[MD] What's Personalism?

[david]

Leaving aside the many insults, your over-reactionary response was actually pretty useful. Thanks, John.



> Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2015 11:54:26 -0700
> From: ridgecoyote at gmail.com
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Subject: Re: [MD] What's Personalism?
> 
> 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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