Aristotelian Substance and Personalistic Subjectivity Mark K. Spencer ABSTRACT: Many personalists have argued that an adequate account of the human person must include an account of subjectivity as irreducible to anything objectively definable. The personalists contend that Aristotle lacks such an account and claim that he fails to meet three criteria that a theory of the human person must fulfill in order to have an account of subjectiv- ity as irreducible. I show first that some later Aristotelians fulfill these criteria, and then that Aristotle himself also does so. He describes four characteristics of human subjectivity that are considered crucial by many personalists. I do this through an interpretation of Aristotle’s accounts of substantial actualities, nous, friendship, and beauty. N A SEMINAL ESSAY, Karol Wojtyła distinguishes two approaches to philo- Isophical anthropology. He calls one approach “objectivistic” and “cosmological.” When using this approach, one explains human beings and our actions using third- person terms, thereby treating us as objects of intentional cognitive acts. He calls the other approach “subjective” and “personalistic.” When using this approach, one explains human beings and our actions in first-person terms, that is, in terms of lived experience or “subjectivity,” thereby treating us as unique conscious subjects, “irreducible” to anything objectively observable or definable.1 In this paper I draw on both Wojtyła and other personalists as well as on some non-personalistic phenomenologists who have dealt with subjectivity in ways similar to the approach favored by the personalists. These thinkers hold that there are four characteristics of the human person that one must meet in order to satisfy the necessary conditions for having human subjectivity. First, one has subjectivity only if one knows oneself or is consciously self-present in a reflexive, non-objective, non-intentional way.2 Subjectivity differs from intentionality in that the latter is 1Karol Wojtyła, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” translated by Theresa Sandock in Person and Community: Selected Essays (New York NY: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 210–11. See Wojtyła, “Thomistic Personalism,” in ibid., p. 166; John Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington DC: The Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1996), pp. 4, 82–83; Linda Zagzebski, “The Uniqueness of Persons,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 29 (2001): 416. 2Crosby, Selfhood, pp. 84–86; Wojtyła, The Acting Person, translated by Andrzej Potocki, edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), pp. 43–46, 61–62. See Jameson Taylor, “Beyond Nature: Karol Wojtyła’s Development of the Traditional Definition of Personhood,”Review of Metaphysics 250 (2009): 429–31. Victor Caston, “Aristotle on Consciousness,” Mind 111 (2002): 789–91, finds, rightly in my view, a view of qualia at De sensu et sensato 425b22–23. In considering Aristotle, I consulted The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York NY: The Modern Library, 2001) and The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols., edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), and the Greek text at www.kennydominican.joyeurs.com/GreekClassics/GreekLit.htm. International Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 55, No. 2, Issue 218 (June 2015) pp. 145–164 doi: 10.5840/ipq201542032 146 MARK K. SPENCER directed towards objects while the former is an immediate, reflexive experience of oneself, not as an object. Second, one has subjectivity only if one experiences oneself as capable of cognizing anything. Third, one has subjectivity only if one has an experience of personal “efficacy” or of being able to determine oneself to act.3 Fourth, one has subjectivity only if one has an experience of self-sensing, that is, an experience of one’s body from a first-person point of view.4 I shall refer to these four necessary conditions for subjectivity as the “characteristics of subjectivity.” On Wojtyła’s view, an account of the human person is adequate only if it explic- itly takes into account subjectivity as an irreducible feature of human persons.5 I shall call this necessary condition for an adequate account of the human person the personalistic condition. A theory fulfills this condition if and only if it takes into account the characteristics of subjectivity and fulfills the three criteria for an ac- count of irreducible subjectivity given below. These characteristics and criteria are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for fulfilling the personalistic condition. In this paper, I consider only the fulfillment of this condition, not other conditions that might be needed for an adequate account of the human person. The personalistic condition should nevertheless be a guiding rule for any philosophical anthropolo- gist, because (as experience shows) the rich interior depth of human subjectivity is a distinctive and central feature of human persons.6 Meeting the personalistic condition should especially be a concern of those who are non-reductionists about the human person, among whom are Aristotelians. 3Crosby, Selfhood, pp. 25–26, 88–89, 186–87; Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, translated by Philip Mairet (London UK: Routledge, 1952), pp. 76–77; Wojtyła, The Acting Person, pp. 67–68, 72–73; Wojtyła, “The Personal Structure of Self-Determination,” in Person and Community, pp. 188–90. See Taylor, “Beyond Nature,” p. 421. 4Crosby, Selfhood, pp. 87, 144; Mounier, Personalism, p. 11; Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, translated by Manfred Frings and Roger Funk (Evanston IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 63–68, 130–32, 398–99; Wojtyła, The Acting Person, pp. 204–06. See also the phe- nomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, translated by Aiden Fischer (Pittsburgh PA: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 47–49, 136–37; Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith (London UK: Routledge, 2002), pp. 70–73, 113, 319, 352–53, 382, 454, 511; Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 9, 133–34, 147–48; Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh PA: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 258, 265, 270; Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, translated by Stephen Lewis (Chicago IL: Chicago Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 114–15; and the entirety of Michel Henry, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, translated by Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975). On these texts, see my Thomistic Hylomorphism and the Phenomenology of Self-Sensing, dissertation (Univ. of Buffalo, 2012). 5Wojtyła, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible,” pp. 210–11, 214–15. See Mounier, Personalism, pp. vii–xi, 4–5; Scheler, The Constitution of the Human Being, translated by John Cutting (Milwaukee WI: Marquette Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 328–31, 401–06; Scheler, Formalism, pp. 386–393; Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, translated by Hans Meyerhoff (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Cudahy, 1961), pp. 40, 65–68, 92–93; Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, translated by Bernard Noble (New York NY: Harper, 1960), pp. 183–84, 193–94; Dietrich von Hildebrand, What is Philosophy? (Chicago IL: Franciscan Herald Press, 1973), pp. 177–80. 6This is not to say that every human person actually has subjectivity since some (such as those at early stages of development and those with certain neurological disorders) are incapable of realizing their sub- jectivity. Rather, it is to say that subjectivity is a central feature of the human person in his or her normal, mature condition. ARISTOTELIAN SUBSTANCE AND PERSONALISTIC SUBJECTIVITY 147 But Wojtyła and other personalists argue that Aristotle’s view is cosmological, for it either ignores or excludes an account of irreducible subjectivity. The personalists acknowledge that Aristotle presents three aspects of an account of subjectivity, but they hold that the way in which he considers these renders his account inadequate because it does not meet the personalistic condition.7 Aristotle begins his account of human nature with experience, but the personalists say that the experience that he considers is intentional, not subjective.8 While Aristotle does take into account the soul’s openness to knowing all things9 and its self-determination,10 his personalist critics allege that these points are made in the context of an objectivistic account of human nature, not in an account of lived experience.11 If this interpretation is correct, Aristotelianism does not fulfill the personalistic condition, and so it is an inadequate theory of the human person. But in my judgment this interpretation is wrong. Aristotle does provide an account of subjectivity and fulfills the personalistic condition. He does so by unifying the cosmological and personalistic approaches, and thereby he achieves a “convergence” of metaphysics and phenomenology. Interestingly, this was also one of Wojtyła’s aims.12 Even though Aristotle and later Aristotelians do not use the personalist language of “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” they nonetheless present the realities denoted by these terms. In order to discuss this claim about a continuity between Aristotelianism and personalism, I shall refer to Aristotelian accounts of objectiv- ity and subjectivity throughout this paper, despite the fact that Aristotelians do not use these terms.13 None of this is to say that Aristotle fulfills every demand of the contemporary personalists for an account of the human person, or that the person- alists have not added to knowledge of subjectivity. Nor is my claim that Aristotle has a concept of “person” in the modern sense. Rather, I claim that Aristotle gives an account of the realities picked out by these concepts, and that his account meets the personalistic condition. In this way his account overcomes an obstacle to having an adequate account of the human person that he is often thought not to have met. 7Wojtyła, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible,” p. 210; Crosby, Selfhood, p. 125. See Mounier, Personalism, p. xii; Seifert, “Personalism and Personalisms” in Ethical Personalism, ed.