Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Robert Spaemann

6 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Robert Spaemann

Robert Spaemann is, alongside Thomas Aquinas, the thinker most frequently drawn upon in the book. His central contribution lies in the diagnosis of the oblivion of the person and in the defense of the thesis that every human being is a person from the very beginning.

Key Contribution

Spaemann coins the term oblivion of the person (Personvergessenheit) in analogy to Heidegger’s oblivion of being: just as modern philosophy has forgotten being, it forgets the person — and precisely where it speaks most about the human being. His central thesis reads: “There are no potential persons.” Whoever is a human being is a person — without gradation, without reservation, without condition. For “persons exist only in the plural”: personhood shows itself in the recognition by other persons, but is not constituted by this recognition (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 218 ff.).

Central Ideas in the Book

Oblivion of the Person

The oblivion of the person is a latent phenomenon of deficiency: it works in hiding and comes quietly. Spaemann distinguishes theoretical and practical oblivion of the person. The theoretical form shows itself in concepts of person that tie personhood to empirically ascertainable functions — as in Locke, Parfit, or Singer. The practical form shows itself wherever human beings are treated like things. Both forms reinforce each other: whoever thinks wrongly about the human being will more easily treat him wrongly.

Against the Split between Human Being and Person

Spaemann opposes the modern split between “human being” (biological organism) and “person” (being with certain capacities). This split, which goes back to Locke and ultimately to Descartes’s division of mind and body, leads to the possibility of “human beings” who are not “persons” — such as embryos or human beings with severe dementia. Spaemann shows: this consequence is not only ethically devastating but ontologically false.

Personhood as Archphenomenon

For Spaemann, personhood is a archphenomenon: it cannot be reduced to anything impersonal. The person is not an epiphenomenon of neural processes (against Parfit), not a mere product of social ascription, but an irreducible reality. Personhood shows itself — in the gaze, in the word, in the affirmation of the other — but it is not first brought forth by this showing.

Spaemann’s Three Arguments

Three of the load-bearing arguments for the substance-ontological concept of person go back substantially to Spaemann. The argument nature as ground finds its most pointed formulation in the dictum “There are no potential persons”: the embryo is not a becoming person, but a person in the process of becoming. The argument from primordial in-itself being holds fast that personhood is a archphenomenon — an irreducible reality that cannot be derived from anything more fundamental. The argument from uniqueness takes up the opening of the book Personen, in which Spaemann shows that we do not count persons like specimens of a genus: even identical twins are not two instances of the same individual, but two unique existences. Every person is an irreplaceable, unsubstitutable someone. To these three positive arguments the book project joins three objections against the empirical-functionalist concept of person, which Bexten unfolds systematically in succession to Spaemann: the exclusion objection, the diachronic identity objection, and the performative contradiction. Spaemann provides central points of departure for the first two; the performative contradiction, moreover, transfers Karl-Otto Apel’s transcendental-pragmatic figure of argument to the ontology of the person and thereby closes a systematic gap in Spaemann (cf. Bexten 2026).

The Personalistic Norm

Spaemann holds the Personalistic Norm, which Karol Wojtyła also formulated: the person is to be affirmed and loved for her own sake. The dignity of the person is not an ascribed value but an ontological one — it belongs to the very being of the person.

Place in the Book

Spaemann is drawn upon especially in the chapters What Happens When We Forget Who the Human Being Is? (German) and Introduction (German). His thought connects the substance-ontological tradition (Thomas, Boethius) with phenomenological analysis (Husserl, Stein) and the philosophy of value (Scheler, Seifert).

Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 218 ff. (Spaemann’s diagnosis of the oblivion of the person and defense of the thesis that every human being is a person from the very beginning).

Further sources:

  • Personen. Versuche über den Unterschied zwischen „etwas” und „jemand” (1996). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta (Engl.: Persons: The Difference Between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, trans. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) (foundation of the distinction between person and thing, critique of the oblivion of the person)
  • Glück und Wohlwollen (1989). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta (Engl.: Happiness and Benevolence, trans. Jeremiah Alberg. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000) (ethics of benevolence, connection between personhood and happiness)
  • Moralische Grundbegriffe (1982) (Engl.: Basic Moral Concepts, trans. T. J. Armstrong. London: Routledge, 1989) (introduction to the foundations of moral action)

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