Editor's Introduction

Personalism is arguably one of the most important and most influential philosophical movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This, of course, is an easy statement to make but perhaps more difficult to back up with evidence. It might, perhaps, be read as one of those trite but seemingly obligatory statements with which an introduction to a volume on a philosophical movement is expected to begin but which, upon closer inspection or further reflection, must be questioned, seeing as every exponent of every philosophical movement will want to claim the same distinction. How does personalism claim such a distinction next to the arguably more well-known and arguably more influential movements that have dominated the story of the last century and a half, including but not limited to phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and so on in the secular sphere and neo-Thomism in the Christian sphere? Have not these been the major players in the intellectual and spiritual drama of the last hundred or so years? Are not these the movements that have come to shape the spiritual forms of contemporary thought, for better or for worse? Apart from the question of academic or scholarly influences, everyday experience with the depersonalizing forces of modernity and postmodernity, at any rate, would seem to tell a different story. One might consider, for instance, the increasing bureaucratization of economic and social life, the increasing anonymity and impersonalization of the youth as normal social interaction more and more shifts from the real to the digital world in the form of social media, and the increased animus and demonization of the "other" of our political discourse aligning itself along the traditional lines of conservative and liberal politics. One might consider also the increased frequency and viciousness of the bullying epidemic and the disturbing regularity of mass shootings, with racial or religious hatred serving as among the chief motivants. Among these, one might also perhaps see in the most dramatic and literal of all forms of depersonalization—the normalization of abortion—convincing evidence to suggest that the history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is one marked not by the triumph of a personalist philosophy but by its defeat. It is, seemingly, a history marked by the victory of increasingly asocial and depersonalizing forces producing a crisis of the loss of respect for the intrinsic value of personhood. And indeed, such a challenge is not without substantial merit. However, I would still maintain that personalism remains, nonetheless—or rather, precisely for those reasons—the most important and most influential philosophical movement of roughly the last century and a half. The reasons for the tenacity with which I and others hold onto this assertion require some explication, however brief.

As to the influence of personalist philosophy, this can be seen in many respects in the fact that personalism is not a wholly unified or monolithic philosophical movement in the sense of an independent philosophical school that one must distinguish as over against the other major movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which personalism had its birth. Rather, personalism emerges in the shared consciousness of a range of very different thinkers, at home in disparate philosophical movements with very different points of departure. A review of some of the major representatives of the personalist movement(s) covered in the contributions to this journal alone is sufficient to illustrate this point. If one may, as John Crosby's recent book The Personalism of John Henry Newman has attempted to show, consider John Henry Newman as well as Søren Kierkegaard, if Michael J. Healy and Ronda de Sola Chervin's contribution in the present volume may be anticipated here, as forerunners to personalism or as protopersonalists, then already the diversity of the personalist tradition as it will subsequently unfold begins to reveal itself. Kierkegaard and Newman share very little with one another culturally or intellectually. What unifies them, apart from the priority that they both give to the reality of personhood, is, on the one hand, the relatively unimportant, for our purposes, fact of historical overlap with one another and, much more important...