — human beings who do not meet the behaviorist standard (embryos, coma patients, human beings with severe dementia) are accorded less respect as persons than an eloquent AI. The Jones/Bergen studies (2024/2025) show that GPT-4.5 was judged to be more human than real human beings in 73 % of cases — an empirical token of how close the confusion of simulation quality with personhood already lies.
A particularly subtle variant of this oblivion of the person shows itself in AI-generated art and text simulation. What AI produces — images, texts, music — is always a product of human persons: the training data stem from the corpus of human cultural production, the algorithms were designed by persons, the inputs come from persons. AI output is therefore derived deutera energeia — a recombination of what persons have created out of their prote energeia. The oblivion of the person lies in a twofold forgetting: on the one hand, the concrete authors are forgotten, whose works serve as training material without consent — an instrumentalization of their creative achievement. On the other hand, the personal origin as such is forgotten when society ascribes the result to the machine instead of to the persons whose heart, individuality, and self-transcendence brought forth the material that the AI recombines (cf. art, AI Ethics).
Chapter assignment: Chapter 5: What Happens When We Forget Who the Human Being Is?, Chapter 1: Introduction
Capability Attribution
Capability attribution is a temporal attribution of a capacity to a person. It distinguishes three levels: the basic enablement (from conception), the actual capacity (from consciousness onward), and the actual exercise (occurrent). This distinction is ontologically decisive for the question of who counts as a person.
Capability attribution makes clear that personhood does not hang upon the actual exercise of capacities: the embryo possesses the basic enablement for rationality from conception onward, even if the actual exercise is not yet possible. The confusion of basic enablement and actual exercise leads to oblivion of the person — to the denial of personhood in persons who cannot presently exercise their capacities.
See also: Person, Personhood, Dignity, Someone, Personalist Norm, Person-Behavior, Cognition, Insight, Truth, Embryo, Substance, Freedom, Love, Body-Soul Unity, Personal Life, First Dimension, Human Person, Nature, Metaphysics, Archphenomenon, Agere sequitur esse, Basal Relations, Concept of Person, Empirical-Functionalist Concept of Person, Substance-Ontological Concept of Person, Dementia, Fertilization, Self-Consciousness, Reason, Interiority, Second Dimension, Third Dimension, Essential Law, Form and Matter, Act and Potency, Soul, Body, Robert Spaemann, Martin Heidegger, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Derek Parfit, Peter Singer, Thomas Aquinas, Karol Wojtyła, Chapter 5: Oblivion of the Person, Chapter 1: Introduction
- Turing Test
- Alan Turing
- Artificial Intelligence
- AI Ethics
- Technology
- Instrumentalization
- Conscience
- War
- Power
- Transhumanism
- Person-violating Norm
- Instrumentalizing Culture
- Murder
- Naturalistic Fallacy
- David Hume
- George Edward Moore
See also: Personhood, Person, Embryo, Fertilization, Act and Potency, Oblivion of the Person, First Dimension, Severe Dementia
Practical Oblivion of the Person
Person-forgetting actions in the concrete treatment of human persons; failure to meet the Personalist Norm in practice.
Ontological relations:
- has subclass: Abortion
- has subclass: Assisted Suicide
- has subclass: Concupiscent Look
- has subclass: Euthanasia
- has subclass: Fragmented Parenthood
- has subclass: Gamete Donation
- has subclass: Violence
- has subclass: Instrumentalization
- has subclass: Cryopreservation
- has subclass: Artificial Fertilization
- has subclass: Surrogacy
- has subclass: Lie
- has subclass: Homelessness
- is subclass of: Oblivion of the Person
- has subclass: Suicide
- (inverse) is mutually exclusive with: Virtue
- has subclass: Contraception
- has subclass: Displacement
- has subclass: AI-Arranged Oblivion of the Person (contemporary, technically scaled; Sunstein/Thaler choice architecture and Foucault’s dispositif)
- (inverse) domain: fragments
AI-Arranged Oblivion of the Person
A particularly contemporary and subtle form is AI-arranged oblivion of the person: the prior structuring of a person’s space of possibility through defaults, orderings, framing, visibility rules, personae, and incentives. It is not open manipulation, but the artful arrangement in which the choice appears free while the arranger remains invisible. Seven manifestations: AI choice architecture, AI algorithmic ordering, AI affirmation arrangement, AI persona arrangement, AI attention arrangement, AI discourse arrangement, and the overarching technocratic paradigm (Laudato Si’ nos. 106–114; Antiqua et Nova 2025).
Fragmentation of Personal Unities
Ontological relation: a practical oblivion of the person fragments an interpersonal relation (e.g., parenthood, motherhood) into partial aspects. The paradigmatic example is surrogacy, which fragments the natural unity of genetic, gestational, and social motherhood — a fragmented parenthood arises. The fragmentation contradicts the Personalist Norm, because it treats personal unities as available material.
- Domain: Practical Oblivion of the Person
- Range: Interpersonal Relation
Theoretical Oblivion of the Person
Theoretical oblivion of the person denotes inadequate philosophical theories about the human person that reductively curtail, reinterpret, or interpret away her proper being. To these belong also the Naturalistic Fallacy and the Is-Ought Fallacy, which undermine the ontological ground of the dignity and the inalienable rights of the person.
In contrast to the practical oblivion of the person, which consists in actions against the person, the theoretical form lies in an error of thought. One fails in the concept to grasp what the person is (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 203–260).
The paradigmatic example is the empirical-functionalist concept of person. Locke defines person through consciousness and memory. Singer and Parfit reduce personhood to presently exercised capacities such as self-consciousness, rationality, or the capacity to suffer. Whoever does not presently exercise these functions — embryos, coma patients, human beings with severe dementia — then does not count as a person.
The dissertation shows that this reduction confuses the being of the person (first dimension) with her acts (second dimension). Agere sequitur esse — acting follows being, not the reverse (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 213–240).
The Turing Test formalizes this confusion as an operational criterion: it defines intelligence — and implicitly personhood — through observable behavior. Thereby it carries the theoretical oblivion of the person of the empirical-functionalist concept of person over into a seemingly scientific test procedure. The thesis of Strong AI radicalizes this: an appropriately programmed computer literally is a mind — the ontological distinction between a someone and a mere something is dissolved.
Theoretical oblivion of the person undermines the recognition of the ontological dignity and opens the way to practical oblivion of the person.
A second strand of theoretical oblivion of the person is dialectical thinking: the sublation of the principle of identity in the line Hegel–Rahner, which dissolves the abiding being of the person and leads to anti-essentialism. Alma von Stockhausen has traced this line in intellectual history.
Ontological relations:
- is subclass of: Oblivion of the Person
- has subclass: Dialectical Thinking
- has subclass: Anti-Essentialism
Ontological classification: Subconcepts: Practical Oblivion of the Person, Theoretical Oblivion of the Person
Ontological relations:
- violates norm: Personalist Norm
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Jones, Cameron R. / Bergen, Benjamin K. (2024): “Does GPT-4 Pass the Turing Test?“. In: Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2024, Vol. 1: Long Papers, pp. 5183–5210. Mexico City: ACL. arXiv:2310.20216.
- Jones, Cameron R. / Bergen, Benjamin K. (2025): “Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test”. arXiv:2503.23674.