The Paradoxes of Person – Some Remarks
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15633/lie.3943Abstract
The goal of the article is to present and analyze the paradoxes of person in the historical, logical-epistemological, and systematic aspect. Their historical source should be sought already in the beginnings of philosophical reflection on the issue of personhood. The interpretation of this concept has been influenced by the Christian religion which contributed to highlighting the opposition between properties common to man and other beings, and those which distinguish him from those beings. It was finally reflected in the paradoxes of person which are construed today as the opposition between existence (being a person) and becoming; (ontic) non-communicability and (intentional) communicability; overtness (knowability) and covertness (essential unknowability); being a whole and being a part. These paradoxes, however, are not antinomies or paralogisms in the logical sense. They cannot be explained away by flaws in human thinking or cognition. They are an expression of the opposite properties of personhood which represent aporias – objective difficulties. As such, they arise from the way a person exists. The paradoxes of person are superimposed, so to say, onto the paradoxes of being, e.g. that of identity and change. They cannot be interpreted as compounds of being. Therefore, they are most often treated as a result of the complex, spiritual-corporeal structure of man. Another problem, just as important as the cause of paradoxes, is the question of their significance. For they may be interpreted as a manifestation of a way of personal being that extends between extreme (almost contradictory) poles; multifaceted, diverse, never limited only to the arrangement of particular properties which form the paradoxes, or to that which can be known through them.
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