Know Thyself: The Crisis of Identity and the Return to Being
“Man is not merely a part of the world, but the place where the world begins to appear.”
– Emanuele Severino
The Disappearance of the Person
In an age obsessed with identity, the person has all but disappeared. We speak endlessly of roles, traits, preferences, genders, diagnoses, and performative expressions, but what remains of the one who is? The person, once thought to be a profound metaphysical reality, has been fragmented into manageable categories of behavior, pathology, and social interaction.
To be a person today is often reduced to being a self-aware biological process, a psychological construction, or a social performance. “Personhood” is debated in terms of sentience, cognition, or legal rights, as if the core of being a person could be defined in provisional and measurable terms. But something is missing, something irreducible and prior.
The person is not an invention of thought, nor a product of language, nor the sum of its relational contexts. The person is not made. The person is.
The Birth of the Modern Construct
The erosion of personhood began long before postmodernity. With the rise of modern science, the self was increasingly understood as an object among objects. Enlightenment rationalism reduced subjectivity to a function of reason. Romanticism reacted by emphasizing emotion and will, but still left the person as something to be shaped, expressed, or discovered through experience.
The 20th century accelerated the fragmentation. In psychology, the self became an object of analysis. In sociology, it was explained by norms and structures. In contemporary discourse, it is something fluid and negotiable, an ever-mutable construct to be curated or contested.
What was lost in all this was the truth that the person is not a phenomenon to be explained, but the very locus where reality appears.
The Person as Appearing of Being
To rediscover the person, we must begin from Being. The person is not the result of becoming, but the necessary presence of what is. In the eternal structure of reality, each person is not an emergent property or temporary configuration, but an unrepeatable and immutable presence within the order of necessity.
This does not mean a return to static essentialism, as if the person were a fixed character type. Rather, it means the person is not contingent. The person is not an accident of evolution or society. The person is the place where Being appears; not as abstraction, but as presence, identity, and radiance.
Emanuele Severino shows us that every being is eternal; not because it endures in time, but because it cannot fall into nothing. The person is not a flicker of self-awareness in a meaningless void; the person is an indestructible manifestation of Being. You are not merely someone who thinks, desires, or acts. You are not a momentary arrangement of shifting parts. You are an eternal.
The Myth of Constructed Personhood
When personhood is seen as something made (biologically, psychologically, or socially), it becomes vulnerable to manipulation, performance, and erasure. If you are what you can become, then you are never truly yourself. If you must make yourself, then you are always at risk of unmaking.
This is the tragedy of modern identity discourse: its promise of liberation becomes a machinery of anxiety. One must perform, curate, and defend the self constantly, because there is nothing underneath. The loss of personhood is the loss of peace.
But if the person is not made, but given, not constructed, but revealed, then everything changes. You are not defined by what others see or what you feel. You are not reducible to personality traits, gender roles, or cultural scripts. You are not the product of forces. You are the appearing of a necessity.
This is not a mysticism. It is the deepest realism.
Recognition and Radiance
To rediscover the person is to rediscover that every being is an eternal necessity. This includes you, and everyone you meet. The rediscovery of personhood is not an individualistic affair. It opens the way to real community, because it recognizes that every person is not a negotiable entity, but a radiant presence of Being.
To see the person in oneself and in others is to begin to love; not sentimentally, but metaphysically. It is to live no longer in the economy of images and impressions, but in the truth of presence. It is to stand not as a product of conditions, but as the one who cannot be reduced.
Toward the Recovery of Dignity
Only a world that remembers the person can recover dignity. And only the person who remembers Being can find peace. We do not need new theories of identity. We need the return of the real.
The rediscovery of personhood is the rediscovery of the truth of oneself; not as a category or function, but as the place where the eternal appears. You were never lost. You were always necessary. To know this is not pride, but joy.
Looking Ahead
If the person is not constructed but revealed; not an accident of forces, but an eternal presence; then dignity, identity, and truth are no longer negotiable or unstable.
This opens the path for community; not as a collective of fragmented selves, but as a gathering of eternal beings whose presence is grounded in the same immutable structure of Being.
Next: Article 9 — The Community of Eternal Selves
It Is What It Is 
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