Newman Studies Journal

I consider myself a neophyte of Christian personalism—nothing more than an educator who regularly revisits the question: "what is it to be human?" I want to claim that people like me are one of the intended audiences of Pro Velasco's stimulating Spanish-language monograph on the ethical thought of Robert Spaemann. A Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Avila in Spain, Pro Velasco holds there the post of Academic Secretary to the John Henry Newman Chair. The resonances between Spaemann and Newman can easily be overlooked because they did not belong to the same epoch. And yet, it often happens in the philosophical enterprise that seemingly unrelated authors open unexpected doorways into one another's thought by having arrived independently at topics of shared interest. In this reviewer's opinion, Newman's original re-reading of the notion of "idea" offers a fertile entry point into Spaemann's understanding of personhood. If this is the case, Spaemann's ethical thought could also be read as a way of furthering Newman's insights in a different intellectual climate.

Pro Velasco's monograph consists of four chapters and is the fruit of her prolonged visitation of Spaemann's work since her master's and doctoral dissertations. An initial biographical chapter provides a feel for Spaemann's personality. One sees him grow up a conscientious youth in war-torn Germany with a felt sense of the inherent dignity of the human person. The second chapter moves to the central presuppositions underpinning Spaemann's ethical thought. Pro Velasco's discussion of the notion of personhood struck this reviewer as particularly informative. She quotes with parsimony to highlight revealing passages in Spaemann's writings: like one, from Grenzen,¹ where the German philosopher suggest that "personhood" can easily get thrown around as a label, as though it were applied to some object of taxonomy (54). Spaemann regards this as a nominalist position—one that might even invite questioning the humanity of "non-typical" individuals (this key point returns in the final chapter). For Spaemann, "personhood" is not reducible to a particular quality that needs to be recorded in all members of a class. In this respect, Pro Velasco claims—more resolutely than in previous secondary literature (61)—that Spaemann locates personhood in that latent "capacity" or orientation for reflexive self-observation and moral choice, through which the specifically human form of life can manifest in its plenitude. This, regardless of its actual [End Page 114] manifestation in a specific person at a specific moment in time, so that a human being who does not instantiate this capacity does not, for this reason, cease to be a person. This is where one sees Spaemann relying on the Aristotelian notion of telos (48) as open-endedness and "being-towards,"² which in turn focuses attention on distinctively human acts, such as promise and forgiveness (62), through which personhood can flourish.

This chapter (chapter two) will be of particular interest to Newman scholars, especially where Pro Velasco argues that personhood for Spaemann cannot be exhausted in an enumeration of particular qualities. It resides instead in a telos—an orientation in the human being that makes space for his/her developmental unfolding as a human being. This formulation could have been quoted straight out of a letter Newman wrote to his brother on 10 November 1840.³ In that letter, anticipating Sermon no. 15 (US), Newman distinguishes between the manifest and the latent as two mutually implicating aspects of reality, such that reality is at the same time apprehended through ostensible forms, while there also remains an unmarked excess beyond such forms.⁴ One might then say, in Newman's terminology, that Spaemann seems to identify the person with the idea of a person—in this dynamic sense suggested by Newman, as disclosure and fulfillment of the latent through the manifest.⁵ The enduring fertility of Newman's notion of "idea...