What The Person Means
David Walsh’s Person Means Relation (hereafter, Person) is a singular and captivating philosophical sonata on the human person. It is worthy of careful attention by both scholars and a general readership. The book is a profound philosophical meditation on a Copernican “breakthrough” involved in understanding how “person” means “relation.” Walsh’s Person offers not just innovative philosophical insights into the theme. He furthermore seeks to communicate these in a rich new language. We might very well “search in vain for words to bear witness” to the splendor and reality of the human person but in Walsh’s book “words [about the person are] being given new airs” leading to unique insights.[1]
Walsh colorfully paints the consequences of the realization that “person means relation” onto a broad canvas encapsulating both human thought and life. The author’s script runs to fifty-nine pages and Professor Matthew D. Walz adds what he calls “A ‘Puckish’ Response to Walsh’s Philosophy of the Person” (61-70). Walsh then gives his own response to the “Response” (71-97). Person is based on a lecture given by the author in 2023 when he was awarded the Aquinas Medal at the University of Dallas.
A BREAKTHROUGH
In an earlier work, The Priority of the Person, Walsh pointed out how Heidegger “thought [that] to be a person is to be a being within being.” Nonetheless, Walsh asserts how Heidegger never took the step of realizing that “transparency is what marks the person. Being is a person.” It is, in fact, “only because he [Heidegger] is a person that it” becomes possible “for a part to attain a glimpse of the whole.”[2] Perhaps this is why throughout the text terms “breakthrough” and “paradigm shift” are often used. The limitations of Boethius’ formula that the person is “an individual substance of a rational nature” are well known. Clearly, there is need to go beyond it. Walsh observes how
paradigm shifts…are not always announced by the innovators…such shifts are rarely intended but emerge as an accidental consequence of more deeply probing the confusions history has bequeathed us (9).
In his monograph the case of Helen Keller is used as an example of the type of “breakthrough” involved into the discovery that “person means relation.” Helen’s fundamental discovery occurs when she “finally understood that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant that cool liquid pouring through her fingers as the well was being pumped.” Walsh considers how
the eureka of the event arises from the superabundance that overflows it all. It is not just that she understood the word for water but that she understood words as such…Helen entered the world of person that is the world of meaning…Her breakthrough was in the recognition of what signs and letters meant for someone else. It was in the sharing of awareness that the meaning of meaning became apparent. By knowing what it means for you I begin to glimpse what it means for me. The epiphany of joint attention discloses the transcendence that is the reality of the person (47-48, my emphasis).
Thus, words like “breakthrough” and “paradigm shift” are significant in any enquiry and equally apply to the philosophical journey of discovery into who we are as human beings.[3] A revolution in understanding necessarily involves taking many steps beyond the evidential pathway. In the case of a philosophy of the person, it means developing and enhancing the famous formulation of Boethius. This requires “endurance” and “transcendence” in overcoming obstacles stumbled upon along the way. It turns out that these obstructions are also part of a disclosure of the essential reality.
A DIALOGUE
Professor Matthew Walz of Dallas University in his response to Walsh’s philosophy of the person outlines how he finds himself “in a quandary” (67). And so, he asks Walsh does he feel likewise. Walz explains his predicament as follows:
I find myself caught in the crossfire of an ongoing argument between the “personalist” or “philosopher of the person” on the one hand, and the stubborn “Aristotelian” or “philosopher of substance,” on the other (67).
Walz asks this because he knows that it is a question a lot of philosophers have when they hear of the Walshian approach in understanding person as “relation.” Professor Walz is very open indeed to the perspective of conceiving “person” as “relation,” but this, he argues, can be understood only in terms of the classic metaphysical framework involving the reality of “substance.” Or, maybe his question at least is, where does the priority of the “relational” leave the more traditional conception? He notes how Aristotle even intuited the importance of the “substantive” category since he wanted to make sure “our reflections on the human being, never become too untethered from the reality of our materiality’ [67]. If it is the case that “person means relation,” Walz asks, how does that apply to the unborn “whose personhood is not altogether manifest and who, therefore” are at immense risk “of being treated as non-persons” (69).
Walsh’s response is a clear acceptance of the importance of going back to Aristotle and other philosophers to gain essential insights into such fundamental questions. But even when we do this, he says, we face the challenge that
the philosophical language we have inherited from the classic sources [Aristotle and Aquinas, for example] is not always adequate, not only to what we want to say but what they too intended to say (72).
Furthermore, what if it is the case, in fact, that the philosophical standpoint invoked when we say “person means relation” is not actually in opposition with the classic perspective? David Walsh, asks: “what if there is really no such opposition,” that is, between a metaphysical emphasis on the human person’s substantive nature and the “relational” viewpoint? (73). He argues, in fact, that if you look at Aristotle’s categorical analyses, they never actually “possessed the fixity he seemed to assign them” (73). It is true Aristotle did set out to give a systematic account of reality but he never claimed that his account was totally successful. As it turned out the words and terms used by Aristotle did not, in fact, fit in so neatly with the actuality (74). This is not a failure but an indication of Aristotle’s greatness. Many Aristotelians are perhaps too “prone to overlook the ways in which” he “was less than satisfied with his own resolution of problems” (74).
In a cordial reaction to professor Waltz’s clearly stated philosophical quandary, Walsh reminds us how “Aristotle was not Aristotelian” (76). He describes how Aristotle knew that “outside of his own core analysis lay an untidy penumbra” in which what it means to be a human being turns out to be even “more mysterious than anticipated” (76). The human person is ultimately “guarded by mystery” and so is our understanding.[4] The “person,” as such, “escapes all attempts to capture it, but it is the source of all attempts to realize it.” It is “that which measures all” things but “which itself can never be measured.”[5]
We can, therefore, say that the actuality of the human person is “otherwise” than or moves us beyond a “substance-based metaphysics” (77).[6] The reality of the human being does not neatly fit into such a framework. This does not entail a deconstruction of “substance” but on the contrary leads to its enrichment. Indeed, intimations of a more dynamic notion of substance are found in the writings of scholars like W. Norris Clarke where he speaks of “substance-in-relation.” Clarke outlines how “relationality and substantiality go together as two distinct but inseparable modes of reality…being as substance [see St. Thomas] …naturally flows over into being relational…To be us to be substance-in-relation.”[7]
OTHERWISE THAN BEING
Nonetheless, in my view, Walsh’s point and approach is actually “otherwise.” It is worth citing him directly at this point. He explains how “Being as substance loses its primacy when it is replaced by the understanding of being as a person” (95, my emphasis). At the beginning of this review, I referred to how the Walshian perspective in philosophical and political thought involves a type of Copernican Revolution in our understanding. Thomas S. Kuhn explains what such a revolution entails outlining how Nicholas Copernicus’s proposal was to increase
the accuracy and simplicity of astronomical theory by transferring to the sun many astronomical functions previously attributed to the earth. Before his proposal the earth had been the fixed center about which astronomers computed the motions of the stars and planets. A century later the sun had …replaced the earth as the center.[8]
The “priority” in Walsh’s perspective is that of “person” and not “being.”[9] Being as “substance” is replaced by a perception of “being as a person” (95). As previously remarked, this does not debunk “substance” but it is now seen outside the “model of immanent being” (95). Walsh explains that such a “breakthrough” can only occur when we perceive how
substance, that which endures through all changes, is no longer immanent being, but personal being that has already transcended and suffered for all. It is perhaps not too implausible to suggest that person is the model of substance rather than the other way around. Only that which contains its own being within itself, that which can freely give itself away, is what endures beyond all the vicissitudes of existence (95-96).
It is, of course, a unique Christian discovery made known in Christ which unfolds the “dynamic of what it means to be a person” (94). St. John Paul II stated as much in his first encyclical letter Redemptor Hominis in which he discusses before a global audience the question: “Who is Man?” The human person is, he says,
the way for the Church…every man without exception whatever-has been redeemed by Christ…even when man is unaware of it: “Christ, who dies and was raised up for all, provides man” —man and every man— “with the light and the strength to measure up…” [to this reality].[10]
Thus, we can see a definitive turn towards the “priority” of the “person” in the writings of John Paul II. David Walsh’s contention is, in fact, that in the Christian tradition we discover how “the practice [of the person being prior] was well ahead of the theory available to describe it” (94). Within the unique Christian differentiation, it emerges how
the friendship between God and man that was incomprehensible to Aristotle would eventually be comprehended in the surpassing action by which God becomes man. When God puts himself in place of man, the fixity of substance is overturned. Now we glimpse the possibility of man becoming God in a way that is utterly beyond the hesitant speculations of Aristotle (94-95, my emphasis).
MISSING LINK
Professor Walz’s hesitancy and philosophical dilemma outlined in his response to David Walsh’s philosophy of the person is easily understandable. In the Categories Aristotle, for instance, perceives “relation” as a purely accidental category (Categories 8a13). And the focus of the analysis in the Categories is on “things” as related to each other rather than on “relation” in itself. Thus, in Aristotle’s treatment it seems certainly to be the case that “relation” appears as nonessential. Although Aristotle leaves out “friendship,” for example, as a category, nonetheless, it plays an extremely significant role in the Nicomachaen Ethics and Politics. “Person” is a missing category but this does not prove its insignificance since it is everywhere in use as a practice in Aristotle. As mentioned previously, Walsh points to this as proof of how our language at times does not always measure up “not only to what we want to say but” also to what philosophers like Aristotle and Aquinas wanted to say (72).
Furthermore, the author reminds us how even within the classic Platonic-Aristotelian philosophical tradition:
we begin to see why, even in the absence of a developed account of the person, they inevitably operated with a sense of the person as engaged in a dynamic self-enactment and self-disclosure. Right by nature, and the Good that is beyond being, can be grasped only by one who is neither a part of nature nor a substance but one whose character is inescapably tied to the existential choice that the souls in the underworld are compelled to make (86).
The imprints of a “breakthrough” to a relational understanding of the human person emerge, for example, even when Aristotle turns to an examination of “the experience of action” and “of the acting person” (87). When it comes to a discussion of “the notion of a final cause as an ultimate ad quem” it is dealt with “not as a metaphysical necessity” but “an imperative arising from human life itself” (87). Walsh means that when Aristotle attempts to underline the primacy of substance, he actually turns to the “person” who is “the least substantial of all foundations” (87). He writes: “the person who cannot live except in relation to what is beyond himself…therefore reveals the extent to which he provides the principal access to an anchoring substance” (87).
The “missing link” of the reality of the human person also surfaces, Walsh argues, in Aristotle’s treatment of friendship in Book IX of the Ethics (89). Aristotle made a remarkable “breakthrough” as “he dug deeper into what makes friendship possible” (91). His exploration on friendship ends up reaching what is more lasting than “substance.” And this is what “substance” actually entails. It is what endures. The bond of friendship, Aristotle asserts, is what makes friends “dear to one another” (90). Aristotle’s formulation “each comes to regard the other as another self” opens the path “to inwardness that is the true realm of friendship (Ethics 1166a30ff)” (90). It is in the bond of friendship that one arrives at “the substance that is beyond loss” (91). Walsh says:
friendship, person as relation, has become even for Aristotle the model of reality even though he lacks the means of fully articulating it (93).
In Person we also find a rich excavation into the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and many more philosophers. Walsh comments that when he says, “person means relation,” he derives great confidence from the example of St. Thomas. He explains that when Thomas thought about substance in the highest sense, he declared “both that person is the highest reality and that person means relation” (96). Earlier in the monograph this is very clearly sketched out. Thomas was loathe to challenge the authoritative Boethian formulation (8ff). Yet, almost as if by accident he blurts out “two of the most astonishing pronouncements concerning what it means to be a person” (9). Walsh outlines the statements as follows:
the first is that personhood is the reality of God. “I [Thomas] answer that, Person signifies what is most perfect in all nature…this name person is fittingly applied to God; not however as it is applied to creatures, but in a more excellent way” (ST I, q.29, a.3). What is striking here is that being or subsistence in no longer the highest, but personhood is that apex of reality. However it is conceived, God is not simply the highest being; rather, person is the highest being (10).
Walsh now makes pertinent philosophical observations on the significance of St. Thomas’ statements. It turns out that a “substance” is that which “endures in being” whilst “a person pours himself or herself out” (10). God’s essential nature is not self-preservation nor self-subsistence but is manifest in “self-giving” (10). Thus, “substance suggests what can be alone, person indicates what cannot be except in relation to another person” (11).
The second most startling idea which St. Thomas proposes is when he asks and answers the question “whether the word ‘person’ signifies relation” (11). Thomas’ reply is that “a divine person signifies a relation as subsisting.” So, relation in God cannot be an accident in a subject. “To be God the Father is not an accidental relationship, but who God is” (11). In Walsh’s essay further elaborations on these critical insights are gainfully explored.
VISIBLE ALLIES
David Walsh has noteworthy allies in his innovative philosophical undertaking into comprehending the human person as “relation.” Joseph Ratzinger clearly saw and called for “a new paradigm of the person” (13). He observed how it was
in this idea of relatedness in word and love, independent of the concept of substance and not to be classified among the “accidents,” Christian thought discovered the kernel of the concept of person, which describes something other and infinitely more than the mere idea of the “individual.”[11]
The German theologian-philosopher Klaus Hemmerle, for example, in Thesen zu einer trinitarischen Ontologie seeks in a very different way to contribute to the “paradigm shift” Walsh suggests. Hemmerle points out how “an understanding of being for which the ultimate reality is substance” is “all too puny in design in order to be able to do full justice to the preliminary Trinitarian gift of the Christian understanding of being.” He holds that the affirmation of St. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 13:13) “only loves lasts” is of such revolutionary import that we have not taken proper account of it. He notes
for if what lasts is love, then the centre of gravity shifts from self to the other…and relationship (relatio, no longer understood as a category, as the most insignificant accident of being) become[s] central.[12]
Likewise Italian theologian Piero Coda stresses:
God is not simply Absolute Substance, the One-Being who excludes in himself each and every relation and distinction, precisely because he is One; but he is the One-Being who as such expresses himself in the reciprocal relations of three distinct Persons…each of whom is the one true God.[13]
Moreover, in his study From The Trinity Coda concurs with the Walshian perspective outlining how:
the consequence, decisive for later development of Western culture, is going from a concept of person as absolute (“as individual substance of a rational nature,” as Boethius would say) to a definition which entails a relationship… .”[14]
Critics might reasonably remark that these considerations only seem theological issues. But the philosophical challenge remains, that is, to allow the “dynamic of relation” enter “the determination of being in itself.”[15]
CONVERSION
I find it very interesting how in a postscript to his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn speaks about the importance of understanding how it is possible after all to enter the actual reality of a “paradigm shift.” He explains how the process ultimately involves: persuasion, communication, translation and finally, a “conversion experience.”[16] There comes to mind an adage a former university associate of mine was fond of repeating. It was “what got us here, will not get us there!” David Walsh equally points to the “requirement for conversion” if we are to personally appropriate the truth and understand how “person means relation.” And this is not a purely academic exercise. In a discussion on Plato’s Republic and his “Seventh Letter” he remarks that what makes a “breakthrough” possible for Plato’s interlocutors is a “radical openness to truth that would eventually transform them” (83). Plato, he says, “remarks on the impossibility in transmitting the truth of philosophy in the form of a result that can be written down.” Instead, it is more like “a spark or an inspiration that leaps from one soul to another as the means by which it catches fire.” Everyone is a candidate for this periagoge (περιαγωγὴ), “turning-around” or conversion experience. In Person we read “all men possess the capacity for gazing on the brightest part of being even those who have resolutely turned their backs on it” (83-84).
An example of this “lived-turning-around” experience is found in Franz Jägerstätter, the Austrian who refused to serve in Hitler’s army knowing that it would lead to his execution. Commenting on his exemplarity David asks “how is a person” like Franz possible? His lawyers and pastors told him “nothing was accomplished” by his actions. But nonetheless he:
persevered on the side of right rather than become complicit in evil…. [He] held his existence in his hands, as his response in the moment of truth made clear…he held far more than the fate of his own soul, for in that decision his actions silently took responsibility for a whole society, perhaps the human race (40).
As human beings we are far more than “centers of consciousness” or “individual substances.” Franz Jägerstätter shows us who we essentially are as “persons.” We “are not things” because like Franz we have the capacity and are “ready to set aside the thing-like hold on existence in order to yield place to the other” (42). In Franz’s life, Walsh attests, the “enduring reality of persons is already accessible” to us. Writing about the fraught situation he and the whole Austrian German community found themselves in, Franz wrote:
and it is still possible for us, even today, with God’s help to lift ourselves out of the mire in which we are stuck and win eternal happiness—if only we make a sincere effort and bring our strength to the task.[17]
David Walsh concludes this intriguing and challenging philosophical monograph explaining how the “paradigm shift” or conversion involved in acquiring a new understanding of the person includes each one of us. Conversion occurs not just on the intellectual level of concepts but means a “transformation of the subject” and of our world.[18] And only we can fill in the details “as to how and what” it means when we say, “person means relation” (96).
Person Means Relation
By David Walsh
South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 2024; 110pp
NOTES:
[1] Czeslaw Milosz, Poet in the Modern World: Poems, 1946-1953, tr. and ed. Robert Hass and David Frick (New York: HarperCollins, 2025), 101. Seamus Heaney, Human Chain (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 46.
[2] Walsh, The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 208, my emphasis.
[3] See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2012).
[4] See David Walsh, Guarded By Mystery: Meaning in a Postmodern Age (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999).
[5] Guarded By Mystery, 20.
[6] See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999).
[7] See https://www.communio-icr.com/files/clarke19-4.pdf, accessed 13th May 2025.
[8] See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Devlopment of Western Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1. Kuhn explains how Copernican insights were not just limited to planetary theory. They “were instrumental in the transition from medieval to modern” understandings because they “seemed to affect man’s relation to the universe and to God” (2).
[9] See David Walsh, The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2020). It is interesting how he entitles the opening chapter as “The Priority of the Person as the Modern Differentiation,” (1-26).
[10] See https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_04031979_redemptor-hominis.html, accessed 13th May 2025.
[11] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trs. J.R. Foster and Michael J. Miller (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2004), 184.
[12] Klaus Hemmerle, Thesen zu einer trinitarischen Ontologie, eds. Wilfried Hagemann and Thomas J. Norris (Würzburg, Germany: Echter Verlag GmbH., 2020), 107.
[13] Coda, Sul luogo della Trinità: Rileggendo il De Trinitate di Agostino (Rome, Italy: Città Nuova, 2008), 59, my translation.
[14] Piero Coda, From The Trinity: The Coming of God in Revelation and Theology (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2020), 360.
[15] From The Trinity, 485.
[16] Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 199-203.
[17] Gordon Zahn, In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter (Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers, 1986), 215.
[18] Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J., Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1971), 130.
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