Abstract
Promising is not just one of many genuinely personal actions. According to Robert Spaemann’s philosophy of the person, promising is the paradigmatic act in which one recognizes that one knows what it means to be a person. The ontological reason for this fundamental aspect of promise is that the being of the person is itself essentially constituted by recognition. Without recognition we would not be persons; but, at the same time, what we recognize when we act as persons is certainly a status which precedes any act of its recognition. This paradoxical constellation makes the promise a paradigmatic example for the phenomenon of fulfilled presence.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Walter Schweidler, “Vollendete Präsenz”, in La presenza, Archivio di filosofia, ed. by Stefano Bancalari (Pisa and Rome: Fabrizio Serra editore, 2019), pp. 61–70.
- 2.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), ii, bk 10, Chap. 3, 1047 ff.
- 3.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668, ed. by Edwin Curley (Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge: Hackett, 1994), Part 1, Chap. 6, § 39.
- 4.
Cf. Tanja Gloyna, “Vertrauen”, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. by J. Ritter, K. Gründer and G. Gabriel, 13 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001), xi, pp. 986–990.
- 5.
G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), § 549.
- 6.
G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. by Allen W. Wood, trans. by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), § 268.
- 7.
See Robert Spaemann, Persons: The Difference Between “Someone” and “Something”, trans. by Oliver O’Donovan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
- 8.
Ibid., p. 182.
- 9.
Cf. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 164 ff.
- 10.
Spaemann, Persons, p. 221.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 222.
- 12.
Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, rev. 4th ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), § 654. One can also think of Jean-Luc Marion’s term phénomène saturé.
- 13.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), Rzn. 36.
- 14.
Spaemann, Persons, pp. 222 f.
- 15.
Cf. Walter Schweidler, “The Self-Repeating Origin: Ontological Aspects of Ricœur’s Concept of Hermeneutics”, in Hermeneutics and the Philosophy of Religion: The Legacy of Paul Ricœur, Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Conference 2013, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth and Marlene A. Block (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebechk, 2015), pp. 81–96.
- 16.
Spaemann, Persons, p. 216.
- 17.
See ibid., p. 27; “Persons exist only in the plural” (ibid., p. 232).
- 18.
The “relational sphere of personal interaction is universal, from which it follows that the exclusion of even one person from the scheme of recognition brings the personal character of the whole system tumbling down” (ibid., p. 196).
- 19.
Ibid., p. 223.
- 20.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. by Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 31.
- 21.
Spaemann, Persons, p. 230. The translation “regularity” is not completely free from doubt; the German original is “Verläßlichkeit” (reliability).
- 22.
Ibid., p. 230.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 231.
- 24.
Cf. the quotation above, fn. 8.
- 25.
See Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of Person”, Journal of Philosophy, 68. 1 (1971), 5–20.
- 26.
Cf. Thomas Buchheim: “Wie die Vernunft uns handeln macht”, in Die Normativität des Wirklichen: Über die Grenze zwischen Sein und Sollen, ed. by Th. Buchheim, R. Schönberger and W. Schweidler (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002), pp. 281–413 and Walter Schweidler: “The Slave in Ourselves. On the Importance of the Aristotelian Concept of Slavery for Political Legitimation”, Working Papers in Philosophy, (2013/2014), 1–17. https://fi.btk.mta.hu/images/Események/2013/working_papers/2013_04_walter_schweidler_the_slave_in_ourselves_on_the_importance_of_the_aristotelian_concept_of_slavery_for_political_legitimation.pdf.
- 27.
Spaemann, Persons, p. 225.
- 28.
Cf. Walter Schweidler, Geistesmacht und Menschenrecht: Der Universalanspruch der Menschenrechte und das Problem der Ersten Philosophie (Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 1994).
- 29.
Spaemann: Persons, p. 234.
- 30.
Ibid. p. 235.
- 31.
The final chapter. “Are All Human Beings Persons?” was added to the text; it comprises Spaemann’s lecture given on the occasion of the bestowal upon him of an honorary doctoral degree at the Catholic University of Washington in 1995.
- 32.
Robert Spaemann: Happiness and Benevolence, trans. by Jeremiah Alberg (South Bend, in: Notre Dame Press, 2000), p. 198.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 199.
- 34.
Cf. Walter Schweidler: “On the Social Origin of Time in Language”, in Origins and Futures: Time Inflected and Reflected, ed. by Raji Steineck and Claudia Clausius (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2013), pp. 37–48.
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Schweidler, W. (2020). On the Ontological Status of Trust: Robert Spaemann’s Philosophy of the Person as a Promise. In: Fabris, A. (eds) Trust. Trust 2020. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 54. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44018-3_8
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