Publication Information: Book Title: Latin American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Man, Values, and the Search for Philosophical Identity. Contributors: Jorge J. E. Gracia - editor. Publisher: Prometheus Books. Place of Publication: Amherst, NY. Publication Year: 1986.

Excerpt, Antonio Caso, "The Human Person and the Totalitarian State," pp.43-47

BOOK 
Contents 
 Preface  9  
 Introduction  13  
 PART ONE: MAN   Introduction  27  
 ANTONIO CASO  41  
 The Human Person and the Totalitarian State  43  
 Person, Individual, Thing  43  
 Person and Culture  45  
 Existence as Economy, Disinterest, and Charity  48  
 Life as Economy  48  
 Art as Disinterest  49  
 Existence as Charity  50  

The Human Person and the Totalitarian State * 
PERSON, INDIVIDUAL, THING 
There are three levels of being: thing, individual, and person. What are the differentiating attributes of each level of being? . . . Thing is being without unity. If a thing is broken, nothing in it has died. Things are inevitably associated with this divisibility. 
This is the region, the realm of the physical, where life does not exist. Things do not have life, therefore they can be divided without changing their intrinsic nature. They continue to be things. Dividing them does not modify their nature. 
If one moves from this lower level of being to that immediately above it, a fundamental difference appears that mediates between the physical world and the realm of organic nature. When things are divided, we still have things, but when we come into contact with life, existence is endowed with profoundly different properties. 
The being gifted with life is called an "individual." By its structure, the individual embodies something essentially different from the nature of things. Individual means what cannot be divided. The idea of indivisibility lies in the very name of an organic being. Individuality can be more or less energetic, but the living being is always indivisible, always individual, always assuming in its own substance a level of being superior to the thing. This superiority is indivisibility. 
Among the individuals endowed with life, there are also hierarchical differences, differences in the intonation of the vital potential. Within the bound of both natural realms, plant and animal, individuality does not reflect the lively differentiation that it takes on in the forms that are superior to those of plants and animals. 
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* 	From Antonio Caso, La persona humana y el Estado totalitario ( Mexico: UNAM, 1941), 187-90, 198ff. 	
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The most perfect form of individuality is the animal organism. Man is an animal organism, the most perfected of all organisms. However, his obvious superiority does not stem from his biological nature, but from his intellectual and moral superiority. Man is a microcosm; in him individuality surpasses physical nature, but an additional nature is also present that cannot be reduced to pure individuality. Man is individual, an admirable biological individual, but he is more than that, he is a person. 
The biological individual takes on the characteristics of substantial unity, identity, and continuity. Only man, however, plays the role of a social being, therefore he is referred to as a person, which means specifically to play a role, as it is played by actors in the theater. In this same way, man, as a social unit, inevitably plays a role in history. 
What other being in the world is capable, as is the human being, of exercising and fulfilling a social function? Only man conceives the ideal, he alone is capable of making his spiritual faculties, such as reason, science, and feeling, work in support of those ideas that the will affirms. And what is an ideal but a firmly cherished idea? 
The purely psychical nature of man is not sufficient for defining the concept of the person. Over and above the psychical is the spiritual. Man is not only a psychical being, he is also a spiritual being. He is a "creator of values," as Nietzsche expressed it so magnificently. 
Human spirituality cannot be achieved in the isolation of the psyche. That is why Aristotle defined man as "the political animal." So-called animal societies are similar to an individual, not to a person. In them, each of the component beings performs a constant function, an activity repeated tenaciously. There is a stereotyped, organic division of labor. A beehive is an individual that reduces each of the individuals within it to the law of the hive. 
The error of individualism and the error of socialism are very much alike because in their extreme forms both the social theories and the philosophical creeds ignore the superior nature of the human being, they ignore the quality of his spiritual reality. 
Individualism and communism lower the dignity of the person. Person and culture, however, are concomitant, for the person requires a society for his development. Society, in turn, needs the person for its very being. The spirit flourishes above life, in the same way that life flourishes above physical nature. 
At issue are the various levels of existence. The highest level is personality. In scholasticism every substance complete in itself but lacking reason is called a supposit. The etymology of the word refers to "what is underneath." The person is not what is underneath, but what is above all. Human personality, in Dante, Newton, and Plato, is the highest level of being. The greatest powers in history, the most famous nations, as well as the cities of the most refined culture, such as Athens, Florence, or Paris, 
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have personality. However, great as they may be, their spirituality cannot be compared with that found in the work of such geniuses as Plato, Dante, or Newton. The human person is the highest level of being. . . . 
PERSON AND CULTURE 
1 
Person is a sui generis essence that rests on the mode of being characteristic of each subject and is also unique in its being. Personality then is the world of irreducible spiritual being. The universal in personality is its unsubstitutability, the uniqueness of its existence. Each actualization of personhood is singularly unique. . . . 
2 
The greatest error of contemporary civilization is the lack of respect for the human person, its preeminent attention to groups, to sums, to the anonymous, the collective, and the common. . . . If man sacrifices himself to the standards of contemporary civilization, his destiny, his sense of humanity shall have been lost forever. Humanity and personality are the proper and genuine dimensions of the species in its historical development. The recognition of the personality of human beings obliges society to accept their real inequality rather than an impossible uniformity. . . . 
3 
We are engaged in a new enterprise: personalism. We would like that each one be recognized for what he is: a human person. The idea of person requires respect because it implies respect. Respect must be the first virtue to emerge from the accumulation of evils characteristic of contemporary war. In this day we are referred to as human beings, as biological unities. One hears talk of the "masses"; everything is anonymous, collective, gregarious, unreal. The human person, the exquisite work of individual and social culture, cannot interact with the disregard for the unconquerable spiritual reality of its own nature. . . . 
4 
Every person is such to the degree that it is itself and not another, for personality is a sui generis essence that rests on the mode of being characteristic of each individual, that is unique in its being. . . . What is char- 
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acteristic and unique cannot be replaced, for this would imply a contradiction. Things are exchanged, individuals are substituted, but persons cannot be replaced. . . . Contemporary civilization works against human essence, against personality. This civilization thinks in terms of groups or sums rather than in terms of real, personal subjects who cannot be equated with each other. . . . 
5 
It is proper for man to achieve his essence gradually and the essence proper to us is the personality that creates values. Being is not moral or juridical reason. To exist is to be contingent and perishable. Individuals and communities are contingent and perishable! To be valuable, however, is what must be stressed. For which is of more value, the individual or the community? Neither the individual nor the community, but the society based on justice, that is, the moral union of men who respect values. The community that tyrannizes man forgets that we men are persons and not "biological units," we are "spiritual centers of cultured action." The individual who opposes the community, conceiving himself as absolute reality, forgets that above the individuality nurtured on egoism is human culture that is always a synthesis of values. Values were not elaborated by the individual or the community, rather they were reflected by the historical continuity of generations and the moral solidarity of peoples. Inevitably, culture is tradition and solidarity. Solidarity is impossible without tradition and tradition is impossible without solidarity. . . . 
6 
Culture is the continuing work of human societies. Culture, however, implies a synthesis of values, and values are constant relationships reflected in thought and action. Further, value or religious experience can never be postponed. In order for man's social life to take on full meaning, value must be the predominating influence in human consciousness. The evil of this century is to postpone the holy because of the profane, believing that man can save himself and does save himself. This is the error and the hidden sophistry of contemporary social and political movements. Humanity has forgotten love. It no longer thinks of works of charity, but of works of egoism. Social distribution is the universal preoccupation, because love, which would give all if it were asked, is confused in the consciousness of our contemporaries. Spengler says "Since contemporary man does not know how to renounce, he aspires to distribute." . . . 
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7 
If personality is not integrated by means of a cultured knowledge that recovers humanism, social endeavor remains incomplete. Only persons deserve to be saved. Things are not saved. Thus, in order to recover the knowledge of salvation, it must be grounded in the cultural integration of personality. Without salvation as its purpose, without God, culture cannot be organized with reference to its essential harmony. God is the kingdom of ends and the center of values. . . . 
8 
Man is not a factum, rather he is the possible direction of a process, and at the same time a task, an eternally luminous goal that hovers above natural man. Man is rebirth. Humanism is more true than man, because man exists only as a process, as humanization. Man is reborn and then gives birth to himself, but he is not merely repetition for he humanizes himself and becomes more of a man. The rebirth of man constitutes his essence. We are not a factum but a development, a coming to be, a perennial process; we die and are reborn in the episodes of history. 
9 
We long to return to the true self, metaphysically as well as morally. The values of being have been obscured. Man lives leaning toward the outside, away from himself, tending toward the external. This is evil, therefore good should result from an inverse action, with people turning toward themselves. They must be taught to examine the awareness they have forgotten. The public plaza cannot be one's inner dwelling. To return to the inner dwellings, to rejoice in the pleasure of one's own self, to feel one is the work and agent of one's own will, capable of one's own substantivity. . . . 
10 
The possibility of being, of developing as a man, of putting essence in harmony with existence can be destroyed by a corrupt, unjust, useless social environment. One must recover the being of the human person in the face of the conditions of contemporary life. Our concern is for being, which we explore along the pathways of contemporary philosophy, because the human person finds a model only in joint action with others. 
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