Abstract
Many theoretical accounts of personhood, both classic and contemporary, regard practical agency as a core feature of what it means to be a person. Husserl is no exception.
To take a stance, to express it, to even form one's whole life and actions according to certain convictions, is at the center of Husserl's descriptions and characterizations of personhood. In Ideas II, Husserl famously introduces his philosophy of the person by arguing that motivation, not causality, is the basic law that governs the life of the person.
Furthermore, he shows that the "personalistic attitude", which discloses this "spiritual world" (geistige Welt) of motivational coherence (motivationaler Zusammenhang), is a basic, natural, and intrinsically social attitude of our everyday life. What follows from this is an equally basic understanding of normativity that is connected to being a person: while the person is intrinsically linked to the motivational structure of her bodily consciousness, she can also let herself be motivated by critical questioning and critical evaluation of these motivations, i.e., by reason.
This crucial capacity to "take a stance", enriched by the possibility of asking for evidence, for true motivation, leads Husserl directly from his social ontology of the person into ethical considerations.