Who is my neighbor?: personalism and the foundations of human rights

8. The Person according to Personalism

8. THE PERSON ACCORDING TO PERSONALISM P    in the first place a theory of the person or a theoretical science of the person. It focuses rather on the person as subject and object of activity and thus deals fundamentally with practical and ethical questions. Nonetheless, since every ethical theory depends on its underlying suppositions about the person, a proper anthropology is essential. Thomistic personalism elaborates on the constitutive elements of Thomas’s understanding of the person and draws from them the key insight that will make possible a satisfactory grounding of human rights, namely, that persons are unique not only as rational subjects of action but also as rational objects of action. Awareness of this uniqueness of persons as objects of action emerges from the personalists’ new take on Thomas’s hierarchy of being.      Thomas clearly maintained the human person’s primacy over the rest of created reality, but he envisioned that primacy as the peak of an ontological continuum. All infra-mundane beings inhabit a specific place on this continuum, and human beings, because of their rational nature, occupy the highest place. Nevertheless, Thomas’s approach emphasizes how the entire continuum occupies the same metaphysical plane, that of created being. Thus rather than accentuate man’s similarity to God and dissimilarity to the rest of creation by reason of man’s personhood, Thomas chose to focus on man’s place among created beings. The personalists’ phenomenological reflections on the manifestations                            of man’s rational nature led them to a different conception. Instead of a creaturely ladder with persons occupying the top rung, created reality includes a fundamental separation between personal and nonpersonal being . The rationality of personhood actually opens up a gulf between man and all other creatures. According to the personalist conception, the fundamental classification of all beings, created and uncreated, is the distinction between persons and nonpersons.1 In the words of Jacques Maritain: “Whenever we say that man is a person, we mean that he is more than a mere parcel of matter, more than an individual element in nature, such as is an atom, a blade of grass, a fly or an elephant.l.l.l. Man is an animal and an individual , but unlike other animals or individuals.”2 What makes man “unlike” other animals is different from what makes a baboon unlike a giraffe or even from what makes a baboon unlike a rock.3 Traditional Aristotelian anthropology defines man as a rational animal , thereby fulfilling Aristotle’s requirement for defining a species in terms of its proximate genus (animal) and specific difference (rational).4 Yet as Wojtyla observes, such a construction “excludes—when taken simply and directly—the possibility of accentuating the irreducible in the human being. It implies—at least at first glance—a belief in the reducibility of the human being to the world.”5 This objective, cosmological view of man as an animal with the distinguishing feature of reason, by which man is primarily an object alongside other objects in the world to which he physically belongs,6 is valid but insufficient, according to Thomistic personalism. In an effort to interpret the subjectivity that is                     . For an excellent exposé on the difference between persons and things, see Robert Spaemann , Personen: Versuche über den Unterschied zwischen “etwas” und “jemand” (Stuttgart: KlettCotta , ), especially ch. , “Sind alle Menschen Personen?” –. . Jacques Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law (Glasgow: Robert Maclehose/University Press, ), –. . “Man is, to be sure, an animal, but an animal of a superior kind, much farther removed from all other animals than the different kinds of animals are from one another” (Grotius, De Iure Belli ac Pacis, prolegomena, ). . Aristotle, Hist. Anim., I, :a; Nichomachean Ethics I, :b; VIII, :a; IX, :b; Politics, I, :a. . Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” –. . As an example, when Thomas ponders the distinction among created things, he observes that “in natural things species seem to be arranged in degrees; as the mixed things are more perfect than the elements, and plants than minerals, and animals than plants, and men than other animals; and in each of these one species is more perfect than others” (S. Th., I, , ). proper to the person, personalism expresses “a belief in the primordial uniqueness of the human being, and thus in the basic irreducibility of the human being to...