Ontological endowment with reason; belongs necessarily to the essence of the Person. Present ontologically even in the not-yet-conscious human being as rational form / rational principle of life. Rationality is one of the eight Essential Characteristics and is therefore necessary and inalienable.
Rationality as an Ontological Determination
Personal-ontological analysis distinguishes strictly between rationality as an ontological determination and the actual exercise of reasoned thinking. Rationality does not mean that the person is thinking, judging, or inferring right now, but that she is by her essence endowed with reason. A sleeping human being is not actually thinking — yet he is rational. An unborn child has not yet conceived a conscious thought — yet as a person it possesses the rational form that constitutes its principle of life.
This distinction is of the greatest importance for bioethics: whoever binds rationality to its actual exercise must deny personhood to the sleeping, the comatose, and the unborn — a consequence that the dissertation rejects as an expression of the forgetfulness of the person.
Rationality and Cognition
Rationality enables the person to attain cognition — the intellectual grasp of being as it is. In the Thomistic tradition, reason (ratio) is the faculty that grasps the essence of things and ascends from the particular to the universal. The person can not only perceive individual things but form concepts, judge, and infer. This capacity for conceptual cognition distinguishes her categorically from every animal — and all the more from every machine.
Rationality stands in close connection with the Capacity for Truth: only because the person is rational can she know Truth. Conversely, the capacity for truth is, in a sense, the intentional orientation of rationality toward the true. The two essential characteristics refer to one another without being absorbed into one another.
Rationality and the Other Essential Characteristics
Rationality is not to be understood in isolation but within the framework of the eight essential characteristics. The free will presupposes rationality — only one who knows the good can freely decide for it. Affectivity complements rationality as an independent organ for the apprehension of value: while rationality grasps the true, affectivity discloses the valuable. Together the two enable the person’s full access to reality.
Rationality and Human Rights
Rationality grounds concrete human rights: the right to education and the right to freedom of conscience. Because the person is by her essence endowed with reason, she has a right to unfold her reason (education) and to follow her conscience (freedom of conscience).
Ontological Classification:
- Genus: Essential Characteristic
Ontological Relations:
- is a form of: Essential Characteristic of the Person
- grounds: Right to Education, Right to Freedom of Conscience
- is presupposed by: Free Will
- stands complementary to: Affectivity
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: Personhood (German)
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Boethius: Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, ch. 3 (naturae rationalis individua substantia — rationality as the essential determination of the person).
- Aquinas: Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, aa. 1–8 (reason and intellect as spiritual faculties).
- Seifert, Josef (1987): Back to ‘Things in Themselves’. A Phenomenological Foundation for Classical Realism. London/New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
See also
Reason, Cognition, Capacity for Truth, Thinking, Right to Education, Right to Freedom of Conscience, Essential Characteristic, Free Will, Affectivity, Person, Forgetfulness of the Person, Bioethics