Corporeity and Person

But Agazzi’s reflection goes further and delves right into the heart of a matter of great importance and delicacy: the identity and status of the human person. In this regard, he proposes the mental experiment of assuming a conceptual gap between being-human and being-person, and evaluating the theoretical and practical sus­tainability of such a formal separation.

[O]ne has the right to ask why a human individual can, not yet or no longer, be a person, and the answer consists in a nominal definition of the person which no longer has a sub­stantialist character, but reduces the concept of a person to a predicate which summarizes a number of empirically ascertainable functional capabilities, but without reference to any ontological substrate that implies them. Then we will call functionalist such a concep­tion of a person (Agazzi 2001b: 21-44).

The main limitation of this approach is that although it does not give up the pur­pose of defining a set of formal or sortal properties, it is unable to arrive at a con­vincing answer about the referential nexus between these properties and the actual individuals which bear them in a unmistakably unique way. This is because we continue to look at the particular, the real concrete person, without the systemic perspective of totality, that is, with no care about grasping its intrinsic typicality. Agazzi remarks again:

when the subject matter of a metaphysical consideration is a particular entity, we intend to consider it as a whole, that is to give a characterization of it that is compatible with its multiple properties, although not exhausted by any of them.

Despite the loss of the idea of substance, for a variety of reasons, some of which may be well grounded, the idea of the totality of the particular as unavoidable metaphysical horizon cannot be given up; its loss would bring about the reduc­tion or fragmentation of being, through the seclusion of properties and proposi­tions including such properties, which can also be true but will not exhaust once and for all the complexity of their reference. For this fundamental reason, never sufficiently understood by today’s philosophical anthropology, it is not permissible to assert that the absence of certain properties (such as consciousness) is a suf­ficient reason to consider them accidental or non-typical. For Agazzi, instead, their absence, understood as contingent deprivation or potential presence, is a full index of personal typicality. Deprivation, in fact, “necessarily entails an ontological reference to the intrinsic essential properties of the carrier of the particular priva­tion involved” (Agazzi 1994: 225). Hence, the person exists even if contingently lacking such intrinsic essential properties. The same principle applies to potential­ity; it does not affect the possession but only the exercise of certain capabilities or properties, as Agazzi explains: “the exercise simply is a kind of external confirma­tion of this possession, and by no means a transition from potency to act” (Agazzi 1994: 229). But all this brings us back to the enormous problem of how to define the real potentialities of the human person. It is a request for meaning, to which once again one can respond only by a realistic look at the whole of any particular human experience.

Earlier we mentioned the idea of separating, artificially and “contrary to the most immediate content of our existential experience... the unity of this experi­ence, in which we do not distinguish soul and body, and in which, in any case, any human being apprehends himself as one and not as two” (Agazzi 2011: 73); but we saw that this idea has led to an impoverishment of the notion of corpore­ity. Agazzi has devoted important studies to the so-called ‘mind-body’ problem, in which he thoroughly examines the contemporary positions and their classical roots, Aristotelian, Cartesian and empiricist. On this occasion we will not dwell, for reasons of space, on the individual clarifications, but we must recognize imme­diately his merit of having considered Cartesian dualism as the philosophical and cultural antecedent of materialism and spiritualism: these trends of thought are well grounded in that doctrine, but have moved independently towards marking the most substantial distance between our spiritual and material dimensions, and ultimately dealing the coup de grace to the unitary image of the human person. Agazzi correctly guesses that

the human body itself is a peculiar body indeed, which is so to speak ‘oriented’ toward the realization of performances which we can still call ‘spiritual’. On the other hand, man as a pure spirit does not exist either, as spirit is ‘incarnate’ in man, and is affected by all the influences of his corporeity. This makes it impossible to say where the body ‘ends’ and the soul ‘begins’; but this happens because man is not two things. As we said, man is certainly a complex reality which presents several aspects, but it would be a mistake to understand these aspects as if they were different ‘parts’ of him (Agazzi 1981: 19-20).

Here emerges Agazzi’s view, which inherits significant parts of the Aristotelian philosophy and of Plato’s anthropology, reading them in an original way though the systems theory. According to this conception, “the relationship between the body and the person is considered as a relationship between a part and the whole” (Agazzi 2013b: 121).

For the same reasons, if we do not consider corporeity as a dimension alien to the whole, and the various kinds of bodily affections (disease, aging, and conse­quently the experience of suffering or fatigue) play a role that goes well beyond the boundaries of the material or biological. Also in this case failure to take into the right consideration the unity of the system leads paradoxically to a fragmented vision of the body, of its affections and of the treatments that can be offered. As Agazzi realistically complains, today “medicine only recognizes influences entirely interpretable within the framework of causal actions of a physical kind, duly under­standable on the ground of physical theories” (Agazzi 2001a: 13), but it loses sight of the whole of an ill and suffering person, and even of the very experience that suffering can represent for people (see Agazzi 2013a). Human finitude, in its various manifestations, is therefore not an absolute limit, but an almost necessary condition for the rediscovery of the inner richness, and of what we recognize as supremely good and valid in itself; this condition of finitude is therefore compatible with the sense of perfection and the pursuit of values and existential purposes.

This analysis of the ought, of freedom, of human and personal identity, and of agency and corporeity, has revealed the traits of a lively and fruitful thought, able to communicate with the contemporary world and with scientific knowledge, and at the same time with the great masters of classical philosophy (from Aristotle and Aquinas to Kant), but mainly committed to the rational defence of the originality and irreducibility of human experience.