[MD] What's Personalism?

david dmbuchanan at hotmail.com
Sat Sep 5 11:02:15 PDT 2015


In the thread titled "Poetry as Practice, Practice as Poetry", John said to Arlo:


"...I'll go ahead and quote you the James statement I had read in my Personalism researches, wherein he gives a broad overview of his philosophy:  "It means individualism, personalism: that the prototype of reality is the here and now; that there is genuine novelty; that order is being won --incidentally reaped.  That the more universal is the more abstract;  that the smaller & more intimate is the truer.  The man more than the home, the home more than the state or the church. Anti-slavery.  It means tolerance and respect."



dmb says:

That's a statement from James? It didn't sound like James to me and I didn't recall his using of the term "Personalism," so I looked it up in the Stanford Encyclopedia. Not sure what game John is playing here but Personalism is a form of idealism, the kind that goes with theism and theology. James' work may have displayed some elements of "Personalism" but it's basically a modification of Hegel's idealism, whereas James was a pragmatists and more than a little bit opposed to idealism. To the extent that Hegel's Absolute was dropped in favor of more concrete particulars, James would applaud. But he still thought idealists were a bunch of smug, stuffed shirts.
 

STANFORD SAYS: "American personalism, best known as represented by such figures as
Borden Parker Bowne (1847–1910), George H. Howison
(1834–1916), and Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884–1953),
took a different tack from continental European personalism in that
instead of a reaction to idealism, it is often actually a form of
idealism, wherein being is defined as personal consciousness. Howison
preferred the term “personal idealism.” Contrary to
twentieth-century continental European personalism, American
personalism, in particular in its early representatives, is a direct
continuation of the development of more or less personalistic
philosophy and theology in nineteenthy-century Europe and its analysis
and refutation of various impersonalistic forms of thought. The
American and the stricter personalist twentieth-century school in
Europe agreed in taking the person as their point of departure for
understanding the world and in drawing all moral truth from the
absolute value of the person, but while the latter derived these
insights primarily from existentialism, phenomenology, and Thomism,
the American school, while in some respects adding to them and
developing them further, basically took them over from the European
“speculative theists”."


Speculative theism may be of interest to some people but the MOQ isn't theistic nor idealistic. Doesn't even think the "self" is a real thing. 


My point? One ought not take John's views seriously. He's just covertly thumping his bible again. Sigh.



 		 	   		  


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