[MD] What's Personalism?

[John Carl]

Thanks for asking, Dave  It helps to segue into a fascinating topic of
discussion.

William James, Characterizing his philosophy as a whole, in the
1903-04 course "A Pluralistic Description of the World," in the --The
Works of William James: manuscript Lectures--, ed. Ignas Skrupskelis
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) 311.

>  "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?

Jc:  yes.  Note the quote marks.  Sorry I didn't provide the source
earlier, but the nice thing about this casual style is that any
questions can be clarified easily upon request.

dmb:

It didn't sound like James to me

Jc:   That's because  your mental picture of James is skewered toward
your personal prejudices and you think Pirsig's MoQ frees you from the
obligation to be "objective" about intellectual matters.  It's a
shame, really.

dmb:

>and I didn't
> recall his using of the term "Personalism," so I looked it up in the
> Stanford Encyclopedia.

Jc:  And yet you consider yourself a James scholar.

dmb:

Not sure what game John is playing here

Jc:  It's a game called "philosophy", Dave.  Or dabbling in the world
of the intellectual - where we follow the rules of logical
argumentation and adhere to ideals like consistency and
non-contradiction and eschew fallacies.  It's would be delightful if
you would play too, but you seem rather attached to the game of
supercilious authoritarianism.  A much simpler game,  I'm sure but in
the end, much less satisfying.

dmb:

>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.
>

Jc:

Instead of SEP, try something a bit more serious - Jan Olaf
Bengtsson's The Worldview of Personalism Origins and Early Development
and/or  Rufus Burrow Jr., Personalism: A Critical Introduction.

 "There was a long-standing claim in the literature that Bowne had
actually gotten the term "personalism" from James, who had gotten it
from Charles Renouvier, but later scholarship has put this in doubt.
On the basis of Bengtsson's research, it seems more plausible that
Bowne knew the term from his years studying with Lotze and Ulrici."
and "the worldview of personalism was well defined in the early
decades of the nineteenth century".

Auxier, Time Will and Purpose.  Page 378

dmb:

> 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.


Jc:  Here is the interesting thing, Dave - Personalism is not about the self.


"... from Principles of Psychology forward, the idea of "person" in
James's writings and thinking is sharply distinguished from the
substantialist idea of "self," ... James treats 'person' as a mode of
ontological relation from the very start; he never saw 'person' as a
substance in the Cartesian sense."

ibid.

James, In a letter to Bowne in 1908, after reading Bowne's Personalism.

"It seemed to me a very weighty pronouncement, and form a matter taken
together a splendid addition to American Philosophy.... it seems to me
that you and I are now aiming at exactly the same end, although, owing
to our different past, from which each retains special verbal habits,
we often express ourselves so differently.  It seemed to me over and
over again that you were placing your feet identically in footprints
which my feet were accustomed to--quite independently, of course, of
my example, which has made the coincidence so gratifying.  The common
enemy for of us both is the dogmatist-rationalist-abstractionist.  Our
common desire is to redeem the concrete personal life which wells up
in us from moment to moment, from fastidious (and really preposterous)
dialectical contradictions, impossibilities and vetoes, but whereas
your "transcendental empiricism" assumes that the essential
discontinuity of the sensible flux has to be overcome by high
intellectual operations on it, my "radical " empiricism denies the
flu's discontinuity, making conjunctive relations essential members of
it as given...  but the essential thing is not these differences, it
is that our emphatic footsteps fall on the same spot.  You, starting
near the rationalist pole and boxing the compass and I traversing the
diameter from the empiricist pole, reach practically very similar
positions and attitudes."

McConnel, Borden Parker Bowne, 277-78

dmb:

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

What you ought to take seriously Dave, is the integrity of your own
profession and to "play the game" well.

John



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