Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Thomas Aquinas

5 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Thomas von Aquin

Thomas Aquinas is the principal philosophical authority of the book. His substance-ontological determination of the person runs through the entire argumentation. Following Boethius and Aristotle, Thomas unfolds an ontology of the person in which personhood and dignity are inseparably bound together.

Key Contribution

Thomas formulates the sentence that is programmatic for the book: “The person signifies that which is most perfect in all of nature” (persona significat id quod est perfectissimum in tota natura, Summa theologiae Ia q.29 a.3). For Thomas, person is no neutral generic concept but a concept of dignity: whoever says “person” thereby says something about the singularity and perfection of this being. The person is someone, not merely something.

Central Ideas in the Book

Agere sequitur esse

The principle agere sequitur esse — “acting follows being” — is the key to understanding the relation of personhood and person-behavior. The human being does not think, know, and love in order thereby to become a person, but because he is a person. Being precedes acting. This principle refutes the empirical-functionalist concept of person, which inverts the relation (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 195 ff.).

Substance Ontology

Thomas adopts and deepens the Boethian definition of the person as rationalis naturae individua substantia. The person belongs to the domain of substance, not of accidents. This means: personhood is not a supervening property but that which underlies all properties and capacities. The soul is the substantial form of the body, so that the human being forms a genuine body-soul unity (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 115–130).

Act and Potency

Within the framework of the Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine of act and potency, personhood is understood as the act from which the faculties of reason, freedom, and love proceed as potencies. Even an embryo or a human being with dementia is a person in the full sense, because his personhood belongs to the First Dimension — to substantial being, which subsists independently of the actual exercise of the faculties.

Nature and Person

Thomas distinguishes clearly between nature (that which someone is) and person (that who someone is). The human person is a being whose nature is determined by reason — but its personhood is not exhausted by this nature; it is the unique, unrepeatable being of this concrete someone.

Place in the Book

Thomas Aquinas is drawn upon extensively above all in the chapters What Is a Person? (German) and What Is Human Personhood? (German). Together with the real ontology of Conrad-Martius, the philosophy of the person of Spaemann, and the value ontology of Seifert, his philosophy forms the systematic foundation of the substance-ontological concept of person. Berthold Wald reconstructed the Thomasian line, both in its reception history and systematically, in his habilitation Substantialität und Personalität (2005) (Engl.: Substantiality and Personality) and defended it against modern critics.

Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 115–130, 195 ff. (Thomas’s substance-ontological definition of the person, agere sequitur esse, and the body-soul unity).

Further sources:

  • Summa Theologiae, esp. Ia q. 29 (definition of the person), Ia q. 75–76 (body-soul unity), I-II q. 1–5 (beatitude and human action)
  • De ente et essentia (Engl.: On Being and Essence) (foundation of the metaphysics of being: essence and being)
  • De veritate (Engl.: On Truth) (truth as the correspondence of cognition and thing)
  • De potentia (Engl.: On the Power of God) (act and potency, doctrine of creation)

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