Christology and Heresy 3 – The basic philosophical issue (JT)

In the last post, I classified Monophysitism, Chalcedonianism, and Nestorianism. All three of these must grapple with a basic philosophical issue, namely this: a complete indvidual human nature brings along with it everything required for being a discrete human person.

Note that ‘individual human nature’ does not mean the humanity in the human in question (readers of scholastic philosophy are often tempted to think that). Rather, it means the humanity plus any individuating features, whatever they might be (a haecceity, a unique collection of accidents, or whatever). That is, an individual human nature is whatever it is that makes an individual human the particular human that it is.

For instance, if some x has a complete individual human nature, then one might say that x has the relevant kind of organic body, the ability to take in and process nutrients, grow, be sentient, think and love, and so on, and all of these things are what being a particular human consists in.

However, these also seem to be the very things that being a particular human person consists in too. After all, it is hard to imagine a human person without the relevant kind of organic body, the ability to process nutrients, be sentient, think and love, and so forth. To be all these things is just what it means to be a particular human person.

So on the face of it, it looks as if being an individual human is the very same as being an individual human person. That is, if one has a complete individual human nature, then they have everything needed to be a discrete human person too. Or, to put it another way, an individual human is completely indiscernible from the corresponding individual human person.