Ipseity and Teleology

A major speculative thesis is that the “myself” is the entelechy, i.e., formal and final cause, of the person I am. As entelechy the “myself” endows the person with a dynamism of a pervasive general will and teleology that informs all will acts analogously to the way a career decision informs the myriad acts that comprise the career. The basic dynamism of the “myself” holds open the horizon of the human cognitive and conative forms of agency, i.e., the position-taking acts which are the medium of personhood, in the direction of an infinite self-ideal. But all of one’s specific acts of achievement are inadequate to this infinite horizon. One’s self-determination as a person stands in correlation with one’s practical and theoretical determination of the world. But in as much as all position-taking acts are inadequate realizations of the infinite horizon of one’s self-ideal the self-determination is emphatic, and Existenz again is a theme, in the acts with which one may whole-heartedly identify. With Existenz I am awakened to “myself” as given to myself to determine my personal being in regard to what is of unconditional importance. Because these are acts I whole-heartedly do, the sort of person I thereby become equates or coincides with who I am. That one exists as being given to oneself to determine oneself means that the ontology of the person is completed in a deontology; i.e., one is fully a person in determining oneself in the direction of how one ideallyought to be. “Character” as one’s identifiable propertied moral personhood determines one’s freedom for better or for worse. Who one is is never adequately accounted for by one’s story or one’s place in the relevant community’s narrative.