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7. A Personalism Primer
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7. A PERSONALISM PRIMER T “personalism” can legitimately be applied to any school of thought or intellectual movement that focuses on the reality of the person (human, angelic, divine) and on his unique dignity, insisting on the radical distinction between persons and all other beings (nonpersons).1 As a philosophical school, personalism draws its foundations from human reason and experience, though historically personalism has nearly always been attached to Biblical theism.2 Maritain hastens to point out that personalism represents a big tent under which many different lines of thought take refuge. Far from being a single school, personalism splits into multiform manifestations, each with its own particular emphases, such that it is more proper to speak of “personalisms” than personalism.3 Unlike most intellectual currents that find their inspiration in a single work or thinker, diverse forms of person- . Personalism, though generally considered a philosophical school, can be applied as well to other branches of speculative thought, yielding such titles as theological personalism, economic personalism, and psychological personalism (along with their inversions: personalistic theology, personalistic economics, personalistic psychology, and so forth). . As Hans Urs von Balthasar observes, the “history of the initially Jewish and Christian personalism has been described often enough, and its essential elements may be presupposed as familiar. Without the biblical background it is inconceivable: its forerunners (Pascal, Kierkegaard, Jacobi, Maine de Biran, Renouvier) and its main representatives (the late Cohen, Buber, Ebner, Guardini, and the strongest of them Franz Rosenzweig)—they all live from their biblical inspiration” (“On the Concept of Person” trans. Peter Verhalen, Communio: International Catholic Review [Spring ]: ). . Maritain asserts that “nothing can be more remote from the facts than the belief that ‘personalism’ is one school or one doctrine. It is rather a phenomenon of reaction against two opposite errors [totalitarianism and individualism], which inevitably contains elements of very unequal merits.” He adds that there are at least “a dozen personalist doctrines, which at times have nothing more in common that the word ‘person’” (The Person and the Common Good, trans. John J. Fitzgerald [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985], 12–13). alism emerged in a relatively short space of time in different sites with many different exponents. Rigobello groups the many strains of personalism into two fundamental categories: personalism in a strict sense and personalism in a broader sense.4 Strict personalism places the person at the center of a philosophical system that originates from an “intuition” of the person himself and then goes on to analyze the personal experience that is the object of this intuition. The method of this strict personalism draws extensively from phenomenology and existentialism, departing from traditional metaphysics and constituting a separate philosophical system. The original intuition is really that of self-awareness by which one grasps values and essential meanings through unmediated experience. The knowledge produced by reflecting on this experience is nothing more than a development of the original intuition, which in turn generates an awareness of a framework for moral action. The intuition of the person as the center of values and meaning is not exhausted, however, in phenomenological or existential analyses. These analyses point beyond themselves, indicating a constitutive transcendence of the person himself, irreducible either to its specific manifestations or to the sum total of those manifestations. In its broader sense, personalism inserts a particular anthropology into a global philosophical perspective. Here the person is not considered as the object of an original intuition, nor does philosophical research begin with an analysis of the personal context. Rather, in the scope of a general metaphysics the person manifests his singular value and essential role. Thus the person occupies the central place in philosophical discourse, but this discourse is not reduced to a development of an original intuition of the person. In this context, the person does not justify metaphysics but rather metaphysics justifies the person and his various operations . More than an autonomous metaphysics, personalism in the broad sense offers an anthropological-ontological shift in perspective within an existing metaphysics and draws out the ethical consequences of this shift.5 This broader sort of personalism will form the basis of the following discussion of human dignity and rights. . Armando Rigobello, “Personalismo,” in Dizionario teologico interdisciplinare, vol. (Torino: Marietti Editori, ), –. . As Wojtyla points out, “Personalism is not primarily a theory of the person or a theoretical science of the person. Its meaning is largely practical and ethical” (“Thomistic Personal- [44.199.241.53] Project...