Act-personalism is a conception of the essence of the person that goes back above all to Max Scheler. Its core idea runs: the person is not a thing behind her acts, but the concrete, living unity of all spiritual acts themselves. Knowing, loving, willing, feeling — in this enacted nexus the person is actual. She does not stand behind her acts like a hidden bearer; she lives in them and through them. For Scheler, the person is therefore neither an empty logical subject nor a substance in the classical sense, but the in each case unique order in which spiritual acts are realized.
This position has a considerable strength: it takes seriously that we never encounter persons abstractly, but always in their enactment — in conversation, in love, in moral action. The person shows herself not as a static something, but as living and acting. Yet precisely here lies the difficulty as well. If the person is nothing other than the nexus of her acts, how can her identity over time then be grounded? What remains of the person in sleep, in unconsciousness, in dementia? Act-personalism comes into tension with the insight that the person also remains the same when she is performing no spiritual acts.
For this reason act-personalism stands in fundamental opposition to substance-personalism, which anchors the identity of the person precisely in her substantial being. Thinkers such as Edith Stein, Josef Seifert, and Robert Spaemann have shown that the personal enactment of acts presupposes a sustaining being — that Scheler’s insight into the actuality of the person is therefore true, but must be supplemented by the insight into her substantiality.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Scheler, Max (1913/16): Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Halle: Niemeyer. Crit. ed.: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2. Bern: Francke, 1954. (English: Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, transl. M. S. Frings & R. L. Funk. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.)
- Wojtyła, Karol (1969): Osoba i czyn. Kraków. English: The Acting Person, transl. A. Potocki. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979.