Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

John Locke

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🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: John Locke

John Locke is the principal philosophical opponent of the substance-ontological concept of person defended in the book. His definition of the person as a thinking being with self-consciousness has shaped the modern debate on the concept of person and laid the theoretical foundation for the split between “human being” and “person”.

Key Contribution

Locke defines the person as “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself”. What is decisive about this definition is the ontological split: “person” is understood not as a concept of being, but as a concept of function. One is a person exactly when one actually exercises certain capacities — above all self-consciousness and reason. Thus there can be “human beings” who are not “persons” (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 85–100).

Central Ideas in the Book

Empirical-Functionalist Concept of Person

Locke founds the empirical-functionalist concept of person, which ties personhood to the actual exercise of certain capacities. Whoever does not (or no longer) think, whoever is not (or no longer) conscious of himself, is by this logic not (or no longer) a person. The consequence: embryos, newborns, human beings with severe dementia, and the comatose can be declared non-persons. Peter Singer and Derek Parfit draw this consequence explicitly.

Three Objections to Locke’s Legacy

The book project answers Locke’s concept of person and its continuation in Parfit and Singer with three systematic objections. The exclusion objection shows that tying personhood to actual cognitive performance necessarily excludes whole groups of human beings from the circle of persons. The objection of diachronic identity shows that Locke’s reduction of personal identity to consciousness and memory runs in a circle: memory already presupposes the remembering someone. Both objections are already systematically unfolded in the dissertation (Bexten 2017). The performative contradiction, finally, shows that whoever defends Locke’s position enacts, in his own argumentative speech act, the very personhood he theoretically seeks to restrict to a narrow subset of human beings — it is an original continuation in the 2026 book project, transferring Karl-Otto Apel’s transcendental-pragmatic figure of argument to the ontology of the person and thereby closing a systematic gap in Spaemann.

The Split Between Human Being and Person

Locke’s definition separates what Boethius and Thomas Aquinas thought together: being (the substance) and doing (the function). While for the substance-ontological tradition personhood precedes person-behavior (agere sequitur esse), Locke inverts the relation: only the doing (thinking, self-consciousness) makes someone a person. Robert Spaemann recognizes in this split a principal root of the oblivion of the person.

Cartesian Legacy

Locke’s position stands in the line of Descartes’ division of reality into res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa (extended substance). If the human being falls apart into mind and body, the person can only be sought on the side of the mind — of actual consciousness. The body-soul unity, which is constitutive for the Thomistic tradition, is dissolved.

Place in the Book

Locke is presented and criticized as a counter-position above all in the chapters What Is a Person? (German) and What Happens When We Forget Who the Human Being Is? (German). His empirical-functionalist concept of person is contrasted with the substance-ontological and the relational concept of person.

Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 85–100 (Locke’s empirical-functionalist concept of person as the root of the split between human being and person).

Further sources:

  • An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Book II, Ch. 27 “Of Identity and Diversity”, added in the 2nd edition 1694 (definition of the person as a thinking being with self-consciousness — foundation of the split between human being and person)

See also

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