The concept of person in history.

The origin of the term persona is commonly traced back to the term prosopon, which indicated the mask worn by the actors of ancient Greece to interpret the different roles in comedies and tragedies, and to which the term persona corresponded, from resound ("personare" ) of this object. In the Greek-Alexandrian and Roman times, the person becomes the subject who speaks, of whom something is preached.

Emmanuel Mounier (1905 - 1950) - in his most mature work, written in 1949 on the eve of his death, Personalism - attempts to trace a brief history of the person, stating that it remains an "embryonic" notion until the Christian era. The first really new moment in Greek culture as regards the concept of person, is with the "γνώθι σαυτον" ("know thyself") of the sanctuary of Delphi, taken up by Socrates. Only with Christianity has this notion taken on clearer connotations, delineating the human being as created by the Supreme Being, the personal God, as endowed with freedom, with the right to sin and as open to relations with the outside world. A risk of the early Christian centuries was that of seeing a dualism between soul and body, inherited from Platonism, up to the vision of Thomist realism which strongly reaffirmed the substantial unity of the two.

In fact, it can be said that the concept of person entered philosophy thanks to the theological and metaphysical debate of the first centuries of Christianity, to explain the meaning of the oneness and trinity of God and to formulate the coexistence of human and divine nature in Jesus Christ. The debate on these two issues led to the affirmation that God has a single nature or essence (divine) in three Persons and that in Christ there is the coexistence of human and divine nature in the same person. The philosophical term of persona is introduced as a translation of the Greek concept of hypostasis, which indicates an individual substance (that is, an essence that exists for itself). Starting from this theological origin, Christian thought then led to the application of the term person to man, to indicate his unique and unrepeatable character and his incomparable dignity. Thomas Aquinas, for example, wrote that "the person indicates what is most perfect in all of nature". Again according to the great medieval theologian, the human being is not being but has being, because he receives it by participation from the One who is ipsum esse subsistens (subsists by himself) and has it as actus essendi (act of being) of a form, the rational one, which is concretized in 'flesh' and 'bones' (Summa theologica). Singularity and individuality take on a specific meaning in the human being as a person, who, precisely for this reason, has a predominant position with respect to the Universe, because it is the seat of freedom of self-awareness and is realized in the relationship with others.

Christian thought, therefore, has "created" from the point of view of theology the concepts of the human person and the divine person, using the biblical lesson for its theoretical elaboration, according to which the human being was created in the image and likeness of divine person, and of the Greek philosophical categories.

Although the notion of person is an acquisition that philosophy owes to Christianity, in itself it is purely philosophical, as it is the result of the exercise of natural reason and uses notions elaborated, as we have said, from classical Greek thought.

According to the definition of Severino Boethius (475/477 - 524/526) - the great Roman philosopher and senator, whose works had a great influence on the thought of the Scholastica) what characterizes the personal substance is that it is individual and of a rational nature; therefore individuality implies both the internal unity of something and the diversity from others, therefore uniqueness. Experience shows us that the person is an individual being - in the sense both of his internal unity and of his uniqueness and unrepeatability -, in an incomparably higher sense than anything that is not personal. And the foundation of this particular individuality lies in its specific difference, which Boethius indicates with a rational nature. Boethius uses the term nature to indicate the essential element, which remains and touches the heart of the thing, in this case of the person.

As regards the rational dimension, St. Thomas Aquinas modifies the Boezian definition by also adding the term intellectual, so as to include all the capacities of human and divine reason, and affirms: "Omne subsistens in natura rationali vel intellectuali est persona", that is "Every subsisting being of a rational or intellectual nature is a person" (Summa contra Gentiles). With modernity, the person has also been described as a subject, an "I", someone and not just something.

All these expressions indicate that characterizing element that makes the person the most perfect form of substance and individual. Rationality specifically expresses the person's ability to be aware of himself and the outside world, but we can understand it in a broad sense as an expression of all the typical faculties of the person, because all the typically personal faculties presuppose awareness: not only those times to know (intellect and reason in the strict sense), but also the will (which for the ancients is rational appetite, therefore the ability to move based on what is grasped by the rational faculties) and, adds contemporary philosophy, those dimensions of affectivity that are not purely instinctive, but represent a response to something we are aware of, as in the case of love, esteem, joy for the arrival of a friend. All this allows us to affirm that the person is a substance of a spiritual and not a material type. Already the consciousness that man has of himself testifies to us that the ego is a reality that permeates the parts of our body, for example by controlling movements and actions, but transcends these parts. He is the simple and conscious subject of all personal acts.

In the course of the modern age the concept of person as conceived by medieval thought loses its connotations, not always due to a radical denial of them, but due to the emphasis on individual aspects already contained in the concept itself and yet absolutized. On the one hand, Descartes insists on the theme of conscience, of the cogito as the realization of oneself. Thus, those aspects indicated above emerge, consciousness and self-awareness, which however are still linked in Descartes with a substantial vision of the human being formed by two res, cogitans et extensa. All this is strongly questioned by J. Locke, for whom the theme of personal identity and conscience is fundamental: a theme that characterizes the positions of G.W. Leibniz (who also insists on physical and real identity as a component of the person).

On the other hand, even if rationalism still tends to give a 'strong' and substantial connotation to the person, it still favors the aspect of awareness and rationality, thus posing a fundamental question from a theoretical point of view: person is only who is aware, or who has the potential capacity to be? The first position seems to prevail in the modern age; the theme of self-awareness of the human being as rational is present in Kant, who brings to completion the perspectives of the modern age by starting a reflection that identifies all the positive attributes of the person: first of all, self-determination from the ethical point of view, placing in the foreground the question of freedom, which will be a constant in Western philosophical and political thought. The metaphysical substantiality of the person is denied or overshadowed and, rather, his ethical consistency emerges through which one also arrives at postulating the immortality of the soul (as happens in Kant).

Idealism returns to insert the personal singularity in a metaphysical background which is, however, the absolutization of subjectivity itself, with the risk of absorbing the person in totality (think of JG Fichte's Ego and GWF's Spirit-Reason Hegel). The reaction to this position takes place through two strands: that which denies, at least in theory, the spiritual vision of the human being and reduces it to the social structure (K. Marx) or to the biological-psychological one (L.A. Feuerbach) and from the Nineteenth century extends into the twentieth century

Some philosophers (Mounier, Hildebrand) have distinguished between person and personality: every human being has a personal nature, is a unique and unrepeatable individual, and also has properties which, although depending on his personal nature, develop according to his own individual characteristics, whether they are given with birth or acquired over time. But each individual manifests himself as such, therefore he has a personality, because he is a person, he is not a person because of external manifestations. Furthermore, relationality must be considered an essential characteristic of the person, even if the person is not exhausted in any of his relationships.