Ontology, or the Theory of Being

by P. Coffey

The most common explanation seems to be that subsistence is a unifying principle of the concrete individual nature, as stated above. Thus conceived, it is not an absolute reality; nor is the distinction between it and the nature a major real distinction. It is a substantial mode ([68]), naturally superadded to the substance and modally distinct from the latter. It so completes and determines the substance or nature that the latter not only exists in itself but is also, by virtue of this mode, incommunicable in every way and sui juris.[302] It gives to the substance that ultimate determinateness which an accidental mode such as a definite shape or location gives to the accident of quantity.[303]

This mode is absent (supernaturally) from the human nature of our Divine Lord; this nature is therefore communicable; and the Personality of the Divine Word supernaturally supplies the function of this absent natural mode.

It must be confessed that it is not easy to understand how this or any other substantial mode can be really distinct from the substance it modifies. And in truth the distinction is not real in the full sense: it is not between thing and thing, inter rem et rem. All that is claimed for it is that it is not merely mental; that it is not merely an ens rationis which the mind projects into the reality; [pg 271] that it is a positive perfection of the nature or substance, a perfection which, though naturally inseparable from the latter, is not absolutely inseparable, and which, therefore, is de facto supernaturally absent from the human nature and replaced by the Divine Personality in the case of the hypostatic union.

It belongs, moreover, to the order of substance, not to that of accidents: the substantial mode differs from the accidental mode, or modal accident, in this, that it gives to the substance some ultimate determining perfection which appertains to the substance as such, and whereby the substance is completed in the order of “existing in itself”. Subsistence is not an accident, even though it supervenes on the complete nature, for it determines the substance of the latter, not in relation to any line of accidental activity, as a power or faculty, nor as something modifying it accidentally, but as a mode which ultimately determines and perfects it in the order of substantial reality itself, in the order of “existing in itself” in such a full and perfect manner as to be sui juris and incommunicable.

The main difficulty against this view is also theological: If subsistence is a positive perfection it either belongs to the complete individual nature or it does not; in the former case the humanity of Christ, assumed by the Divine Word, was not a complete human nature; in the latter case the individual human nature can exist without it: and both consequences are equally inadmissable. But it may be replied that, granting the first member of the disjunctive, the consequence inferred from it does not really follow: subsistence belongs to the complete individual nature as an ultimate natural complement; but when it is absent and supplied supernaturally by the Divine Personality the nature is still complete as a nature: it is wanting in no absolute or entitative perfection, but only in a modality which is supereminently supplied by the Divine Personality. Neither is the consequence from the second member of the disjunctive a valid inference. For though personality as a mode does not belong to the essence of an individual human nature, no such individual nature can exist without some personality, either its own or another: just as extension cannot exist without some shape, though any particular shape is not essential to it.

To sum up, then, the doctrine of the two preceding sections: What are we to understand by a person, and by personality? Unquestionably our conception of person and personality (concrete and abstract) is mainly determined, and very rightly so, by an analysis of what constitutes the actually existing individual of the human species. Whatever our concept be, it must certainly be realized and verified in all human individuals: these, before all other beings, must be included in the denotation of our concept [pg 272] of person. In fact, for the philosopher, guided by the natural light of reason alone, the term can have hardly any other connotation. He will, no doubt, ascribe personality, as the highest mode of being he knows of, to the Supreme Being; but he will here ascribe it only in an analogical and supereminent way; and only from Divine Revelation can he know that this Supreme Being has not a single but a threefold Personality. Again, his consideration of the nature of the human soul as an embodied substance which is nevertheless spiritual and immortal will enable him to affirm the possibility of purely spiritual created beings; and these he will of course conceive as persons. But, conceiving the human soul itself as a constituent principle of the human individual, he will not conceive the soul itself as a person.

The philosopher who understands the traditional Aristotelian conceptions of substance, of individual substance (substantia prima), of incomplete, complete, and composite substances, of substance considered as nature or principle of action, of substance considered as hypostasis, as the actually existing individual being which is the ultimate logical subject of all predications and the ultimate ontological subject of all real determinations: the philosopher who understands these concepts, and who admits them to be validly grounded in experience, and to offer as far as they go a correct interpretation of reality, will have no difficulty in making up his mind about what is requisite to constitute a person.

Wherever he finds an existing individual being of any species, a being which, even if it is really composite, is nevertheless really one, such a being he will pronounce to be a “subsisting individual being”. He may not be able, in the inorganic world or among the lower forms of life, to distinguish for certain what is the real individual from what may be perhaps only an accidental, if natural, colony or group of real individuals. As a test he will always seek for the manifestation of an internal directive principle whereby all the vital functions of the organized mass of matter in question are co-ordinated in such a manner as to make for the preservation, growth and development of the whole throughout a definite life cycle from birth to death. This formative and directive principle is evidence of an individual unity of nature and subsistence; and such evidence is abundantly present in “individuals” of all the higher species in botany and zoology. The “individual subsisting being” will therefore be a “complete [pg 273] individual substance or nature, existing and acting in every way distinct from and incommunicable to any other being, so that it exists and acts sui juris, autonomously”.

If such an individual nature is not merely corporeal but organic or animate, not merely animate but sentient, and not merely sentient but rational or intelligent, i.e. constituted at least in part by a spiritual substantial principle whereby the individual is intelligent and free, then that individual is a person. Every individual of the human species is such. And all that is essential to his complete individual human nature enters into and constitutes his person in the concrete. Not merely, therefore, his intellect and will; not merely his soul considered as “mind,” i.e. as the basis and principle of his whole conscious and subconscious psychic life; or also as the principle of his merely organic life; or also as the actualizing principle of his corporeal nature; but no less also the corporeal principle itself of his composite being, the body itself with all its parts and members and organs: all these without exception belong equally to the human person; all of them without exception go to constitute the Ego.[304] This, which is the Aristotelian and scholastic view of the human person, is in perfect accord with the common-sense view of the matter as evidenced by the ordinary usages of language. We speak intelligibly no less than correctly when we say that a man's body is part of his person as well as his soul or mind. And we make a no less accurate, intelligible, and necessary distinction, when we distinguish between all that which constitutes the human person and that whereby we know ourselves and other human individuals to be persons. Yet this distinction is not kept clearly in mind by many modern philosophers, who, approaching the study of personality exclusively from the side of what the individual consciousness testifies as to the unity and continuity (or otherwise) of mental life in the individual, are scandalized at the assertion that the human body can have anything to do with human personality.

74. Consciousness of the Personal Self.—In order to form the concept of person, and to find that concept verified in the data of our experience, it is absolutely essential that we be endowed with the faculty of intelligence, the spiritual power of forming abstract concepts; and secondly, that having formed [pg 274] the concept of person as a “rational or intelligent subsisting being,” we be capable, by the exercise of reflex consciousness, to find in our own mental life the data from which we can conclude that this concept of person is verified in each and every one of ourselves. It is because we are endowed with intelligence that we can form all the abstract notions—of substance, individual, subsistence, existence, etc.,—which enter into and constitute our concept of person. And it is because we can, by means of this faculty, reflect on our own mental operations, and infer from them that each of us is a complete individual rational nature subsisting independently and incommunicably, that we can know ourselves to be persons.