René Descartes figures in the book not as a direct counter-position, but as the philosophical switch-setting that made possible all later forms of the oblivion of the person. His division of reality into res cogitans and res extensa is the root of the modern split between human being and person.
Key Contribution
Descartes divides the whole of reality into two domains: res cogitans (thinking substance, mind) and res extensa (extended substance, body). For Descartes, the human being is fundamentally a thinking being that has a body — not a unified body-soul being that is at once spiritual and corporeal. As Spaemann shows, this division has far-reaching consequences for the concept of person: 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 (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 220 ff.).
Central Ideas in the Book
Root of the Oblivion of the Person
Spaemann identifies Descartes’s dualism as an essential cause of the oblivion of the person: if reality falls apart into consciousness and matter, there is no longer any place for the person as body-soul unity. The person becomes either pure consciousness (and loses its body) or mere body (and loses its soul). Both reductions miss what the person is: a unified being that is at once spiritual and bodily.
Enabling Functionalism
Descartes’s dualism is what first makes the empirical-functionalist concept of person possible: if the person stands on the side of consciousness, then it is a person precisely when it (actually) thinks. Locke draws this consequence: person = thinking being with self-consciousness. Parfit radicalizes it: the person is only an epiphenomenon of psychological processes. Singer applies it: not all human beings are persons.
Loss of the Body-Soul Unity
The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition (Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas) understands the human being as a unity of form and matter, in which the soul is the form of the body. Descartes destroys this unity: mind and body are for him two distinct substances that are externally connected. What is thereby lost is essential to the ontology of the person: that the whole human being — with body and soul — is a person, not merely his consciousness.
Place in the Book
Descartes is analyzed above all in the chapter What Happens When We Forget Who the Human Being Is? (German) as the cause, in the history of philosophy, of the modern oblivion of the person. His position forms the background against which the substance-ontological alternative (Boethius, Thomas, Conrad-Martius) stands out all the more clearly.
Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 220 ff. (Descartes’s dualism as the philosophical root of the modern oblivion of the person).
Further sources:
- Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641) (Engl.: Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) (foundation of the dualism of res cogitans and res extensa)
- Discours de la méthode (1637) (Engl.: Discourse on the Method, in: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) (methodical doubt and the cogito as the starting point of modern philosophy of the subject)
See also
- John Locke
- Derek Parfit
- Peter Singer
- Robert Spaemann
- Martin Heidegger
- Blaise Pascal
- Aristotle
- Thomas Aquinas
- Boethius
- Hedwig Conrad-Martius
- David Wiggins
- Oblivion of the Person
- Body-Soul Unity
- Person
- Substance
- Self-Consciousness
- Soul
- Body (Leib)
- Empirical-Functionalist Concept of Person
- Concept of Person
- Substance-Ontological Concept of Person
- Personhood
- Human Person
- Person-Behavior
- Form and Matter
- Reason
- Cognition
- Dignity
- Someone
- Nature
- First Dimension
- Agere sequitur esse
- Interiority
- Freedom
- Accident
- Metaphysics
- Chapter 5: Forgetfulness of the Person (German)
- Chapter 1: Introduction (German)
- Chapter 3: The Concept of Person (German)