Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Substance-Ontological-Relational Concept of Person

5 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Substanzontologisch-relationaler Personbegriff

Original contribution

The synthesis of substance ontology and relationality into the substance-ontological-relational concept of person — together with the corresponding sublation argument — is the original contribution of this work (Bexten 2017, continued 2026). Points of connection: Spaemann (relation), Wojtyła (personalist norm), Stein (community), Richard of Saint-Victor (incommunicabilis existentia).

The substance-ontological-relational concept of person is the concept of person defended as adequate within the Personhood ontology. It unites the substance-ontological foundation — the person as a spiritual substance — with the relational dimension: the person is, co-originally, ordered toward community (communio).

Proponents

The substance-ontological-relational concept of person is held by six thinkers:

Adequacy

This concept of person intends human personhood in its primordial in-itself-being most adequately, because it:

  1. secures the substance-ontological foundation: the person is not the product of her functions but their bearer;
  2. incorporates the relational dimension: the person is essentially ordered toward encounter, recognition and love;
  3. holds the performative contradiction in readiness as a weapon turned against the opposing side.

What precisely does “relational” mean here?

Anyone reading the formula “substance-ontological-relational” for the first time encounters an apparent contradiction: a relation presupposes its relata. A relation cannot exist without the entities that stand within it. To speak of the “co-originality” of substance and relation seems to want to abolish this connection by decree. The objection holds — so long as “relational” is understood in a metaphysically constitutive sense. It does not hold once the two levels brought together in the formula are distinguished.

What the concept of person does not claim. It does not claim that to be a person means to stand actually in a relation. Such a proposition would declare the embryo in the womb, the deeply comatose human being and the hermit on the mountain to be non-persons the moment they stand in no actual relation. Classical anthropology has rejected this consequence ever since Thomas; this concept of person follows it in that.

What it does claim. “Relational” designates two determinations on different levels:

  1. An essential potency. Every person bears the capacity for relation not as some arbitrary added feature, but as a constitutive trait of her nature. An entity altogether incapable of love, of recognition, of joint meaning-making would not be a person. This potency belongs essentially to the nature of personhood — it is not contingently accidental. But it is potency, not act. The embryo and the comatose person possess it; its non-actualization does not make them non-persons.

  2. A phenomenological-ethical mode of disclosure. Spaemann’s phrase “one becomes a person only in the plural” describes how personhood becomes accessible to us: in the enactment of recognition, in being addressed and being regarded. This is not a metaphysical statement about what personhood is, but an observation about how personhood shows itself. Recognition is not what constitutes the person — it is what does justice to her.

    What does “recognition” mean here concretely? Recognition means more than cognitive apprehension: it is the responsive attitude in which another is received as someone (not as something) — in being regarded, being addressed, being taken seriously. It has an ethical structure: whoever recognizes already co-enacts the dignity that belongs to the other. For this reason recognition may occur or fail to occur without the ontological constitution of the one recognized being altered; but where it succeeds, personhood comes forth as what it is. It is thus not a category of constitution but a category of response — and for precisely that reason the basic ethical norm of every encounter with a person.

Why this clarification makes the concept stronger. All that is lost is the metaphysical superstructure that later interpreters of the relational turn have read into it. Spaemann himself argues predominantly by way of recognition, not of constitution. The principle agere sequitur esse remains intact: the person enacts her relations because she is a person; she is not a person because she enacts relations. At the same time, this distinction immunizes the concept of person against the sharpest objection conceivable against it — that “intrinsic relationality” is merely a label that displaces an accidental relation into the interior of the substance. The objection no longer takes hold once it is clear: on the side of being, substance with an essential potency for relation; on the side of appearance, recognition as a mode of disclosure.

Classical substance ontology and the phenomenological experience of the person are not rivals. They describe two sides of the same reality — and a concept that takes up both without confounding them keeps what its name promises.

Dialectical balance

Not a single objection is directed against the substance-ontological-relational concept of person. It is supported by 6 arguments that form a mutually supporting network. See Argumentative-Dialectical Balance.

Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.

Further sources:

  • Spaemann, Robert. Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’. Translated by Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
  • Wojtyła, Karol. Osoba i czyn. Kraków, 1969. — German: Person und Tat. Translated by H. Springer. Freiburg: Herder, 1981. (German)

See also

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