Personalism, Thomism and Epistemology

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EmToRs: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS oF THE PRoVINCE oF ST. JosEPH Publishers: Sheed and Ward, Inc., New York City VoL. VIII JANUARY, 1945 No.1 PERSONALISM, THOMISM AND EPISTEMOLOGY I T HE latest newcomer to the philosophical forum has been proclaimed by its adherents as " a philosophy of the person." Personalism, announced in two continents as a complete philosophy, is, according to its exponents, the answer to the need of the hour, and already claims the support of respectable philosophical authority. It envisages the problem of personality in its. broadest perspective, placing it within the framework of a complete philosophical system. From this central concept it seeks a solution of the problems of knowledge and being, of psychology and axiology. Primarily, it presents an interpretation of reality. From the point of view of development, we may distinguish two phases: naive Personalism and critical Personalism. Naive Personalism is simply the primitive, unphilosophical interpretation of reality, the product of a mind in Comte's "theological stage" of human development. Having once made the distinction between subject and object, it sees everything under the aspect of person1 JOHN A. CREAVEN ality. In the background of the world of objects it places demons, gods, spirits of various kinds. Clearly, such a view is the antithesis of impersonalism. But its uncritical procedure is obviously insufficient to safeguard vital human values from the attacks of impersonalism. To achieve its object, it needs a rational explanation and development , which it finds in critical Personalism.1 Critical Personalism , endeavoring to safeguard vital human values, is eclectic: it retains what seems true in the conclusions of naive personalism and impersonalism. From the former it takes its teleological view of the universe which sees in it an orderly system of autonomous and purposive beings, organized in a hierarchy of persons. From impersonalism it borrows its scientific concepts and its " synoptic " or synthetic method.2 The synoptic method, so common in Personalism, is a reflection of modern trends in psychology. In effect, the principle underlying the method declares that we can know an object as a whole of parts, or as a part of a whole, or as both. William Stern, the German personalist, has developed the theory of synopsis in both directions. He has insisted that synopsi~ everywhere precedes analysis, and that synopsis reveals or contains more than analysis can ever discover. The former thesis he takes as proved by the Gestalt psychology. The totality of our inner experience-the Ego or " I "-is itself a unity, for synopsis is the normal mode of experience: elements are but abstractions from it. In his criticisms of the " Elementarist " psychologies, he has insisted that analysis, as a work of dissection , can never discover a Gestalt quality, which disappears as soon as it is resolved into its elements. Again, synthesis, by working upon a previously known whole, can discover therein a new form: by altering the contour, the lines, the lights and the shades it can discover a new Gestalt and a new beauty. But synopsis is also a knowledge of an object as a part of a 1 Cf. W. B. Thorp, " Mechanism or Personalism," The Personalist, XIII, 198~, pp. ~00-~05. 2 Lewis W. Beck, "The Method of Personalism," 'The Personalist, XIX, 1989, p. 871. PERSONALISM, THOMISM AND EPISTEMOLOGY 3 whole. " To regard every object as a whole is to neglect the essential partiality of every object except the universe itself." 3 Though an object may be, metaphysically, an individual, this does not prevent it from being related by activity to another individual of which it is a subordinate part. Personalists, then, insist on the necessity of synopsis as a method of knowledge. Our earliest as well as our latest concepts, they teach, deal with things as wholes: with situations which are wholes; with ourselves as members of a social order; with our inner life, which reveals itself as a whole. The mind perceives situations as wholes, and there is comprehension before it is expressed in articulate language. In his " personalistic " psychology, Stern has exploited to the full the method of synopsis. " The methodological requirement ," he tells us, " that scientific psychology always...