the specific being of acts as opposed to everything "psychical." According to Scheler, the person can never be thought of as a thing or a substance. Rather it is "the immediately co-experienced unity of experiencing—not just a thing merely thought behind and outside of what is immediately experienced."4 The person is not a thinglike substantial being. Furthermore, the being of the person cannot consist in being a subject of rational acts that have a certain lawfulness.
The person is not a thing, not a substance, not an object. Here Scheler emphasizes the same thing which Husserl5 is getting at when he requires for the unity of the person a constitution essentially different [48] from that of things of nature. What Scheler says of the person, he applies to· acts as well. "An act is never also an object, for it is the nature of the being of acts only to be experienced in the process itself and given in reflection."6 Acts are nonpsychical. Essentially the person exists only in carrying out intentional acts, and is thus essentially not an object. Every psychical objectification, and thus every comprehension of acts as something psychical, is identical vVith depersonalization. In any case, the person is given as the agent of intentional acts which are connected by the unity of a meaning. Thus psychical being has nothing to do with being a person. Acts are carried out, the person carries them out. But what is the ontological meaning of "carrying out," how is the kind of being of the person to be defined in an ontologically positive way? But the critical question cannot stop at this. The question is about the being of the whole human being, whom one is accustomed to understand as a bodily-soul-like-spiritual unity. Body, soul, spirit might designate areas of phenomena which are thematically separable for the sake of determinate investigations; within certain limits their ontological indeterminancy might not be so important. But in the question of the being of human being, this cannot be summarily calculated in terms of the kinds of being of body, soul, and spirit which have yet first to be defined. And even for an ontological attempt which is to proceed in this way, some idea of the being of the whole would have to be presupposed. But what obstructs or misleads the basic question of the being of Dasein is the orientation thoroughly colored by the anthropology of Christianity and the ancient world, whose inadequate ontological foundations personalism and the philosophy of life also ignore. Traditional anthropology contains the following:
1. The definition of human being: ζῷον λόγον ἔχον in the interpretation: animal rationale, rational life. The kind of being of the
10. But the discovery of the a priori is not an "a prioristic" construction. Through Husserl we have again learned not only to understand the meaning of all genuine philosophical "empiricism," but we have also learned to use the tools necessary for it. "A priorism" is the method of every scientific philosophy which understands itself. Because a priorism has nothing to do with construction, the investigation of the a priori requires the proper preparation of the phenomenal foundation. The nearest horizon which must be prepared for the analytic of Dasein lies in its average everydayness.