Human Persons – A Process View

Anne Sophie Meincke

Forthcoming in: Was sind und wie existieren Personen?

(What are Persons and how Do They Exist?), ed. by J. Noller, Münster: Mentis.

Abstract

What are persons and how do they exist? The predominant answer to this question in
Western metaphysics is that persons, human and others, are, and exist as, substances, i.e.,
ontologically independent, well-demarcated things defined by an immutable (usually mental)
essence. Change, on this view, is not essential for a person’s identity; it is in fact more likely
to be detrimental to it.
In this chapter I want to suggest an alternative view of human persons which is motivated by
an appreciation of their biological nature. Organisms, human and non-human, are dynamical
systems that for their existence and persistence depend on an on-going interaction with the
environment in which they are embedded. Taking seriously this most fundamental human
condition leads to recognising human persons as processes, i.e., as entities for the identity of
which change is essential. It also implies a holistic view of the human mind.

1. Introduction

What are persons and how do they exist? In this chapter I want to propose a novel answer to
this question posed by the editor of this volume.1 The answer is novel in that calls for a
revolution of our most fundamental assumptions about the nature of human persons and
about reality in general. Human persons, I shall argue, are processes rather than substances
or things. They are a specific kind of process in a world full of processes of various kinds.

The process view of human persons is a corollary of the appreciation of the biological nature
of human persons. Animalist theories of personal identity, which are currently on the rise,

1
The way the question is formulated leaves open the kind of person it refers to. I shall confine myself here to
considerations regarding human persons. Historically, as far as Western philosophy is concerned, the ontological
concept of human personhood has developed in the context of discussions about the personhood of God,
especially with respect to the concept of trinity, see, e.g., Augustine’s De trinitate and the discussion in Spann
(2012).
have emphasised the latter, opposing the hitherto predominant psychological accounts of
personal identity. However, animalism has mostly failed to reflect on the ontology of
organisms if not actually (tacitly or explicitly) presupposing that organisms are substances,
this in line with its broadly Aristotelian heritage.2 In contrast, the ‘processual animalism’ that
I advocate is motivated by insights from today’s biological sciences. It takes seriously the fact
stressed in particular by systems biology that organisms are self-organising dynamical
systems.

The twofold structure of the guiding question of this volume insinuates that ‘to be a person’
and ‘to exist as a person’ are not necessarily the same. Looking at the history of philosophy,
we may associate this with the distinction between essence and existence common in
scholasticism. Thus St. Thomas Aquinas held that essence and existence coincide in God but
are distinct principles in all contingently existing beings.3 The underlying assumption here is
that the essence of a thing can in principle be grasped independently of the existence of that
thing. This explains how we can have concepts of non-existing things, say, the concept of a
unicorn. It follows that in the case of finite beings that do exist there must be a further
principle that explains their existence. According to the scholastic philosophers this is to be
found in the fact that God created those beings.

As it is well-known, this view has been contested, most notably by Kant, Frege and Russell. As
Kant puts it, existence (being) is not a ‘real predicate’; it doesn’t add anything to the concept
of the thing in question.4 The dismissal of the concept of existence has, however, not resulted
in abolishing the distinction altogether. Instead, it has underlined, or even amplified, the
traditional priority of the concept of essence.

The priority of essence over existence is a hallmark of substance ontology, i.e., of the view
that reality most fundamentally consists of entities – called ‘substances’ – which are defined
by an immutable set of intrinsic (‘essential’) properties. As I shall show in what follows,
Western metaphysics of the person has been dominated by a view that is committed to this

2
See, e.g., Olson (2007), ch. 2.2.
3
See, e.g., Aquinas’ On Being and Essence IV, § 6.
4
See Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason A598/B626. Kant’s argument is part of his criticism of the so-called
ontological argument as put forward by St. Anselm of Canterbury, according to which the concept of God
necessarily entails His existence because otherwise God would lack perfection and we would not actually have
a concept of God.
very idea of substance. This is true up until today, despite 20th century’s existentialism’s
rediscovery and reappraisal of the concept of existence. Heidegger famously claimed that
‘Dasein’s essence lies in its existence’,5 followed by Sartre’s thesis that ‘existence precedes
essence’.6 According to Heidegger and Sartre, the idea that we could say what a person is
independently of how a person exists is illusory because most fundamentally a person creates
herself. Heidegger combines this claim with the diagnosis that philosophers, by not paying
attention to the aspect of existence, have failed to appreciate the specific mode of the
existence of persons. As a result, they have generally failed to distinguish between different
modes of being, this being a symptom of a fundamental ‘oblivion of being’ in Western
metaphysics.7

The process view of human persons that I am going to propose in this chapter is congenial to
those existentialist approaches (which can be interpreted as specific versions of such a view).8
However, I will put the claim about the processual nature of human persons on a more robust
footing by grounding it in the biological conditions of human life. I shall proceed as follows. I
shall first trace the various metamorphoses of the substance view of the person in the history
of philosophy which span both mentalistic and biologistic paradigms concerning the essence
of human persons as well as both traditional and modern interpretations of what I will call
the ‘thing aspect’ of the substancehood of human persons. I will then introduce the
alternative process view of human persons, explaining its biological foundations and
adumbrating its most important implications for the understanding of the specifically
personal dimensions of the existence of human persons. I shall conclude with some brief
considerations concerning the relation between (neo-) Aristotelian versions of the substance
view of the human person and the process view of the human person.

5
See Heidegger’s Being and Time § 9.
6
See Sarte’s Existentialism is a Humanism.
7
See Being and Time, esp. Introduction, ch. 2, and The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, esp. Part One, ch. 3.
For more detailed discussions of Heidegger’s approach to the metaphysics of the person see Meincke
(forthcoming), Meincke (2017), Meincke (2015), ch. 3.3.2 and 3.3.3., and Spann (2012).
8
See Meincke (forthcoming) for a portrait and discussion of Heidegger’s process account of personal identity.