Personalism

INFORMAL INTRODUCTION TO THE PERSONAL UNIVERSE

THE word ‘personalism’ is of recent usage. Employed in 1903 by Renouvier to describe his philosophy, it then fell into disuse. Several Americans have made use of it, following Walt Whitman in his Democratic Vistas (1867). It reappeared towards 1930 in France, a very different climate of thought, to designate the first researches of the review Esprit and of some neighbouring groups (Ordre Nouveau and others) concerning the political and spiritual crisis then arising in Europe.¹ Laland’s Vocabulaire philosophe gives the word currency in the 5th Edition of 1947. Contrary to all custom, the Larousse makes it a synonym for egocentricity. It follows, apparently, an undecided and branching course, that of an inspiration seeking and testing its directions.

However, what is called personalism today is by no means a novelty. The universe of the person is the universe of man. It would indeed be surprising if we had had to wait till the XXth century for its exploration, albeit under other names. The most recent personalism is grafted, as we shall see, upon a long tradicion.

Personalism is not a system

Personalism is a philosophy, it is not merely an attitude. It is a philosophy but not a system.

Not that it fears systematization. For order is necessary in thinking: concepts, logic, schemes of unification are not only of use to fix and communicate a thought which would otherwise dissolve into obscure and isolated intuitions; they are instruments of discovery as well as of exposition.¹ Since it defines certain positions, personalism is a philosophy and not only an attitude.

But its central affirmation being the existence of free and creative persons, it introduces into the heart of its constructions a principle of unpredictability which excludes any desire for a definitive system. Nothing can be more profoundly repugnant to it than the taste, so common today, for an apparatus of thought and action functioning like an automatic distributor of solutions and instructions; a barrier to research; an insurance against disquiet, ordeal and risk. Moreover, a movement of original reflection should not be too quick to tie up the sheaf of its findings.

Also, though we speak, for convenience, of personalism, we ought rather to say that there is a plurality of personalisms and to respect their diverse procedures.

A Christian personalism and an agnostic personalism, for instance, differ even in their intimate disposition.

They would gain nothing by trying to unite in a middle way. Nevertheless they confirm one another in certain realms of thought, in certain fundamental affirmations and upon certain lines of practical conduct concerning individual or collective order; and that is sufficient to justify their use of the same name.

General Idea of the Personalist universe

One might expect that personalism would begin by defining the person. But one can only define objects exterior to man, such as can be put under observation. Here is my neighbour. He has a unique feeling of his body which I cannot have; but I can look at this body from without, examine its dispositions, its heredity, its form, its maladies; in short, I can treat it as an object of physiological, medical or other knowledge. He exercises functions, and there is a functional order and a functional psychology which I can apply to the study of his case, although they are not he, the whole man in his total reality. Moreover, and in the same way, he is a Frenchman, a bourgeois, a socialist, a catholic etc. But he is not a Bernard Chartier, he is Bernard Chartier. The thousand ways in which I can distinguish him, as an example of a class may help me to understand him, and above all to make use of him, they show me how practically to behave towards him. But these are merely sections taken, in each case, through one aspect of his existence. A thousand photographs put together will not amount to a man who walks, thinks and wills. It is a mistake to believe that personalism only means that, instead of treating men according to type, we take their shades of difference into account. Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ is one in which armies of doctors and psychologists are engaged in a re-conditioning of each and every individual based on detailed investigations. Since they do this from the outside and by compulsion, reducing all men to nothing but well-mounted machines in good working order, their super-individualized world is nevertheless the opposite of a personal universe, for everything in it is contrived, nothing is created and no one engages in the adventure of responsible liberty.

There are not, then, stones, trees, animals—and persons, the last being like mobile trees or a more astute kind of animals. The person is not the most marvellous object in the world, nor anything else that we can know from the outside. It is the one reality that we know, and that we are at the same time fashioning, from within. Present everywhere, it is given nowhere.

We do not, however, relegate it to the ineffable. A fount of experience, springing into the world, it expresses itself by an incessant creation of situations, life-patterns and institutions. But the essence of the person, being indefinable, is never exhausted by its expression, nor subjected to anything by which it is conditioned. Nor is it definable as some internal substratum, as a substance lurking underneath our attitudes, an abstract principle of our overt behaviour: that would still be a mode of being objective, the ghost of an object. It is the living activity of self-creation, of communication and of attachment, that grasps and knows itself, in the act, as the movement of becoming personal. To this experience no one can be conditioned nor compelled.

Those who carry it to the heights, call thence to all those around and below them. Their call awakens the sleepers, and as one responds to another, all mankind is stirred out of its drowzy, vegetative slumber. Whoever refuses to hear that call and will not enter into the experience of the personal life loses the feeling for it, as the sensitivity of an organ can become atrophied by disuse. He will then dismiss the idea as a mere complication of the mind, or as the mania of a sect.

There are, then, two ways of expressing the general idea of personalism.

One can proceed from the study of the objective universe, to show that the personal mode of existing is the highest form of existence, and that the evolution of pre-human nature converges upon the creative moment at which this achievement of the universe is attained. One may say that its central reality is this act of personalisation; the impersonal realities, or those that are more or less depersonalized (matter, living species and the ideas) being only the effects of a loss of speed, of nature’s lagging-behind upon the road to personalization. The insect that mimics the branch, in order that it may be overlooked in its vegetative immobility, prefigures the man who buries himself in conventionalities rather than answer for himself; or the man who gives himself up to abstract ideas or sentimental effusions to escape the confrontation of events or other men. But such a description, in so far as it is objective, can but imperfectly convey a reality which is not primarily objective.

Or one may openly live the experiment of personal life, hoping to convert to it a number of others who still live like trees, like animals or like machines. Bergson called for ‘the appeal of the hero and the saint’. But these words must not deceive us: the personal appeal may spring from the humblest levels of human life.

This brings us to the central paradox of personal existence. The personal is the mode of existence proper to man. Nevertheless it has ceaselessly to be attained: consciousness itself can but gradually disengage itself from the mineral, the plant and the animal that weigh it down.

The history of the person, therefore, runs parallel with that of personalism. It will not unfold itself on the plane of consciousness alone, but throughout the length and breadth of the human struggle to humanize humanity.

Brief history of the notion of the person and of the personal condition¹

To consider Europe alone, the sense of the person remains embryonic throughout antiquity until the dawn of the Christian era. The man of antiquity is absorbed in the city and the family, subservient to a destiny that is blind, nameless and stronger than the gods themselves. Slavery does not shock the foremost spirits of those days. The philosophers value only impersonal thought and its static order, which is the order of nature as well as of ideas. To them the singular appears as a blemish, whether in nature or in consciousness. Plato is tempted to reduce the individual soul to a participation in nature plus a participation in the city; whence his ‘communism’. And for him as for Socrates, individual immortality is only a beautiful, bold hypothesis. Aristotle indeed declares that there is no reality except the individual; but his God cannot will with a particular will, nor can he know essence in the singular, nor love with a selective love. For Plotinus there lies, so to speak, a primordial fault at the root of every individuality, and there is no salvation but in a desperate flight back to the One and the Timeless.

Nevertheless, the Greeks had a keen sense of the dignity of the human being, which periodically brought troubles upon their impassible order. Their taste for hospitality and their cult of the dead in themselves bear witness of this. Sophocles tried, once at least (in Oedipus Colonnus) to replace the idea of blind Fate by that of a divine justice endowed with discernment. Antigone affirms that the witness of the eternal is against the powers. In The Trojan Women the notion of the inevitability of war is opposed by that of the responsibility of men. Socrates searches the utilitarian arguments of the sophists with the probe of irony, and upsets his interlocutor by putting the latter himself in question as well as his knowledge. His ‘Know thyself’ is the first great personalist revolution of which we know. But this could have only a limited effect against the surrounding resistances. Finally, we must not forget the Sage of the Nichomachean Ethics, nor the Stoics and their moving presentiment of the caritas generis