Boethian persons

“Persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia,” said Boethius in his treatise on the two natures. This has been viewed as a radically deficient definition of personhood, but Peter Simpson argues that it’s got more going for it than many imagine.

In response to the charge that it relegates what really matters to us – our actual living and existence – to the secondary realm of accident, Simpson argues:

“This criticism is based on a rather mechanical interpretation of the substance/accident distinction, an interpretation that treats accidents as if they were some sort of separate entity stuck onto substance like external bits. But this is quite erroneous. Substances do not have accidents in some external fashion, they are through their accidents (one should not forget that, even in the classical and medieval tradition, the substance/accident distinction, though regarded as necessary and real, is nevertheless an abstraction made by the mind from within what in reality is a single whole). Accidents are the ways of substance, how substance expresses itself; they are not things in themselves; they are of substance and substance is in accidents. In that case substance without its accidents, its expressings, is incomplete and imperfect; for it is through them that it is articulated in the ways of its being. This is especially so in the case of activity and operation. A thing’s acting is not its substance in the sense that it would cease to be if it ceased to act (persons do not cease to be persons when asleep or resting), but it is the exercising of its substance, the actual bringing into the open the latent capacities inherent in it. And without this bringing into the open, substance would remain barren and fallow like an unsown field.”

If this is so, then why isn’t this worked into the definition? Simpson thinks this would be disastrous, since it would involve defining only those beings as persons who actually do fulfill their capacities for lived experience: “To do this would imply that only perfect and actually energized persons are persons, and that would be absurd, for it would mean that young humans or humans asleep were not persons. In fact even those who advert to such features as capacity to value life or enter into meaningful relationships with others talk of the capacity to do this, not the actual doing of it. And the same will apply to all the features of lived experience, for those who talk about lived experience as central to the idea of person are not claiming that one is always enjoying this lived experience, or that the experience is present all at once and not given successively over time. What they are claiming is that a person is through these experiences, or that it is by these experiences that one is able to identify those capacities (i.e. the capacity for this sort of experience) that distinguish persons from non-persons.”