THE METAPHYSICS OF PERSONALITY
TOGETHER with the concept of value and the Ought, that of personal being is the central concept of ethics. It became prominent in the problem of the positive Ought-to-Be, as every reaching forth of values out of the ideal realm into the actual depends upon the part played by the subject. Among all real entities only the subject has the power of mediation. Consciousness, knowledge—of the world as well as of values (“reason”)—activity, Will, self-determination, purposive activity, and prevision and predestination, which are involved in such activity, all these are elements of this power of the subject.
But it was further shown that the subject in this sense is something more than a subject; he is a person. He is characterized not only by the existence of such acts, but also by a specific quality of value and disvalue, which adheres to them and only to them. He is no longer a mere ontological entity, he is also an axiological entity. The subject is a person in so far as he is, in his transcendent acts—that is, in his conduct—a carrier of moral values and disvalues.
To this extent a personal entity may be distinguished purely by the ethical phenomenon. However metaphysical this delineation in itself may be, however little the essence of personality—and its peculiar mediation between values and actuality—may be discerned from it, the boundary of facts given in the ethical phenomenon has not been overstepped. To this extent the metaphysic of personality lies still within the nature of what is demonstrable and nothing in any way speculative has been added to it. It contains a critical minimum of metaphysics.
Such unavoidably metaphysical factors, however, have in them something seductive for philosophical thought. They easily rob it of critical moderation; they exercise a kind of impulsion towards the removal of limits even in the case of quite modest interpretations. The inducement to explain the world in terms of personality, to personalize the world, has its root in the problem of the personal entity.
Since ancient times, this view of the world has been widely held. The Stoic doctrine of the Logos, although itself not yet properly personalistic, prepared the way for it and created its categories. Here the concept of a world-spirit had its immediate predecessor—in Neo-Platonism it was identified with the voυς of Aristotl here arose the concept of that συμπáθєια, which, as the common feeling of finite beings for one another, permeates the cosmic whole and binds it into the unity of a collective spiritual entity. And here also was developed the view that the finite spirit (man) is embedded in a universal infinite spirit, the divinity—a thought which already contains in a nutshell the ordered gradation of spiritual units from man upwards to Godhead.
Personalistic metaphysics may be of different origins. Something of it lurks in every theistic view of the world. But in theism its basis is not ethical but religious. Ethics cannot involve itself in any speculative philosophy of religion, so long as the latter does not set up tenets contrary to ethics. But the case is different when such speculation thinks it can base itself on the ethical nature of personality, and when a universal cosmic personalism is derived from the unavoidable metaphysic of the person as a moral being. Then ethics must take sides. For in the tenability of such a derivation its own foundations are at stake.
Among contemporary theories, the chief example of such a personalism based on ethics is furnished by the very theory to which the investigation of values owes its greatest advancement—the ethics of Scheler. With his view we must necessarily come to grips just at the very point where, in fundamental matters, we are at one with him.
(b) SCHELER’S DOCTRINE OF PERSON AND ACT
His theory starts from the position that person and act belong indissolubly together, that the two are not in consciousness, not in the “ego,” that neither is an object of psychological reflection and that neither appears in “experience.” “A person is not an empty starting-point of acts, but is a concrete being, without which any talk about acts never touches the full and adequate essence of any act.” The person is not something behind or above the acts, but is already contained in them; he is their real unity, inseparable from their essence. And this unity is concrete, it subsists “for acts of every possible variety.” It is presupposed as the consummating essence of every single act. In the unity of this consummation the acts are fundamentally joined. An isolated act is a psychological abstraction. In actuality—and the consummation of an act is its actuality—there is no isolation.
Phenomenologically, these propositions embrace the essence of a person—in distinction, on the one side, from a thing, and, on the other, from a subject. But they do not, of course, touch the positive essence of personality. All appearances, contents, functions of consciousness, so far as they can be psychologically conceived, do not coincide with acts and certainly not with their concrete unity in execution. As the genuine act is only in its fulfilment, so the person is only in the unity of the fulfilment and therefore not in any, even an inner, manifestation, nor in any experience.
Here an absolute limit is set to psychological understanding. There is no proper psychology of the person. Indeed, there is not even a psychology of acts. The essence of remembering, expecting, hoping, loving, eludes reflection directed upon the facts of consciousness. If consciousness is the field of psychological objectivity, the proposition must hold good that acts have a superconscious existence. And if in regard to them there is no question as to any other than this psychological objectivity, the further proposition must also hold good, that, in general, acts are not objects and cannot be given in any objective presentation. The same then holds naturally in a higher degree of their consummating unit—the person.
Scheler draws this latter inference. According to him, the person, because he “exists and lives only in the fulfilment of intentional acts,” is, in his essence, not an object. We may very well have an inner experience of the ego and its functions, but not of the person and his acts. In this the presupposition always is that inner experience in the psychological sense is the only kind of knowledge about anything that is here under question.
But precisely this presupposition may be disputed. If there were no possibility of a presentation of acts and persons as objects, ethics would itself be an impossibility. For man as a person is the object of ethics. And his actively transcendent acts (disposition, will, conduct) are just what is subjected to valuational judgments, they are what constitute the object of the judgment of value. Ethics takes as its object what Scheler says is incapable of becoming an object. The attitude of ethics is in this not a fictitious one, not, as it were, one which is first set up by philosophical theory; rather does ethics take over this attitude from concrete moral life itself. The evaluating attitude towards actions and acting persons is a thoroughly solid one, characteristic of man in general. Indeed, one might say it is the primal attitude, infinitely more natural and general than psychological reflection and certainly at least just as natively original as the attitude towards things. For the unsophisticated man, the latter is always conditioned by his attitude towards persons; for in life persons are always the more actual.
But such a primitive attitude towards persons is thoroughly objective. However essentially different it may be from the attitude towards things and the relations of things, it is in its objectivity in no respect different. The difference between ontological and axiological, between theoretical and practical reference, stands on this side of all conceivable limits of objectivity in general. All reference is to a something referred to; and all intuition or immediacy is an intuition or an immediacy of objects. That those acts which here constitute the object are themselves in turn acts referring to something and therefore on their side have objects to which they are directed, does not in the least prevent them from being themselves objects. There are acts sui generis, which are referentially directed to acts. And the phenomenon of moral consciousness consists precisely in this, that there are such acts.
(c) ACTS AND PERSONS AS OBJECTS
This phenomenon, as was said, is an elemental one, not to be traced back to other phenomena. Whether one can explain it by the help of any theory may be regarded as questionable. But its existence and its phenomenological describability are indisputable. The description of it would alone fill a whole chapter. Here it is cited only as evidence for the following facts of the moral life.
Man, understood in the sense of a natural presentation of him, discovers himself as a person among persons. He belongs to a world of persons. Anyone who enters into the domain of his personal life is primarily, as such, presented intuitively to him. Not by reflection does he first come upon the fact that there is another person, but from the outset he sees himself placed in a living actional relation with the person, which is at the same time a relation of disposition, conduct and evaluation. Thus for him every “other man” is an immediate object of conduct, inward and outward; and he sees that every other man in the same way makes him himself an object of conduct, irrespective of whether this conduct be merely inward or of a kind that shows itself in actions.
For one another, persons are from beginning to end embedded in a communal world of real objects. They share the same mode of reality with things and the relations of things. That they do not exist except in the fulfilment of acts makes no difference. For the acts themselves share the same reality with events of every kind. But it inheres in the essence of the real in general, to be a possible object of knowledge. Whether in fact there is a knowledge which grasps a specific reality depends upon other conditions. In itself it might be that there were no knowledge of persons because no real knower was adjusted towards persons as objects. But such a personalistic agnosticism does not tally with the facts. We have a consciousness of persons, and indeed one as elemental as of things—an immediate knowledge that these beings surrounding us do not stand there, as things do, indifferent to us, but in every situation of life take up an attitude towards us, turn away from us or recognize us, bear us ill-will or love us. Precisely in the fulfilment of such acts consists the personal element in them, and it is exactly these acts of taking sides for or against, of which we have an immediate consciousness—a consciousness which may be deceived like any other consciousness of an object, but which exists in even the most simple-minded.
We have a primary perception of other persons, it is of the most vivid, concrete and individualized kind, a knowledge of the acts of inner preference on the part of other persons; chiefly of acts which are directed towards ourselves, but also of acts which are directed towards others than ourselves. This knowledge has nothing to do with psychological reflection, nor is it essentially furthered by psychological knowledge when such is added to it. It is something immediate and in its immediacy supremely puzzling. For, however much it may be conditioned by external experience and thoughtful reflection, it can never be resolved into these as its elements. Besides this, there is contained in it a direct attitude of feeling for the actional consummation of another person—that is, for the peculiarly personal element in him.
In this sense persons and genuine personal acts are in fact objects. Persons, as well as things, are objects. The difference between person and thing has no bearing on the matter. Persons are no more transcendent than things. Whatever is real equally transcends the subject who knows it, is equally independent of him, equally self-existent. Persons may be knowable in a more limited sense than things; but, like things, they are objects of possible knowledge.
Nor has this gradation anything to do with the opposition of the outer and inner worlds. For every person, every other person belongs to the outer world; and, once more, every person is in himself an inner world, he is the subject for which other persons are objects. The whole ontological interpenetration of inner and outer worlds is already presupposed here. It is a condition of the mode of existence for personal beings.
(d) PERSONALITY AND SUBJECTIVITY, “I” AND “THOU”
But persons are, of course, objects of a different kind. This difference does not affect their modality and proper objectivity; but it does, of course, affect their structures and their meta physical essence. Persons are not chiefly objects of knowledge, but of interest, of disposition and action. And they are so for this reason, that they themselves are, likewise, beings who are interested in others. They are interwoven into another texture than that of cognitive relationship. The correlation of subject and object does not exhaust their concrete connection with life. To be sure, things also are woven into the many-sided context, but always in one aspect only. An attitude can be taken towards them, but they themselves take no attitude. For this reason the attitude towards them is different. They are not objects of disposition and action, they are only means in the connection of possible actions. Actional intentions pass beyond them to persons. Ethical or axiological consideration applies only indirectly to them. But to persons and acts it applies directly.
The two correlations “person and thing” and “subject and object” do not coincide, but are not indifferent to each other; they do not simply overlap each other, like spatial dimensions. For things are never subjects, but objects may very well be persons. Things are not necessarily on this account objects (to a subject), they can—just like persons—be trans-objective, indeed trans-intelligible. Everything real is fundamentally neutral concerning the limits of its objectification or capability of being objectified. But persons are necessarily subjects of possible objectification. For acts, in the unitary achievement of which personality consists, are nothing but transcendent acts; they are directed to objects, and herein they carry in themselves the centrality of the subject. None the less subjectivity and personality are fundamentally different. One and the same entity, in which subject and person coalesce, is one thing as subject and another as person. As subject he is a purely ontological entity and stands over against the real external world which is in part objectified. But, as a person, he is at the same time an axiological being; in his transcendent acts he is at the same time the carrier of specific values and disvalues which are peculiar only to him. But this distinguishes him from the thing with which, ontologically, he shares reality, and, gnoseologically, shares the peculiarity of being an object of knowledge.
A person stands in a twofold relationship—to the world of things on the one side, and the world of persons on the other. In the former, as a “self,” he stands over against the “not-self,” in the latter as “I” over against “Thou.”
It is a widespread psychological error to refer the correlation of I and Thou to the subject. Rather is it the peculiar relationship existing only among persons, which above all other relations everyday speech indicates by the personal pronouns. I and Not-I constitute a gnoseological, and indirectly also a psychological, contrast: I and Thou a purely ethical contrast. This subsists only among act-fulfilling, personal beings, and is really present only in the execution of transcendent acts directed by a person to a person. It is a distortion of this relation, in itself so simple, when Scheler affirms that an “I” can neither act nor take a walk. Only an “I” can do either. Naturally not as a subject—a subject never acts nor takes a walk—but surely as a person. The terminology which applies the word “I” to the subject is linguistically forced and entirely arbitrary. Language says “I act,” and “I take a walk.” Here the personal sense of the “I” is clear. And in so far as the speech, disposition and conduct of an “I” are necessarily directed to a “Thou,” so the same thing which holds good of the “first person” necessarily holds good of the “second person.”
The error becomes still more serious if with Scheler one separates the essence of the person from that of the subject and makes it independent. The failure to appreciate the personal significance of the concept “I” intensifies the evil. The person, if taken out of the correlation of I and Thou—in which alone we know him—becomes transformed into something absolute which is no longer referred back, is no longer relative to anything at all. “God, for instance, can be a person but not an I, since for him there is neither a Thou nor an external world.” Such an argument betrays its untenability in this, that it finds itself at home in what is most unknown and most impenetrable (in what is never an object of definite thought) and carries over to what is known and alone is given that which it assumes to behold in the most unknown. We do not know whether such a personal Being exists or even can exist—a person not in the presence of a second and similar person and not confronted by an actual world. Just as little as we may on this account deny his possibility, so little may we assume it. And even if there be such a Being, nothing follows as to the essence of personality as such. For even this may have been utterly transformed in him.
If God be a person—in the only meaning of the word accessible to us and given in the phenomenon—he must also be a subject. For a person is a fulfiller of acts; and the existence of acts consists in their execution. But the acts, which alone are under consideration, are transcendent acts; they are directed towards persons as objects and thereby they mark their fulfiller as a subject. As a categorial form, a subject is a presupposition of a person. Personality is the higher and therefore the more fully conditioned; but the subject is the lower, and therefore the conditioning, form. In the subject the ethical carriership of values is lacking; the subject, as such, is not a fulfiller of acts ethically relevant.
In itself a subject might exist even without personality: a purely mirroring, representing entity, without any sensing of values, any disposition, any preferences. We do not know of such a being, and have no right to assume its existence; but it is conceivable without inner contradiction; philosophically it has often been constructed from the point of view of epistemology, in order, then, to lead in theory a shadow-like existence incapable equally of being confirmed or denied. But the converse, a personal being without subjectivity, is in any case not possible. It is conceivable only by stripping both concepts of their fulness of content and by detaching them outwardly and abstracting them from each other. But if one means the personal being in its concreteness, as a unity and as a fulfiller of transcendent acts directed towards persons, one immediately sees that one has presupposed in it the transcendent relation “subject-object.” A person who is not a subject is an empty abstraction.
Personality exists only on a basis of subjectivity, just as subjectivity exists only on a basis of organic life, and life only on a basis of the whole subordinate uniformity of nature. This categorial gradation is not reversible. Nor does it mean a bringing-forth of the higher out of the lower, but only that the higher is conditioned by the lower. The novelty of the higher form is autonomous as compared with the lower, it introduces new uniformities and formations which are not in any way contained in the lower. But it cannot exist without them. It has free play only “upon them,” it cannot displace or nullify its own basis. The higher category is always the weaker, the more dependent—in spite of its autonomy; the lower is the stronger, it cannot be ever again destroyed by any power—in spite of its paucity of content and indefiniteness of outline. For the higher form it is only material, but it is neces sary material. Without it the higher remains an abstraction. Every inversion of this categorial law—however plausibly it can be done by abstraction from the specific content of the forms—is a fundamental misunderstanding of the metaphysical facts, a distortion of the problem, a falsification of the given coherence of phenomena, an empty play with thoughts. And even if one should by such sport arrive at desired results, the thing desired would not on that account have been demonstrated to be true. The result would have crept in surreptitiously.
Scheler’s further thesis concerns the correlation of person and world. According to him a world is always relative to a person whose world it is; it is “only a concrete world and only as the world of a Person.” Consequently, an individual world corresponds to an individual person. And, again, in such a world only individual truth is valid; for instance, metaphysical truth itself must have for every person a different content, “since the content of cosmic existence itself is for every person a different one.” Therefore absolute truth also can be only “personal”; and the fact that it is so is grounded not in the nature of truth but in the nature of existence. As for the person, he does not belong to the world, he is not part of it, he for ever remains over against it.
If one takes this proposition exactly in the connection in which it stands, it has a distinctive merit. For it is directed against the assumption of a “transcendental reason,” a “consciousness in general”, a “universal” to which the world is said to be relative. Such an assumption is, of course, unfounded, particularly if one means to base the super-personal unity of the world upon it. But the mistake lies not in the impersonality of the world-correlate, but in its subjectivity; and ultimately in the presupposition that in general the world is relative to a correlate. For such a relativity permits in no way of being demonstrated ontologically. There exists no phenomenon which corresponds to it.
But this latter consideration turns against Scheler’s proposition itself. In its polemical meaning this is far from being exhausted. It is throughout a positive, highly metaphysical proposition. Remarkably enough there is at work here a motive inspired by that very idealism which Scheler is attacking. It is only transformed from the transcendental-subjectivistic scheme to one which is equally a transcendental-personalistic scheme; a shifting which is very slight, since personality presupposes subjectivity. Nor is the inference lacking which directly follows from it—namely, that there is a transcendental person, the inference that there is an “infinite and perfect spiritual person” to which alone the proposition was directed.
Above all: A world, concrete, intuited, given, can of course only be the world of a person, must be “relative” to that person, and all truth valid in regard to it must necessarily be a “personal truth.” But it does not inhere in the nature of the world simply as existent, to be either concrete and intuited or to be given. Its existence and that of all things in it has its mark in this, that it subsists independently of any discernment of it or any presentation of it; indeed, there is no single phenomenon of discernment and objectiveness, in which the self-existence of the thing discerned and given is not involved. Every kind of insight—be it experience or aprioristic discernment, emotional certainty (as in the sensing of value) or inference according to the understanding—carries in it this index of the self-existence of its object as an essential factor; and only so far as it bears this index in itself does it at all manifest the specific character of an insight. It regards its object as something self-existent. That a real self-existence corresponds to the self-existence which is implied may of course be questioned, but only in the sense of universal scepticism, or of a universal subjectivism. But neither of these corresponds in any way to Scheler’s “relativity to a person.” Each is besides a mere assertion in contradiction to fact, an assertion the tenability of which is still to be proved.
The real world exists, even when it is not beheld, even when it is present to no one. Subjects, to which alone it, or rather a part of it, can be presented, themselves emerge only in it, they are entirely embedded in it, they are carried by it. But it itself, as also those parts of it which are observed, exists quite apart from the emergence of a subject. The world and its parts do not stand or fall with their being discerned, with their being objects, but they arise and vanish according to quite differently constructed laws of universal existence—not otherwise than do the subjects who also are embedded in their environment. But this self-existent world is likewise in itself “concrete,” as is every member of it; it is ontologically concreted, independently of any concreteness of a possible intuition or presentation. Concreteness is just as little relative to an experiencing subject, or to a person, as is the texture of life itself, which has incorporated the person into the whole of the cosmic texture. Concreteness is not at all an affair of experience, like beholding and presentation, but is a peculiarity of all ontological reality as such.
If we wish to draw the “world” at all into the realm of ethical investigation, we must accept as true what is true of it ontologically: that it is in no wise a correlate of anything. What is meant by the world is precisely the whole, which plainly embraces all correlations. If we do not wish to describe this whole as the world, we must call it something else; but that would not remove the problem of the cosmos. “The world,” this eternal singular one, is far from being merely the world of things—not to mention the world merely of objects, for even things in their self-existence are indifferent as to whether they be objects for anyone or not—this same world is just as primarily a world of persons; it embraces the real living texture of persons, including their specifically ethical relations; these are just as originally in it as is the universal context of reality in general. If we wanted to banish personal entities from this cosmic context, we should thereby rob them not only of their concrete environment, but even of their reality. For the cosmic context is the context of all reality.
“Person and thing” constitute a relation of opposites within the real world. But the contrast is by no means concerned with existentiality, it is exclusively constitutive, structural, and, besides that, axiological; it is a contrast as regards the carriership of values. It cannot therefore be so extended as to apply to “person and world.” For the “world” is as much a world of persons as of things. Accordingly, it is erroneous not to wish to acknowledge persons to be on a level with things as parts of the world. And whether there also exists a person outside of the world to whom “the world” as a whole could be a correlated thing is beyond human judgment. We know only the phenomenon of persons existing in the world, living in it, entities which will and act, and it is a fundamental phenomenon of such a personal entity—since it exists in the unifying fulfilment of its acts; but its acts, again, presuppose a living context of persons—it can only exist in a world of persons (and things), but can never stand wholly over against the world as a correlate.
And, finally, as for the concept of “personal truth,” it is in a certain sense, of course, correct: namely, as an expression of the scope of transcendent acts on the part of a single person—a realm that is actually most specifically conditioned. What we may rightly call the “personal world” of the individual is always a segment of the self-existent world, and is therefore conditioned by its larger connections, as well as by the special position which the individual person holds towards persons and things.
The segment as such, as well as the special perspectives and objectifications of which it consists for the individual, are of course relative to the person. But the mode of existence of the persons and things themselves, which lie within the segment, is by no means relative to the individual, but is wholly independent, like everything real. For the “personal world,” for the segment as such and for its mode of objectivity, “personal truth,” which exists only for the person, must hold good. But even this sort of validity is not that which pertains to truth as such. Only in an inexact sense is there such a thing as “personal truth”; rightly speaking, it is not truth at all. It is of the essence of the existent, as something determined for all time in itself and unequivocal, that there can be only one, and indeed only an absolute, truth in regard to it. Every other concept of truth is a substitute which does not deserve the name.
Were the fulness of content of the “personal world” a fulness existing only for one person, there would not be, above the relative and personal, an absolute truth; and the orientation of man in the world would sink in a shoreless relativism. But if all forms which are drawn into the orientation are ontologically rooted in the common self-existent world, every personal enclosure of sections and, with it, all discernment, all experience, are something secondary. Above the questionable “personal truth” rises an absolute truth, which for the individual person remains, of course, an Idea, but nevertheless gives the foundation to his insight and his orientation in the world.