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Chapter 8 THE SOLIDARITY OF PERSONALISM AND THE METAPHYSICS OF EXISTENTIAL ACT There have been human persons since Adam delved and Eve span. And the word persona, prosopon—thickened and deepened by the revelation of the God-man Jesus Christ—has been with us since the great Councils of the Church. Is it not surprising, then, that we have had to wait until the twentieth century to hear of philosophies that bear the name “personalism”? Emmanuel Mounier suggests that the neo-Kantian idealist Charles-Bernard Renouvier first used the term to describe his own philosophy in 1903,1 before it was rescued from idealism for Catholic thinkers by Max Scheler.2 No doubt, the thing, the reality—the person and the name—played an important part in the thought of earlier thinkers: referring to the Godhead, Tertullian wrote of una essentia, tres personae; turning to man, St. Augustine sang of the restless spirit; Boethius drew from the reality a classical definition; Richard of St. Victor stressed the existential spirituality of the person; Thomas Aquinas saw in the person the most perfect reality in all of creation; Pascal celebrated its ambiguity; and more recently, Kierkegaard proposed the drama of religious existence. On the philosophical plane, Immanuel Kant insisted that the person was to be treated as an end of all moral action. 132 Reprinted from Fides Quaerens Intellectum 1, no. 1 (Summer 2001): 183–99. Copyright © 2001 by Fides Quaerens Intellectum. 1. Le personnalisme, 1950; English translation by Philip Mairet, Personalism (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1952), xv, also xxvi. 2. Inasmuch as Kant meant by “person” a fully autonomous self-reflective reason, his use posed difficulties for a Catholic philosopher, so that its use was generally avoided until Scheler rescued the term from such radical immanent individualism with his phenomenology of the realism of values. For this reason, Scheler can be counted among the “fathers of the so-called theological and Christian personalism.” Heinrich M. Schmidinger, “Max Scheler (1874–1928) und sein Einfluss auf das katholische Denken,” in Christliche Philosophie, vol. 3, ed. E. Coreth et al. (Graz/Vienna: Styria, 1990), 89–111, in particular 103–105. Yet, on the other hand, one may read the development of modern philosophy in the past four centuries as a series of attempts to redefine man in terms other than person: as the adunatio of mind and body (Descartes ), the vessel of impressions and dynamo of passions (Hume), a material machine (de la Mettrie), pure and practical reason (Kant), the speculative determination of Absolute Spirit (Schelling, Hegel), transcendental subjectivity (Husserl), Dasein as Being-in-the World (Heidegger )—until more than one postmodernist (Derrida, Foucault) has put a stop to all such attempts at defining the human reality. For all that, during the preceding centuries, conditions arose which disposed a wide and varied group of thinkers to tread a path that has led in this past century to the person as a focus for philosophical reflection. These preconditions are operative in the constitution of the thought of personalist philosophers. It is readily agreed that the variety of personalisms does not admit of any easy unification or categorization, but rather, precludes their being gathered together into anything resembling a school or even a welldefined movement; it is enough to call it a “turn.”3 Nevertheless, they share more than a name, so that it is fruitful to look briefly at some of the more important features that are constitutive of this “turn.” Now, in such a perilous undertaking as that of speaking of shared dispositions among such a varied group of thinkers, one may still discern mutual features and themes, while respecting the different ways in which they are conceived and expressed. An old usage was wont to call the profusion of birds in song a “charm,” and the word serves well to recall the resonant diversity of present-day personalisms.4 3. I borrow the term from Richard Rorty who used it to express the “linguistic turn” that defied any easy uniform description of ordinary language philosophers. 4. Mounier briefly mentions philosophers who have contributed to the emergence of personalism (Personalism, xv–xxviii). Among those he names: Lotze, Scheler, Buber, Berdyaev , Bergson, Laberthonniére, Blondel, Peguy (who greatly influenced Mounier), Maritain , Marcel, and Jaspers. As he conceives it, such thought has remote affinities with Pascal , Leibniz, Kant, Rousseau. He also acknowledges the role that Nietzsche and Marx have played in his own personalist development, and distinguishing “an existentialist tangent of personalism (comprising...

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