The Personal Individual
'The uniqueness of the person, individuality in the strongest sense, is what is proper to the singular soul, and which, like the soul, originates from nowhere other than the Creator of all being.'
In previous essays, while drawing attention to the exalted being and value of the person, I frequently mentioned the importance of the person as an individual, but this importance came to the foreground only while reflecting on the Boëthian definition of the person, where ‘individual’ is included as one of the its four significant terms. However, we still have not directly attended to this importance, and not because it is not foundational, but because it was necessary to first understand these other aspects of being a person before we can properly understand the importance of the individual. Yet, when we have then moved toward an understanding of the individual and come to a corresponding appreciation of their preeminent value, we have arrived at the center of significance of everything personal, and indeed the locus around which all that is of significance is concentrated.
The Meaning of Being an Individual
To be an individual is to be ‘undivided in itself yet divided from all else.’ As ‘undivided in itself’ every individual is a unified whole, and as ‘divided from all else’ each individual is distinct from and separate to all others. Individuals are then the basic units of reality, and reality is constituted out of the multiplicity of actual individuals.
Now, since humans possess a bodily nature, we can begin our approach to the individuation of the person by acknowledging that the human person, precisely as a unified bodily whole, is individual in like manner to the way other material things are individual, that is, by the designated matter of the body (at least if we follow Aristotle and Aquinas). Yet, having begun at this point, we can also acknowledge that the human person is an individual in a more significant way than other material things, and in manifold interrelated ways. First, since the spiritual nature of the person cannot be produced by any material process, every personal soul must be created directly and immediately by God; then, since there is no natural aptitude for corruption in spiritual being, the personal soul cannot decay or be destroyed by any natural process; and finally, since persons have dominion over their own actions, every person (suitably matured) has the capacity to orient his or her own life toward happiness (to be realized in attainment of in the supreme good that is God the Creator). The upshot of all this is that, in the words of Aquinas, the person is an individual in a ‘more special and perfect way.’
To understand the nature of this ‘more special and perfect way,’ we have first to understand that individuality ultimately reduces to incommunicability. To be incommunicable means to possess something exclusively, and this is to bear something as one’s own proper possession. Every genuine individual possesses something in this way, something that cannot be given or taken away, at least without its own destruction. Incommunicability is then the core principle determining the individual as an individual, for it is precisely this feature that sets the individual apart as its own thing.
But what feature of the human person renders the person incommunicable?
Well, at the first level of analysis, we must recognize that the matter of the body makes the human person incommunicable, since designated matter, with its exclusive extension and position in place, is proper to the individual as an inherently incommunicable substrate of life. Yet again, having begun at this point, we must also recognize that as spiritual the human person is individual in a superior sense to other material bodies. Since persons act not only out of their nature but also out of themselves as individuals, personal actions are the person’s own proper and exclusive possession; and since personal actions are one’s own in this way, the principle of these same actions must also be one’s own in the same way. Therefore, unlike the other beings of the natural world, which possess only a material incommunicability by virtue of their material constitution, human persons possesses a spiritual incommunicability by virtue of their spiritual constitution. This spiritual mode of incommunicability—in the free willing center of the person—is then manifest in the very dynamism of personal life, in the free choices of the person and the way these choices unfold over time in bodily expression and action. Evidently, this is something that cannot be shared with or transferred to another, but is rather the proper and exclusive possession of the individual him or herself.
When we then turn to the thought of Edith Stein and her phenomenology of personal subjectivity, we can extend our metaphysical conclusions about the incommunicability of the person. Beginning with the original givenness of the person as a subject of experience, Stein reasons that the person is inwardly distinguishable for himself as an individual via his own conscious experiences. In conscious experience, the person discovers that he is distinguishable from experience itself, the contents of experience, and every object given in experience, and thus finds himself to be a self—one who is able to call himself ‘I,’ and thus declare ‘I am,’ and ‘I am I,’ and finally ‘I am who I am.’[1]
By alighting on the significance of the ‘I’ in this way, Stein highlights how the person comes to identify himself in experience as something eminently unified and distinct, a center of consciousness that is utterly incommunicable to another, and thus an individual in a most eminent way. Whereas all other individuals are given to the personal subject in an outward way as objects experienced (objects of cognition, affection, and volition), the personal subject is given for himself in an inward way as the experiencing subject. Therefore, in consciousness—the ultimate vantage point, and that which is closest to each one of us—the person discovers his own subjectivity to be his own proper and exclusive possession—for it is inconceivable (in the strongest possible sense) that one’s consciousness be possessed by another.
Let us here quote Stein who states the case most clearly,
That every person can distinguish himself from every other person, whether they live at the self-same time or at another time, whether they are specifically alike or specifically different, this is grounded in the peculiarity of being-self-conscious, which belongs to the personal being-I.
Unique—Unrepeatable & Irreplaceable
Now, while all persons are individual in this way—from the very center of their personal being, as conscious subjects and free agents—we can still ask in what way each person might be different from other persons, and if persons are then in some qualitative sense unique. To be unique means to be one-off and one-of-a-kind. Though one-off uniqueness is found already in the above listed bases of incommunicability—in the materiality, consciousness, and dominion of the person—one-of-a-kind uniqueness is not yet found in any of these bases—for they are all the same in kind (specifically alike) even while they are singularly possessed by each individual (numerically distinct).
Therefore, if persons are to be unique, we must look for another basis of being one-off that is also a basis of being one-of-a-kind. According to Stein there is such a basis, for she reasons that the personal subject possesses a unique qualitative perfection that makes him different from all others, and that this differentiating feature determines the interior depth of the spiritual soul, what Stein calls ‘the soul of the soul.’ She says,
The innermost of the soul, what is most spiritual and most properly its own, is not colorless and shapeless, but rather has a peculiar characteristic: the soul feels this characteristic when it is ‘with itself,’ when it is ‘recollected within itself.’
This quality determining the depth of the soul then radiates outward in every expression and action that comes forth from the free willing center of the person, before eventually coming to impress itself in an enduring way upon the entirety of the soul and living-body, leaving an especially pronounced mark on the face and the look of the eyes—that is, if the individual learns to live life with authenticity, in a genuinely personal way.
Stein uses the metaphor of color to further illustrate the character of this quality. She reasons that when God creates finite persons He refracts His immense goodness into innumerable differentiated ‘hues,’ so that each and every personal individual bears a peculiar hue of the refracted fullness of divine white light. Thus, all finite persons are the same inasmuch as every person bears a personal likeness to God, and all are different inasmuch as every person bears this same likeness in a distinguishable way.
Now, given all this, we immediately see how the human person is not only unique—in being both one-off and one-of-a-kind—but precisely as so unique is also unrepeatable. First, on the basis of their consciousness and agency, the person is actually unrepeatable; then, on the basis of their qualitative individuality, the person is also essentially unrepeatable. This makes the person unrepeatable in the strongest possible sense, for the person is not only actually distinct in being from everything else, but is also essentially distinguishable by virtue of their qualitative differentiation. But if the person is unrepeatable in this way, then the person is also irreplaceable, for you can replace only that which can be repeated without loss. But this is simply not possible with persons, for persons distinguish themselves in manifold interrelated ways, all of which are grounded in their consciousness, agency, and qualitative individuality.
Two further quotations of Stein bring all this home. In the first, Stein summarizes the divine source of personal individuality, saying,
The uniqueness of the singular human person, individuality in the strongest sense of the word, is that which is proper to the singular soul, and which, like the soul itself, originated from nowhere other than immediately from the Creator of all being [. . .] What the human being is, his deepest and most proper, he owes to God alone [. . .] There is in every human being a sphere that is free from earthly binding, which does not originate from other human beings and is not determined by other human beings. Here he stands alone before God. This is the innermost depth of the soul, the absolutely individual and free I, the personal.[2]
And in another work, she continues,
And when the Revelation of John says, ‘To him who conquers I will give […] a white stone, upon which is written a new name which no one knows except him who receives it,’ shouldn’t that name be a proper name in the full sense of the word, a name that speaks forth the innermost essence of the recipient and unlocks for him the mystery of his being hidden in God.[3]
Now, this very incommunicability, uniqueness, and irreplaceability grounds everything truly personal in human life, and all genuinely personal relationships revolve around this hub of the significance of the singular. This becomes most clear when we consider the way love reveals the being and value of the person, for it is precisely the look of love that uncovers the uniqueness and irreplaceability of the beloved, and it is this very feature of personal life that ultimately determines the love of all lovers.
In later essays, when I attend to the relational and communitarian aspects of personalist thought, I will return to this question of love and the person, and there explore how friendship, family, and community are central to what it means to be a person. Indeed, by exploring these further dimensions we will then come to see most clearly how the individual cannot rightly be understood without a consideration of love and the various relationships that develop upon its basis.
[1] If this sounds familiar, it should be, more on this to come in later essays.
[2] Edith Stein, Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person (The Structure of the Human Person) (Freiburg: Herder, 2010), p. 157; translation my own.
[3] Edith Stein, Endliches und ewiges Sein (Finite and Eternal Being) (Freiburg: Herder, 2013), p. 422-3; citing Revelation 2.17.
