Personalism

Personalism is a philosophical school of thought searching to describe the uniqueness of 1) God as (Supreme)
Person or 2) a human person in the world of nature,
specically in relation to animals. One of the main points
of interest of personalism is human subjectivity or selfconsciousness, experienced in a persons own acts and inner happeningsin everything in the human being that
is internal, whereby each human being is an eye witness
of its own self.[1]

gave to the spiritual individualism of Leibniz and Berkeley a deniteness of content that it had previously lacked,
and also supplied it with a rm epistemological basis.

1.3 Berdyaev
Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (Russian:
) (18741948) was a Russian
religious and political philosopher who emphasized human freedom, subjectivity and creativity.

Other principles:
1. Persons have unique value, and
2. Only persons have free will

1.4 Possible proto-personalism in philosophy

According to idealism there is one more principle

1.4.1 Socrates

1. Only persons are real (in the ontological sense).

1
1.1

Socrates (469399 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.

History of personalism in philosophy

Berkeley

George Berkeley (16851753) was the rst philosophical personal idealist. He completely denied the substantial reality of the material world, reducing it to a series
of presentations produced in nite minds by the Innite.
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
unveriable. 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.

1.2

1.4.2 Plato
To Plato (427347 B.C.) the debt of personalism is philosophically most signicant. He stated that only the logical, the ideal, and the selfactive is true. His doctrine of
Eternal Ideas provided a clear armation of the objectivity of valuenorms 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 signicant wholes. In ethics, he espoused a doctrine of selfrealization, 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.

Kant

Immanuel Kant (17241804) inuenced American personalism under three headings: the theory of knowledge,
ethical theory, and the primacy of practical reason. Personalism owes much to Kants 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

1.4.3 Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras (500430 B.C.) approached a personalistic
theism by his doctrine that the divine Nous or Mind governs all motion.
1

2
1.4.4

1 HISTORY OF PERSONALISM IN PHILOSOPHY

Aristotle

Aristotle (384322 B.C.) emphasized reality as concrete

and individual, and thus disagreed with Platos armation of an abstract metaphysical universalism. He substituted the WorldSoul of Plato for a single selfconscious
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 selfrealization and an aesthetic theory which found
intimate positive relations between aesthetic experience
and other needs of the human person.
1.4.5

Gregory of Nyssa

Gregory of Nyssa (c 335 after 394) emphasized the notion of humankind as created in the image of God. He
was among the rst to explicitly claim that God is qualitatively innite, and so incomprehensible. From this follows that humankind, being the image of God, is also to
some extent incomprehensible and that every person has
innite value. This led him to his famous critique of slavery:
God said, Let us make man in our image and
likeness. If he is in the likeness of God, and
rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who
is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To
God alone belongs this power; or rather, not
even to God himself. For his gracious gifts, it
says, are irrevocable. God would not therefore
reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God
does not enslave what is free, who is he that
sets his own power above Gods? (Homilies on
Ecclesiastes)
1.4.6

Augustine

Augustine of Hippo (354430) developed the conception

of the unity of the mental life, the signicance of the will
in the life of both God and humans, and also he formulated the truths that selfcertainty is more immediate than
our knowledge of the external world and that valid metaphysics must be based on the selfknowledge of the nite
personality. Not only did he put thought above things but
he 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.

1.4.7 Bothius
Anicius Manlius Severinus Bothius (480524) dened
the person as the individual substance of a rational nature (Personae est denitio: naturae rationabilis individua substantia).

1.4.8 Avicenna and Thomas Aquinas

Avicenna (9801037) in the Islamic East and Thomas
Aquinas (12251274) in the Christian West drew from
Aristotle a personalistic interpretation and thereby preserved the peculiar genius of Eastern and Western culture. St. Thomas ascribed ecient as well as nal 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.

1.4.9 Descartes
Ren Descartes (15961650) revived the Augustinian
doctrine of the primacy of selfcertainty and made it basic to his system: Cogito, ergo sum (or more correctly,
cogito sum, simply). At the same time he broke the Aristotelian distinction between matter and form which had
triumphed over the western 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 selfidentity capable of an immortal destiny.

1.4.10 Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (16461716) dened 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 Innite and in nite 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 preestablished harmony. As Descartes
reintroduced the primacy of selfcertainty, so Leibniz reformulated the principle of individuality.

Personalism as diverse category

of thought

Writing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,[2]

noted scholar Thomas D. Williams cites a plurality of schools holding to a personalist ethic and
"Weltanschauung, arguing:
Personalism exists in many dierent versions,
and this makes it somewhat dicult to dene as a philosophical and theological movement. Many philosophical schools have at their
core one particular thinker or even one central
work which serves as a canonical touchstone.
Personalism is a more diused and eclectic
movement and has no such universal reference
point. It is, in point of fact, more proper to
speak of many personalisms 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 armation
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 signicance, uniqueness and inviolability of the person, as well as the persons 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 reection.
They are concerned to investigate the experience, the status, and the dignity of the human
being as person, and regard this as the startingpoint for all subsequent philosophical analysis
[Williams, 2009].

Thus, according to Williams, one ought to keep in mind

that although there may be dozens of theorists and social
activists in the West adhering to the rubric personalism,
their particular foci may, in fact, be asymptotic, and even
diverge at material junctures.

3 Emmanuel Mouniers personalism

Further information: Non-conformists of the 1930s
In France, philosopher Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950)
was the leading proponent of personalism, around which
he founded the review L'Esprit, which exists to this day.
Under Jean-Marie Domenach's direction, it criticized the
use of torture during the Algerian War. Personalism was
seen as an alternative to both Liberalism and Marxism,
which respected human rights and the human personality without indulging in excessive collectivism. Mouniers
personalism had an important inuence in France, including in political movements, such as Marc Sangnier's Ligue
de la jeune Rpublique (Young Republic League) founded
in 1912.
A Jewish anti-fascist, Zeev Sternhell, has identied personalism with fascism in a very controversial manner,
claiming that Mouniers personalism movement shared
ideas and political reexes with fascism. He argued that
Mouniers revolt against individualism and materialism"
would have led him to share the ideology of fascism.[3]

4 Roman Catholic personalism

A distinctively Christian personalism developed in the
20th century. Its main theorist was the Polish philosopher Karol Wojtya (later Pope John Paul II). In his work,
Love and Responsibility, rst published in 1960, Wojtya
proposed what he termed 'the personalistic norm': This
norm, in its negative aspect, states that the person is the
kind of good which does not admit of use and cannot be
treated as an object of use and as such the means to an
end. In its positive form the personalistic norm conrms
this: the person is a good towards which the only proper
and adequate attitude is love.[4] This brand of personalism has come to be known as Thomistic because of
its eorts to square modern notions regarding the person
with the teachings of Thomas Aquinas.[5] This is a rst
principle of Christian personalism: persons are not to be
used, but to be respected and loved. In Gaudium et spes,
the Second Vatican Council formulated what has come
to be considered the key expression of this personalism:
man is the only creature on earth that God willed for its
own sake and he cannot fully nd himself except through
a sincere gift of himself.[6]

This formula for self-fulllment oers a key for overcoming the dichotomy frequently felt between personal realization and the needs or demands of social life. Personalism also implies inter-personalism, as Benedict XVI
stresses in Caritas in Veritate: As a spiritual being, the
human creature is dened through interpersonal relations.
The more authentically he or she lives these relations, the
more his or her own personal identity matures. It is not
by isolation that man establishes his worth, but by placing
himself in relation with others and with God.[7]

ANTECEDENTS AND INFLUENCE

ism of Thomas Aquinas are inadequate, for they make

nite persons dependent for their existence upon an innite Person and support this view by an unintelligible
doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.[9]

The Personal Idealism of Howison was explained in his

book The Limits of Evolution and Other Essays Illustrating
the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Idealism. Howison
created a radically democratic notion of personal idealism that extended all the way to God, who was no more
the ultimate monarch, no longer the only ruler and creator of the universe, but the ultimate democrat in eternal relation to other eternal persons. Howison found few
5 Boston personalism
disciples among the religious, for whom his thought was
heretical; the non-religious, on the other hand, considered
Personalism ourished in the early 20th century at Boston his proposals too religious; only J. M. E. McTaggart's ideUniversity in a movement known as Boston Personalism alist atheism or Thomas Davidson's Apeirionism seem to
[10]
led by theologian Borden Parker Bowne. Bowne empha- resemble Howisons personal idealism.
sized the person as the fundamental category for explaining reality and asserted that only persons are real. He
stood in opposition to certain forms of materialism which
would describe persons as mere particles of matter. For
example, against the argument that persons are insigni- 7 Antecedents and inuence
cant specks of dust in the vast universe, Bowne would say
that it is impossible for the entire universe to exist apart
from a person to experience it. Ontologically speaking, Philosopher Immanuel Kant, though not formally considthe person is larger than the universe because the uni- ered a personalist, made an important contribution to the
verse is but one small aspect of the person who experi- personalist cause by declaring that a person is not to be
ences it. Personalism arms the existence of the soul. valued merely as a means to the ends of other people, but
Most personalists assert that God is real and that God that he possesses dignity (an absolute inner worth) and is
is a person (or as in Christian trinitarianism, three 'per- to be valued as an end in himself.
sons, although it is important to note that the nonstandard Catholic philosopher and theologian John Henry Newmeaning of the word 'person' in this theological context man, has been posited as a main proponent of personalis signicantly dierent from Bownes usage).
ism by John Crosby of Franciscan University in his book
Bowne also held that persons have value (see axiology, Personalist Papers. Crosby notes Newmans personal apvalue theory, and ethics). In declaring the absolute value proach to faith, as outlined in Grammar of Assent as a
[11]
of personhood, he stood rmly against certain forms main source of Newmans personalism.
of philosophical naturalism (including social Darwinism)
which sought to reduce the value of persons. He also
stood against certain forms of positivism which sought to
render ethical and theological discourse meaningless and
dismiss talk of God a priori.

California personalism

George Holmes Howison taught a metaphysical theory

called Personal Idealism[8] which was also called California Personalism by others to distinguish it from
the Boston Personalism"(see above) taught by Borden
Parker Bowne. Howison maintained that both impersonal, monistic idealism and materialism run contrary to
the moral freedom experienced by persons. To deny the
freedom to pursue the ideals of truth, beauty, and benignant love is to undermine every profound human venture, including science, morality, and philosophy. Thus,
even the Personalistic Idealism of Borden Parker Bowne
and Edgar S. Brightman and the Realistic Personal The-

Martin Luther King, Jr. was greatly inuenced by personalism in his studies at Boston University. King came
to agree with the position that only personality is real. It
solidied his understanding of God as a personal God. It
also gave him a metaphysical basis for his belief that all
human personality has dignity and worth. (see his essay
Pilgrimage to Nonviolence)
Pope John Paul II was also inuenced by the personalism
advocated by Christian existentialist philosopher Sren
Kierkegaard. Before his election to the Roman papacy,
he wrote Person and Act (sometimes mistranslated as
The Acting Person), a philosophical work suused with
personalism.[12] Though he remained well within the traditional stream of Catholic social and individual morality, his explanation of the origins of moral norms, as expressed in his encyclicals on economics and on sexual
morality, for instance, was largely drawn from a personalist perspective.[13] His writings as Roman ponti, of
course, inuenced a generation of Catholic theologians
since who have taken up personalist perspectives on the
theology of the family and social order.

Notable personalists

Notes

[1] K. Wojtya, Subjectivity and Irreducible in: Idem Person

and Community. Selected Essays, Th. Sandok OSM, P.
Lang (trans.), New York 1993, p. 214; Cf. P. Bristow,
Christian Ethics and the Human Person, Family Publications Maryvale Institute, Oxford 2009, pp. 102-103 ISBN
978-1-871217-98-8
[2]

Personalism entry by Thomas D. Williams in the

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

[3] Zeev Sternhell, Sur le fascisme et sa variante franaise,

in Le Dbat , November 1984, Emmanuel Mounier et la
contestation de la dmocratie librale dans la France des
annes 30, in Revue franaise de science politique, December 1984, and also John Hellman's book, on which
he takes a lot of his sources, Emmanuel Mounier and
the New Catholic Left, 1930-1950 (University of Torento
Press, 1981). See also Denis de Rougemont, Mme
Mounier et Jean-Marie Domenach dans Le personnalisme
dEmmanuel Mounier hier et demain, Seuil, Paris, 1985.
[4] Love and Responsibility (Ignatius Press, 1993), pg. 41
[5] Williams, Thomas D. What Is Thomistic Personalism?"
(PDF). Alpha Omega. Retrieved 20 June 2014.
[6] Gaudium et spes, no. 24. This apparently paradoxical idea
- if you seek your life selshly, you will lose it; if you
are generous in giving it, you will nd it - is rooted in the
gospel: cf. Mt. 16:25; Mk 8:35; Lk 17:33.
[7] Caritas in veritate, #53
[8] http://www.howison.us/george_holmes_howison.htm
[9] http://www.bookrags.com/research/
howison-george-holmes-18341916-eoph/
[10] http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_of_
speculative_philosophy/v020/20.3mclachlan.html
[11] Crosby, John (2003). Personalist Papers. Washington,
D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. p. 280.
ISBN 978-0-8132-1317-0.
[12] ISBN 90-277-0985-8
[13] see Doran, Kevin P. Solidarity: A Synthesis of Personalism and Communalism in the Thought of Karol Wojtya/John Paul II. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. ISBN
0-8204-3071-4
[14]

Dorothy Day interviews on YouTube: with Christopher Closeup (1971) and Hubert Jessup/WCVBTV Boston (1974) where she discusses her personalist views

[15] Kolko, Gabriel, Anatomy of a War pages 83-84, ISBN 156584-218-9

[16] Karnow, Stanley, Vietnam: A History p. 259

[17] John English (2006-10-06). Citizen of the World. Knopf

Canada. p. 147. ISBN 978-0-676-97521-5. ISBN 0676-97521-6.
[18] X CONGRESSO da TSD - Trabalhadores Social
Democratas (Social Democratic Workers)" (PDF). Retrieved 2008-01-07. (Portuguese), pg. 7

10 See also
Can Lao Party, the Revolutionary Personalist Party,
a South Vietnamese party founded and led by Ngo
Dinh Nhu for use as an instrument of control for the
presidency of his brother Ngo Dinh Diem
Charles Liebman on Jewish personalism
Christian and atheistic existentialism
Francisco Rolo Preto, leader of the National Syndycalists, an Integralist Personalist group.
The Personalist - a journal dedicated to personalism
from about 1920-1979, now the Pacic Philosophical Quarterly.
Juan Manuel Burgos Velasco

11 External links
Personalism: a critical introduction By Rufus Burrow
Emmanuel Mounier and Personalism
Personalism: A Brief Account. Department of
Philosophy, University of Central Florida, includes
link to personalism bibliography
Personalism Magazine (Lublin, Poland)
History of Personalism - Acton Institute - also articles on Economic Personalism
Who Is My Neighbor? Personalism and the Foundations of Human Rights by Thomas D. Williams
A Presentation of Personalism by [Bogumi Gacka]

12

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