Routes toward Personhood: Response to Markus Rothhaar

Markus Rothhaar has provided us with well-thought-through reflections on what is obviously one of the central themes of his own philosophical calling. As he notes at the start of his essay in this volume, the path of reflected recognition is not the sole via inventionis of personhood, but it is in its implicit forms universal and in its explicit forms a well charted and accessible path, arguably the via manifestior toward personal identity. I will begin my response by recalling two recent figures familiar with the topography of the recognition-approach to affirming human dignity as a basis for just laws: Robert Spaemann, whom Dr. Rothhaar references several times, and Paul Ricoeur, who here has yet to be heard from. Let me begin with the second figure. After both of these voices, some texts of Thomas Aquinas will be brought into the discussion as well.

In his final work, The Course of Recognition,¹ Paul Ricoeur, for all his studious avoidance of the concept and problematic of "person,"² addressed many of the same issues with many of the same argumentative goals as those thematized by Markus Rothhaar in his essay, regarding what several interconnected forms of recognition could tell us about subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Once these parallels are seen, it will be evident that other dimensions of recognition thematized by Ricoeur can augment Rothhaar's more explicit reflections on personhood.

Recognition (the German Anerkennung as referenced by Ricoeur) is meant by all these roughly contemporary thinkers as something more than, say, the acknowledgement and recognition of a sovereign nation by other sovereign nations, more than the acknowledgement of being recognized by the chair at a conference as a speaker given the floor for a time, or again, as Rothhaar shows in what he argues convincingly is in agreement with Spaemann, more, too, than simply the acknowledgement or recognition of a juridically protected status as the claimant of rights. And yet there is another side of this phenomenon, recognition, because at the same time recognition is also meant to remind us that the recognition of personhood is also something less than direct, certain cognition, less than indisputable knowledge of an evidentiary kind. For this reason, Spaemann can say: "The recognition of being-a-self is always an act of freedom."³

Ricoeur returns in his cited work on The Course of Recognition to the idea of "attestation," which as "scattered" or "broken" (brisée) attestation had been what he described as the "watchword" of Oneself as Another.⁴ There he had explored diverse and—due to circumstantial evidence—necessarily partial "witnesses" to selfhood that are found in instances intrinsically related to and yet "other" than subjectivity, witnesses which could be ignored or denied only at the price of losing oneself. The three exemplary witnesses identified and examined in that earlier work (not as an exhaustive list) are (1) my body, as not always in life and certainly not in death compliant to the inclinations of the subject; (2) other persons, who, as Levinas had insisted, have always already bound us by obligations, even before we might ask them to; and (3) the conscience, insofar as its voice can differ even from the good intentions of the moment. The reader might be reminded here of what Thomas Aquinas includes among the many voices of the conscience: obligation (ligare), inspiration (instigare), accusation and self-accusation (accusare), regret or remorse (remordere), and even excusing (excusare), all calls of the conscience to become other than in fact we already are.⁵ The list of three witnesses was not meant by Ricoeur to be exhaustive and might easily be extended to include further witnesses such as non-revisionist history (a key topic of his Memory, History, Forgetting⁶), tedious work (labor improbus⁷), and in certain contexts the body of the other.⁸ Common to all of these categories of witness is that they are given a hearing because the full sense of personhood is not self-evident a priori. Anticipating all but the initial step in the course of recognition, a robustness of the self...