The Relationship Between the Terms "Human Being" and "Human Person
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The Relationship Between the Terms "Human Being" and "Human Person."
Philosophy is a privileged place for clarifying and objectifying this problem. The antinomies of subjectivism vs. objectivism and the underlying antinomy of idealism vs. realism created conditions that discouraged dealing with human subjectivity. In the past, Husserl's phenomenological analyses conducted in the realm of "pure consciousness" have bracketed the existence, or reality, of the conscious subject. Today we can no longer treat humans exclusively as objective beings. Still, we must also somehow treat it as a subject - and that dimension would seem to be personal subjectivity.
Aristotle's Aristotelian definition of the human being implies a belief in its irreducibility to the natural world. Tymieniecka, A. T. (Ed.). (2013). Maintaining such reducibility has always been the need to understand the person as a subject. This type of understanding could be defined as cosmological. In the Aristotelian tradition, the human being was mainly an object. On the other hand, subjectivity is a term proclaiming that the human person's true essence cannot be reduced to and explained by the proximate genus and specific difference. The Boethian definition marked out the "metaphysical terrain" —the dimension of being.
The need to understand the human being as a subject experiencing its acts and inner happenings takes on greater significance. From the moment the need to interpret the acting human being (home agissant) is expressed, the category of lived experience must have a place in anthropology and ethics. In Ayn Rand's The Interpretation of Human Experience, he argues that by giving lived experience such an essential function in interpreting the human being as a personal subject, we are not inevitably condemned to subjectivism. Without going into a detailed response, I would say that so long as we maintain a firm enough connection with the necessary experience of the human being, we will safeguard the authentic personal subjectivity.
The experience of the human being cannot be derived by way of cosmological reduction. We must pause at the fundamental, unique, and unrepeatable in each human being. Only then do we get an accurate and complete picture of the human being. The irreducible refers to everything in the human being that is invisible and wholly internal. In my lived experience of self-possession and self-governance, I experience that I am a person and a subject. Morality is subject in this dimension and can also be adequately understood.
The irreducible signifies that which is essentially incapable of reduction, which cannot be reduced but can only be disclosed or revealed. Lived experience essentially defies reduction. This does not mean that it eludes our knowledge; it only means we arrive at its expertise differently. The phenomenological analysis is an indispensable means for knowing the human being as a personal subject. At the same time, this individual human subjectivity is a determinate reality: it is a reality when we strive to understand it within the objective totality that goes by the human name being.
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Reference
Tymieniecka, A. T. (Ed.). (2013). The Human Being in Action: The Irreducible Element in Man Part II Investigations at the Intersection of Philosophy and Psychiatry (Vol. 7). Springer Science & Business Media.
