First published Thu Nov 12, 2009; substantive
revision Mon Dec 2, 2013
Although it was only
in the first half of the twentieth century that the term personalism became
known as a designation of philosophical schools and systems, personalist
thought had developed throughout the nineteenth century as a reaction to
perceived depersonalizing elements in Enlightenment rationalism, pantheism,
Hegelian absolute idealism, individualism as well as collectivism in politics,
and materialist, psychological, and evolutionary determinism. In its various
strains, personalism always underscores the
centrality of the person as the primary locus of investigation for
philosophical, theological, and humanistic studies. It is an approach or system
of thought which regards or tends to regard the person as the ultimate
explanatory, epistemological, ontological, and axiological principle of all
reality, although these areas of thought are not stressed equally by all
personalists and there is tension between idealist, phenomenological,
existentialist, and Thomist versions of personalism.
- 1. What is personalism?
- 2. Personalism's historical antecedents
- 3. European personalism
- 4. American personalism
- 5. Eastern personalism
- 6. Characteristics of personalist thought
- 6.1 Human beings, animals, and nature
- 6.2 The dignity of the person
- 6.3 Interiority and subjectivity
- 6.4 Self-determination
- 6.5 Relationality and communion
- Bibliography
- Academic Tools
- Other Internet Resources
- Related Entries
Personalism exists in
many different versions, and this makes it somewhat difficult to define as a
philosophical and theological movement. Many philosophical schoolshave
at their core one particular thinker or even one central work which serves as a
canonical touchstone. Personalism is a more diffused and eclectic movement and
has no such universal reference point. It is, in point of fact, more proper to
speak of manypersonalisms than one personalism. In 1947 Jacques
Maritain could write that there are at least “a dozen personalist doctrines,
which at times have nothing more in common than the word ‘person.’” Moreover,
because of their emphasis on the subjectivity of the person and their ties to
phenomenology and existentialism, some dominant forms of personalism have not
lent themselves to systematic treatises.
It is perhaps more
proper to speak of personalism as a “current” or a broader “worldview”, since
it represents more than one school or one doctrine
while at the same time the most important forms of personalism do display some
central and essential commonalities. Most important of the latter is the
general affirmation of the centrality of the person for philosophical thought.
Personalism posits ultimate reality and value in personhood — human as well as
(at least for most personalists) divine. It emphasizes the significance,
uniqueness and inviolability of the person, as well as the person's essentially
relational or communitarian dimension. The title “personalism” can therefore
legitimately be applied to any school of thought that focuses on the reality of
persons and their unique status among beings in general, and personalists
normally acknowledge the indirect contributions of a wide range of thinkers
throughout the history of philosophy who did not regard themselves as
personalists. Personalists believe that the human person should be the
ontological and epistemological starting point of philosophical reflection.
They are concerned to investigate the experience, the status, and the dignity
of the human being as person, and regard this as the starting-point for all
subsequent philosophical analysis.
Personalists regard
personhood (or “personality”) as the fundamental notion, as that which gives
meaning to all of reality and constitutes its supreme value. Personhood carries
with it an inviolable dignity that merits unconditional respect. Personalism
has for the most part not been primarily a theoretical philosophy
of the person. Although it does defend a unique theoretical understanding of
the person, this understanding is in itself such as to support the prioritization of moral philosophy, while at the same time the moral experience of the person is
such as to decisively determine the theoretical understanding. For
personalists, a person combines subjectivity and objectivity, causal activity
and receptivity, unicity and relation, identity and creativity. Stressing the
moral nature of the person, or the person as the subject and object of free
activity, personalism tends to focus on practical, moral action and ethical
questions.
Some personalists are
idealists, believing that reality is constituted by consciousness, while others
claim to be realist philosophers and argue that the natural order is created by
God independently of human consciousness. For taxonomic convenience, the many
strains of personalism can be grouped into two fundamental categories:
personalism in a strict sense and personalism in a broader sense. Strict
personalism places the person at the center of a philosophical system that
originates from an “intuition” of the person himself, and then goes on to
analyse the personal reality and the personal experience that are the objects
of this intuition. The method of the main twentieth-century European version of
this strict personalism draws extensively from phenomenology and
existentialism, departing from traditional metaphysics and constituting a
separate philosophical system. In the idealistic version of personalism, it
becomes more obvious, however, that the deeper sources of strict personalism
are to be found primarily in the early critical reception of German idealism
and in some aspects of moral sense philosophy. The original intuition is really
that of self-awareness, by which one grasps not least values and essential
meanings through unmediated experience. The knowledge produced by reflecting on
this experience is nothing more than an explicitation of the original
intuition, which in turn generates an awareness of a framework for moral
action. The intuition of the person as the center of values and meaning is not
exhausted, however, in phenomenological or existential analyses. These analyses
point beyond themselves, indicating a constitutive transcendence of the person
himself, irreducible either to its specific manifestations or to the sum-total
of those manifestations. Despite their differences, both the American school of
Bowne and his first followers and the European personalism of Emmanuel Mounier
represent personalism in this strict sense.
Personalism in the
broader sense does not consider the person as the object of an original
intuition, nor does it conceive of philosophical research as beginning with an
analysis of immediate personal experience and its context. Rather, in the scope
of a general metaphysics the person manifests his singular value and essential
role. Thus the person occupies the central place in philosophical discourse,
but this discourse is not reduced to an explicitation or development of an
original intuition of the person. The person does not justify metaphysics but
rather metaphysics justifies the person and his various operations. Instead of
constituting an autonomous metaphysics, personalism in the broader sense offers
an anthropological-ontological shift in perspective within an existing
metaphysics and draws out the ethical consequences of this shift. Perhaps the
best known strain of personalism in the broad sense is so-called “Thomistic
personalism.” Represented by such figures as Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon,
Étienne Gilson, Robert Spaemann, and Karol Wojtyła, Thomistic personalism draws
on principles of Thomas Aquinas's philosophical and theological anthropology in
what it sees as a coherent development of inchoate elements of Aquinas's
thought.
As a philosophical
school, personalism draws its foundations from human reason and experience,
though historically personalism has nearly always been attached to Biblical
theism. von Balthasar suggests that “Without the biblical background it
[personalism] is inconceivable.” Yet while most personalists are theists,
belief in God is not necessary to all personalist philosophies, and some
profess an atheist personalism.
Though generally
considered a philosophical school, the personalist approach is often applied to
other disciplines as well, yielding a plethora of titles such as theological
personalism, economic personalism, ecological personalism and psychological
personalism (along with their inversions: “personalistic theology,”
“personalistic economics,” “personalistic psychology”) and so forth.
The term “personalism”
made its world debut in Germany, where “der Personalismus” was first used by F.
D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) in his book Über die Religion in
1799. Amos Bronson Alcott seems to have been the first American to use the
term, calling it in an 1863 essay “the doctrine that the ultimate reality of
the world is a Divine Person who sustains the universe by a continuous act of
creative will.” The term “American personalism” was coined by Walt Whitman
(1819–1892) in his essay “Personalism,” which was published in The
Galaxy in May 1868. In 1903 Charles Renouvier published Le
Personnalisme, thereby introducing the word into the French as well. The
word “personalism” first appeared as an encyclopedic entry in Volume IX of
Hastings's Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics in 1915 in an
article by Ralph T. Flewelling.
According to Albert C.
Knudson, personalism is “the ripe fruit of more than two millenniums of
intellectual toil, the apex of a pyramid whose base was laid by Plato and
Aristotle.” Catholic personalists emphasize more
specifically the decisive role of medieval thought, and in particular
scholasticism, for the development of personalism. Étienne Gilson, for
instance, has observed that where Plato locates the center of reality in ideas
with concrete instantiations of these being merely accidental, and Aristotle
places emphasis not on numerical individuals but on the universal specific
form, Thomas Aquinas saw the individual person as unique among beings because of
reason and self-mastery. Though none goes so far as to call Aquinas a
personalist, some suggest that he furnished the necessary soil in which
personalistic theory could take root. In this regard, Karol Wojtyła wrote that
Aquinas “provided at least a point of departure for personalism in general.”
The term person comes
from the Latin persona, whose origins are traceable to Greek drama,
where the πρόσωπον, or mask, became identified with the role an actor would
assume in a given production. Such usage is carried over today in the word
“persona,” referring to characters in fictional literature or drama, or second
identities which people adopt for behavior in given social contexts. Its
introduction into the mainstream of intellectual parlance, however, came with
theological discourse during the patristic period, notably the attempts to
clarify or define central truths of the Christian faith. These discussions
focused primarily on two doctrines: the Trinity (three “persons” in one God)
and the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity (the “hypostatic” union
of two natures—divine and human—in one “person”). Confusion marred these
discussions because of ambiguities in the philosophical and theological
terminology, such that, for example, the thesis — ascribed to Sabellius — would
be advanced that in God there was one ύπόστασις and three πρόσωπα, where
ύπόστασις conveyed the meaning of “person” and πρόσωπα bore the sense of
“roles” or “modes” of being. In order to present these mysteries with
precision, the concept of person and the relationship of person to nature
needed clarification. The debates culminated in the First Council of Nicaea
(325) and the First Council of Constantinople (381), and in the drafting and
propagation of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed.
Though the concept of
person first developed in this theological context, with reference to the
persons of the Trinity, the general Greek philosophical concepts involved in
these Trinitological origins facilitated its application to human beings as
well. Philosophical personalism may or may not appropriate the theological
suppositions with which the early usage of the term “person” is laden. The classic,
basic, and purely philosophical definition which is still accepted by
personalists, as far as it goes, was given early on by Boethius (ca. 480–524):
“persona est naturae rationalis individua substantia.” This definition consists
of two parts. The essential starting point is a subsistent individual: a
singular, existing suppositum or ύπόστασις. Here the adjective
“individual” distinguishes an existing substance from common or second
substance. The second element of the definition—naturae rationalis—qualifies
the notion of individual substance: the person is an individual possessing arational
nature. It is this rational, spiritual nature that gives rise to the
different qualities that distinguish the person, qualities to which
personalists attach decisive importance.
The Trinitological
concept of the person was far from the modern meaning that the term assumes in
personalism, and Boethius' definition too indicates only in the barest abstract
outline the deep and comprehensive signification that personalism ascribes to
it. As accepted by personalism, it is the result of a long and complex
cumulative development, resulting in a rich, if somewhat elusive, concept which
in some respects wholly inverts the original connotations of exteriority in the
early meanings of “mask” and “role”: person comes rather to denote the
innermost spiritual and most authentic kernel of the unique individual. Already
in the course of the Middle Ages, further definitions were provided, and not
just by Aquinas. Not least the Augustinian example of experienced interiority
and reflexivity, the idea of form as the principle of individuation, and the
late medieval and Franciscan emphasis on will and singularity entered into
early modern thinking about the person, and combined with the stronger focus on
human personality that was characteristic of Renaissance humanism.
Along these lines, the
early modern concepts of subjectivity and self-consciousness added new elements
to the definition and understanding of the central concept in personalism.
Immanuel Kant's epistemic dualism, underscoring the importance of both subject
and object in knowledge, opened the door both to the idealistic form of
personalism and to the phenomenology and existentialism that became so
important for twentieth-century personalism. Kant also contributed
significantly to the personalist understanding of human dignity. Unlike Hobbes,
for whom “the worth of a man” is “his price,” and dignity is “the publique
worth of a man,” Kant regarded dignity as “intrinsic worth”. He posited a
dichotomy between price and dignity, whereby “something that has a price can be
exchanged for something else of equal value; whereas that which exceeds all
price and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity.” His celebrated
practical categorical imperative—Act so as to treat humanity, whether in
your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means
only—was incorporated nearly verbatim into Karol Wojtyła's “personalist
principle.”
Personalism in the
sense of a distinct philosophy or worldview focusing on the full, accumulated
import of the concept of the person, however, emerged only in the context of
the broad critical reaction against what can be called the variousimpersonalistic philosophies
which came to dominate the Enlightenment and Romanticism in the form of
rationalistic and romantic forms of pantheism and idealism, from Spinoza to
Hegel. Key figures in this reaction were Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819),
the initiator of the so-called Pantheismusstreit in the 1780s,
and F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), who in his later work rejected the
impersonalist positions of his early idealist systems. But these were only the
most important figures in a broad movement that included many other
philosophers, primarily the so-called speculative theists, as well as
theologians, both Catholic and Protestant. The modified idealistic, theistic
personalism developed in this counter-movement became decisive, not least via
its late German representative, Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817–81), not only for
the American, idealistic personalism of Bowne, but also for the parallel,
British idealistic personalism whose leading representative was Andrew Seth
Pringle-Pattison (1856-1931). Although the continental European personalists of
the twentieth century would reject idealism and turn instead to phenomenology,
existentialism, and Thomism, the outline of the personalistic criticism of
impersonal modes of thought was already clearly and consistently developed by
the thinkers here mentioned, ever since the last decades of the eighteenth
century.
Personalism thus arose
as a reaction to impersonalist modes of thought which were perceived as
dehumanizing. The impersonal dynamic of modern pantheism and monism in both
their rationalistic and Romantic forms underlie many of the modern philosophies
that personalism turns against, idealistic as well as materialistic. The
absolute idealism of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) held that Kant's noumenal
reality is not an unknowable substratum of appearances, but a dynamic process,
which in thought and in reality passes from thesis to antithesis, and finally
resolves itself in synthesis. This process is absolute mind, the state,
religion, philosophy. Hegel's idealism saw history as an unfolding of absolute
spirit through a necessary dialectical process, and this framework left little
room for the freedom or significance of individual persons. Through the Young
Hegelians, this impersonalist form of idealism was soon transformed into
equally impersonalist forms of materialism, culminating in Marxism, which
regards the essence of man as his true collectivity; impersonalist determinism,
in the form of Communism, decisively determined twentieth-century political
totalitarianism. In other thinkers, idealism tended to merge with increasingly
naturalistic forms of nationalism and racialism, giving rise to other new
political movements in the twentieth century that elevated alternative
collectivities above the person, such as national socialism. Personalism always
resisted the absorption of the individual into the collectivity by asserting
the inherent worth of the singular person. The person should never be a mere
means to an end, subordinated to the will and purposes of another. The state
exists for persons, and not persons for the state. In this regard, personalism
stands as a foil to totalitarianisms that value persons only for their worth to
the community, and insists instead on their inherent dignity. Thus R. T.
Flewelling could write that “the person is the supreme essence of democracy and
hostile to totalitarianisms of every sort.” Personalism's insistence on
personal freedom and responsibility, self-determination, creativity, and
subjectivity all bear out this deep-seated resistance to collectivism.
Parallel to the
development and transformation of Hegelianism, other theories of human nature
were developed in the course of the nineteenth century that blurred or
cancelled the distinction between man and the rest of nature, and downplayed or
denied man's unique individual value, spiritual nature, and free will. These
theories too, directly or indirectly, contributed to twentieth-century
totalitarianism. The philosophical positivism of Auguste Comte (1798–1857)
affirmed as a historical law that every science (and the human race itself)
passes through three successive stages, the theological, the metaphysical, and
the positive, each superior to the last. Comte insisted so much on the reality
and predominance of society that this became for him the true subject, while the
individual was regarded as an abstraction. Darwinism, in particular, uprooted
the classical understanding of human beings as essentially superior to the rest
of creation by offering a theory whereby man would be simply the most advanced
life form along an unbroken continuum, and the difference between man and
irrational animals would merely be one of degree, not of kind.
The emerging
personalist philosophy, however, rejected impersonalism not only in the form of
idealistic or materialistic determinism and collectivism, but also in the form
of the radical individualism that was equally a product of modern rationalism
and romanticism, and which, through, for instance, certain forms of liberalism
and anarchism, was also characteristic of the nineteenth century. From the
beginning, personalism proclaimed in its own way the communitarian values of
solidarity and inter-relation. In their insistence on inviolable dignity,
personalists resisted a utilitarianism which would make one person merely
“useful” for another. Whereas individualism seeks the self above all and views
others as means to one's own profit, personalism seeks to make of the self a
gift to another. “Thus,” Emmanuel Mounier later wrote, “if the first condition
of individualism is the centralization of the individual in himself, the first
condition of personalism is his decentralization, in order to set him in the
open perspectives of personal life.” Where individualism hopes to find personal
realization in self-interest, personalism asserts the absolute need for
openness to others, even as a condition for one's own realization.
Karol Wojtyła
characterized the two extremes of individualism and collectivism in the
following way: “On the one hand, persons may easily place their own individual
good above the common good of the collectivity, attempting to subordinate the
collectivity to themselves and use it for their individual good. This is the
error of individualism, which gave rise to liberalism in modern history and to
capitalism in economics. On the other hand, society, in aiming at the alleged
good of the whole, may attempt to subordinate persons to itself in such a way
that the true good of persons is excluded and they themselves fall prey to the
collectivity. This is the error of totalitarianism, which in modern times has
borne the worst possible fruit.”
The existentialism
that gave such important impulses to much continental European personalism in
the twentieth century developed in certain respects in the line of the later
Shelling's philosophy, and traces even of Jacobi's criticism of impersonal
pantheism can be found in it. With Schelling, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
opposed Hegel's idealism and underscored the value of the individual person,
both for philosophy and for life in general. He accused idealism of emptying
life of meaning by neglecting the reality of human existence. Whereas
Kierkegaard and later existentialists (Marcel, Sartre, Camus, Blondel) focused
on issues central to the meaning of human existence (love, marriage, death,
faith, morality, etc.), other thinkers continued to focus on the more direct
exploration of the meaning and nature of the person himself, and it was these
thinkers that came to be known as, and to call themselves, personalists.
The philosophy of
Friedrich W. Nietzsche (1844–1900) gave its own, distinct expression to these
themes, showing, as many of the romantic poets and philosophers had done before
him, and despite his criticism of romanticism, that the new individualism was
in reality closely interrelated with the general impersonalism of the dominant
strain of romanticism: from the exaltation of the individualist ego, the step
was never far to its extinction in a larger impersonal whole of any of the many
available varieties. Modern individualism represented no real challenge to the
intellectual environment in which man tended to be seen as a mere phenomenal
being, easily assimilated into nature, the impersonal principle of idealism,
the unconscious, the cosmic will, or the collectivities of the family, the state,
the nation, the social class. Man was a product of external forces, an
insignificant piece in a cosmic puzzle, without dignity, freedom,
responsibility, or fundamental existential significance. It was this overall,
many-faceted intellectual climate and development that produced the personalist
counter-movement throughout the nineteenth century, a movement which, by
drawing on other, alternative resources in the thought of the Enlightenment and
Romanticism as well as on the classical, medieval Christian, and early modern
legacy, sought to rescue the unique position and status of the singular human
person.
The personalist Jean
Lacroix is justified in declaring personalism to be an “anti-ideology”, awoken
by social and political situations that are alienating to the human person; in
the face of such impersonalist forces, personalism reaffirms the absolute
dignity and interrelationality of the human person. Maritain, too, wrote of
personalism as “a phenomenon of reaction” against the “two opposite errors” of totalitarianism
and individualism. Contrary to Hegelian collectivism and the fierce
individualism of Nietzsche's superman, these thinkers stressed both the
inviolable dignity of the individual person and at the same time his social
nature and essential relationality.
In the twentieth
century personalists gathered especially around three European centers of
higher learning: Paris, Munich, and Lublin. Until recently, the best known and
most prolific of these three schools was the Parisian group. Between the First
and Second World Wars the French personalist movement revolved around a monthly
journal, Esprit, founded by Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950) and a
group of friends in 1932. In the face of economic collapse and political and
moral disorientation, these French personalists proposed the human person as
the criterion according to which a solution to the crisis was to be fashioned.
The new, irreducible key to thought, especially regarding social organization,
was to be the human person. In his programmatic essay Refaire la
Renaissance, which appeared in the first issue ofEsprit, Mounier
proposed the need to disassociate the spiritual world from the debased,
materialistic bourgeoisie. In substance much in line with the late eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century origins of personalism, Mounier, before the Second
World War, turned sharply against the impersonalistic development of
individualistic, parliamentary democracy and the mass culture that had come to
shape the countries of Western Europe. Both personalism's nineteenth-century
background and this fact about the leading twentieth-century European
personalist indicate that for personalism, a simple, uncritical endorsement of
liberal democracy is not a sufficient guarantee against totalitarianism, since
liberal democracy too tends to absorb the impersonalist ideas and the deep,
historical impersonalist dynamic clearly perceived and anlysed by personalistic
thinkers long before Mounier.
Political and
traditionalist religious reaction was not an alternative for Mounier. There had
to be a real revolution, consisting in the creation of a new humanism, where
the bourgeois ideal of “having” would yield to Christian “being,” a being in
communion with others. The spiritual revolution envisioned by Mounier was to be
above all the work of committed witnesses to the truth, who through their own
interior renewal and living faith would galvanize the masses into a new
communal structure. Such a revolution entailed a triple commitment:
denunciation, meditation, and technical planning. Underlying this program was
Mounier's bold conception of Christian experience, an experience of “tragic
optimism,” colored both by the drama of Christian existence and by the
certainty of eschatological victory. The Christian's most important virtue is
that of the heroic witness, far from the evasiveness or sentimentality of
other, eviscerated strains of Christianity. Thus Mounier's idea of the
Christian as the watchful athlete engaged in spiritual combat provided a stark
response to Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity as a religion of the weak.
His assertion that there is no true progress without the dimension of
transcendence countered the Marxist search for an earthly paradise through
class struggle. His acceptance of the importance of psychology while
reemphasizing man's freedom and responsibility furnished an answer to Freud's
instinct-centered psychoanalysis.
Mounier's work
attracted the attention of important French thinkers such as Gabriel Marcel,
Denis de Rougemont, and Jacques Maritain, who through their research, lectures,
and writings helped develop French personalist thought. Maritain, who worked
with Mounier for a number of years, was responsible for bringing French
personalism to the United States. After the war, European personalism, led by
Mounier himself, adapted to and took a more uncritical view of liberal
democracy, and Maritain played a role in drafting the 1948 United Nations
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Like other Thomistic personalists, Maritain
criticized the frailty of certain widespread strains of Scholasticism, and
appealed to the important role of intuitive experience in philosophy.
The French philosopher
Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), though never identifying himself as a personalist,
shared many of the concerns and interests dear to personalists, and both
benefited from and contributed to the development of personalistic thought in
France. Gabriel Marcel was one of Ricoeur's philosophical mentors, and Ricoeur
was also deeply influenced by his contact with Emmanuel Mounier, especially in
the postwar years, 1946-1951. He contributed essays to Esprit as
well as the journal Le Christianisme social. Ricoeur drew on many
of the themes most precious to Mounier, such as the nature of human freedom and
the centrality of the human person vis-à-vis the state, though his own later
development of these themes departed considerably from Mounier's. He also
shared personalism's rejection of materialism and of Cartesian dualism, and a
rejection of abstractions in favor of concrete human reality. Perhaps the
single greatest element of Mounier's personalism adopted by Ricoeur, in fact,
was the impermissibility of withdrawal from political and social engagement.
Personalism in Germany
was closely wedded to another philosophical school, phenomenology, developed by
Austrian-born Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). Like existentialism and French
personalism, phenomenological realism was a response to German idealism, though
it bore a distinctive focus on epistemological questions. In his Logische
Untersuchungen, published in 1900, Husserl laid out his phenomenological
method and suppositions, and through it he attracted the first students of his
school. The distinguishing characteristic of phenomenology is not doctrinal,
but methodological. Seeking to avoid the imposition of preconceived notions or
structures on reality, phenomenology goes “back to the thing” (zurück zum
Gegenstand) by bracketing (epoché) all philosophical presuppositions
about the world, man, and the rest of reality. This direct observation and
consultation of reality eschews the problems of deductive reasoning by focusing
on the intellectual act of intuition, or direct apprehension of reality. The
eidetic reduction focuses on the essential structures of what appears
(phenomenon), so that one is dealing neither with empirical observation nor
with a description of Platonic forms, but with the phenomenon's meaning.
Phenomenologists identified the object of intuition as the essences of things,
and in so doing sought to overcome the Kantian noumenon/phenomenon dichotomy as
well as the errors of positivism and nominalism.
Though in his later
life Husserl leaned toward philosophical idealism, in his earlier life and
in Logische Untersuchungen he embraced philosophical realism.
A realist phenomenology stresses phenomenology's contribution to perennial
philosophy, and seeks to explore through experience the ultimate structures of
being. By going back to the thing itself, phenomenology aimed at eluding the
errors of both empiricism (reducing reality to the measurable) and idealism
(rarefying reality into abstraction and subjectivism). Among Husserl's students
were Max Scheler (1874–1928), Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977), Roman
Ingarden (1893–1970) and Edith Stein (1891–1942), all of whom influenced the
development of personalist thought. Husserl's later turn to Idealism, which
came about in the 1920s, precipitated a break with many of his disciples, who
came to believe that he had abandoned his original commitment to reconnect
philosophical reflection and objective reality. They therefore struck out on
their own, each creating an original body of work in pursuit of Husserl's
original intention. Stein, for instance, looked to phenomenological method as a
complement to Thomism, and von Hildebrand introduced phenomenology into ethics
in a personalistic synthesis.
The third and youngest
of the three centers of European personalistic thought grew up around the
Catholic University of Lublin. After studying with Husserl, Roman Ingarden took
phenomenology and interest in personalist topics back to his native Poland in
the early 1940s, and there he met a young priest by the name of Karol Wojtyła,
whom he encouraged to read Max Scheler. Wojtyła became interested in Scheler's
phenomenology and ended up doing his doctoral dissertation on Scheler's ethics
of values, which he presented in 1953. Having previously received an
Aristotelian-Thomistic formation, Wojtyła drew from his studies of the
phenomenological method to develop a creative and original personalistic
synthesis, complementing Thomistic metaphysics and anthropology with insights
from phenomenology. He subsequently took a post as professor of ethics at the
Theological Faculty of Krakow and Lublin's Catholic University, where he founded
the Polish personalist school. Wojtyła, who was also influenced by the writings
of another of Husserl's disciples, von Hildebrand, produced two significant
personalist books, Love and Responsibility (1960) and The
Acting Person (1962), as well as numerous essays, lectures and
articles. His later election as pope contributed strongly to the spread of
personalist thought, especially among Catholic thinkers. As Pope he continued
to employ personalist arguments in his magisterial teaching, and spurred new
interest in personalist theories. John Paul called for “theological renewal
based on the personalistic nature of man” and explicitly invoked the
personalist argument in his encyclical letters Laborem Exercens (1981)
and Ut Unum Sint(1995) as well as his 1994 Letter to
Families.
Personalism has also
been represented, to varying degrees, in many other European countries.
American personalism,
best known as represented by such figures as Borden Parker Bowne (1847–1910),
George H. Howison (1834–1916), and Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884–1953), took
a different tack from continental European personalism in that instead of a
reaction to idealism, it is often actually a form of idealism, wherein being is
defined as personal consciousness. Howison preferred the term “personal
idealism.” Contrary to twentieth-century continental European personalism,
American personalism, in particular in its early representatives, is a direct
continuation of the development of more or less personalistic philosophy and
theology in nineteenthy-century Europe and its analysis and refutation of
various impersonalistic forms of thought. The American and the stricter
personalist twentieth-century school in Europe agreed in taking the person as
their point of departure for understanding the world and in drawing all moral
truth from the absolute value of the person, but while the latter derived these
insights primarily from existentialism, phenomenology, and Thomism, the
American school, while in some respects adding to them and developing them
further, basically took them over from the European “speculative theists”.
Boston University was
long considered the hub of American personalism, under the auspices of
philosophy professor Borden Parker Bowne. Bowne was a
Methodist minister who had studied under Rudolf Hermann Lotze in Germany.
Lotze, a student of the speculative theist Christian Hermann Weisse (1801–66)
who assimilated much of the later Schelling's criticism of Hegel, sought, like
the speculative theists, to modify Hegelian idealism by maintaining that the
real is always concrete and individual, transforming Hegel's absolute idealism
into a personal idealism. Adding elements also from recent trends in
psychology, Bowne developed a distinct and explicitly personalist position,
which assumed the character of a philosophical school. His late book Personalism,
published in 1908, is a popular summary of his philosophy which introduced the
term personalism into American philosophical and theological discourse.
Bowne gathered a group
of talented disciples who carried on his work in a second generation. The most
important among these were Edgar Sheffield Brightman, Albert C. Knudson
(1873–1953), Francis J. McConnell (1871–1953), George Albert Coe (1861–1951),
and Ralph T. Flewelling (1871–1960). While Howison had established the
personalist tradition at the University of California, Berkeley, Flewelling
took personalism to the University of Southern California, which became the
second important twentieth-century center of personalist thought in the United
States. Flewelling also founded The Personalist, the journal that
would serve as the forum for American personalism. In 1915, he published Personalism
and the Problems of Philosophy: An Appreciation of the Work of Borden Parker
Bowne. At Boston Universtiy, Brightman continued the studies in
personalism, in time holding the Borden Parker Bowne chair of philosophy, while
Knudson, having first taught classes in the Old Testament, moved into
personalist theology. Meanwhile Walter George Muelder (1907-), professor of
social ethics and Christian theology at Boston University and the University of
Southern California, helped bridge the gap between the Bostonian and
Californian schools, calling his doctrine “Communitarian Personalism.”
The Boston personalist
school has continued to influence American culture, sometimes in unexpected
ways. A third generation of American personalists, represented by such figures
as Peter A. Bertocci (1910–1989) and W. Gordon Allport of Harvard, a student of
William Stern, further developed the psychological dimension of personalism.
Martin Luther King studied under the personalists at Boston University, and
credited the experience with shaping his worldview: “I studied philosophy and
theology at Boston University under Edgar S. Brightman and L. Harold DeWolf…It
was mainly under these teachers that I studied Personalistic philosophy—the
theory that the clue to the meaning of ultimate reality is found in
personality. This personal idealism remains today my basic philosophical
position. Personalism's insistence that only personality—finite and infinite—is
ultimately real strengthened me in two convictions: it gave me metaphysical and
philosophical grounding for the idea of a personal God, and it gave me a
metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all human personality.”
It is important to
note, however, that American personalism cannot be reduced to the Boston
University school. It flourished also at Harvard University. Not only is this
where Howison came from, but the work of leading Harvard philosophers such as
William James (1842–1910), Josiah Royce (1855–1916), William Ernest Hocking
(1873–1966), and Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) displays strong personalist
elements. All of them, with the sole exception of Royce, even called themselves
personalists.
In some respects close
parallels to or equivalents of Western personalism are present in Islamic,
Buddhist, Vedantic, and Chinese thought, although comparative work in this
field is confronted with often formidable problems of translation and
interpretation.
With regard to Islam,
it should first of all be pointed out that classic Islamic philosophy, with its
roots in classical Greek philosophy, is not Eastern in the same sense as
Buddhist, Vedantic, Chinese, and Japanese thought. It shares roots with
Augustinianism and Thomism, and thus with some of the traditions that have been
central to the development of personalism in the West. On the other hand, it
has been observed that there is no conceptual equivalent of the Western
philosophical concept of “person” in Arabic and in classic Islamic philosophy,
something which would seem to confirm the importance of the specifically
Christian, to a considerable extent Trinitological, terminological and
conceptual origins of the term. But as there are other sources of personalism
than the Trinitological thought that was decisive for the early formation of
the concept (when, it should also be remembered, it was not yet fully personalistic
in the modern sense), and as these sources have also produced Jewish versions
of personalism, the historical absence of a conceptual equivalent in Arabic has
not precluded the development of Islamic personalism. Themes with regard to the
self and the nature of God which are very similar to those of Western
personalists are found in a modern Muslim thinker like Muhammad Iqbal
(1877–1938). Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi (1922–1993) explicitly sought to develop a
Muslim version of personalism, and was influenced not least by Mounier.
No precise conceptual
counterpart of “person” is found in the more properly Eastern traditions of
thought either, traditions which do not share the Greek philosophical roots.
When we speak of personalism in the case of these traditions, it is in the
sense of themes and positions, elaborated in terms of other concepts, closer to
such Western ones as “self” and “individual”, which are part of Western
personalism and enter into the definition of the modern concept of person.
The term personalism
has, for instance, been applied to the early Buddhist school called puggalavada,
which takes positions with regard to the identity and continuity of the
individual self which differ from what has traditionally been considered the
orthodox ones of Theravada Buddhism. Other versions of these positions are
found later in some of the currents of Mahayana thought.
More unambiguous
parallels are found, however, in Vedanta. The vishishtadvaita(qualified
non-dualism) school turned against advaita's radical non-dualism,
and insisted not only on what in English works by representatives of this
school and later schools which are similarly critical of advaita,
is often explicitly termed the personal concept of brahman or
the absolute, but also on a personal understanding of the individual beings
that are conceived as fragmentary selves (jivatmas) that are “parts” —
at the same time one with and distinct transformations — of brahman.
As the different classical darshanas of Indian thought are not
wholly isolated and receive influences from each other, elements of Samkhya
thought are also taken up in personalistic Vedanta, as are still further
elements of Yoga, and of the traditional Hindu scriptural legacy. It is the
clarity, the traditional primordiality, and the fundamental nature of the
teaching of the permanent self, the atman, in Vedanta, and not
least in the schools critical of advaita, which make this
personalism more unambiguous than puggalavada's in Buddhism.
A striking feature of
the debates within Vedanta between the non-dualist, impersonalist schools and
the theistic, personalist ones is the partial similarites with and parallels to
the opposition between nineteenth-century representatives absolute idealism and
personalistic idealism in the West, despite the distance between them in time
and space, the mutual independence, and the different conceptual contexts. But
while there is a long-standing scholarly tradition of comparative work on advaitaVedanta
and absolute idealism (not least in F. H. Bradley's version), only very little
such work has as yet been done on the vishishtadvaita and
similar personalist Vedantic schools and the early, idealistic personalists in
the West.
What most clearly
distinguishes Vedantic personalism from Western personalism is that the former
builds on the fundamental teaching of all Vedanta that the
true self exists beyond the limitations of the transient body and the mind, and
beyond the tendency — called in Sanskrit the ahamkara, literally,
the “I-maker” — to identify with these, whereas Western personalism is often
characteristically defined in terms which from the perspective of Vedanta must
be seen as pertaining to the mental level, or sometimes, in particular in the
twentieth century, to the physical body.
This does not mean,
however, that according to personalistic Vedanta the body should be ignored or
devalued. It is from its perspective primarily the erroneous identification
with the mind that is harmful to the body, as it indeed is to the proper use of
the mind itself. The actualization of our true and higher nature as
consciousness, as the sat-cit-ananda (being/eternity,
knowledge, and bliss) that are the nature of the atman-brahman,
brings light to both the body and the mind, including all the faculties so
closely analysed by Western personalists, like will, imagination, and reason.
Thus it at least indirectly supports, to the extent it is needed, the moral
character-formation on the humanistic level which is emphasized by Western
personalism.
Most traditional
Chinese and Japanese thought shares with personalism an emphasis on the need
for concrete, practical transformation of character as a prerequisite for
insight. In the Chinese and Japanese versions of Buddhism, the Indian tradition
of devising specific practices and exercises for this purpose was continued,
but gradually disconnected from the parallel and very strong theoretical and
metaphysical legacy of India. This development can be said to culminate in Zen.
But the emphasis on the practical is found also in Taoism, which contributed to
the development of Zen. At the same time all of these schools share an
understanding of the ultimate or true reality as rather impersonal than
personal, which makes them further removed from personalism than Vedanta.
Confucianism shares
with the other Chinese and Japanese traditions the emphasis on the practical.
Contrary to them, however, it is focused much more exclusively on the
“humanistic” level, on moral character-formation, and the requirements of the
social order. While its humanistic orientation is in line with personalism,
Confucianism is, however, more concerned with the practical attainment of the
general ideals of true humanity and gentlemanliness as understood in
traditional China, than with the personal individuality and uniqueness which
Western personalists stress as related to, and often indeed as inseparable
from, a true understanding and affirmation of universal values.
Neo-Confucianism, as developed by Chu Hsi (1130-1200), introduced strong
metaphysical elements, but the understanding of the metaphysical principles or
laws, li, was still a generalist one. Other Neo-Confucians differed
to some extent in this respect, and, as Confucianism is a living tradition in
today's China, new thinkers keep developing versions of it which are closer to
personalism. This, and the importance of humanist character-formation, speaks
in favour of the designation of Confucianism in general as a personalistic
philosophy. But there are also some considerations that speak against it, both
general ones regarding some aspects of historical Chinese society, and, in view
of Chu Hsi's version of Neo-Confucianism, metaphysical ones.
Though personalism
comprises many different forms and emphases, certain distinctive
characteristics can be discerned that generally hold for personalism as such.
These include an insistence on the radical difference between persons and
non-persons and on the irreducibility of the person to impersonal spiritual or
material factors, an affirmation of the dignity of persons, a concern for the
person's subjectivity and self-determination, and particular emphasis on the
social (relational) nature of the person.
Personalists have
generally insisted on the falsity of Darwin's claim that man's difference from
other terrestrial beings is one of degree and not of kind. Human exceptionalism
has defined most personalist thought. Obviously, such exceptionalism is not
exclusive to personalism, but represents, rather, a standard assumption of
classical philosophical anthropology. In 1625, for instance, Grotius wrote:
“Man is, to be sure, an animal, but an animal of a superior kind, much farther
removed from all other animals than the different kinds of animals are from one
another” (De iure belli ac pacis, Prolegomena, 11).
According to a typical
personalist conception, the fundamental classification of all beings, created
and uncreated, is the distinction between persons and non-persons. For many
personalists, what makes man “unlike” other animals is different from what
makes a baboon different from a giraffe, or even from what makes a baboon
different from a rock. Thus, in the words of Jacques Maritain: “Whenever we say
that man is a person, we mean that he is more than a mere parcel of matter,
more than an individual element in nature, such as is an atom, a blade of
grass, a fly or an elephant…Man is an animal and an individual, but unlike
other animals or individuals.” Or as William Stern wrote, in his introduction
to Person und Sache (vol. 2): “Despite any similarities by
which persons are identified as members of humankind, a particular race or
gender, etc., despite any broad or narrow regularities which are involved in
any personal events, a primal uniqueness always remains, through which every
person is a world of its own with regard to other persons.”
Here personalists
react not only to the main forms of idealism, the materialism, and the
determinism of the nineteenth century, but even to the objectivism of
Aristotle. Following his methodology for defining a species in terms of its
proximate genus and specific difference, Aristotle had defined man as a
rational animal (ho anthropos zoon noetikon) (Aristotle, Hist.
Anim. I, 1: 488a7; Nichomachean Ethics I, 5: 1097b11;
VIII, 12: 1162a16; IX, 9: 1169b18; Politics, I, 2: 1253a3).
Personalists, while accepting this definition, as far as it goes, see such a
construction as an unacceptable reduction of the human person to the objective
world. This objective, cosmological view of man as an animal with the
distinguishing feature of reason—by which man is primarily an object alongside
other objects in the world to which he physically belongs—would be only partly
valid, and insufficient. In an effort to interpret the subjectivity that is
proper to the person, personalism expresses a belief in both the non-material
dimension and the primordial uniqueness of the human being, and thus in the
basic irreducibility of the human being to the natural world.
Many personalists see
human beings as dealing with all other realities as objects (something related
intentionally to a subject), but affirm a substantive difference between the
human person and all other objects. The person alone is “somebody” rather than
merely “something”, and this sets him apart from every other entity in the
visible world. No precise and general position specific to personalists with
regard to the nature of animals can be discerned. But the sharp distinction
between “somebody” and “something”, in particular as applied to such other
sentient beings, reflects both the influence on personalism of the
Judaeo-Christian tradition and at least some of the general impact or spirit of
distinctly modern, Cartesian rationalism, which latter is of course not unaffected
by inherited Christian dualisms. Only the human being is typically conceived by
personalism as simultaneously object and subject, while at the same time this
is held to be true for all persons, irrespective of age, intelligence,
qualities, etc. For personalists, personal subjectivity assures that the human
being's proper essence cannot be reduced to and exhaustively explained by the
proximate genus and specific difference. Subjectivity becomes, then, a kind of
synonym for the irreducible in the human being.
But the broader,
realist personalism does posit, in the classical and scholastic tradition, the
essential difference between man and all other objects on man's ability to
reason, which differentiates a person from the whole world of objective
entities. Since it is precisely his intellectual and spiritual nature that
makes subjectivity possible, one can say that in the subjectivity of the human
person is also something objective. Yet these personalists insist on the clear
separation between non-personal beings and this subjectivity of the person
which is derivative of his rational nature in a broader or higher sense.
Regardless of how, more precisely, animals are to be understood, the person
differs from even the most advanced among them by a specific kind of inner
self, an inner life, which, ideally, revolves around his pursuit of truth and
goodness, and generates person-specific theoretical and moral questions and
concerns.
Other strains of
personalism, such as that represented by the dialogical philosophy of Martin
Buber, pay less attention to the difference between persons and non-persons and
underscore instead the way one relates to all of reality. Buber separates the
way of dealing with other realities into two, which he terms “I-Thou” and
“I-It” relationships, the first reflecting a fundamental openness to the
reality of the other and the latter reflecting an objectivization and
subordination of the other to oneself. According to Buber, we engage others
either as an It, forming an I-It primary word, or
as a Thou, forming the I-Thou primary word. Yet
whereas other personalists would assert that such an I-Thou relationship
is the only appropriate way of dealing withpersons, and the I-It relationship
the only appropriate way of dealing with things, Buber presents
the I-Thou relationship as the ideal for the human person's
dealing with all reality, personal and non-personal alike. And though
this I-Thou relation will take on different characteristics
according to the sphere in which the relation arises (nature, men, spiritual
beings), for Buber the fundamental difference lies within the human person
himself and in the attitude with which he engages reality.
Some personalists have
come to take a critical view of the starkly formulated human exceptionalism,
and to go further than Buber in not just reconsidering the attitude of the
human being, but also the rigid dualism involved in the view of everything that
is not human (and divine) persons as just soulless, impersonal “objects”. The
Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák is an example of an in important respects
personalist thinker who has tried to rethink both our attitude to and our
understanding of nature in this respect. The various effort to overcome the
impersonal objectification of nature and other life-forms, and to conceive of a
more thoroughgoingly personal universe, partly resemble the positions of some
of the early idealistic personalists in the nineteenth century. Just like these
personalists had sometimes incorporated the accumulated and interrelated
insights of self-consciousness, subjectivity, interiority,
individuality/singularity, will, imagination, and historicity in a way which
the still in some respects often somewhat one-sidedly generalist Thomistic
currents of personalism had not, they also came closer to a view of nature that
rectifies the overly rigid dualisms of a created world at such distance from
its creator as to be almost independent, and man as almost equally sharply
separated from the rest of creation. The human form of life is clearly
exceptional in that it allows a much higher degree of development of
personality in every respect, but to regard as a corollary of this insight the
position that plants and even animals are mere impersonal objects, without
consciousness and their own kind of subjectivity, seems to be regarded as
increasingly problematic among personalists.
A not unimportant part
of personalism's human exceptionalism reflects these cleavages of a world in
which the presence of the divine is no longer sensed and perceived in nature.
The modern desacralized world, open to human exploitation, as articulated by
Cartesianism but prepared by Ockham and even in some respects by Aquinas, is
also in reality in important respects an impersonalized world. While guarding
against the new impersonalism and moral ambiguity of the romantic pantheists,
the early personalists of the nineteenth century at least perceived clearly the
problems with the stark dualisms of much Christian theology as well as of
modern rationalism, the Enlightenment, and scientism.
In stressing the
uniqueness of persons vis-à-vis all other entities, personalists influenced by
Thomism designate the essential dividing line of reality as that which
separates personal and non-personal being. Dealings with persons, therefore,
require a different ethical paradigm from that used to describe dealings with
non-personal realities. The “rules” of dealing with non-personal reality do not
hold when dealing with persons, and vice-versa. This radical dichotomy between
persons and non-persons is essentially ontological, but produces immediate
consequences on the ethical level.
At the center of this
personalism stands an affirmation of the dignity of the person, the quality,
insisted on already by medieval thinkers, which constitutes the unique
excellence of personhood and which gives rise to specific moral requirements.
Dignity refers to the inherent value of the person, as a “someone” and not
merely “something,” and this confers an absoluteness not found in other beings.
Here classical-realist personalists reject the Hobbesian notion of dignity as
the price set on an individual by the commonwealth, and ally themselves rather
with Kant in his assertion that dignity is inherent and sets itself beyond all
price. The language of dignity rules out the possibility of involving persons
in a trade-off, as if their worth were a function of their utility. Every
person without exception is of inestimable worth, and no one is dispensable or
interchangeable. The person can never be lost or assimilated fully into the
collectivity, because his interrelatedness with other persons is defined by his
possession of a unique, irreplaceable value. The agreement with Kant in this
regard can be said to constitute a bridge between personalism in the broader
sense and personalism in the narrow sense.
Attributing a unique
dignity or worth to the human person also throws light on the cardinal virtue
of justice. Rendering “to each his due” hinges on one's understanding of what
each deserves, and this cannot be correctly ascertained without taking into
account the dignity and worth that are at the same time general qualities of
all persons, and inseparable from the singularity of each of them. Personalists
in the broader sense therefore lay special stress on what persons deserve by
the very fact of their personhood, and on the difference between acting toward
a person and acting toward any other reality. When the person is the object of
one's action, a whole ethical structure enters into play that is absent when
the object of one's action is a thing. How persons should be treated forms an
independent ethical category, separate in essence and not only in degree from
how non-persons (things) are to be treated. Whereas traditional ethical systems
stress the internal mechanisms of the moral agent (conscience, obligation, sin,
virtue, etc.) and the effect that free actions have on moral character,
personalists add to this a particular concern for the transcendent character of
human action and the dignity of the one being acted upon. The person's absolute
character provides for the possibility of absolute moral norms when dealing
with persons.
For personalists,
human dignity as such does not depend on variables such as native intelligence,
athletic ability or social prowess. Nor can it result merely from good conduct
or moral merit. It must rather be rooted in human nature itself, so that on the
deepest level, despite the variations of moral conduct and the resultant
differences in moral character, all members of the species share this dignity.
The difference between being something and someone has been seen as so radical
that it does not admit of degrees. Most personalists have denied that
personhood is something that can be gradually attained. It is like a binary
function (1 or 0) or a toggle switch (on or off), that admits no middle ground.
But as we have seen,
these positions can be related to a not wholly unproblematic view of non-human
nature. Personalists in the narrow sense accept, as far as it goes, the view of
the dignity of man as found in Kant's ethics or practical philosophy, but
modify and add to it not least from the perspective of a more thoroughgoingly
personalist understanding of the importance of individual uniqueness. And since
they do not merely emphasize the importance of the person within the framework
of a pre-existing metaphysics and a philosophical and theological anthropology,
there is available to them a theoretical space for conceiving of the non-human
world of “somethings” in a less objectifying and exploitative manner. The
early, idealistic personalists were much more inclined to see external nature
too as ultimately expressive of personal reality, and to account for its
impersonal appearance in terms of the limitations of finite perception.
Personalists assert
that only persons are truly “subjects.” This is not to say that in the
syntactic sense other entities do not “act” or “produce” or “cause,” but
properly speaking they do not possess subjectivity. In the modern sense,
subjectivity depends primarily on the unity of self-consciousness, and on
interiority, freedom, and personal autonomy. Though non-personal beings may
“act” in the syntactic sense, they are not truly subjects of action since the
cause of their action is extrinsic to them. Despite the difference with regard
to the ultimate nature of the “non-personal” between some personalists in the
narrow sense and personalists in the broader sense, there is in this area a
considerable overlap between the two forms of personalism. Personal
subjectivity embraces the moral and religious dimensions, which are part and
parcel of the person's nature as a conscious, intelligent, free, willing
subject in relation with God and others. As free, thinking subjects, persons
also exercise creativity through their thought, imagination, and action, a
creativity which affects both the surrounding world and the person himself. Furthermore,
personalists have observed that the lived experience of the human person, as a
conscious and self-conscious being, discloses not only actions but
also inner happenings that depend upon the self. These
experiences, lived in a conscious way, go into the makeup and uniqueness of the
person as well. As regards the ethical question, not only are persons free and
responsible moral subjects, but their subjectivity also conditions others'
ethical responsibility toward them.
What we perceive as
“things” can be examined and known from the outside, as what is regarded as
“objects”. In a sense, they stand in front of us, they present themselves to
us, but always as outside of us. They can be described, qualified, and
classified. Classical-realist personalists accept the legitimacy, even
necessity, of knowing man too in this way. From this objective viewpoint it is
possible to discern some of the superiority of the human being to the rest of
reality. Yet in the human person, a thoroughly unique dimension presents
itself, a dimension not found in the rest of reality. Human persons experience
themselves first of all not as objects but as subjects, not from the outside
but from the inside, and thus they are present to themselves in a way that no
other reality can be present to them. But here the influence and value of the
phenomenological method, as well as of aspects of the earlier idealistic
tradition, often makes itself especially felt in personalism and adds to the
classical-realist analysis. The essence of the person is explored as an
intuition from the inside, rather than as a deduction from a system of thought
or through empirical observation in the ordinary sense. The human being must be
treated as a subject, must be understood in terms of the modern view of specifically
human subjectivity as determined by consciousness. But this contribution is not
conceived by personalists as simply replacing in every respect earlier, more
objectivist notions of man, but quite as much as complementing them.
This conscious self-presence
is the interiority of the human person, and it is so central to the meaning of
the concept of person that one can say that personality signifies interiority
to self. Because of the person's subjectivity, he is not only acted upon and
moved by external forces, but also acts from within, from the core of his own
subjectivity. Since he is the author of his actions, he possesses an identity
of his own making, which cannot be reduced to objective analysis and thus
resists definition. This resistance to definition, this irreducibility, do not
mean that the person's subjectivity and lived experience are unknowable, but
rather that we must come to know them differently, by a method that merely
reveals and discloses their essence. In lived experience of self-possession and
self-governance, one experiences that one is a person and a subject, and
through sympathy and empathy one experiences the personhood of others. To
apply the early terminology with some added modern meanings, the person
comprises both an objective subsistence (ύπόστασις) and a subjective
subsistence (πρόσωπον).
A conclusion of
personalism is that the experience of the human being cannot be derived by way
of cosmological reduction. We must pause at the irreducible, at that which is
unique and unrepeatable in each human being, that by virtue of which he or she
is not just a particular human being—an individual of a certain species—but a
personal subject. This is the only way to come to a true understanding of the
human being. Obviously the framework of the irreducible is not exhaustive of
the human condition, and such an understanding must be supplemented by a
cosmological perspective. Nevertheless, personalists would say it is impossible
to come to a true understanding of the person while neglecting his
subjectivity.
The focus on the
subjectivity of persons explains many personalists' insistence on the
difference between the concept of “person” and that of “individual.” Gilson
wrote that “every human person is first an individual, but he is much more than
an individual, since one only speaks of a person, as of a personage, when the
individual substance under consideration possesses in his own right a certain
dignity.” The major distinction is that an individual represents
a single unit in a homogenous set, interchangeable with any other member of the
set, whereas a person is characterized by his uniqueness and
irreplaceability.
Von Balthasar, for
example, wrote: “Few words have as many layers of meaning asperson. On
the surface it means just any human being, any countable individual. Its deeper
senses, however, point to the individual's uniqueness which cannot be
interchanged and therefore cannot be counted.” In this deeper sense persons
cannot, properly speaking, be counted, because a single person is not merely
one in a series within which each member is identical to the rest for all
practical purposes and thus exchangeable for any other. One can count apples,
because one apple is as good as another (i.e., what matters is not that it
is this apple, but simply that it is an apple),
but one cannot count persons in this way. One could count
human beings, as individuals of the same species, but the word person emphasizes
the uniqueness of each member of the human species, his incommensurability and incommunicability.
Von Balthasar goes on to say: “If one distinguishes between individual and person (and
we should for the sake of clarity), then a special dignity is ascribed to the
person, which the individual as such does not possess…We will speak of a
‘person’…when considering the uniqueness, the incomparability and therefore
irreplaceability of the individual.”
As valid as these
philosophical distinctions are, whether one speaks of a human individual or a
human person, these are simply two names applied to the same reality.
Personalists are quick to assert that personality is not superadded to
humanity, but a quality of every human being. “Human person” and “human
individual,” while underscoring different dimensions of a human being, are
synonymous in everyday language and have the same referent. Some thinkers have
proposed a real distinction between a human person and a human individual. From
their perspective, personhood would be an acquired “extra” for a human being, a
status reached not simply by being an individual of the species, but by
entering into certain relationships with other persons in a conscious,
intentional way. In other words, while all human persons would be human
individuals, the reverse would not be true.
Personalists typically
reject this, and insist that each living human being normally
possesses—actually and not merely potentially, although the importance of
further development or actualization is strongly stressed—the definitional and
constitutive consciousness, intentionality, will etc., the radical capacity to
reason, laugh, love, and choose. These are not just some abstractly conceivable
common characteristics of a species, but aspects of the unique, individual,
organic functioning of every human being. In this way, personalists see
personhood as subsisting even while its operations come and go with many
changing factors such as immaturity, injury, sleep, and senility.
Man's
intellectual nature, which according to Boethius is the distinguishing
characteristic of personhood, is also the font of freedom, subjectivity,
immortality, and man's cognitive and moral life. It is as a rational being, and
therefore as a person, that the individual can distinguish true from false and
good from evil. Therefore science and morality are proper to persons. Because
the person possesses a spiritual nature, the source of its action is internal
to itself and not extrinsic.
Personalists insist
that in his contact with the world the human person acts not in a purely
mechanical or deterministic way, but from the inner self, as a subjective “I,”
with the power of self-determination. Possession of free will means that the
human person is his own master (sui iuris). Self-mastery and freedom
characterize personal beings; a free being is a person. The person's power of
self-determination explains the non-transferable nature of personality. His
incommunicability does not only refer to the person's uniqueness and
unrepeatability. What is incommunicable or inalienable in a person is intrinsic
to that person's inner self and to the power of self-determination. No one can
substitute his act of will for another's.
In what does
self-determination consist? A classic distinction separates “human acts” (actus
humani) from so-called “acts of man” (actus hominis). An act of man
describes something that “happens” in the subject whereas a properly human act
ascribes free and responsible authorship of the act to the subject. The element
of interior causality is referred to as self-determination. This self-determination
involves a sense of efficacy on the part of the acting subject, who recognizes
that “I act” means that “I am the efficient cause” of my action. One's sense of
efficacy as an acting person in relation to the action performed is in turn
closely connected to one's sense of responsibility for the activity. This
experience on the phenomenological level draws attention to the will as the
person's power of self-determination, while at the same time making clear that
self-determination is a property of the person himself, and not just of the
will. It is the freedom of the person as such, through his will.
Yet self-determination
does not only describe the causality of the action, but also of the one acting.
In acting, the person not only directs himself toward a value, he
determines himself as well. He is not only the efficient cause
of his actions, but is also in some sense the creator of himself, especially
his moral self. By choosing to carry out good or bad actions, man makes himself
a morally good or bad human being. Action is organically linked to becoming. By
free moral action the personal subject becomes good or bad as a human being.
When a person acts, he acts intentionally toward an object, a value which
attracts the will to itself. At the same time, self-determination points inward
toward the subject himself. As a result of this, the human being is capable of
existing and acting “for itself,” or is capable of a certainautoteleology.
This means that the person determines not only his own ends but also becomes an
end for himself. The person is not only responsible for his actions, he is also
responsible for himself, for his moral character and identity. Freedom means
that one is responsible for one's choices but also for one's self.
Freedom and self-determination
also bear a close relation to another characteristic of the person's spiritual
nature: creativity. Freedom as a property of the person allows the person to
create through thought and action. The will is not simply the executor of the
intellect's reasoned conclusions. The intellect presents a variety of goods to
be realized, none of which imposes itself in such a way as to be necessarily
desired or chosen above the others. The person himself decides spontaneously
and freely, and thus determines his own moral value and identity. “This
particular good I am choosing has value for me according to the ‘me’ that I
freely desire and choose to be.”
Personalists stress
the person's nature as a social being. According to personalists, the person
never exists in isolation, and moreover persons find their human perfection
only in communion with other persons. Interpersonal relations, consequently,
are never superfluous or optional to the person, but are constitutive of his inherent
make-up and vocation.
Relation is proper
only to the person. Personalism has endeavored to highlight this aspect of
personhood and bring it to the fore. It is central to personalism's reaction
against and endeavor to overcome the polarization of individualism on the one
hand and collectivism on the other. Personalists consider the human being as a
“being for others.” Relationship is not an optional accessory for the human
person, but is essential to his personhood. He is a being-for-relation.
Personalists recognize
that as much as he may strive for independence, the human person necessarily
relies on others. He depends on other persons for his survival and development,
and this interdependence is a hallmark of human existence. Beyond this, the
human person also tends toward society as a basic human value. Such society is
not only a matter of utility or convenience but reflects an innate tendency of
the person to seek out his fellows and enter into spiritual association with
them. The trait of sociableness has been observed since the earliest
philosophers, and reflects both man's dependence on other people for his
subsistence and development, and his vocation to deeper communion.
Some personalists note
that man's social nature and his vocation to inter-personal communion are not
the same thing. Their capacity for rational community and friendship is one of
the things that make human beings social. But the person's capacity for
communion is according to these personalists deeper than mere sociability.
“Society,” in fact, is sometimes analogously applied to non-personal beings
that live and interact as a group rather than in isolation from one another,
whereas the word communion could never be understood in this way. Communio does
not simply refer to something common, but rather to a mode of being and acting
in common through which the persons involved mutually confirm and affirm one
another, a mode of being and acting that promotes the personal fulfillment of
each of them by virtue of their mutual relationship. This mode of being and
acting is an exclusive property of persons.
Personalists see the
human person's vocation to communion as rooted in rational nature, through the
person's subjectivity and self-determination. Far from closing the person in on
himself, these characteristics of the person's spiritual nature dispose him to
communication with other persons. For most personalists, the subjectivity of
the person has nothing in common with the isolated unity of the Leibnitzian
monad but requires the communication of knowledge and love.
This communication, in turn, depends on the person's
self-determination with its distinctive structure of self-possession and
self-governance. As a free, willing subject, the person cannot be possessed by
another, unless he chooses to make a gift of himself to another. Personalists
assert that the person belongs to himself in a way that no other thing or
animal can. Self-possession does not imply isolation. On the contrary, both
self-possession and self-governance imply a special disposition to make “a gift
of oneself.” Only if one possesses oneself can one give oneself and do this in
a disinterested way. And only if one governs oneself can one make a disinterested
gift of oneself. This vocation to self-giving is so essential to the
constitution of the person that it is precisely when one becomes a gift for
others that one most fully becomes oneself. Without a disinterested gift of
self man cannot achieve the finality that is proper to a human being by virtue
of his being a person, and cannot fully discover his true self.
For personalists, this
“law of the gift” shows that the relation and the society of which the person
alone is capable, and which are necessary for his realization as a person,
consist not only in association, but in love. They consist in a love which
gives and gives itself, which receives not only things but other persons as
well. Only persons can give love and only persons can receive love.
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