personalism
• Personalism is a scientific, philosophical (social–ethical)
and theological movement that finds ultimate reality
and value in the Divine or human person (absolutely in
God and analogically in created persons).
• As a doctrine or school of thought Personalism
emphasizes the significance, uniqueness and
inviolability of the person, and the communitarian
dimension of the person, which is the principle, cause,
goal and sense of all reality.
• A person (persona) means an objective subsistence
(ύιποστασις) and a subjective subsistence (προσώπου).
• Thus Personalism is a scientific, philosophical and
theological perspective or system for which the person is
the ontological ultimate and for which the person is the
fundamental explanatory principle.
• Within this system, there are two types of Personalism:
– Realistic Personalism and
– Idealistic Personalism
• Generally however, the core of the Personalist doctrine is
that God is Personal (Theistic Personalism) and that all
scientific, epistemological, metaphysical and ethical
(moral), social and theological truth derives from the
highest mystery (fact, category and dignity) of the
person which is a key to reality.
• Personalism emphasizes that the person is a key notion
which gives meaning to all of reality and is the supreme
value: the dignity of a person is always respected.
Personalists hold that a person combines unity and variety,
permanence and change, causal activity and receptivity,
actuality and potentiality, subjectivity and objectivity,
mechanism and purpose, identity and creativity.
• According to Albert Cornelius Knudson Personalism
“represents one of the oldest and broadest currents in the
history of human thought; it stands organically and
structurally related to the spiritual philosophy of all the
ages. It 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.”1
• The personalistic Hall of Fame has truly a long history:
Anaxagoras (500–430 B.C.) approached a personalistic
Theism by his doctrine that the divine Nous or Mind
governs all motion.
• Socrates (469–399 B.C.) is praised for having taken
philosophy seriously as the search for truth by which to
live, even at the cost of his life, and opposed moral
relativism by a critical, rational method which
combined an ethics of satisfaction and an ethics of
reason. He discovered the soul or self as the center
from which sprang all human action.
• To Plato (427–347 B.C.) the debt of Personalism is
philosophically most significant. He stated that only the
logical, the ideal, and the self–active is true. His
doctrine of Eternal Ideas provided a clear affirmation
of the objectivity of value–norms independent of
human opinion. In his method Plato contributed what
he called a ‘synopsis’, a deliberate viewing of
experience in its larger and more richly significant
wholes. In ethics he espoused a doctrine of self–
realization, the aspiration to become a harmonious
whole in which every aspect of the soul might take the
role most consonant with the meaningful unity of the
whole.
• Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) emphasized reality as concrete
and individual, and thus corrected Plato’s tendency
toward an abstract metaphysical universalism. He
substituted the World–Soul of Plato for a single self–
conscious Being, a ‘Prime’ or ‘Unmoved Mover’. To
Aristotle the American Personalists gratefully attribute
an increased emphasis upon empirical method and a
sharpening of logical instruments, the continuance of
the ethical tradition of self–realization and an aesthetic
theory which found intimate positive relations
between aesthetic experience and other needs of the
human person.
• St. Augustine (354–430) developed the conception of the unity of
the mental life, the significance of the will in the life of both God
and humans, and also he formulated the truths that self–certainty
is more immediate than our knowledge of the external world and
that valid metaphysics must be based on the self–knowledge of the
finite personality. Not only did he put thought above things but he
rightly valued the thinker above thought. Augustine established the
existence of the soul as a thinking and willing being. In
his Confessions and De Trinitate, he made much use of analogies
between observed aspects of the human soul and the distinctions
within the Holy Trinity, thus showing many times his belief in a
profound kinship between the human soul and God, despite the
mystery and transcendence which he also emphasized.
• A. M. Boethius (480–524) defined the person as the individual
substance of a rational nature (Personae est definitio: naturae
rationabilis individua substantia).2
• Avicenna (980–1037) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–
1274) drew from Aristotle a personalistic interpretation
and thereby preserved the peculiar genius of Eastern
and Western culture. St. Thomas ascribed efficient as
well as final causality to God and thus made the world
directly dependent upon the divine will both for its
origin and its preservation (creatio et conservatio
mundi). He attributed a distinctly personal character to
God as the Author of all being and established the
belief in personal immortality, defending a system of
philosophical ethics and ascribing to humans the
highest worth possessed by any creature on earth.
• R Descartes (1596–1650) revived the Augustinian
doctrine of the primacy of self–certainty and
made it basic to his system: Cogito, ergo sum. At
the same time he broke the Aristotelian
distinction between matter and form which had
triumphed over the human mind for almost two
thousand years, and in its place he put a radical
distinction between thought and extension or
mind and body. He held the mind to be
independent of the body and by virtue of its own
unique self–identity capable of an immortal
destiny.
•
•
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) defined more precisely the nature of individuality and
ascribed to the individual a large degree of metaphysical independence. He conceived of substance
as realized both in the Infinite and in finite monads as psychical and active. The Leibnizian
monadology represented reality as made up of active individuals, including human persons but also
a vast variety of other psychic units, ranging from the most dimly conscious or unconscious sleeping
monads to the sublime consciousness of God. Every monad is active (“to be is to act”) in the
universe consisting of simple psychic monads, but the monads do not interact (only seem to) by
virtue of a pre–established harmony. As Descartes reintroduced the primacy of self–certainty, so
Leibniz reformulated the principle of individuality.
George Berkeley (1685–1753) was the first philosophical personal idealist. He completely denied
the substantial reality of the material world, reducing it to a series of presentations produced in
finite minds by the Infinite. To God and to souls alone did he ascribe metaphysical reality. All reality
consists of active spirits and their perceptions or passive ideas. There is no unconscious material
substance (esse est percipi). Material substance is unverifiable. Nature exists only in spirits,
primarily in the Divine Spirit or Person, and then is communicated as “a divine language” to human
spirits. In describing the material world as the divine language G. Berkeley combined Christian
Theism with metaphysical Idealism. His system was, in the strict sense of the term, a Personal
Idealism.
• Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) influenced American
Personalism under three headings: the theory of
knowledge, ethical theory, and the primacy of
practical reason. Personalism owes much to
Kant’s theory of knowledge. The central aspect of
his theory is the activity of the mind. By this
doctrine of the creative activity of thought Kant
gave to the spiritual individualism of Leibniz and
Berkeley a definiteness of content that it had
previously lacked and also supplied it with a firm
epistemological basis.
• American personalists have emphasized the
central place of the activity of the mind in
knowing and being more than Kant and have
fully acknowledged their Kantian source.
Personalism has maintained with Kant that
knowledge is an achievement, the product of
the creative activity of the human person.
• The second aspect of the theory of knowledge
for which Personalism is indebted to I. Kant is
what is called epistemic dualism. This latter
essentially means that knowledge is always a
matter of subject and object. For Kant
knowledge is identified with the paradigm of
science. To have knowledge (science) there
must be a knower (subject) and something
else that is known (object).
• Most personalists reject the Kantian restriction of
knowledge to phenomena. Although personalists agree
with Kant that we do not have direct cognitive access to
reality and that scientific knowledge is not metaphysical
knowledge, personalists do not believe that metaphysical
knowledge is thereby precluded. For American personalists
experience provides clues to the way things are ‘out there’.
If the clues are interpreted coherently, one is entitled to
speak of legitimate metaphysical knowledge. Personalists
do not claim that such knowledge is certain; it is at best
hypothetical. Kant would not have accepted such a
conception of metaphysical knowledge because knowledge
had to have the apodictic certainty of the kind represented
in Newtonian physics.3
• The centrality of the person was fundamental in Kant’s
ethics. The principle of autonomy, namely, the only
principles that are moral principles are principles I
impose upon myself, and the principle of altruism, and
the principle of personality were general aspects of his
ethics. By his conception of personality as an end in
itself he laid the foundation of Ethical Personalism. As
he held in his famous categorical practical imperative:
• Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own
person or in that of another, always as an end never as
a means only.4
• By his doctrine of the primacy of the practical reason I. Kant
justified the belief in freedom, immortality, and God (Theistic
Personalism). The primacy of the practical reason means that the
affirmations of the moral life take precedence over scientific
knowledge of phenomena. The postulates of the practical reason,
which ground this precedence, are freedom, immortality, and God.
Kant held that in order to have morality there must be freedom. In
order for virtuous people to be rewarded with happiness there
must be immortality, since virtue is certainly not so rewarded in this
life. And in order for there to be immortality there must be a God,
who so arranges mysteries that virtue and happiness are crowned
in immortal life.
• In Kant’s synthesis of apriorism with empiricism there is also to be
found the justification of the profound metaphysical significance
attributed by American Personalism to self–experience.
• Although Georg W. F. H e g e l (1770–1831)
established the rationality of the real (“the real is
the rational”) and he made coherence the
criterion of ethical and aesthetic value as well as
of truth (“the true is the whole”), Rudolf
Hermann Lotze (1817–1881) corrected the
Hegelian tendency toward an abstract and
universalistic type of metaphysics by successfully
maintaining that reality is always concrete and
individual. In his Absolute Idealism Hegel never
solved the problem of the transition from
universality to individuality.
• R. H. Lotze also realized that reality is infinitely richer than thought,
and that in the form of personality it offers an adamantine
resistance to every dissolvent that thought is able to apply. For
without a thinker there can be no thought just as without an agent
there can be no activity, either mental or physical. The self is a
presupposition of thought. True existence must, therefore, be
something more than thought – it must be existence for self.
According to L. Harold DeWolf Lotze defined the human soul
neither as a substratum substance nor as an observed
consciousness, but as the observing, thinking, willing subject,
always to be distinguished from phenomena of every kind. It is the
observer, not the data observed in introspection. R. H. Lotze thus
transformed the logical rationalism of Hegel into a personal
rationalism, and the Absolute Idealism of Hegel into a Personal
Idealism. He styled his own philosophy ‘Teleological Idealism’ and
was, in fact, a personal idealist.
• In Germany the term ‘der Personalismus’ was
first used by F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–
1834) in his book On Religion in 1799. R.
H.Lotze (1817–1881) published
his Mikrokosmus in Leipzig, 1856–1858. The
prominent German psychologist William Stern
(1871–1939) edited hisPerson und Sache in
Leipzig in 1906. Max Scheler (1874–1928) was
famous for his Ethical Personalism.
• In France personalistic principles are to be found in M. Biran (1766–
1824), F. Ravaisson (1813–1900), and G. Marcel , H. L. Bergson
(1859–1941), E. Mounier (1905–1950) and J. Maritain (1882–1973).
In 1903 Charles Renouvier (1815–1903) published his book Le
Personnalisme in Paris.
• In England John Henry Newman (1801–1890) used the words ‘this
method of personation’ in 1830, and John Grote, Professor of Moral
Philosophy at the University of Cambridge published in 1865 his
bookExploratio Philosophica, where he gave the name Personalism
to the basic principle of his own Metaphysics. The other
representatives of Personalism in Britain were H. W. Carr (1857–
1931) who wrote The Unique Status of Man, London 1928, and J. M.
E. McTaggart (1866–1925).
• Russian Personalism was developed namely by V. S. Soloviev (1853–
1900), N. A. Berdyaev (1874–1948) in his autobiography Dream and
Reality, and presented by N. O. Lossky (1870–1965) in his History of
Russian Philosophy (1951).
• In Poland the genius of N. Copernicus (1473–1543) in
Astronomy, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) and F.
Chopin (1810–1849) in Music, preceded Personalism in Philosophy,
Theology and History. Card. Karol Wojtyła (1920–) in his Osoba i
Czyn, Kraków 1969, developed his own original Personalism. Card.
Stefan Wyszyński is well known for his Social Personalism, and the
President of the Catholic University of Lublin, Rev. W. Granat (1900–
1979) wrote Personalizm chrześcijański. Teologia osoby ludzkiej,
Poznań 1985. Rev. Cz. S. Bartnik (1929–), is a seminal
Personalist, Personalizm, Lublin 1995, 2000 and also Rev. Tadeusz
Styczeń, Rev. Stanisław Kowalczyk.
• In America one of the most interesting episodes
in history was the founding of the Concord and
the St. Louis Schools of Philosophy and of
America’s first philosophical magazine, The
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, by William
Torrey Harris (1835–1909), with the help of
Conrad Brockmeyer (1826–1906) and Thomas
Davidson (1840–1900). Walt Whitman, Amos
Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), and Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1803–1882) were members of these
Schools.
• According to Odell Shepard, Alcott finally summed up his thought
which he called ‘Personalism’. This term he may have borrowed
from the St. Louis group. To him as to George Howison and, later, to
Borden P. Bowne, Personalism was 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 main advantage of this
doctrine is the mediation that it provides between the extreme
idealistic and materialistic positions, and this alone would have
commended it to a thinker who had always been fascinated by the
dual aspect of the world. Even more important to a man of Alcott’s
intense social concern, however, was the clear implication that all
apparently separate minds are bound together, like the planets in
the solar system, by their common relation to a central Mind.
• On April 28, 1868 Bronson Alcott wrote in
his Journals:
• “Letter from Walt Whitman, with his paper on
Personalism in the Galaxy. Is pleased with my letter of
Jan. 19, last. This Personalism is in the same grand vein
of the Democracy, and he promises a third on
Literature.
• Say what men may, this man is a power in thought, and
likely to make his mark on times and institutions. I shall
have to try a head of him presently for my American
Gallery: Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt. If there be an
ideal Personalism, so is there an actual individualism,
of which Thoreau and Whitman are prodigious
impersonations – Walt for institutions, Thoreau for
things. …
•
•
•
•
Write to Whitman and send him my Emerson.
Read “Personalism” again after day’s work. Verily, great grand doctrine, and great grand Walt,
grown since I saw him in his Brooklyn garret in 185–. Greater, and grown more open–eyed, as
perhaps ourself, since then. Another American beside Thoreau and Emerson.”5
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) published The Limits of Evolution in New York, 1901. He
seemed to prefer the term ‘Personal Idealism’ and established the personalistic tradition at the
University of California, Berkeley. Mary Whiton Calkins began to use the term Personalism in 1906–
1907 and called herself ‘An Absolutistic Personalist’.
The term ‘American personalism’ was first used by America’s most famous poet, Walt Whitman
(1819–1892) in his essay “Personalism” which was published in The Galaxy, May 1868. Whitman’s
articles “Democracy” (The Galaxy, December 1867) and “Personalism” were later parts of his
“Democratic Vistas” (1871). But the father of American Personalism is Borden Parker Bowne (1847–
1910), a Methodist minister, who studied under R. Lotze in Germany and introduced the term
‘Personalism’ into American Science, Philosophy and Theology with his famous bookPersonalism,
Boston 1908. He taught as Professor of Philosophy at Boston University which may be considered
the cradle of American Personalism. On May 31, 1909 B. P. Bowne wrote a letter to his wife where
he presented himself: I am a Personalist, the first of the clan in any thorough–going sense.6
•
•
Bowne’s disciples and the prominent exponents of the second generation of
Personalism in American Philosophy were the leader of The Bostonian School,
Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884–1953) and the leader of The Californian School,
Ralph Tyler Flewelling (1871–1960). Boston Personalist Albert Cornelius Knudson
(1873–1954) who published The Philosophy of Personalism, New York 1927, fully
introduced Personalism into American Theology.
In the third generation of American Personalism the psychological dimension was
developed by Peter Anthony Bertocci (1910–1989), and W. Gordon Allport of
Harvard, pupil of William Stern. Martin Luther King , J r. (1929–1968) studied at
Boston University under Brightman and Muelder, and represents the fourth
generation of Personalism in America. At the University of Southern California, Los
Angeles, R. T. Flewelling, in April 1920, published The Personalist, a Quarterly
Journal of Philosophy, Theology and Literature, which was continued until October
1979. As the editor and writer he emphasized Democratic Personalism: “To
Personalism, personality is the supreme value. Society then should be so organized
as to present every person the best possible opportunity for self–development,
physically, mentally, and spiritually since the person is the supreme essence of
democracy and hostile to totalitarianisms of every sort.”7
• In San Anselmo, California, near San Francisco, Carol
Sue Robb (1945–), representing the fifth generation of
American Personalism, transformed the Boston
Personalist Tradition into the California Personalist
Tradition, particularly in the fields of Social Ethics and
Feminism. She coedited with Paul Deats a handbook on
Bostonian Personalism: The Boston Personalist
Tradition in Philosophy, Social Ethics, and Theology. In
addition, Georgia Harkness taught and wrote in Boston
as a Personalist Theologian as well as the other
Personalists: L. Harold DeWolf, S. Paul Schilling and
John H. Lavely.
• Walter George Muelder (1907–), Emeritus Dean,
Professor of Social Ethics and Christian Theology
at Boston University and the University of
Southern California bridged the Bostonian School
and the Californian School. His father studied
under B. P. Bowne and Professor Muelder
personally knew E. S. Brightman and R. T.
Flewelling. He was an observer at the Second
Vatican Council (1964) and calls his doctrine
‘Communitarian Personalism’ which recalls John
Paul II’s ‘communio personarum’.
• Erazim Kohák, a Czech Personalist, wrote in his essay on American
Personalism (1992) that in the United States of America at the turn
of the century, the conception of a personal God was powerfully
present in the philosophical discussion of the time. In making
assertions such as that God is the only being who can be fully said
to be a person, the personalists linked their conception of the
normative way of being human to God, much as Karol Wojtyła does
in his personalism. The personalist terminology and imagery thus
served to make the point that this is not a subjective idealism,
reducing reality to human thought. It is God’s transcendence which
gives God’s creation an irreducibility of its own. Though the
meaningful order of reality is subject–related, it is only constituted,
not created, by human subjects. God as the ultimate Person
guarantees both the meaningful order and that irreducible reality of
the real. As for the religious personalists today, the terminology
of person and personalism implies all of the above.
• Indeed, Karol Wojtyła, as Pope John Paul II, explained his notion of a
person and his Personalism in the following way: The true personalistic
interpretation of the commandment of love is found in the words of the
Council: “When the Lord Jesus prays to the Father so that ‘they may be
one’” (Jn 17:22), He places before us new horizons impervious to human
reason and implies a similarity between the union of divine persons and
the union of the children of God in truth and charity. This similarity shows
how man, who is the only creature on earth that God wanted for his own
sake, can fully discover himself only by the sincere giving of himself”
(Gaudium et Spes 24). Here we truly have an adequate interpretation of
the commandment of love. Above all, the principle that a person has value
by the simple fact that he is a person finds very clear expression: man, it is
said, “is the only creature on earth that God has wanted for his own sake.”
At the same time the Council emphasizes that the most important thing
about love is the sincere gift of self. In this sense the person is realized
through love.
• Therefore, these two aspects – the affirmation of the
person as a person and the sincere gift of self – not
only do not exclude each other, they mutually confirm
and complete each other. Man affirms himself most
completely by giving of himself. This is the fulfilment of
the commandment of love. This is also the full truth
about man, a truth that Christ taught us by His life, and
that the tradition of Christian morality, no less than the
tradition of saints and of the many heroes of love of
neighbor, took up and lived out in the course of
history”.8
• ***
• The International Forum on Persons organizes Conferences on
Persons in a biennial series.
• The first Conference was held at Mansfield College, Oxford, from
the 11 th –14 th September 1991.
• The second Conference was held at Saint Mary’s College, Notre
Dame, Indiana, from the 22 nd – 25 th September 1993.
• The third Conference was held at Oriel College, Oxford, from 15 th –
19 th August 1995.
• The forth international Conference on Persons was arranged at
Charles University, Prague from 8 th – 13 th August 1997.
• The fifth Conference was organized at St. John’s College, Santa Fe,
New Mexico from 3 rd – 8 th August 1999.
• Finally, the sixth international Conference on Persons was held in
Gaming, Austria, August 7 – 12, 2001.
Wojtyla: The Acting Person
Coda
Husserl
Reinach
Scheler
Ingarden
Wojtyła
Holism / Granularity
• Wojtyła: The Acting Person (Person and Deed,
1969)
• a study of the human person / substance /
organism / individual
• and of the structures common to all persons
and of all human action
Reinach: action vs. passion
• what merely happens in a person
• vs. spontaneous doings of a person, both internal
(choosing, deciding) and external (kissing, kicking).
• the person is an enduring dynamic centre of
spontaneous acts
• Problem: there is a range of different dynamic orders
in which each person is involved which he must
somehow integrate through the choices he makes
through his life.
• Persons create themselves by acting.
Man acts
•
•
•
•
•
Acting is the first of many dynamisms
(=dimensions of dynamic activity and organization) in
the structure of the human person.
Acting is conscious,
and consciousness, too, is a dynamism in the
structure of the person.
There are also bodily dynamisms, e.g. the
circulation of the blood
How is this multiplicity of dynamisms to be
unified by the person through actions?
Consciousness mirrors external reality
•
•
•
•
•
But it is aware also (as it were from the inside) of the
actions of the person whose consciousness it is.
When we act we experience our action
1. as a doing of which we are the agent, as
something which we are now directly (causally) responsible
for bringing about.
2. as reflecting certain conscious processes in
ourselves called desires.
3. (sometimes) as a bearer of moral value or
disvalue (= as part of a drama of good and evil within
ourselves)
The dynamism of feelings and emotions
•
Some of our consciousness is so intensely emotionalized that the
emotions take over from a more reasonable, cognitive consciousness.
•
The objects and the actions which make up our world are to different
degrees valuable and our emotions are sensitive to these values.
•
Our cognitive, reasoned consciousness, too, is then able to grasp
these same values as it were second hand. It then has the task of bringing
about a unity of the person through diminution of the strife to which our
awareness of values would otherwise give rise.
•
In the case of an over-emotionalized consciousness, there is a
struggle between the intense emotions which our consciousness is
effected by and our consciousness itself. And sometimes, of course,
consciousness loses, we find it impossible to act in such a way as to bring
about an integration of our person. The person as unity disintegrates.
Freedom
•
Every action is in principle able to involve an
experience of freedom
•
But only a person who has a relatively low
degree of emotionalization of his consciousness and
a relatively high degree of integration of his person
experiences this "I may, but I need not". Hence only
such a person is free.
•
Freedom presupposes self-possession
•
Self-possession presupposes the cognitive
awareness that my decisions are contributing to the
integration or unification of my person.
Freedom thus presupposes a reference to
truth
•
and not only a reference to the objects which elicit the
corresponding actions
•
Someone who is living in error is not free
•
Just as there is a dynamism which makes us constantly
aware of and constantly receptive to value in the outer world,
constantly choosing and deciding, moving this way and that in
relation to outer objects, so there is a similar dynamism in the
inner world, a receptivity to inner value, called "conscience".
Conscience serves control the goodness or the badness of our
actions: it serves to control the degree to which our acts of
will are such as to respect the truth.
Two broad classes of human dynamisms:
relating to consciousness, and relating to the
body
•  solution to the mind-body problem
• The mental and bodily dynamisms are brought to a
unity on the higher level constituted by the
dynamisms of human action. Integration occurs, for
instance, through the cultivation of bodily skills
through work and practice à la Merleau-Ponty (and
virtue, too, is a skill which can be acquired, like
swimming or piano-playing).
All men
• have the ability to use conscience in order to
distinguish truth from falsity as far as their
acts are concerned, and to do this infallibly (a
view embraced also by Brentano in his
Religion und Philosophie)
• The International Forum on Persons provides a context wherein
scholars from all disciplinary backgrounds and religious traditions
can enter into dialogue about what it means to be a person, and
what it is to for persons to live in personal, social, national and
international relationships in an age of increasing globalization.
These challenging Conferences aim to promote, encourage, and
publish original research into aspects of personhood, personal
identity, and Personalism, and creatively to explore their application
in all fields of science, philosophy and theology.
• Personalism and life are linked. Personalism is realized between
idealism and materialism, between individualism and collectivism
and between abortion and euthanasia. An unborn human being is a
person. Somebody will try to clone a human organism but it is
impossible to clone a human person.
• To be a person means to be in relationship. A
bridge signifies this relationship.
• I hope that the biannual Personalism will build
a golden bridge between science, philosophy
and theology in this age of personalization.