Dictionary:
per·son·al·ism (pûr'sə-nə-lĭz'əm)  |
| French Literature Companion: Personalism |
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
| Philosophy Dictionary: personalism |
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.
| Wikipedia: Personalism |
 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2008) |
| Part of the Politics series on |
| Christian democracy |
| Politics portal |
Personalism is a school of thought that consists of three main principles:
Contents |
In France, philosopher Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950) was the leading proponent of Personalism, around which he founded the review L'Esprit, which continues to exist 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. Mounier's Personalism had an important influence in France, including in political movements, such as Marc Sangnier's Ligue de la jeune République (Young Republic League) founded in 1912.
A famous historian of Fascism, Zeev Sternhell, has identified personalism with fascism in a very controversial manner, claiming that Mounier's personalism movement "shared ideas and political reflexes with fascism". He argued that Mounier's "revolt against individualism and materialism" would have led him to share the ideology of fascism[1].
Personalism flourished in the early 20th century at Boston University in a movement known as Boston Personalism and led by theologian Borden Parker Bowne. Bowne emphasized 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 insignificant 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, the person is “larger” than the universe because the universe is but one small aspect of the person who experiences it. Personalism affirms the existence of the soul. Most personalists assert that God is real and that God is a person (or as in Christian trinitarianism, three persons, although it is important to note that the meaning of the word 'person' in this context is significantly different from Bowne's usage).
Bowne also held that persons have value (see axiology, value theory, and ethics). In declaring the absolute value of personhood, he stood firmly against certain forms 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 reduce the importance of God.
Philosopher Immanuel Kant, though not formally considered a personalist, made an important contribution to the personalist cause by declaring that a person is not to be valued merely as a means to the ends of other people, but that he possesses dignity (an absolute inner worth) and is to be valued as an end in himself.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was greatly influenced by personalism in his studies at Boston University. King came to agree with the position that only personality is real. It solidified 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 influenced by personalism. Before becoming Pope, he wrote Person and Act (sometimes mistranslated as The Acting Person), a philosophical work suffused with Personalism (ISBN 90-277-0985-8). 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[2]. His writings as Pope, of course, influenced a generation of Catholic theologians since who have taken up Personalist perspectives on the theology of the family and social order.
|
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
 | Borden Parker Bowne (American philosopher) |
| Esprit |
| La Relève |
Copyrights:
 |
 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| French Literature Companion. The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
|
| Philosophy Dictionary. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Copyright © 1994, 1996, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Personalism". Read more |
Mentioned in
