Personalism

The claim

Persons have dignity rather than price. They are ends and never merely means, they are constituted in relation to other persons, and no social arrangement may treat them as material.

What it held

Personalism arose in several places at once, with a common enemy: systems that dissolved persons into something else. Idealism made them moments of spirit; materialism made them configurations of matter; collectivism made them units; industrial capitalism made them labour.

Mounier's French version, developed in the 1930s, positions itself explicitly against both liberal individualism and Marxist collectivism — and its social criticism is sharp, arguing that a society organised around production treats persons as material whatever its ideology.

Buber's contribution is the most philosophically portable. The I-Thou relation, in which another is addressed rather than described, is categorically different from the I-It relation of use and analysis. Both are necessary; the danger is that I-It expands until nothing is addressed at all.

Wojtyła's Polish version, developed under communism, worked out an ethics of participation and self-donation, and — since he later became John Paul II — had unusual practical consequences.

The language of human dignity in postwar declarations and constitutions comes substantially from here.

How it argued

Phenomenological description of encounter and relation, combined with social criticism and, in the Catholic versions, engagement with Thomist ethics.

What it was arguing against

Every reduction of the person: to a bundle of experiences, an economic unit, a class member, or a moment in a dialectic.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether the person is definable at all, or whether personalism is a name for refusing to define it. How far the different national schools share a position rather than a vocabulary.

Common misconceptions

That it is individualism. Mounier's whole point is that the individual of liberal theory — self-contained, choosing — is precisely what personalism rejects, since a person exists in relation or not at all.

How it began

Multiple independent origins around 1900: Bowne at Boston, the phenomenologists at Munich, and Mounier's journal Esprit in 1932.

What became of it

Living, with the strongest continuing presence in Catholic social thought and in bioethics.

Lasting influence

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and postwar constitutions, through the language of dignity. Catholic social teaching. Levinas' ethics is adjacent and draws on Buber.

Why it still matters

Dignity is the operative concept in bioethics and human rights law, and personalism is where it was philosophically developed.

Put another way

Two faces turned toward each other, with the space between them lit.

Where to start

I and Thou. It is a hundred pages and unlike anything else.

The surprising bit

Karol Wojtyła wrote a technical work of phenomenological ethics, The Acting Person, while a bishop under communist rule, and it was published two years before he became pope.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Phenomenology

Opposed by

Objectivism, Classical Marxism

Parallel to

Ubuntu Philosophy

The verdict

A philosophy assembled in four countries at once because the same thing needed saying in all of them.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy