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222
Book Reviews
Robert Spaemann
Persons: The Difference between “Someone” and “Something” (Oxford,UK: Oxford
University Press, 2017). 272 pp. $26.95 paperback.
It is well-known that much theology—especially in the ancient and medieval periods—attempts to describe God apophatically: careful consideration of what God is not is said to produce important conclusions about what and who God is.Thisvianegationishas its strengths as well as its flaws, but is still a handy method. Robert Spaemann applies this method in his latest offering, Persons: The Difference between “Someone” and “Something.” In this relatively short but dense book, Spaemann provides substantive analysis about what persons are by distinguishing what persons do from what nonpersons do. But this is no mere case of positing—in good Sartrean fashion—that human existence pre- cedes essence. No, this is a sophisticated investigation into what makes persons unique among all other existing entities through a focus on those activities, pri- marily of the mind, that enable one to understand human beings as persons.
Spaemann begins with extended reflections—contained within the first three introductory chapters—on the origin of the concept “person” noting that without Christian tradition, the West would not have such a concept at all (17). The ancient Greeks prior to the dawning of Christian faith had no focused theory of person, though there were elements of their work that contributed to such a theory. For example, Aristotle’s three means of persuasion provide insight into what persons are (or may be), for they presuppose things that later became ascriptions of personhood. But whatever Aristotle said about the qual- ity of character of the speaker (ethos), the emotional condition of the listeners (pathos), or the intellectual merit of the argument (logos) was only of tangen- tial concern in the constitution of the human being—what mattered primarily was the art and techniques necessary to persuade, to induce a response of agreement. It took the Christological debates of the earliest Christian centuries and the Trinitarian debates that followed, to provide the cognitive apparatus necessary to begin to ask and answer the question: what is a person? The earli- est Christian theologians borrowed language from Roman jurisprudence and Greek ontology to develop notions that became the basis of the idea. Spae- mann’s recognition of the origin of the concept necessarily and rightly shows its Christian pedigree without suggesting that the theological context remains compulsory for later development.
With the etymological question satisfied, Spaemann moves to his main pur- pose: establishing the concept, that is, filling it with substance by saying that a person is a subject known by its acts without being reducible to them— a person is greater than the sum of its actions. The acts of a person happen
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-04001012
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within contexts or result from dispositions that are now variously understood to be inherent to human life: intentionality, religion, freedom, promise and for- giveness, and others. These are the arenas within which we observe persons in action or the observable effects of what persons do. The chapters on these topics—fourteen in all, preceded by three introductory chapters and one con- cluding one—are shorter than expected, pithy, and reveal extensive research without too much technical footnoting (references to original source mate- rial from Aristotle, Locke, et. al., is a plus). Spaemann, at times, writes with an aphoristic flair yielding abbreviated wisdom surpassing the boundaries of the subject proper.
One of more fascinating chapters in Spaemann’s book is the one on “the negative.” Only persons, says Spaemann, can chase the negative as something desirable, as a means of achieving some other end that cannot be accomplished throughlessdemandingmeans.Othercreaturesintheanimalworldgothrough arduous moments toward some positive goal, such as salmon in the Pacific Northwest swimming against the great river currents to spawn. This move- ment is, to be sure, difficult—and pursued vigorously—but this can be clas- sified as an evolutionary or genetic necessity and we will never know whether the salmon would engage in this laborious pursuit if they had the freedom to choose otherwise. Examples like this (and there are many of them) do not show that other creatures also pursue the negative and in their own ways turn it into something positive. No, only human persons can actively pursue what is negative and categorize it as positive. Only human persons can bracket their experiences and place before them either a positive or a negative symbol as if in a mathematical equation (45).
One great strength of Spaemann’s approach is the provision of example after example of what can only be ascribed to human behavior taken to be exclu- sive evidence that humans—and only humans—can be described as persons. Again, features of human behavior such as religious (or spiritual) devotion, freedom of choice, and transcendence of one’s own subjectivity are all hall- marks of personhood. About this Spaemann is surely correct. But, since we have no sufficient way of understanding whatever forms of communication emanate from other creatures—if, indeed, such sufficiently intelligible com- munication is even possible—we can never know if these are genuinely unique to human experience. And this leads to the major weakness of the book: there is no separate and focused treatment of language, that singular feature of human existence that truly divides the human from all other species.
Language is difficult to discuss because to do so presupposes it. Spaemann alludes to this early, saying: “it is natural for the human race to communicate linguistically, but there is no language given us in nature” (17). So the act of
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linguistic communication is natural but the specific manner in which it mani- fests is not inherent in human life—that is one reason why Hindi is so different from Russian, and French from Arabic, and so on. The capacity to commu- nicate is natural, a biological or genetic feature of human being as it is for most other creatures. It is the linguistic aspect of that communicability that is special for humans—and this is what makes it a suitable candidate for explo- ration and analysis in Spaemann’s book. There are occasions where Spaemann comes close to recognizing this, albeit indirectly. He comments on the fitness of the “speech-situation” in the Johannine discourse as key to unlocking the mystery of divine being (26); proposes cryptically a model for understanding the relation between word/speech/language and reality (87–88); and provides substantial (but brief) support for something close to a correspondence theory of truth with an analysis of speech both dependent upon and independent of context (128–130). But the absence of a chapter devoted exclusively to language is unfortunate. Given the extraordinary quality of human language, it is almost an inexcusable lacuna in the book that the only—but still merely ancillary— treatment of language comes in the chapter on fiction (81–92). Despite this weakness, the book contains far more positive contributions that explain what it is and why it is that human beings are persons.
Chris Emerick
Grand Canyon University, Phoenix, Arizona
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