Person and I

The theme of the person is one of the most difficult and elusive in the whole history of philosophy, and for reasons which are not at all coincidental. Around this theme perhaps the most radical transformation of that whole history has taken place—or is taking place—and strictly speaking it is a question, rather than of the different ways of studying or interpreting a reality, of the emergence of that same reality and of its establishment as such on the mental horizon of the West. Customarily the origin of the notion of person is sought in the Latin word persona, and this is considered to be the equivalent of the Greek prósopon which, as a Hellenic word, is naturally taken as “previous” to the Latin one. But none of this is particularly clear when we take a closer look at things.

In the first place, the word πρόσωπον (prósopon) is very infrequent in philosophical texts, and rarely means “person” or anything like it. Among the pre-Socratics it appears in three texts, Antiphon, Democritus, and Empedocles, and means face, countenance, even the visage of Helios, the Sun. In Plato it also means countenance. This is again the meaning which appears in Aristotle, who speaks at length of the prósopon and its parts (the nose, for example), and also of the face of the Moon. Somewhere he remarks that one says prósopon of a man, but not of an ox or a fish. This remark is interesting, for in the use of the Greek language there is frequent mention of the “face” (prósopon) of animals: ibis, dogs, horses, deer, fish. Of course, the most interesting meaning of this Greek word, the one which has been taken as a basis or starting point for the notion of “person,” is the meaning in which it coincides with the Latin word for mask, the tragic or comic mask worn by actors, for example. It is from this that meanings of “role” or “character” or “personage,” and ultimately “person,” are derived. It is possible, though not certain, that the meaning of prósopon as “mask” is indebted to influence from the Latin persona; this word has a doubtful, probably an Etruscan, etymology.The direction the word has taken—the mask and the personage represented by the actor—has led to abandonment of another which strikes me as interesting: the meaning of “face” in speaking of animals or stars, and also the “façade,” more specifically, the front of a building. In a moment we shall see why this is more important than it appears to be at first glance.

During the Scholastic period, when there was an attempt to think about “person” philosophically, the notions which have been decisive are not the ones arising from these contexts, but from those of “property” or “subsistence” (hypóstatis). Boethius’ famous definition, which has been so influential—persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia—started off from the Aristotelian notion of ousía or substantia thought of primarily in relation to “things.” Always explained with the eternal examples of the statue and the bed, this notion was founded on the old Greek ideal of the “independent” or sufficient, of the “separable” (khoristón). That this substance or thing which we call “person” is rational, is no doubt important, but not sufficiently so to react upon this quality of ousía and modify its mode of being, its manner of reality. The person is a hypóstasis or suppositum like the others, only it is of a rational nature. Signoriello’s Lexicon peripateticum, which is so careful in its distinctions, says literally: “persona nihil addit supra suppositum, nisi aliquam dignitatem et excellentiam petitam ex natura intellectuali” (“Person adds nothing to substance, except some dignity and excellence required by the intellectual nature”). That is, the person is simply a thing with a slightly greater degree of dignity and excellence than the rest.

But suppose that there were an error in all this? Suppose that the “model” of reality which has been used to think about things were not applicable to the person? Suppose it were completely inadequate? The introduction of the theological viewpoint in the theory of the person represented a decisive step as well as a risk. Beginning very early, Scholasticism spoke of divine persons; moreover, the word “person” is applied more to God than to man; in fact, man is described as homo and only secondarily as persona; it is the person—the divine person—of Christ who is simultaneously God and man (homo tends to become relegated to natura). Similarly, it was thought that the person could be divine or angelic or human. This is fruitful in one sense: the divine person is not, of course, a “thing,” and in this sense theology has been a fertile stimulus for the investigation of personal reality. But it also contains a serious risk: the notion of person was thought of in such a way that it could “harbor” the reality of divine or angelic persons as well as human ones. This has caused a loss of contact with immediate reality, with that which becomes immediately present to us. Perhaps it is better to proceed from presence, phenomenologically, reserving the right to add and subtract later so as to be able to arrive at other persons and to think about them from the only person who is clear to us. To begin with, the only persons we know are human ones: I, thou.

We cannot even say “man,” for this is to say a great deal. When we hear a knock on our door we ask “Who is it?” (Although philosophy and science have been mistakenly asking “What is man?” for 2,500 years and receiving, as was to be expected, mistaken answers.) The normal and sufficient answer to the question “Who is it?” is “I.” Naturally, an “I” is accompanied by a voice—a known voice—that is, by a circumstance. If the voice is unknown the answer does me no good, which means that the significance of that word “I” has been changed. Now it means something else, a non-circumstantial I, that is, anybody at all; as if someone were to say “an I.” But I already knew that when I asked “Who is it?” and the answer does not resolve my doubts. What I was asking for when I inquired was precisely the pronominal position of that “someone” who is knocking, his concrete circumstantialization in “I,” unsupplantable, unequivocal, irreplaceable. This pronominal function of the circumstantial “I” or “thou” is equivalent to a proper name—a personal name—if, of course, we always keep in mind that this has not only a significance but a denominative function, along with another vocative function whose full significance will become apparent later on.Certainly, when I say “I,” “thou,” or a proper name, I am thinking of a body; we must not forget this for a single moment, and we must not content ourselves with saying it once and then leaving it inoperative as we go on thinking. But we think of a body insofar as it is the body of someone. That corporeal someone is, to begin with, what we understand a person to be. But now let us try, without relinquishing that first piece of evidence, to see more clearly what we actually understand and are trying to say.The corporeal someone or person not only “happens” but is identified with futurition, that forward tension—or pretension—which is life. Now we begin to glimpse the meaning of prósopon as “front” or “façade” or “forward part.” It is important to retain that frontal quality of the person because life is an operation performed in a forward direction. That “someone” is future-oriented; that is, present and real but turned toward the future, oriented toward it, projected toward it. The face in which the person expresses and shows himself faces the future and hence the face is, among all the parts of the body, the strictly personal one, that in which the person is concentrated and revealed, in which he is expressed. But this future-oriented condition of the person contains one essential trait: it is partially unreal, for the future is not as yet, but will be. In the countenance or person we now see—truly present—the person he will be. By person we understand a reality that is not only real. A “given” person would cease to be one. The programmatic, projective quality is not something that merely happens to the person; rather, it constitutes that person. The person is not “there,” he can never be there as such, but he is arriving.When we say that he “is being made,” we can easily misunderstand what is being sought is his “result.” That is not the point: the person already is, is made as a person, and on the other hand his “finishedness” or result is unimportant. His present being is to be becoming; better still, to be arriving. Every strictly personal relationship—friendship, love—proves this. In such relationships, “being” means “to keep on being,” a condition made of duration and primarily of future, a constant arriving and setting forth, especially a “going to be.” The personal relationship, insofar as it is truly personal and not “thingified,” is always “the eve of delight” even in the fullest presence or possession.Of course, this is also true of myself. My possession of myself has the same programmatic, durative, and arriving quality, by means of which the personal pronoun—me, I—is possessive: mine. And this turns the traditional ontological definition upside down. So far from possessing sovereignty or sufficiency, the person is defined by the indigence, the neediness, the unreality of anticipation, poised on an expectant reality.

I am a person, but “the I” is not the person. “I” is the name we give to that programmatic and arriving condition. When I say “I,” I “prepare” or “get ready” to be. For man, to be is to prepare oneself to be, to get ready to be, and therefore he consists in disposition and readiness. When we say “I” we are not dealing with a simple point or center of the circumstance, but with the fact that this circumstance is mine. Because I am I myself I can have something which is mine. In the person there is selfhood, but not identity: I am the same one but never the same. But here we must add something which I have said many times but which is often forgotten: the past “I” is not I, but circumstance with which I find myself; that is, the circumstance which I—the projective and future-oriented I—encounter when I am going to live. And mere “succession” would not be sufficient for selfhood. There is need for that anticipation of myself, that already being what I am not, that intrinsic futurition or neediness. Man can possess himself throughout his whole life and be the same man because he does not possess himself wholly at any moment in that life.The common noun signifies what is; the proper name, as I have already noted, denominates who one is. The reality of that “who” is never given, and simultaneously includes a certain infinitude and an essential opacity. That infinitude does not affect the finite character of human reality. The image of infinity is lack of definition, and only in this form is the human person infinite: not to be “given,” always able to be something more, to be arriving. The arcane quality of that reality consists in its superlatively internal condition, its intimacy (intimate is the superlative of inner). Hence, the need and possibility of the expression as the person’s mode of being: the secret intimacy in which that arcane person consists rises to the surface in the face—which is the person as he is projected forward. And one’s own person? you will ask. One’s own person is the means by which each can understand himself, interpret himself, and thus project himself. My own reality is reflected in those mirrors which are other people; in them I find my expression, I recognize myself, and thus project myself. This is why personal life is essentially living-with.In the Introduction to Lessons in Logic, Kant summed up the field of philosophy in the mundane sense (in dieser weltbürgerlichen Bedeutung) in these four questions:

What can I know? (Metaphysics.)

What ought I to do? (Ethics.)

What can I hope for? (Religion.)

What is man? (Anthropology.)

And he said that fundamentally all these questions could be included in anthropology, for the first three are reduced to the last. Well—and leaving aside the Kantian correlation between the questions and the philosophical disciplines, which today would be debatable—my point of view would be considerably different.

I think that everything could be reduced to two radical and inseparable questions, whose meaning lies in an intrinsic mutual connection: 1) Who am I? 2) What is to become of me? It is not a question of “man,” or of “what,” but of “I” and “who.” And that question can only be answered by living, with an executive response. The second is also a personal question: I ask “what,” but inquire what is to become of me. The articulation of the “who” and the “what” is precisely the problem of personal life.

But the decisive point is the interconnection of both questions. To know the first means not to know the second and in the measure in which the second is answered, the personal quality of that me vanishes and becomes more like a what, a thing. The more I know who I am, the more I possess my programmatic and projective reality, future-oriented, unreal, and “arriving.” The more authentically I am “I” in the mode of personal life, the less I know what is to become of me, the more uncertain is my future reality, which is thus the more open to possibility, to invention, chance, and innovation.This is the radical neediness of man as person, projected forward, facing the future, going toward the other and especially toward the other person. The person needs the other person in the measure in which that person is presented to him as irreplaceable and unreasonable. And since every human person is affected by that same insufficiency and neediness, we find here the reason why the personal being, considered to its ultimate consequences, brings us to the need for something that is described by one of the most obscure words there is: salvation.

Julián Marías

METAPHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY:

The Empirical Structure of Human Life