A common interpretation of Plato's theory of human reality is to identify it with
"soul." It has been for some a problem as to whether or not Plotinus adhered to
his master's position on this point. H. J. Blumenthal initiated much discussion when he
asked: "Did Plotinus believe in Ideas of Individuals?" (1)
Supported by apparently contradictory texts Blumenthal concluded that Plotinus did believe
at times in such ideas, and at other times did not. One way that commentators take in such
cases is to state that inconsistency is the mark of great thinkers. Hilary Armstrong did
not do this. (2) He reconciled the apparent contradictions
with the use of new punctuation for the most decisive text against individual forms for
human beings. The passages often taken as contradictions applied to quite other realities.
Plotinus position is to be taken from Ennead V,7,1 lines 18-23:
No, there cannot be the same forming principle for different individuals, and
one man will not serve as model for several men differing from each other not only by
reason of their matter but with a vast number of special differences of form. Men are not
related to their form as portraits of Socrates are to their original, but their different
structures must result from different forming principles.
As Armstrong points out, Plotinus' higher self is not simply identical with the
individual form of a particular human being. The higher self which Plotinus interprets as
the intellect or Nous which does not come down is nevertheless said to be a soul.
In Ennead V.3 humans are described as reasoning souls, wandering between embodiment
and intellect. But humans can transcend their reasoning souls and identify themselves with
their higher soul or intellect and even transcend that to arrive at union with the One, an
unknowable Selfhood to which, according to J.P. O'Daly, (3)
it is urged on by love, given by the Good, which is what the One's Selfhood is.
The composite human being, that is, the human person as embodied rational soul is
rightly represented by its higher self or the "I" as the self-governing
principle of the totality of humanness.
Plotinus clearly sees the human being as deriving from the One First Principle, through
Form-Intellect and All-Soul. In this sense he is not a dualist. But he recognizes the
material components in any given family and environment as contributing distinctive
features to individual personalities. But he also recognizes the free "I" or
higher soul which chooses how the material circumstances will be used to reach the human
goal made possible by the union of truth and love.
It is not appropriate to posit another Ego called by Armstrong the empirical
self .
If, as he says, and I think rightly, that Plotinus is only talking about different
attitudes toward what is of greatest value within the human possibilities for action, then
there need only be one "I" or higher self which exercises self-determination in
the empirical world, and with regard to one's opening to the transcendent world where
transcendent means the realm of truth, goodness, beauty, distinct from but not separated
from the sensible world. Indeed, Plotinus said that the sense-world is in one place, but
the intelligible world is everywhere. (4)
Thus self-realization is union with the Good to which the higher powers of knowing and
loving open human beings. The human "I" is the possessor of an embodied spirit
with the vocation of bringing the human spirit to its true fulfillment. In union with the
Good one's focus widens to include the good of all rather than that of one's particular
personality. The human being, individual as it is, escapes the narrowness of its own
concerns to take an outlook that is universal and providential. This is the only
advantageous way for human individuals to participate in universality. Plotinus is to be
congratulated for not remaining only with Plato's universal forms of man as higher than
that of individuals. There can be no friendship between universal forms as there can be
between particular individuals. To surrender the high value of friendship would be
disastrous.
In his searcb for as much understanding of God as humans can attain by human reason
working in the light of Faith, Augustine developed a philosophical anthropology. (5)
He thought that to take seriously one's religion is to strive to understand it. And this
entails a certain degree of self-knowledge. He concluded that if humans only are made to
the image of God, that image must be found in that which differentiates them from animals.
He looked to the rational soul, therefore, and to the soul's highest part as the one
nearest to God, namely, mens, mind. For a human person is what he is, Augustine
taught, primarily in virtue of his spiritual substance.
Recognizing that openness to the divine resides in the intellectual activities of
knowing and willing, Augustine spoke of mens as the spiritual eye of the soul. In
assigning to it the power of self-possession by self-knowledge and self-determination, he
gave to the mind the role of personal leader, represented by the grammatical pronoun
"I" without, however, equating the mind or soul with the human person. For him
the human spirit permeates all parts of the body and can orient them toward the human
person's spiritual destiny.
In referring to the mind as the "I" or self-presence, he included memory,
intellect and will. Because one is never without mind and yet not always thinking about
oneself, there is memory of oneself. The mind acts and speaks in the name of the whole
human person, body and rational soul. The inner "I" of the self-conscious
spiritual soul is a reality every mature human being experiences, but this does not entail
the human person being defined as "consciousness" or
"self-consciousness". It is, one may suggest, the power and the glory of being
human but not the total reality of human personhood.. "The complete nature of
man," wrote Augustine, "is made up of spirit, soul, and body." (6)
For Augustine, moreover, the self that is remembered and known is not only the substantial
human individual but the individual as a divine image.
The "I" is a knowing mind or conscious subject of various spiritual and
bodily activities. These spiritual acts distinguish persons from non-persons, yet mind is
part of a rational soul present throughout a body that it has formed According to
Augustine, there is one single reality which thinks and which animates the body and is the
principle of physiological activities. (7) The "I"
as a self-conscious mind is also conscious that it is a part representing the whole. This
was sometimes done in Scripture when the whole human being was referred to as soul or
body. The whole person can be signified by each of its parts. (8)
Augustine was non-Platonic in his philosophical anthropology. The expression
"human person" always meant for him the human subsisting substance. He said that
the human soul is naturally inclined to live in a body, (9)
and that "whoever wishes to separate the body from human nature is a fool." (10)
He never offered a metaphysical explanation of how body and soul are united. He considered
their union very mysterious but thought that it was realized in and by the activity of
mind.
The personal "I" acts by means of mental parts and bodily parts, but
Augustine insists that the self-determining principle acts on behalf of one single person.
The unity of all human experiences has to be in the self-conscious mind, for what other
part of the embodied spirit can be aware? Self-reflection is impossible for material
realities. Without providing a metaphysical explanation of human unity (such as
act-potency) he nevertheless taught that the physiological life-principle in humans was
one with the rational life-principle while he distinguished their roles. (11)
Augustine was very aware that according to Scripture God said: "Let us make man to
our image and likeness," not let us make man's mind to our image and likeness.
Finding, as he did, in the mind an analogy of God's inner life as the divine Processions,
he nevertheless regarded the human person, an embodied soul, to be fully represented by
the self-conscious Ego who determines all personal actions to exist and to be whatever
kind they are. (12) Since the rational soul brings about a
human person, personhood for Augustine derives primarily from the human soul but refers to
a man or woman constituted of a rational soul and human body. This composition of soul and
body is a personal unity. (13)
III
The most quoted remark of St. Thomas Aquinas about the human person is a statement
concerning its value. He said: "Person refers to that which is most perfect in the
whole of nature, namely, to that which subsists in rational nature." (14)
But he became more philosophically definitive in the following statement:
...we correctly speak of substances as individuals.... Now, particularity and
individuality are more specially and perfectly present in rational substances who control
their actions..... For it is proper to individuals or singular substances to act. So a
special name is given among all other substances to individual beings having a rational
nature, and this name is "person." ...
In the opinion of some theologians, "substance" as found in the
definition of person refers to "first substance"... Yet the addition of
"individual" is not unnecessary. For what we eliminate by the word..."first
substance" is being universal or partial.....but by adding "individual" we
eliminate the notion of a reality that can be assumed by another. (15)
It is commonly known that in adopting Aristotelian form-matter as act-potency
principles, Aquinas kept the human body and soul together in a close metaphysical unity
with the one rational form, virtually sensitive and vegetative, bringing its spiritual
existence to the body.
There is an echo of Augustine's self-conscious "I" or Ego (representing the
human person) in the Thomistic view of knowledge. As F. D. Wilhelmsen has pointed out, the
ego for Thomas "is simply spiritual [or intellectual ] existence totally open to
itself in its very becoming what is not "itself" but an "other". (16)
St. Thomas discusses this as "all knowledge taking place through the assimilation of
the knower and the known." (17) In .this way the ego is
constituted in the act of knowing the other. This makes the self "a reflective phase
of intellection"......This self-reflection through becoming the other is the
ego." . The act of knowing is open to its own being, with the intellect judging its
own relation to reality: such is intellectual reflection. Thus the ego is a function of
the truth as known. Perhaps this is why Aquinas wrote so many articles on knowledge and
very few, if any, on the "self" which arouses such interest today.
To say that there is no substance which equals the ego is not to deny the
substantiality of the human person. The ego is what I am as knowing and doing: it is,
Thomas Aquinas would say, a myselfness which is my history.
This analysis is rooted in Aquinas' theory of knowledge: that the knower becomes the
known; that the intelligible species is not what is actually understood but that by which
the intellect understands. There is no representative picture between the knower and the
reality known. Judgment is the act of union with the real; in judgment the subject and
predicate signify the same thing in reality. To find the ego or I as concomitant with
intellectual activity is to verify that only human persons and not natures are the
subjects or agents of human activities.
In this position Aquinas joins with Augustine who said: "I understand that I
understand." (18) This is knowledge knowing its own
relationship to the real. In conclusion, therefore, according to Thomas Aquinas, the
"ego or self-consciousness, consciousness of self, is simply spiritual activity
taking "itself" in hand and measuring its own conformity to the real." (19)
IV
The philosopher, Karol Wojtyla, better known as John Paul II, accepted Thomas Aquinas'
view of the human person as a substantial entity of rational soul and human body but also
examined human existence from a phenomenological perspective. In this way he has expanded
and improved upon Boethius' definition of a human person as "an individual substance
of rational nature." Moreover, Wojtyla fully accepts Aristotelian hylomorphism and
Aquinas' adapting of Aristotelian act-potency to existence-essence.
He believes, however, that the phenomenological method can illuminate certain ethical
facts that are crucial for gaining a more comprehensive view of human persons. Using this
method he approaches human experience without abstracting from its concrete conditions.
This is, of course, the way of Merleau-Ponty.
Among such experiences is the universal one of conscience where we experience our
actions as good or evil. Although the justification for such an experience is in the
metaphysical order where the nature of the good is investigated, the phenomenological
method reenforces the Thomistic position of the mutual relation of soul and body within a
human person.
It is in the act of self-determination (20) that Wojtyla
finds the personal being as agent not only of what is done in the external world but also
in the fashioning and developing of a unique personal being. In his 1976 Harvard
lecture he said: "I possess self not so much through self-consciousness as through
self-determination."
Wojtyla's first encounter with Thomas Aquinas as a seminary student was through a book
on metaphysics in the perspective of Transcendental Thomism. (21)
He told his Examiner that the vision he gained from this study was more precious to him
than the good grade he had received. It was for him a confirmation of his personal
experience as the experience of personhood.
All know that his thesis for qualification as a university professor was devoted to
Scheler's discussion of the objective status of value as experienced phenomenologically.
Later he rejected much of Scheler's thought but admits making use of insights from Merleau
Ponty.
Wojtyla echoes Aristotle in seeing human dignity not only in rational consciousness
with the emphasis on self-determination but also in virtuous actions. Wojtyla taught that
the moral experience of a human person is an important manifestation of "who" he
or she is. The "who" of a human person is a "becoming" and cannot be
defined, only described. He stated: "Person.....is the subsisting subject of
existence and actions which cannot be attributed to rational nature." Is the purpose
of personal life to be found within nature?, asks Wojtyla. He answers that human
experience reveals a certain transcendental character to human actions. He therefore cites
"action" as a phenomenon open to common awareness, capable of ever more refined
description. That is why he focuses on the Acting Person, the person as a subject of
actions, and concludes that a person is of rational nature and the subsistent subject of
existence and actions. (22)
The emphasis on action harmonizes with Wojtyla's respect for experience. Yet he never
thought that phenomenonology sufficed to interpret even sensible experience. For however
undeniable are the differences of the functions of sense and intellect, it is to be
stressed that human knowledge constitutes an organic and not merely an organizational
unity. In experience is contained not only the sensuous but also the intellectual element.
For this reason we may say that human experience is already an understanding.
The same applies to the human person as the object of investigation. The basis for
understanding him or her must be sought in experience. Any human act includes the
intentional, the pragmatic, and the ethical aspect. The experience of any human action is
an experience of the "I" that is doing the action. This doing is personal
action. It entails the consciousness of being the agent, of the personal self, of being
solely responsible for the action as good or evil. But the act of self-determination for
Wojtyla is more than a "doing"; it is a "becoming". In deciding to
move toward this or that value I am deciding about myself, whether by this act I become
good or evil. In self-determination the ego or "I" encounters itself as object
of its action. The self is revealed. In the act of self-determination one experiences
oneself as a person. In self-determined actions that are directed toward others for their
benefit, the acting person becomes more fully himself as person, since only persons are
able to make a disinterested gift of themselves to others. Karol Wojtyla emphasizes more
than Aquinas the relational as well as the substantive character of person as revealed in
mature acts of self-determination.
In concluding, let us recall that whether the "I" or Ego is born in acts of
consciousness or acts of will, whether the "I" is eventually identified with
soul or with mind, the highest part of soul, with intellect or will, the "I"
nevertheless signifies the total human being constituted of soul and body which
ontologically is a human person.
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