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If I am asked in the framework of Book 1, Who are you? I, in answering, might say I don’t know who in the world I am. Nevertheless there is a sense in which I always know what I refers to and can never not know, even if I have become, e.g., amnesiac. Yet in Book 2, Who are you? has other senses of oneself in mind than the non-sortal myself . For example, it might be the pragmatic context, as in a bureaucratic setting; but Who are you? or Who am I? might be more anguished and be rendered by What sort of person are you? or What sort am I? Such a question often surfaces in the face of a limit-situation , such as one’s death or in the wake of a shameful deed where we are compelled to find our centers , what we also will call Existenz . Existenz here refers to the center of the person. In the face of the limit-situation one is called upon to act unconditionally in the determination of oneself and one’s being in the world.
In this Book 2 we discuss chiefly one’s normative personal-moral identity which stands in contrast to the transcendental I where one’s non-sortal unique identity is given from the start. This moral identity requires a unique self-determination and normative self-constitution which may be thought of with the help of the metaphor of vocation . We will see that it has especial ties to one’s Existenz as well as to love. This Book 2 claims that the moral-personal ideal sense of who one is is linked to the transcendental who through a notion of entelechy. The person strives to embody the I-ness that one both ineluctably is and which, however, points to who one is not yet and who one ought to be. The final two chapters tell a philosophical-theological likely story of a basic theme of Plotinus: We must learn to honor ourselves because of our honorable kinship and lineage Yonder .
