These limitations, however, are found not only in Dilthey and Bergson but in all the 'personalitic' movements to which they have given direction and in every tendency towards a philosophical anthropology. The phenomenological Interpretation of personality is in principle more radical and more transparent; but the question of the Being of Dasein has a dimension which this too fails to enter. No matter how much Husserlii and Scheler may differ in their respective inquiries, in their methods of conducting them, and in their orientations towards the world as a whole, they are fully in agreement on the negative side of their Interpretations of personality. The question of 'personal Being' itself is one which they no longer raise. We have chosen Scheler's Interpretation as an example, not only because it is accessible in print,iii but because he emphasizes personal Being explicitly as such, and tries to determine its character by defining the specific Being of acts as contrasted with anything 'psychical'. For Scheler, the person is never to be thought of as a Thing or a substance; the person 'is rather the unity of living-through [Er-lebens] which is immediately experienced in and with our Experiences—not a Thing merely thought of behind and outside what is immediately Experienced';iv The person is no Thinglike and substantial Being. Nor can the Being of a person be entirely absorbed in being a subject of rational acts which follow certain laws.
The person is not a Thing, not a substance, not an object. Here Scheler is emphasizing what Husserlv suggests when he insists that the unity of [48] the person must have a Constitution essentially different from that required for the unity of Things of Nature.1 What Scheler says of the person, he applies to acts as well: 'But an act is never also an object; for it is essential to the Being of acts that they are Experienced only in their performance itself and given in reflection.'vi Acts are something non-psychical. Essentially the person exists only in the performance of intentional acts, and is therefore essentially not an object. Any psychical Objectification of acts, and hence any way of taking them as something psychical, is tantamount to depersonalization. A person is in any case given as a performer of intentional acts which are bound together by the unity of a meaning. Thus psychical Being has nothing to do with personal Being. Acts get performed; the person is a performer of acts. What, however, is the ontological meaning of 'performance'? How is the kind of Being which belongs to a person to be ascertained ontologically in a positive way? But the critical question cannot stop here. It must face the Being of the whole man, who is customarily taken as a unity of body, soul, and spirit. In their turn "body", "soul", and "spirit" may designate phenomenal domains which can be detached as themes for definite investigations; within certain limits their ontological indefiniteness may not be important.
1 '... wenn er fur die Einheit der Person eine wesentlich andere Konstitution fordert als für die der Naturdinge.' The second 'der' appears in the later editions only.