[MD] What's Personalism?

John Carl ridgecoyote at gmail.com
Tue Sep 8 13:12:29 PDT 2015


Exactly, Dave.  Nothing is more enlightening than the perceptive
arguments of your dialogic opponent.  Use me, I'm here.

John


On 9/8/15, david <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>>
>> >
>> Moq_Discuss mailing list
>> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
>> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
>> Archives:
>> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
>> http://moq.org/md/archives.html
>  		 	   		
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org/md/archives.html
>


-- 
"finite players
play within boundaries.
Infinite players
play *with* boundaries."



More information about the Moq_Discuss mailing list