Dictionary:

personalism

  (pûr'sə-nə-lĭz'əm)

1. The quality of being characterized by purely personal modes of expression or behavior; idiosyncrasy.
2. Philosophy. Any of various theories of subjective idealism regarding personality as the key to the interpretation of reality.

Personalism (Le Personnalisme). A philosophy which takes the person as the fundamental reality and yardstick of value. In France it is most closely associated with Emmanuel Mounier and the review Esprit. The concept of the ‘person’ has played an important, if intermittent, role in European philosophy since the medieval scholastics, acquiring well-defined legal, moral, and psychological meanings. But ‘Personalism’ as a general tendency was a late 19th-c. development, with small Personalist movements developing in Britain, Germany, and America. Charles Renouvier's book Le Personalisme (1903) offered a Kantian neo-critical approach to ethics, though it was little followed in France. The emergence of a strong French Personalist movement in the early 1930s was an attempt to construct a viable social philosophy within the Catholic tradition. It was constructed under the aegis of Mounier and the group around Esprit, which included Jean Lacroix and Paul-Louis Landsberg (d. 1944). Important contributions came from the Ordre nouveau groups, including Arnaud Dandieu (1897-1933), Robert Aron (1898-1975), and Denis de Rougemont.

Elements of Personalism were drawn from Bergson's vitalism; from Maritain's neo-Kantian Thomism; from earlier socially oriented Catholic movements such as the Sillon, the Semaines sociales, and Péguy's Cahiers de la quinzaine; and from Max Scheler's phenomenology, which proposed an objective hierarchy of values, culminating in personhood.

The human person was conceived as a free centre of initiative, but distinguished from the abstract individual by its roots in natural, social, and spiritual dimensions. The person was characterized by his or her incarnation, combining both material and spiritual existence, communication, combining both autonomous and social existence, and vocation, combining both immanence and transcendence. The fulfilment of the person could only be envisaged in a dynamic balance between these dimensions, and depended on the natural, social, and spiritual processes of which the person was part.

Innovative work relating the person to the natural environment was produced by the Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. His major work, Le Phénomène humain, posthumously published in 1955, suggested that evolution was a process of personnalisation, with the whole of nature aspiring to the condition of a person, manifested now in conscious human existence, but eventually leading to a personal God at a future ‘Omega point’.

Mounier focused on the person's insertion in the social world. He distinguished a number of levels of organization, culminating in an integrated community, where a person's potential could be most fully realized. He therefore criticized the ‘désordre établi’, pointing to the depersonalizing character of modern capitalist society, which stood in need of a Personalist and communitarian revolution. Mounier recognized that, while moral values should be proclaimed prophetically, they also needed to be put into practice in the real world, politically. He therefore argued the necessity of commitment, which would often involve difficult decisions.

Despite the opposition of more conservative supporters, Mounier developed a dialogue with Communists, especially those of humanist tendency, whom he saw as sharing key Personalist values. But generally, Esprit saw Socialism or radical Christian Democracy as the closest political approximation of its ideals, and gave critical support to the Popular Front. During the Occupation Mounier attempted to influence the youth movements sponsored by the pro-Catholic Vichy government, though he and Esprit were eventually banned. With its Resistance credentials, Esprit became an influential journal in the post-war period, especially in Catholic circles. Personalist ideas were professed by several currents within the post-war French governments, and had some currency in philosophical and psychological circles. In addition to Mounier's own writings, they were expressed in the literary and cultural criticism of Claude-Edmonde Magny and Pierre-Aimé Touchard, and of Mounier's successors as director of Esprit, Albert Béguin and Jean-Marie Domenach.

Personalism was strongly articulated in the debates of the Second Vatican Council (1962-4), especially by Cardinal Jean Daniélou (1905-74), and the ‘human person’ largely supplanted the ‘soul’ as the focus of Catholic social thinking. These ideas also enjoyed a considerable following in Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Poland, North and West Africa, South-East Asia, and Latin America.

[Michael Kelly]

Bibliography

• E. Mounier, Le Personnalisme (1949)
• M. Kelly, Pioneer of the Catholic Revival (1979)

The philosophy of probability pioneered by Ramsey and de Finetti, and furthered by the American statistician L. J. Savage in his Foundations of Statistics (1954). Personalism rejects the view that probabilities are ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered. It views assignments of probability to events as purely personal expressions of the degree of confidence to be had in the occurrence of an event. Saying that an event is 50% probable is simply an expression or endorsement of a strategy of betting on the event at evens. Betting rates must, however, be coherent in the sense of conforming to the mathematics of probability, since if an agent buys and sells bets without obeying its laws (for example, assigning a high probability both to an event e, and to its complement, not-e) he can be put in the position of losing whatever the outcome. This constraint is known as that of avoiding a Dutch book. The convergence of arbitrarily different initial betting rates upon a stable (‘objective’) probability is due to the pressure of evidence, which forces an agent who seeks coherence through time to conditionalize (see conditional probability), or modify his probability assignments in accordance with some version of Bayes's theorem. See also representation theorem, exchangeability.

In an older usage, personalism is the theistic stress on the existence of divine personality, or any philosophy according to which the individual person or thinker is the starting-point of theory.

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)