The African American Personalist Perspective on Person as Embodied in the life and thought of Martin Luther King Jr.

My philosophy of religion professor, the late Peter Anthony Bertocci, who also taught Martin Luther King Jr. the philosophies of Hegel and Kant, defines a person as "a unique, telic, indivisible, but complex self-identifying unity of activity-potentials best characterized in consciousness as sensing, feeling, desiring, remembering, imagining, thinking, willing, oughting, allotting, anticipating, and appreciating, and the activities we distinguish as aesthetic and religious that is able to develop reason and values" (1988, 9). 

"These activities" says Bertocci, "enable a person to know an external world, to plan and will the satisfaction of his wants in the light of those social, moral, esthetic, [theoretical, economic, political,] and religious ideals to which he comes to feel obligation" ([unpublished manuscript], 1). It was this understanding of the person that was the foundation in Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophical conception of the person as a sacred personality. According to King, not only is the person what Bertocci would later refer to as a "unitas multiplex," but what Walter George Muelder would call "a center of autonomous value" worthy of unconditional love. For King, the person's structure is shaped, at least in part, by the value conferred upon it. Thus, there is no separation between the structure, or how the person is defined, and the value, or how the person might be viewed in light of that definition.

Bertocci defines personality as something that is "learned as a person interacts with other persons." "More exactly," says Bertocci, "a person's personality is his more or less systematic mode of response to himself, to others, and to his total environment in the light of what he believes them to be, and what they actually are." King demonstrated the significance of understanding persons with capacities for and strivings toward authentic identity in an unprecedented philosophical personalist activism through the Civil and Human Rights Nonviolent Movement (Bertocci 1970, 95).

In his book, The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism, James J. Farrell deals with Catholic worker personalism, which he saw demonstrated in the beat of personalism, civil rights personalism, liberated personalism, student personalism, the Vietnamization of personalism, and counter-cultural personalism. He does not, however, deal with theistic personalistic idealism, teleological personalism, communitarian personalism or dynamic interpersonalism. A quick glance at the Personalist Forum and the Internet, however, will convince you of how many variations of philosophical personalism exist. In studying the Gandhian nonviolent method of nonviolent resistance, King discovered in his philosophically based activism a consistency between the principles of personalism and the inherent respect for the person in the method of nonviolence as a strategy and a way of life. Thus, King thought nonviolent direct action was reasonable, practical, and moral in its regards for persons. Nonviolent personalism operated on the following fourteen assumptions, which bring into view King's conception of the person:

1. 1. Nonviolent personalism stressed the sacred dignity of persons.

2. 2. Nonviolent personalism focused especially on the centrality of the oppressed and poor persons, using their conditions as an index of the health and justice of their society.

3. 3. Nonviolent personalism was suspicious of systems, the market economy, and the government, because they were not ultimately focused on the inviolable dignity of persons.

4. 4. Nonviolent personalists believed in the inner revolution and the personal reformation that comes from the personal reflection and practice of ethical principles or the science of ideals.

5. 5. Nonviolent personalists believed that awakening the power of the person's individual potential through conscious evolution and changes in conscience-ness could realize the power of our social potential.

6. 6. Nonviolent personalists did not stop with the conversion of the individual: they understood the importance of negotiating through institutions; hence, they acted politically for social and structural change.

7. 7. Nonviolent personalists believed that people in community could govern themselves and their needs to reduce the conflicts caused by competitive individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, and corporate liberalism.

8. 8. Nonviolent personalists assumed the essential harmony of personal and political life, that virtues like compassion and cooperation could and should be applied to...