Forthcoming in: Was sind und wie existieren Personen?

(What are Persons and how Do They Exist?), ed. by J. Noller, Münster: Mentis.

Human Persons – A Process View

Anne Sophie Meincke

Abstract

What are persons and how do they exist? The predominant answer to this question in
Western metaphysics is that persons, human and others, are, and exist as, substances, i.e.,
ontologically independent, well-demarcated things defined by an immutable (usually mental)
essence. Change, on this view, is not essential for a person’s identity; it is in fact more likely
to be detrimental to it.
In this chapter I want to suggest an alternative view of human persons which is motivated by
an appreciation of their biological nature. Organisms, human and non-human, are dynamical
systems that for their existence and persistence depend on an on-going interaction with the
environment in which they are embedded. Taking seriously this most fundamental human
condition leads to recognising human persons as processes, i.e., as entities for the identity of
which change is essential. It also implies a holistic view of the human mind.

1. Introduction

What are persons and how do they exist? In this chapter I want to propose a novel answer to
this question posed by the editor of this volume.1 The answer is novel in that calls for a
revolution of our most fundamental assumptions about the nature of human persons and
about reality in general. Human persons, I shall argue, are processes rather than substances
or things. They are a specific kind of process in a world full of processes of various kinds.

The process view of human persons is a corollary of the appreciation of the biological nature
of human persons. Animalist theories of personal identity, which are currently on the rise,
have emphasised the latter, opposing the hitherto predominant psychological accounts of

1
The way the question is formulated leaves open the kind of person it refers to. I shall confine myself here to
considerations regarding human persons. Historically, as far as Western philosophy is concerned, the ontological
concept of human personhood has developed in the context of discussions about the personhood of God,
especially with respect to the concept of trinity, see, e.g., Augustine’s De trinitate and the discussion in Spann
(2012).

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personal identity. However, animalism has mostly failed to reflect on the ontology of
organisms if not actually (tacitly or explicitly) presupposing that organisms are substances,
this in line with its broadly Aristotelian heritage.2 In contrast, the ‘processual animalism’ that
I advocate is motivated by insights from today’s biological sciences. It takes seriously the fact
stressed in particular by systems biology that organisms are self-organising dynamical
systems.

The twofold structure of the guiding question of this volume insinuates that ‘to be a person’
and ‘to exist as a person’ are not necessarily the same. Looking at the history of philosophy,
we may associate this with the distinction between essence and existence common in
scholasticism. Thus St. Thomas Aquinas held that essence and existence coincide in God but
are distinct principles in all contingently existing beings.3 The underlying assumption here is
that the essence of a thing can in principle be grasped independently of the existence of that
thing. This explains how we can have concepts of non-existing things, say, the concept of a
unicorn. It follows that in the case of finite beings that do exist there must be a further
principle that explains their existence. According to the scholastic philosophers this is to be
found in the fact that God created those beings.

As it is well-known, this view has been contested, most notably by Kant, Frege and Russell. As
Kant puts it, existence (being) is not a ‘real predicate’; it doesn’t add anything to the concept
of the thing in question.4 The dismissal of the concept of existence has, however, not resulted
in abolishing the distinction altogether. Instead, it has underlined, or even amplified, the
traditional priority of the concept of essence.

The priority of essence over existence is a hallmark of substance ontology, i.e., of the view
that reality most fundamentally consists of entities – called ‘substances’ – which are defined
by an immutable set of intrinsic (‘essential’) properties. As I shall show in what follows,
Western metaphysics of the person has been dominated by a view that is committed to this

2
See, e.g., Olson (2007), ch. 2.2.
3
See, e.g., Aquinas’ On Being and Essence IV, § 6.
4
See Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason A598/B626. Kant’s argument is part of his criticism of the so-called
ontological argument as put forward by St. Anselm of Canterbury, according to which the concept of God
necessarily entails His existence because otherwise God would lack perfection and we would not actually have
a concept of God.

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very idea of substance. This is true up until today, despite 20th century’s existentialism’s
rediscovery and reappraisal of the concept of existence. Heidegger famously claimed that
‘Dasein’s essence lies in its existence’,5 followed by Sartre’s thesis that ‘existence precedes
essence’.6 According to Heidegger and Sartre, the idea that we could say what a person is
independently of how a person exists is illusory because most fundamentally a person creates
herself. Heidegger combines this claim with the diagnosis that philosophers, by not paying
attention to the aspect of existence, have failed to appreciate the specific mode of the
existence of persons. As a result, they have generally failed to distinguish between different
modes of being, this being a symptom of a fundamental ‘oblivion of being’ in Western
metaphysics.7

The process view of human persons that I am going to propose in this chapter is congenial to
those existentialist approaches (which can be interpreted as specific versions of such a view).8
However, I will put the claim about the processual nature of human persons on a more robust
footing by grounding it in the biological conditions of human life. I shall proceed as follows. I
shall first trace the various metamorphoses of the substance view of the person in the history
of philosophy which span both mentalistic and biologistic paradigms concerning the essence
of human persons as well as both traditional and modern interpretations of what I will call
the ‘thing aspect’ of the substancehood of human persons. I will then introduce the
alternative process view of human persons, explaining its biological foundations and
adumbrating its most important implications for the understanding of the specifically
personal dimensions of the existence of human persons. I shall conclude with some brief
considerations concerning the relation between (neo-) Aristotelian versions of the substance
view of the human person and the process view of the human person.

2. The Metamorphoses of the Substance View of Human Persons

Western metaphysics of the human person for the most part subscribes to what I call the
substance view of the person, this in accordance with the general pre-eminence of substance

5
See Heidegger’s Being and Time § 9.
6
See Sarte’s Existentialism is a Humanism.
7
See Being and Time, esp. Introduction, ch. 2, and The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, esp. Part One, ch. 3.
For more detailed discussions of Heidegger’s approach to the metaphysics of the person see Meincke
(forthcoming), Meincke (2017), Meincke (2015), ch. 3.3.2 and 3.3.3., and Spann (2012).
8
See Meincke (forthcoming) for a portrait and discussion of Heidegger’s process account of personal identity.
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ontology in Western metaphysics. The notion of a substance (οὐσία) was first introduced by
Aristotle to denote a discrete particular whose identity is determined by a certain immutable
set of intrinsic characteristics, its essence (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) or intrinsic nature. Aristotle gives the
examples of a man and a horse. The idea is that these are genuine individuals, despite being
composed of parts. Substance ontology in this traditional sense takes substances to be
ontologically fundamental; substances are bearers of properties, stand in relations, cause
events, etc.9 This entails that also change is dependent on substances. Substances are
supposed to keep their numerical identity while instantiating different properties at different
times. They are themselves unchanging bearers of merely accidental change.10

The substance view of the human person underwent various metamorphoses in the course
of the history of philosophy. In order to trace these, it is helpful to distinguish two aspects of
the original notion of a substance, namely, as I like to label them, the thing aspect and the
essence aspect. The thing aspect refers to the fact that a substance is taken to be some sort
of discrete particular, an individual object or thing. The essence aspect refers to the fact that
there is something that supposedly defines what sort of thing a given substance is, to which
kind it belongs or what it is most fundamentally. The different versions of the substance view
of the human persons arise in the first place from different views about the essence aspect.
However, also the thing aspect has been subject to transformations, forcing us to distinguish
between a narrow and a wide understanding of what it means for a person to be a ‘substance’.

Let me start with the essence aspect. The standard version of the substance view of the
human person is committed to what I call mentalism about personhood, i.e., to the idea that
persons are distinguished from other substances by their mental skills and characteristics.
Paradigmatically we find this in Boethius’ canonical definition of a person as “an individual
substance of a rational nature” (“persona est naturae rationabilis individua substantia”).11
According to Boethius, rationality is what makes a person a person; individual substances
identifiable as persons are rational substances.12 The same idea reappears in early modern

9
See in particular Aristotle’s Categories and his Metaphysics, especially book VII.
10
“It seems most distinctive of substance that numerically one and the same thing is able to receive contraries”
(Aristotle, Categories 4a 10ff.).
11
See Boethius’ Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, ch. 3.
12
This is an adaptation of the view endorsed by Aristotle – who was not yet familiar with the notion of a person
– that humans are rational animals, i.e., possess a rational soul. See the following discussion.

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times in Descartes’ substance dualism and in subsequent 18th century’s rational psychology.
A human person is believed to be essentially a ‘thinking thing’ (res cogitans) – an immaterial,
simple, self-identical, immortal rational soul – that is contingently attached to a body (res
extensa).13 Modern versions of substance dualism are held, e.g., by E. J. Lowe and Richard
Swinburne.14

Mentalistic substance dualism is a way to make sense of the fact that we are (more or less)
rational and at the same time have a bodily existence; but it is not the only possible one.
According to an alternative view, we are rational animals in the sense that in us body and
mind are inseparably intertwined, namely as the two principles of matter and form which are
constitutive of any substance. What makes us special and sets us apart from non-living
substances is the fact that our form is a soul, and what sets us apart from living substances
such as plants and animals is the fact that our soul is a rational soul. This so-called
hylomorphism was defended by Aristotle as part of his substance ontology.15 Hylomorphism
was popular in Scholasticism before being superseded by Cartesian Dualism. It is regaining
increasing attention within the more recent debate on personal identity, where it is embraced
by neo-Aristotelian or neo-Thomistic theories of personal identity as a form of non-dualist
mentalism about personhood.16

There is a third version of a substance view of the person which emerged from the same
debate on personal identity. So-called animalism opposes the view that we are essentially
mental beings, i.e., ‘persons’. Instead the claim is that most fundamentally we are animals in
a purely biological sense, not entailing any mental or psychological characteristics.17 Although
it is difficult to draw sharp boundaries between the aforementioned neo-Aristotelian and
neo-Thomistic views on the one hand and animalism on the other hand,18 we can characterise

13
See Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy.
14
See, e.g., Lowe (2008) and Swinburne (1996).
15
See Aristotle, Metaphysics VII.
16
See Oderberg (2007), ch. 10, and Hershenov (2008).
17
See Olson (1997) with the programmatic title “The Human Animal. Personal Identity without Psychology”.
18
This is especially true for David Wiggins’ version of animalism but also for Peter van Inwagen’s theory of
‘material beings’ which inspired Olson’s animalism, see Wiggins (2001) and van Inwagen (1997).

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animalism as a theory that takes us to be Aristotelian substances without a soul, as merely

biological substances.19

Animalism’s rejection of the idea that personhood is essential to us might raise doubts as to
whether it is rightly listed here as a version of the substance view of the person. Three things
are to be said in response. First, animalists do not deny that we are persons; they merely insist
that being a person is not what we most fundamentally are, as revealed by the facts that we
once were foetuses and that we may fall into a persistent vegetative state without ceasing to
exist. The animalist thesis, hence, can be interpreted like this: we – who happen to be persons
for the most time of our lives – are ontologically speaking animals, i.e., beings that do not
have to have any personal characteristics in order to exist. Second, the denial that we are
persons in some fundamental ontological sense rests upon the assumption that ‘persons’ are
mental beings. There thus is a sense in which animalism subscribes to mentalism about
personhood. Third, we could use the term ‘person’ in some broader, generic sense in which
it, in a quasi-indexical way, refers to us, whatever this reference implies ontologically;20 in
other words, we could use it as a placeholder for any account of ‘what we most fundamentally
are’. Animalism clearly is such an account, namely one that, assuming this particular sense of
‘person’, does not actually subscribe to mentalism about personhood, endorsing some form
of biological reductionism – ‘biologism’ – instead.

In accordance with the generic meaning of the term ’person’ just explained, we thus can
distinguish three different versions of the substance view of the human person stemming
from three different views about what our essence is: the mentalist version according to
which we are thinking substances; the hylomorphist version according to which we are living
thinking substances; and the animalist version according to which we are merely living
substances. These three form a major and powerful tradition within Western metaphysical
thinking about human persons.

Let me go a step further and underpin my claim that the substance view of the person is the
predominant view in Western metaphysics with the further claim that it remains powerful as

19
See Meincke (2015), ch. 2. 3. 1 b), Meincke (2016) and Meincke (2010) for a discussion of animalism and its
affinity to substance ontology.
20
For a reflection on some peculiarities and difficulties of the usage of the indexical ‘we’ in animalism see
Meincke (2010).
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a paradigm also where it is not explicitly endorsed or even rejected. Thus, to start with, the
substance view of the person remains negatively powerful for a number of important
cautious, restrictive or even destructive theories about the existence and persistence of
human persons. The relevant debate here is again the debate on personal identity which
forms the context where questions about the nature of the human came up more recently,
i.e., with John Locke in the 17th century. By ‘negatively powerful’ I mean that the substance
view of the person serves as a negative point of reference, as something which is taken to be
impossible to achieve in some sense or the other. This applies to at least the following four
positions: John Locke’s constructive agnosticism, Immanuel Kant’s transcendentalist
humbleness, David Hume’s scepticism and Derek Parfit’s eliminativist reductionism.

Locke constructively formulates a criterion of personal identity (the so-called memory

criterion), while agnostically resisting committing himself to any particular view of what a
person in terms of substance is.21 Kant assumes a ‘transcendental Ego’ as the logical subject
of experience but denies the possibility of theoretical knowledge about the self as this would
mean to recognise the self as a substance. Recognising the self as a substance, he argues,
would require a corresponding perception, i.e., the perception of a continuant thing.
However, we haven’t got such a perception; something Kant learnt from Hume.22 Hume
sceptically doubts the existence of personal identity given that we lack the perception of a
self-substance.23 Finally, Parfit claims that personal identity, if there is such a thing, is no
metaphysically deep fact. For it to be such a metaphysically deep fact, persons would need to
be Cartesian substances, which cannot be true for the reasons given by Hume.24 Locke, Kant,
Hume and Parfit thus agree that if one could have a positive and interesting view about
persons and personal identity, then it would be a substance view.

However, there is more to the story. The critical stance on the substance view of the human
person as something ideal yet unattainable was accompanied by the development of an

21
See Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, ch. XXVII.
22
See in particular Kant’s critique of the so-called paralogisms of Rational Psychology in his Critique of Pure
Reason, Second Book (“Transcendental Dialectic”), First Chapter. See Meincke (2015), ch. 3. 2. 2, for a detailed
discussion.
23
See Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature Book I, Part IV, Section VI (“Of Personal Identity”) and Meincke (2015),
ch. 3. 1. 2 for a discussion.
24
See Parfit (1987), Part Three, ch. 10-13. See Meincke (2015), ch. 2. 2. 2, and Meincke (2016).

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alternative view of human persons: the bundle theory of the self. As is well known, David
Hume opposes the substance view of the person by pointing out that the self is “nothing but
a bundle or collection of different perceptions”.25 Neo-Humean proponents of the bundle
theory of the self, such as David Lewis and Derek Parfit, reconceptualise persons as bundles
of mental events or properties. Personal identity, accordingly, is reconceptualised as being
reducible to some sort of continuity relation holding between the elements of the bundle.26
The bundle theory of the self has become the most important competitor, as it seems, of the
substance view of the person. I am writing ‘as it seems’ because, as I am going to argue now,
the substance theory and the bundle theory of the person have more in common than people
think. They are in fact two different versions of the same overall approach to the ontology of
human persons – and to ontology in general.

This takes us to the second aspect of the notion of substance – the thing aspect – and its
metamorphoses. Substances, I said, are things in the sense that they are discrete particulars
and self-identical bearers of change. One major motivation for Aristotle to introduce the
concept of a substance was to overcome the atomist view of reality popular in pre-Socratic
philosophy. According to atomism, whatever exists reduces to the arrangements of indivisible
elementary particles, the so-called atoms. Change, accordingly, reduces to the diversity of
such arrangements; there is nothing that undergoes change (in the sense of changing its
properties). Against this view, Aristotle aimed to argue for the existence of objects which,
despite their composite character, and, i.e., despite their divisibility, qualify as genuine, and
even ontologically primary, objects and undergo change, the so-called substances.

Atomism is still alive in modern Humean ontologies as, e.g., defended by David Lewis.
According to Lewis’ well-known “doctrine” of Humean supervenience, “all there is to the
world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then
another”.27 Objects are correspondingly construed as bundles of atomic elementary entities
of whatever ontological type (matters of fact, events, individual properties (‘tropes’)). The

25
Hume, Treatise, Book I, Part IV, Section VI (1964, 239).
26
See Lewis (1983a), Lewis (1983b) and Parfit (1987). The idea that personal identity can be reduced to some
empirical relation of continuity is what distinguishes theories belonging to the so-called Complex View from
those belonging to the so-called Simple View. The latter hold that personal identity is a primitive, non-empirical
‘further fact’ and typically presume that human persons are substances, see Meincke (forthcoming), Meincke
(2016), Meincke (2015), ch. 2.2 and ch. 2.3.
27
Lewis (1986), ix.
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aforementioned bundle theory of the self belongs to the family of bundle theories of
objecthood in the Humean tradition, resting upon the assumption that the ‘atoms’ that
constitute a person are (at least also) of a mental nature (the bundle theory of the self
endorses mentalism about personhood). This view of the essence of human persons is
something the bundle theory of the self shares with the standard version of the substance
view of the human person.28 However, there are more similarities.

The bundle theory of the self, like the substance theory, treats human persons as some sort
of thing, namely in two respects. First, the elements of the bundle (e.g., mental events, mental
individual properties) qualify as things insofar as they are by definition numerically self-
identical, discrete and static. (Atoms, in the literal and philosophical sense, do not change;
they are what they are due to immutable intrinsic properties at any time of their existence.)
Second, one might surmise that a bundle of things is a thing too, at least in some looser sense.
(If bundle theories are meant to be bundle theories of objecthood, then there must be some
object after all.) Typically, neo-Humean versions of the bundle theory of the self address
persons as so-called four-dimensional objects, i.e., as something made up of unchanging
‘parts’ which occupy different locations in spacetime (and which therefore are called (spatio-
) ‘temporal parts’). Persons are conceived as aggregates of different atomic portions of
spacetime.29 As such four-dimensional objects, persons are clearly differentiated from other
four-dimensional objects (different bundles are differentiated by their different elements)
and numerically self-identical by definition (by identifying the elements of the bundle, we
identify the bundle).

The context in which this view is most frequently promoted is the debate on personal identity.
According to so-called perdurantism, a person persists through time by having different
temporal parts. Commonly this is combined with the claim that perdurantism also explains in
what sense a person, or any other persisting entity, changes over time: namely by having
temporal parts that have different properties. Change is thus taken to be dependent on things
which themselves do not change. This is in alignment with the analysis of change given by
pre-Socratic atomism. However, the very same idea that change can be explained in terms of

28
As we have seen, the substance view of the human person shows a greater variety with respect to the essence
aspect than the bundle theory of the self which seems generally committed to mentalism about personhood.
29
See Lewis (1983a) and (1983b).
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its opposite is also built into the traditional notion of a substance: a substance, as indicated,
is a thing that, while instantiating different properties at different times, supposedly remains
self-identical through time (i.e., ‘endures’ rather than ‘perdures’), as an unchanging
substratum, defined by an immutable set of essential properties. Both substances and
bundles are entities for the identity of which change – in the definition given by the respective
theories – is not essential.

These striking similarities reveal a common root of what seem to be opposing ontological
accounts of the human person – or even opposing ontologies as such. Both the substance
view of the human person and the bundle view of the human person, and equally both
substance ontology and Humean ontology in general, assume static entities – things – as the
building blocks of reality: either bigger things (‘substances’) or smaller things (‚temporal
parts‘, i.e. events or particular properties) which compose bigger things (‚four-dimensional
objects‘, ‚property bundles‘). They thus turn out to be versions of the same overall ontology
which I call ‘thing ontology’ or ‘substance ontology’ in a wide sense, as distinguished from
substance ontology in the narrow sense referring to the tradition of Aristotle, Boethius,
Descartes and their modern heirs. Calling the overall ontology ‘substance ontology’ in such a
wide sense, even though Humean ontology traditionally strictly opposes itself to what is
commonly called ‘substance ontology’, is justified by the fact that Humean ontology tacitly
takes over essential characteristics of the traditional notion of substance, notably what I have
called its thing aspect.

The diagnosis of the common substance ontological root of the two main competing views of
human persons underlines the thesis that the substance view of the person is the
predominant view in Western metaphysics. It, however, also points towards a problem: the
problem of the disappearance of change. As I have explained elsewhere in more detail,30 at
the foundations of substance ontology in the wide sense lies the conviction that reality is
made up of static entities the identity of which can be determined independently of any
change happening. Change is taken to be dependent on those static entities which are
believed to be ontologically primary, implying, at best, a secondary, superficial and parasitic
ontological status of change. ‘At best’ because one may have doubts as to whether there is

30
See Meincke (2018c).
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any genuine change at all in the substance (or thing) ontological picture of reality, given that
identity and change are believed to be incompatible with one another, this in accordance with
Leibniz’s Law.31 Identity (as taken for granted for things) ultimately requires the absence of
change. This is to say that change can never be a truth-maker of identity statements; it only
is a false-maker. If there is identity, then there cannot be any change. Change disappears.

To put it briefly: this doesn’t sound right – neither with respect to reality as such nor
concerning the specific reality of what it means to be, and to exist as, a human person. Human
persons do change in the course of their lives; they do so rather drastically in many respects.
Yet, we attribute identity through time to them in some ontologically robust sense. It is
therefore sensible to look for an alternative ontological approach.

3. Towards a Process View of the Human Person

The alternative view that I want to suggest is a process view of the human person. According
to this view, human persons are not things or substances but processes, namely stabilised
higher-order processes which most fundamentally are biological in nature. As already
indicated, the process view of the human person follows from recognising human persons as
organisms. This might sound surprising to the ears of the friends of animalism given that the
latter is renowned exactly for its appreciation of our biological nature, resulting in a strict
opposition to common psychological or mentalist approaches. However, animalism’s
Aristotelian heritage – its commitment to some sort of substance view – is at odds with
today’s biological science. Systems biology in particular makes clear that human organisms
just like any other organisms are processes rather than substances.

Organisms are complex dynamical systems, namely dissipative systems that keep themselves
stable in a thermo-dynamically far-from-equilibrium state by maintaining a controlled
exchange of matter and energy with the environment. Entropy is minimised inside by
increasing it outside the system. The most fundamental process through which this happens
in living dynamical systems is metabolism, the series of biochemical reactions within a living
cell that break down organic matter coming from the outside to build up components of the
cell. This process is all-pervasive: there is no unchanging core exempted from the turnover of

31
Leibniz’ Law requires for numerical identity a sameness of all properties. Change, however, implies a difference
in properties.
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matter and energy. The organism’s entire matter is caught up in a constant process of
destruction and reconstruction by which the organism maintains its existence. Living systems,
as Hans Jonas has emphasised,32 persist by metabolising in the sense that they are this process
themselves.

This implies that we cannot construe the organism from pre-existing parts. There are no such
pre-existing parts. Instead, what parts there are at a time and over time is itself a result of the
organising interactive process of self-maintenance which Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela famously called autopoiesis – ‘self-production’33 – and which is currently discussed
especially in the context of theories of so-called biological autonomy.34 Just think of the
metabolites whose short-lived existence is directly dependent on the process of metabolism.
In the same way, longer-lived higher-level parts, such as limbs, organs, cells, are created and
constantly stabilised through congeries of processes in the course of the overall process of an
organism’s self-constitution. Any stability of parts to be observed – just as the stability of the
organism as a whole – is a function of process and, i.e., of change.35

These insights from systems biology sharply contrast with the way substance ontologists see
the world. According to the latter, as we have seen already, the world is populated by objects
(‘substances’ or any other sorts of ‘things’) whose default state is stasis in the sense that they
don’t need to change in order to exist. Change (insofar as there is any) is thought to be
parasitic upon static objects which can be identified independently. Organisms, however,
teach us the opposite. They teach us not only that change is real but also that change comes

32
See Jonas (1966) and Meincke (2018c) for a more detailed discussion of Jonas’ views.
33
See Maturana & Varela (1980) and Varela (1979).
34
See Moreno & Mossio (2015). For an interpretation of the theory of autopoiesis and of the theory of biological
autonomy as versions of a process view of life, including an analysis of their relationship to one another, see
Meincke (under review).
35
This is in fact a powerful argument against current reductionist approaches to an explanation of living systems
as promoted by the so-called New Mechanism in the philosophy of biology, see Meincke (under review). New
Mechanists, while conceding the importance of processes or so-called activities for the ontological make-up of
living systems, presuppose that entities composing so-called mechanisms can be identified independently of the
activities or processes in which they are involved (see Machamer et al. 2000, Bechtel 2006). This is in line with
the substance ontological tenet that for every process there must be a substance on which this process is
ontologically dependent. Process ontologists, on the other hand, insist on the existence of so-called unowned
processes (see Rescher (1996), 42ff., Seibt (2008)) and emphasise, if there are any objects at all, that these
depend ontologically exactly the other way around on processes (see Meincke (under review) and the following
discussion).

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first, determining whatever objects, if any, are to exist.36 We cannot understand what
organisms are, and how they persist through time, if not acknowledging their genuine
dynamicity, fluidity and constitutive changeability. There is no unchanging core, no
immutable set of essential properties in organisms. All there is are recurring patterns of
processes, such as the life cycles.37

A number of philosophers of biology, biology-inspired metaphysicians and biologists have

accordingly started promoting process ontology as the ontological framework most suitable
for biology.38 Process ontology gives the ontological priority to process and change rather
than to static things, whether these be substances in the traditional narrow sense or in the
wide sense encompassing atomic entities of whatever sort.39 Such things do not actually exist.
The concept of a substance, thing or object has to be replaced with the concept of a stabilised
higher-order process which exhibits a genuinely dynamic identity through time.40

This leads to an interesting reversal of the perspective of investigation with respect to the
relationship between identity and change. So far, discussions have centred around the
question of how there can be any change given that the world is inhabited by things whose
default state is stasis, and given that change seems to be incompatible with identity.
Presuming process ontology, we have to ask the other way around how stasis is possible given
the processual nature of reality. In other words, under what conditions do certain processes
stabilise themselves in a way that seduces us to regard them as things even though they are
not things metaphysically speaking? Addressing this question means to consider change not
only as a false-maker of identity statements but, most importantly, as a truth-maker. It means
to give up the common prejudice that identity and change exclude one another. Certain
processes persist through time because they change in particular ways.

36
Biological processes are, as it were, dynamical relations that create their relata rather than presupposing them.
37
Jonas describes these patterns as a processual ‘form’ which, while dependent on the constant flow of matter,
also directs this flow to perpetuate itself, see Jonas (1966) and Meincke (2018c).
38
See Nicholson & Dupré (2018), Meincke (2018c), Simons (2018), Jaeger & Monk (2015), Campbell (2015),
Bapteste & Dupré (2013), Dupré (2012), Jaeger et al. (2012), Bickhard (2011).
39
See Seibt (2016), Meincke (2018c), Meincke (forthcoming) and Meincke (under review).
40
This is the radical version of process ontology that I defend in Meincke (2018c). For a more moderate version,
according to which things are ‘precipitates’ of processes, see Simons (2018).

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According to the process view of human persons this is true for human persons just as for any
other processes that reach, and maintain over time, a certain level of stability. More
specifically, human persons share with other organisms the basic characteristics of biological
higher-order processes. This is why a processual account of biological identity can be used to
ontologically ground a processual account of personal identity.41 Most fundamentally,
ontologically speaking, human persons are autopoietic higher-order bio-processes. This has
three important implications.

First, contrary to alleged incompatibility of identity and change, the identity of human persons
involves a constructive dynamical (‘dialectical’) relationship between identity and change:
biological identity is identity despite change insofar as changes detrimental to the
maintenance of the higher-order identity need to be warded off or suppressed (depending
on whether they are coming from the outside or the inside); and it is at the same time an
identity by virtue of change insofar as all stability is brought forth by change.42 Second, human
persons, just like other organisms, are deeply entangled with surrounding processes. They
demarcate themselves from these surrounding processes by interacting with them in various
ways (e.g., metabolism, symbiosis, behaviour). This entails a strong ontological dependence
from the environment, as opposed to the notion of a substance as a self-contained,
ontologically independent individual.43 Third, the identity of human persons is amenable to
objective empirical description and analysis. The conditions of stabilisation and
destabilisation can be scientifically investigated, namely, at this fundamental level, by the
biological and medical sciences. This is great progress as compared to the traditional
substance metaphysical framework in which identity appears as something primitive, being
what one has to start with rather than what needs to be explained.44

Thinking clearly about organisms and biological identity, I have argued, leaves no choice but
to adopt the process view of the human person, provided that human persons are, at least

41
See Meincke (2018c).
42
See, Meincke (2018c) for a more detailed discussion of this dynamical account of biological identity including
its potential to solve the dilemma of current accounts of personal identity. The dilemma of personal identity is
also presented and systematically analysed in Meincke (2015).
43
This ontological dependence need to be emphasised against substance ontological misinterpretations of the
concepts of autopoiesis and biological autonomy, see Meincke (under review).
44
See also Meincke (2018c).

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most fundamentally, biological beings (which seems hard to deny). However, as indicated by
the qualification ‘at least most fundamentally’, human persons are not purely biological
beings, at least not (another qualification) if ‘biological’ is understood in some reductionist
sense.45 Accordingly, we are still faced with the task of explaining the specifically personal
aspects of being, and existing as, a human person along the lines of the process view of the
human person.

I mentioned earlier that the prevailing view with respect to the essence aspect of the concept
of human persons as substances is mentalism about personhood, i.e., the view that
exclusively mental features, states and abilities make a person a person. This diagnosis still
holds true despite the rise of animalism. Strikingly, as already noted, animalists, such as Eric
Olson, agree with the mentalists that persons have to be thought of as purely mental beings,
which is why they insist that we – you and I – are not persons, at least not essentially. In other
words, animalism combines mentalism about personhood (in the traditional narrow sense)
with biologism about ‘us’ (interpretable as ‘persons’ in some wide sense as explained earlier),
presupposing that these two – ‘the persons’ (the mental beings) and ‘us’ (the biological
beings) – are separable from one another. This impressively illustrates how large parts of the
debate on persons and personal identity are tacitly shaped by a dualism of Cartesian style
(with the exception of hylomorphism maybe).

I take dualism to be on the wrong track when it comes to making sense of what human
persons are and how they exist. Fortunately, there is a better alternative available, one that
actually matches well with a process ontological framework: so-called enactivism. Enactivism
belongs to the family of embodied cognition approaches in cognitive science and the
philosophy of mind. These theories oppose cognitivist and computationalist approaches by
insisting that cognition deeply depends on the body as a whole rather than only on the brain.
Enactivist versions of the embodied cognition approach emphasise especially the interactive
character of cognition that results from embodiment.46 This entails the thesis that cognition

45
I am going to argue that it should actually not be understood that way.
46
“Cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of
a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs” (Varela
et al. (1991), 9). “Enaction is the idea that organisms create their own experience through their actions.
Organisms are not passive receivers of input from the environment, but are actors in the environment such that
what they experience is shaped by how they act” (Hutchins (1996), 428).

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is a biological function. Cognition is taken to arise through a dynamic interaction between an

acting organism and its environment, namely, according to the original thesis, as part of an
organism’s autopoiesis.47
Enactivism has many important implications.48 One of these is that by virtue of its genuinely
interactive character the mind has to be thought of as embedded in an environment. There
is no mind without an environment with which it interacts – just as there is no organism
without an environment with which it interacts. Some scholars have drawn from this the
further conclusion that the mind actually extends beyond the boundaries of the physical
body.49 Another implication is that cognition is deeply processual. This is not to be understood
in the sense of cognition being a process performed by the organism as some non-processual
substance-like entity. This would just be another version of the old view according to which a
substance-like brain or Cartesian mind engages in processes characterised as cognitive.
Instead, the thesis is that cognition is a constituent of the mode of existence and persistence
of the organism itself, i.e., an integral part of the autopoietic process which an organism is.
Organisms, at least the more complex ones, persist by cognising, i.e., by making sense of the
world through experience and thought so as to perform meaningful actions.50 We thus arrive
at a radically anti-dualist view according to which ‘mental’ or ‘cognitive’ and ‘biological’
processes are inextricably intertwined. There is a continuity between life and mind; the mind
is no ‘ghost in the machine’.51

Implementing the enactivist approach to cognition in the envisaged process view of the
human person leads to a recognition of the holistic character of the human mind and the
human person as such. This means that none of the characteristics that make human persons
persons can be separated from their biological constitution. Mentalism about personhood is

47
See Varela et al. (1991), Varela (1996), Varela (1997), Thompson (2007). For a recent critical discussion of
‘autopoietic enactivism’ and its contemporary competitors (e.g., ‘sensorimotor enactivism’ and ‘radical
enactivism’) see de Jesus (2016).
48
Enactivism caused a revolution in cognitive science, leading to a new era in AI as well (so-called embodied
robotics), see Meincke (2018b).
49
See Clark & Chalmers (1998). Within the embodied cognition approach, cognition accordingly is often
described as ‘4E cognition’, i.e., as embodied, enacted, embedded and extended, see Menary (2010).
50
Maturana and Varela’s radical thesis is that cognition is actually indispensable to life as such: “Living systems
are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms,
with or without a nervous system” (Maturana & Varela (1980), 13).
51
See Ryle (2000).

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false. It, however, also means that one cannot understand what we are, not even what we
most fundamentally are, while ignoring the fact that we have mental abilities and skills.
Cognition is a dimension of our biological constitution rather than some superficial feature
that only temporarily occurs and the absence of which does not affect our existence.52
Biologism about ‘us’ (as ‘persons’ in a wide sense) is false too.

If we acknowledge the embodied nature of human persons’ mental lives, personal identity
turns out to be neither mental nor biological but both. This holistic character is, however, not
a unique feature of human persons but something human persons share with all other
organisms which are cognisers, and these are many, if not even just all organisms on earth.53
This amounts to an important insight: whatever is special about human persons in terms of
their mental abilities and skills is located within a spectrum encompassing a large, or even the
total, number of biological species. Therefore, while it is certainly true that human persons
possess particularly sophisticated mental lives, they yet differ thereby only gradually rather
than categorically from other species.54 We should not make the mistake of searching for
uniqueness in the sense of those traditional dualist and anthropocentric approaches which
are exactly what we want to overcome.

This being said, when comparing human persons to other organisms, certain aspects of the
basic ontological constitution at least appear to be transformed in characteristic ways. Thus,
to start with, the interactive aspect of bio-cognitive self-constitution in humans most
prominently takes on the form of social life: the interaction with other people. This is not to
deny that the normal environment of human persons contains a variety of beings, such as
non-human organisms, non-living natural things and artefacts. We depend on an interaction
with all of these. However, there is a sense in which we specifically depend on other persons,
namely with respect to those sophisticated mental skills that constitute our personhood. We
are not born with these skills but rather acquire them by undergoing long, often arduous,
processes of nurturing, parenting, educating and socialising, i.e., through various forms of

52
This entails a rejection of the assumption made by animalist accounts that foetuses and people in a persistent
vegetative state do not have any psychological states (see, e.g., Olson (1997), 24 and 73ff.).
53
See footnote 50.
54
Similarly, recent theories of so-called bio-agency assume that human agency is located at the far end of a
spectrum of agential skills and practises, starting with primitive organisms, see Skewes & Hooker (2009) and the
discussion in Spann (2014).

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person-person interactions.55 There is no person without other persons being around; a point
that has been stressed already by Hegel-inspired recognition theory.56 Personal identity is
social identity.

Again, however, one must not overlook that sociality in some wide sense is far from being
unique to human organisms. Ants and bees, for example, are highly social animals whose
identities are strongly shaped by the co-presence of and interaction with conspecifics. Just as
with human persons, we wouldn’t understand what it is to exist and persist as an ant or a bee
without taking into account that these creatures are part of societies of ants and bees.
Admittedly, ants and bees don’t have schools and universities, don’t do politics, don’t have
legal systems etc. Their sociality does not take the form of culture. However, studies of these
so-called superorganisms reveal the stunning complexity of social organisation in non-human
species,57 thus undermining the belief in a categorical difference between the human form of
sociality and the forms to be found in other members of the animal kingdom.58

Similarly, both continuity and transformation characterise the specific processuality of the
existence and persistence of human persons. Enactivism tells us that how we see the world
results from the history of our interactions with the world. Personal identity, accordingly, can
be understood as historical identity, namely in the specific sense that there is no person
without a biography. What we are is comprehensible only through a reflection on how we
became what we are, i.e., through a reflection on our personal life story. This story also shapes
the way we look into the future. The importance of biographies has been emphasised by
narrativist accounts of personal identity according to which we construe our own identity
through time by telling and enacting our story.59 This idea resonates with the process view of
the human person insofar as it is assumed that we are nothing but the very story of our life.60

55
See Meincke (2018a).
56
See, e.g., Honneth (1995).
57
See, e.g., Hölldobler & Wilson (2008).
58
Recent studies in plant cognition suggest that even plants might instantiate rudimentary forms of sociality,
see, Calvo (2016).
59
See, e.g., MacIntyre (1984), Taylor (1989) and Schechtman (1996).
60
Narritivist accounts of personal identity typically do not present themselves as making a contribution to the
metaphysics of personal identity which is understood as a form of practical reality instead. See my article Spann
(2013) for a critical analysis of narrativism’s self-distancing from metaphysics.
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It is debatable whether biographies need to be narrative in some explicit terms in order to

qualify as such. We may actually attribute biographies in a weaker sense also to animals that
are not able to literally construe and tell their story. My dog Nora who was rescued from a
dog killing station and spent years in different animal shelters until finally finding a permanent
home with me behaved very differently from my dog Felix, the happy family dog I had before.
Nora’s behaviour did not come as a surprise, given, as we might say, her biography (which
might be regarded as having an implicit rather than explicit narrative structure). More
generally, we might also speak of ‘learning biographies’ of individuals of some species.

Here is another suggestion how to describe the specific sense in which human persons have
biographies: personal life stories manifest themselves in the personality we have. Even
though psychologists do not tire of analysing personalities in terms of personality types under
which people are supposed to fall, it is commonly thought that each person has her unique
personality: her individual character, her individual way of life, her individual emotional and
behavioural dispositions. These individual socio-psychological profiles are the effect of both
our interactions with the world and our evaluations of these interactions (which may have a
narrative structure). Because we are able to relate ourselves to our biographies, we are also
able to give our lives a direction instead of being pushed around by the vicissitudes of life. We
can work towards being this-and-that person, to be such-and-such. We actually have to work
on ourselves in that way if we want to survive. Having a direction helps in keeping stable over
time, preventing us from becoming fragmented.

The hypothesis that the concept of personality provides a key to understanding the
specifically personal aspect of what it means to be, and to exist as, a human person seems
promising despite ongoing research on personality in non-human animals.61 The least we can
say (apart from emphasising the unparalleled complexity of human personalities) is that
humans are animals that not only happen to have individual personalities but, by virtue of
their sophisticated capability of self-reflection, are in a position to actively shape their
personalities, both in accordance with their own preferences and responding to requirements
of the life situation which includes expectations and restrictions related to their social
environment. As life situations might change, personalities might change too. To the extent

61
See, e.g., Gosling (2008).
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that this latter change is controlled and guided by the person, as opposed to being imposed
on her, identity is not disrupted. On the contrary, a ‘strong personality’ is one that exhibits a
certain flexibility so as to adjust to changing conditions. It changes in order to stay the same.

Personal identity – the identity of human persons – thus appears, most distinctively, as the
process of developing and maintaining a personality. This needs to be accurately understood.
The thesis is not that there is some substance-like subject, called person, which engages in a
process of forming a personality as some sort of property possessed by the person-substance.
Instead, according to the process view of the human person, the person herself is this very
process of a self-stabilisation of a personality. Ontologically speaking, a person does not ‘have’
a personality but it ‘is’ one; and being a personality means constantly creating a personality.
It means to become who one is. This process of becoming who one is, as already indicated, is
deeply interactive. Most importantly it involves the interaction with other people. There is no
personality that is not situated in some social environment. Even so-called asocial
personalities are the result of, and engage in, social interactions – interactions, however, that
conflict with widely shared norms and values of the social group the person in question
belongs to.

Personal identity and biological identity are strictly isomorphic with respect to their
interactive-processual character. This includes the specific dialectical relationship between
identity and change: personal identity in the sense of maintaining a personality over time is
an identity despite change insofar as change which would undermine its stability is being
successfully suppressed; but it is equally an identity by virtue of change insofar as it not only
emerges, as a higher order process, from multifarious interaction processes, but also
deliberately makes use of change for the purpose of its self-maintenance. This fragile balance
between identity and change in the social sphere is all too characteristic of human persons’
lives and one of the biggest challenges they face.

4. Conclusions

What are human persons and how do they exist? I have argued that we should answer this
question in terms of a process view of the human person rather than in terms of the substance
view that has dominated Western philosophy. Persons, people like you and me, are not

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substances – neither in the traditional sense of a ‘substance’ as a discrete particular whose

identity is determined by a certain immutable set of intrinsic characteristics, nor in the sense
of a bundle of unchanging atomic things of a certain kind. It is not true that change is either
peripheral or detrimental to our existence; instead, being dynamical living systems, we are
required to change continuously and at all levels of organisation so as to maintain stability
over time, namely, in the first place, through an on-going interaction with the environment in
which we are embedded. Human persons are processes: organised and stabilised higher-
order processes, consisting of complexes of interactive processes of various kinds and as such
deeply dependent for their existence and persistence on, and intertwined with, surrounding
processes.

The claim that human persons are processes entails a distinctive answer to the second part
of the above question: human persons exist by maintaining themselves. There is no person
beyond the ‘personal’ process of self-maintenance: to be a person means to perpetuate
oneself as the same person-process within a sea of processes, which implies that all ‘personal’
characters of a person, i.e., all characteristic qualities instantiated by a person over time, are
the effect of this process. ‘The person’s essence lies in her existence’, to quote Heidegger
again. This is opposed to the substance ontological view, according to which what a person is
can be discerned independently of whether or how a person exists, with the further
implication that there is not much interesting to say about a person’s existence. Nothing could
be farther from the truth. We completely miss what human persons are if abstracting away
from their specific processual mode of existence.

I have further argued that the process view of the human person follows naturally from an
appreciation of the biological nature of human persons. However, I have also made clear that
one has to avoid one-sided biologistic approaches just as one-sided mentalistic views. The
processual animalism that I envisage and whose essential elements I have outlined here
presupposes a holistic understanding of biological life as encompassing cognitive abilities and
processes. This is in line with embodied cognition approaches, such as enactivism. Human
persons ‘enact’ their identity through time through various processes of interaction, reaching
from the basic biological processes constitutive of any organism’s biological identity to the
sophisticated and possibly specifically ‘personal’ processes of social interaction, the narrative
construction of biographies and the inter-active shaping of personalities.
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I have presented here the process view of the human person as a radical alternative to the
substance view of the person which, in various metamorphoses, has been dominating
thinking about persons in Western metaphysics. However, one might wonder if the difference
between these two views actually is as deep as suggested. In particular (neo-) Aristotelian and
(neo-) Scholastic versions of the substance view of the human person appear to share
important features with the version of a process view of the human person advocated in this
book chapter. First, they are, by endorsing hylomorphism, programmatically both anti-dualist
and anti-monist. Matter and form, i.e., body and soul in the case of animate substances, are
supposed to form a genuine unity so as to constitute an individual substance.62 Second,
proponents of Aristotelian substance ontology typically stress the reality and importance of
change, especially as occurring in the form of actions which are performed by substances
(biting, swimming, thinking) and which are taken to demonstrate what these substances are
(dogs, fish, persons).63 David Wiggins even interprets the ‘form’ of living substance as a
“principle of activity that sustains the stability and persistence of the sort of organism in
question”,64 arguing on this basis that a radical redescription of biological phenomena, or
even reality as a whole, in terms of process ontology is not needed.65

I am happy to concede that Aristotelian-style substance ontology has significantly more space
for change and activity than other versions of substance ontology have. However, I want to
refute the suspicion that human persons, according to the process view that I endorse, are
actually (Aristotelian) substances that are merely ‘dressed up’ as processes. Without delving
too far into the abysses of the exegesis of Aristotle, one has to bear in mind that substances,
according to Aristotle, while being capable of undergoing and engaging in change, e.g.,
through actions, yet do not need to change or act in order to keep existing. A substance can
happily sit there without ‘doing anything’. This is because the ‘form’ of any substance is
supposed to be unchanging, i.e., static. The form – as a supposed ‘principle of activity’ –

62
This entails that ‘matter’ and ‘form’ must not be understood as (proper) parts of a substance, as rightly
emphasised by Marmodoro (2013) against Koslicki (2006).
63
Runggaldier (2008) refers to the Scholastic motto operatio demonstrat substantiam in this context.
64
Wiggins (2016), 272.
65
See Wiggins (2016), especially 280.

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determines in what sort of activities a substance can engage, but it is not itself the result of
activities, in which case it could possibly change over time.66

Unlike Aristotle we now know that there are no eternal natural kinds. Species evolve,
constantly adapting to changing environmental conditions. Any stability to be observed in the
biological domain, at whatever level of organisation, is the transient result of countless
processes that are intricately intertwined. Assuming, as we should, that human persons are
organisms, and that there is a continuity between life and higher cognitive functions, we need
not be surprised to encounter the same characteristic interplay between identity and change
in the phenomenology of personal life.

As I have explained, one of the characteristic symptoms of the processual constitution of

personal identity is that we do not start out as persons but rather become persons through
interactions with other persons. While I feel sympathetic to hylomorphism insofar as it offers
an alternative to dualist as well as to one-sided monist (mentalistic or biologistic) views of the
human person,67 I want to emphasise that we are not born with a ‘rational soul’ that endows
us with the intellectual skills characteristic of human persons. Rationality, personhood,
personality are not, as it looks in hylomorphist theories, a personal possession, inherent in
the person as some primitive fact that evades empirical explanation.68 Instead, they flow from
processes of inter-personal interaction. This underlines the thesis defended here that the
common picture of a human person as a well-demarcated, ontologically independent
individual for the identity of which change is secondary (or even a threat) is wrong. Human
persons are entities for the identity of which change is essential, and which are genuinely in
touch with other people. Human persons, in other words, are processes rather than
substances.

66
Thus the scholastics also claimed operari sequitur esse (as mentioned in Rescher (1996), 43), which indicates
the more epistemic rather than ontological character of the principle operatio demonstrat substantiam.
67
See also Runggaldier (2006).
68
Hylomorphism, like modern embodied cognition approaches, interprets cognitive or mental functions as vital
functions of organisms. However, apart from the fact that Aristotle grants only humans a ‘rational soul’ (whose
active part, the νοῦς ποίήτικος, is also taken to be separable from the body), the assumption of such a rational
soul provides only a top-down explanation of why humans possess certain intellectual skills (they possess these
skills because they possess a rational soul). Embodied cognition approaches, in contrast, offer bottom-up
explanations of cognition, including higher cognitive skills, as arising from the specific organisation of living
systems.
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Acknowledgements

This book chapter was funded by the European Research Council, grant agreement number
324186 (“A Process Ontology for Contemporary Biology”, grant holder: John Dupré). It is
based on a paper presented in three public talks at the Ludwig Maximilian University in
Munich on 18th April 2016 (as part of the lecture series “What are Persons and how do they
exist?”, funded by the DFG research network “Ontologies of Personal Identity”), at the
Leopold Franzen University in Innsbruck on 20th April 2016 and at the University of Exeter on
13th June 2016. I would like to thank the organisers, Thomas Buchheim and Jörg Noller
(Munich), Bruno Niederbacher (Innsbruck) and John Dupré (Exeter) for inviting me and the
audiences for helpful discussions. I am also grateful to John Dupré and Edmund Runggaldier
for helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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