An Introduction to Personalism by Juan Manuel Burgos (review)

What is personalism? Who are the most important personalist philosophers? What are the distinctive doctrines of personalism? What is the relationship between personalism and phenomenology? Is personalism consistent with Thomistic metaphysics? What are the most important issues for contemporary personalist philosophers? Anyone seeking answers to these questions has an invaluable guide in Juan Manuel Burgos's An Introduction to Personalism, an expanded and revised version of Introducción al personalismo (2012).

The book can be divided into two uneven halves. The first and longer half (chapters 1 to 3) provides a historical overview of the personalist movement from its origins in France in the first half of the twentieth century. Personalism began as a response to the intellectual, political, and spiritual crisis in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. Figures such as Emmanuel Mournier (1905–1950), Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), and Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) sought to resist the dehumanizing tendencies of both utilitarian individualism and various forms of collectivism by calling attention to the unique and inviolable dignity of the human person. Burgos narrates the history of the personalist movement by surveying the life and thought of the main personalist philosophers. In additional to the authors mentioned above, there are short sections on Maurice Nédoncelle (1905–1976), Max Scheler (1874–1928), Martin Buber (1878–1965), Luigi Stefanini (1891–1956), Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977), and Karol Wojtyla (1920–2005), inter alia.

The second half of the book (chapter 4) is more philosophical. Under the title "Personalist Philosophy: A Proposal," Burgos defends the idea of personalism as a distinct school of philosophy that opens a path for a creative synthesis of classical and modern concepts. The guiding thread for this chapter, and the book as a whole, is the concept of the person: "The decisive and foremost feature which characterizes any personalist philosophy is the structural centrality of the person in its conceptual architecture." Elsewhere Burgos elaborates the novelty of the modern concept of the person:

[Personalist philosophers] have the following characteristics: (1) they are structured around a modern concept of the person; (2) the modern concept of the person is understood to be the anthropological perspective which chooses as emphases or areas of study some or all of the following elements: the person as "I" and "who"; affectivity and subjectivity; interpersonality and the communitarian aspect; … the person as male and female; the primacy of love; freedom as self-determination.

As suggested by this passage, the structural centrality of the modern concept of the person naturally opens to several interrelated themes: the experience of subjective interiority, the importance of relationality, the meaning of the sexual difference, and the nature of love. Burgos briefly addresses each of these themes, noting the contribution of personalist philosophy and indicating some contemporary disputed questions.

Given the introductory aim of the book, it is not surprising that some philosophical issues are addressed in a fairly cursory manner. There is, however, one question that invites further reflection insofar as it touches the central thesis of the book. What is the precise relationship between person and nature or being? Burgos emphases a radical discontinuity or "insuperable separation" between persons and things:

for the Greeks, man was one more thing within the world of nature—special, certainly, but one among others—while in the West, through the influence of Christianity, man emerges forcefully from that world as radically distinct. This emergence, which establishes an insuperable separation between mankind and the rest of the beings, has some structural consequences which were not sufficiently valued by a classical philosophy too dependent on Greek metaphysical postulates.

This formulation, which overlooks the analogical continuity of nature and person, will not satisfy philosophers formed in the classical tradition.

In Fides et ratio, John Paul II indicated that the relationship between person and nature or being is one of the most important issues of our time. In a special way, he writes, "the person constitutes a privileged locus...