Living Personhood between Laughter and Tears

Plessner transformed the spiritual status of personhood into a form of life. The co-world of embodied persons answers to the questionability in an eccentric positionality of living nature. Starting from the intrapersonal relation, I present behavioral ambivalences between asserting oneself and being modestly, naivety and reflection, unveiling and concealment. They demand a preservation of dignity. The interpersonal relations are thematized as playing in and acting with roles of persons. The use of personal pronouns opens up an access in the singular to community forms and in the plural to society forms. These forms contain emotional orders between love, performance and functionality. Their existence assumes the linguistic coordination of eye-hand cooperation and the coordination of one’s own voice with other voices. The modern autonomies of science, art and discourse are understood in a semiotic way as schematization, thematization and specification. Living personhood experiences its limits in laughing and crying.