Berthold Wald is a German philosopher, Professor of Systematic Philosophy at the Theological Faculty of Paderborn (2002–2018), and head of the Josef Pieper Research Center. His contribution to the book lies in the substance-ontological grounding of the identity of being human and personhood and in the historical-philosophical reconstruction of the concept of person from antiquity to the present.
Key Contribution
Wald’s habilitation thesis Substantialität und Personalität (2005; “Substantiality and Personality”) unfolds the thesis that the person-constituting features — self-consciousness, relationality, identity — are not to be thought against the concept of substance but are included within it. Being a person is a particular way of being a substance. Wald thereby turns against the assumption, widespread since Locke and Kant, that the concept of substance is useless for the ontology of the person.
Fundamental thesis: to be human is to be a person. Every human being is, as a human being, already a person — not only upon proof of certain capacities such as rationality, autonomy, or self-consciousness. This is a decidedly anti-functionalist position that coincides with the book’s substance-ontological concept of person.
Central Ideas in the Book
A Survey of the History of Philosophy
Wald traces the development of the concept of person: from Aristotle’s metaphysics, through the critical reception of the Boethian formula of the person (naturae rationalis individua substantia) by Richard of St. Victor and Bonaventure, to Thomas Aquinas’s Christological writings, in which the concept of person receives its most mature form.
A Counter-Model to Modernity
Wald develops a coherent counter-model to modern theories of the person. Modern theories (Locke, Kant, Scheler, Heidegger) derive the features of the person directly from self-experience and mutual recognition, while holding the ontological grounding of the concept of substance to be indemonstrable or categorially mistaken. Wald shows that this rejection rests on a misunderstanding of the Aristotelian-Thomistic concept of substance.
Critique of Luther
In Person und Handlung bei Martin Luther (1993; “Person and Action in Martin Luther”), Wald argues that Luther dissolves the real correlation of person and action for theological reasons: only faith, not works, is relevant to the salvation of the person. For Luther, the significance of action lies solely in its effect on others — whereby Luther becomes a forerunner of the utilitarian moral principle. From a Thomistic perspective this contradicts agere sequitur esse: action follows being and perfects the person; it is not a mere means to an external end.
Josef Pieper
As editor of the Pieper edition of collected works (8 volumes, Felix Meiner Verlag), Wald has opened up for scholarship the work of the most important German Thomist of the twentieth century. Pieper’s philosophical anthropology — the human being as creatura with inviolable dignity — forms a background for Wald’s own ontology of the person.
Place in the Book
Wald’s substance-ontological grounding of the concept of person complements the positions of Spaemann, Seifert, and Wojtyła. While Spaemann unfolds the distinction between someone and something phenomenologically and Seifert determines the dignity of the person as an ontological value, Wald supplies the deep historical-philosophical drilling: he shows that the substance-ontological concept of person is no scholastic narrowing, but the result of two thousand years of intellectual labor that finds its most mature form in Thomas Aquinas.
Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 113–141 (substance ontology and the concept of person).
Further sources:
- Wald, Berthold (2005): Substantialität und Personalität. Philosophie der Person in Antike und Mittelalter (Substantiality and Personality: Philosophy of the Person in Antiquity and the Middle Ages). Paderborn: mentis.
- Wald, Berthold (1993): Person und Handlung bei Martin Luther (Person and Action in Martin Luther). Weilheim-Bierbronnen: Gustav-Siewerth-Akademie (Schriftenreihe der Gustav-Siewerth-Akademie, vol. 9).
- Wald, Berthold (1986): Genitrix Virtutum. Zum Wandel des aristotelischen Begriffs praktischer Vernunft: Thomas von Aquin – Johannes Duns Scotus – Wilhelm von Ockham – Martin Luther (Genitrix Virtutum: On the Transformation of the Aristotelian Concept of Practical Reason: Thomas Aquinas – John Duns Scotus – William of Ockham – Martin Luther). Münster: LIT.
- Wald, Berthold (2017): Christliches Menschenbild. Zugänge zum Werk von Josef Pieper (The Christian View of the Human Being: Approaches to the Work of Josef Pieper). Munich: Pneuma Verlag.
- Wald, Berthold (2021): “Menschenwürde und Menschenrechte. Unverzichtbarkeit und Tragweite naturrechtlicher Begründungen” (Human Dignity and Human Rights: The Indispensability and Scope of Natural-Law Justifications). In: Revista Internacional d’Humanitats 53.