Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Aristotle

4 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Aristoteles

Aristotle is the philosophical bedrock on which the entire substance-ontological tradition is built. His concepts and distinctions — form and matter, act and potency, substance and accident — provide the conceptual framework that Boethius and Thomas Aquinas made fruitful for the ontology of the person.

Key Contribution

Aristotle defines the human being as zoon logon echon — the living being endowed with reason. This determination is no mere classification, but a statement of essence: the human being is the being that has logos — reason, language, the capacity to distinguish the true from the false. Aristotle calls philosophy the “science of truth” (episteme tes aletheias), thereby grounding the claim that the question of the essence of the human being admits of a rational answer (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 37 ff.).

Central Ideas in the Book

Form and Matter

The doctrine of form and matter (hylomorphism) states: every natural being is a unity of matter (materia) and form (forma). Form is the determining principle, matter the determinable one. In the case of the human person, the soul is the form of the body: it makes the body what it is — an ensouled, living, personal body. From this follows the body-soul unity, which is not a subsequent joining of two parts, but an original unity.

Act and Potency

The distinction between act and potency is indispensable for understanding personhood. A being can have capacities (potency) without exercising them at a given moment (act). A sleeping human being has the capacity to think even when he is not thinking. An embryo has the capacity for reason even though it has not yet actualized it. Personhood is the act (the First Dimension); person-behavior is the actualization of the potency (the Second Dimension).

Philosophy as the Science of Truth

Aristotle’s understanding of philosophy as the search for truth underlies the methodological claim of the book. The question “What is the human being?” is not a matter of taste, but a question that admits of a true answer. Insight into essential laws — necessary states of affairs that are as they are and cannot be otherwise — is the way to this answer.

Place in the Book

Aristotle is drawn upon in the chapters Chapter 2: How Can This Question Be Answered? (German), Chapter 3: What Is a Person? (German), and Chapter 4: What Is Human Personhood? (German). His concepts are developed further by Thomas Aquinas, Conrad-Martius, and Reinach and made fruitful for the ontology of the person.

Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 37 ff., 93–98 (Aristotle as founder of substance ontology; philosophy as the science of truth).

Further sources:

  • Metaphysics (substance ontology, act and potency, science of truth)
  • De Anima (the soul as form of the body, body-soul unity)
  • Nicomachean Ethics (doctrine of virtue, happiness, rational action)
  • Physics (doctrine of motion, form and matter, concept of nature)

See also

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