Personalism Revisited: Its Proponents and Criticsby Thomas O. Buford; Harry H. Oliver

Personalism Revisited: Its Proponents and Critics by Thomas O. Buford; Harry H. OliverReview by: Randall E. AuxierThe Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2005), pp. 81-87Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25670552 .

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Review Essay

Personalism Revisited: Its Proponents and Critics. Ed. Thomas O. Buford and

Harry H. Oliver. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi, 2002. Value In

quiry Book Series no. 124. xxix + 399 pp. $80.00 h.c. 9-0420-1519-5.

Some readers will perhaps want to know immediately "what is personalism?" and that question will be answered a bit later in this review, but the first task is to situate this volume in its context, after which the question about its perspec tive can be answered with greater ease. Personalism Revisited is one of the latest offerings in the Value Inquiry Book Series (VIBS), belonging to the subseries Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies (HAPS). Editions

Rodopi and the VIBS are doing the philosophical community a great boon by encouraging the leaders of the various philosophical societies to gather and pub lish their histories before those histories begin to pass away. There has been

quite a flurry of similar activity in recent years along these lines, including no

tably the ongoing publication in book form by Kluwer under the editorship of Richard T. Hull, also the editor of HAPS, of the presidential addresses of all of the divisions of the American Philosophical Association (APA), which has re leased four volumes as of this date. Hull wrote a foreword and compiled an

outstanding index for Personalism Revisited and is by anyone's standards doing yeoman's work for the profession. Editions Rodopi and VIBS are leaving to the

keepers of the societies themselves the decisions about how thorough and ex haustive to be about documenting their own histories, but is doing its part by publishing the books according to "ISO 9706: 1994 Information and Documen tation" standards for permanence?the translation of which is that these books

will last for hundreds of years, and that is why they are being published. HAPS is, as Hull states "saving from obscurity and loss the elements of much philoso phy done in the post-modern era" (xi-xii). The present volume is the fourth in the HAPS subseries to appear.

Personalism Revisited documents the history of the Personalist Discus sion Group (PDG), which was the first recognized group to begin meeting at the APA gatherings. The PDG was first convened in 1938 at the Eastern APA by its founder Edgar Sheffield Brightman, and has met annually without interruption since. This volume represents a great amount of archival and historical research

by the PDG's Editorial Committee. This Committee was appointed in 1983 to

compile an archival volume in commemoration to the PDG's fiftieth anniver

sary, consisting of a selection of some of the best papers presented over the

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2005.

Copyright ? 2005 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

81



82 RANDALL E. AUXIER

history of the PDG. The Editorial Committee was made up of the editors of the

present volume, Buford and Oliver, along with Jack Padgett and the late Warren Steinkraus. This committee was charged with locating and archiving every pa per ever presented at the PDG, with devising guidelines for selecting from among them for the jubilee volume, and with getting the volume published. In 2002 the committee completed its charge?no one has ever alleged that archival commit tees work quickly, and one must not judge their excellence upon that criterion. This particular archival committee has done a tremendous job, and the amount of effort expended in documenting and structuring this volume has been im mense. Philosophers rarely have the patience of historians with documentation and research, but this committee has shown the historian's kind of patience and attention to detail. Personalism Revisited contains, in addition to the selected

essays, a list of the papers given at the PDG's Eastern Division Meetings, in

cluding their places of subsequent publication, in cases in which the essays were later published (perhaps three-fourths of the essays have appeared in various

journals and books). There are some inevitable gaps in the list, in early years, since no one was keeping records (or the records cannot be found) regarding groups meeting concurrently with the APA. The volume makes no attempt to document systematically the somewhat sporadic meetings of the PDG in the APA's Central Division (formerly Western Division). John Lavely devotes some

attention to this second group, which, he believes, began meeting in 1954 or

1955 (xxiv), and had some memorable sessions over the years. Each selected essay in Personalism Revisited begins with a sketch of the

author's life and career?a little over half biographical, the others autobiographi cal?and a photo of the author. The biographical sketches have been written by a wide variety of authors who were recruited by the editors for the task, al

though the editors themselves also contributed several of these sketches. The sketches and photographs add significant historical interest to the volume and also provide a richer sense of the persons involved, which is a high priority among personalists, since their sense of context is always centered upon the

personal aspects and possibilities of situations. The structure of Personalism Revisited is topical rather than chronologi

cal. The nineteen chapters are distributed in four parts, plus an introduction. I

will discuss each of these in turn. The introduction, by Lavely, Professor Emeri tus of Boston University, is a brief, first-person recounting of the years of the

PDG, which "has always been organized very informally, to put it mildly" (xxiii). The PDG has never elected officers, never held a business meeting, never charged dues (contributions only), and has always been open to anyone who was inter

ested in the discussion. The "membership" was a stack of index cards with names

and addresses from sign-up sheets at the meetings. Perhaps this openness and

informality is the secret of the PDG's longevity and relative vigor. As was often the practice in former days, the PDG was among the societies that mailed the



REVIEW ESSAY 83

paper to be presented to its members prior to the meetings and discussion was

facilitated and invigorated by the fact that many who attended the PDG had studied the paper closely before the meeting. Apresentation before a philosophical society was, in those days, a more serious endeavor than it is it today, no matter how informally the society was organized. Lavely observes that the fluctuations in the PDG's history are a "microcosm of the personalist tradition." He contin ues: "Personalism has never been a dominant philosophical movement. It has, however, been a continuing presence in the philosophical world. It intersects with and has an influence on prominent intellectual perspectives and vital social

issues of our day. As such, the persistence of The PDG and of the papers herein

published is a warrant that the work of personalism is not yet done, and, hence, that the history of The PDG is not complete" (xxv). This is a sober and accurate assessment of personalism and its place in the philosophical world. It has had few spectacular moments, but it is a continual presence. Perhaps the only two momentous aspects of the history of philosophical personalism one can point to are these: (1) personalism was the explicit philosophical perspective of Martin Luther King Jr. (who studied with Lavely, Brightman, and Walter G. Muelder, all contributors to Personalism Revisited), and through him became an impor tant social force for reform; and (2) personalism is the explicit philosophical perspective of Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, whose long papacy and pro lific philosophical output has raised philosophical personalism to a level of popu

larity, influence, and attention it has never had before. On the basis of King's achievement and Wojtyla's enormous influence, personalism can be said not

only to have maintained a presence in the philosophical world, but also to have exerted an influence upon how many millions of people live and think.

A further word about Wojtyla may be entered here, as there will not be occasion to treat his views later in this review. It may be arguably asserted that

philosophical personalism has become the dominant perspective in Roman Catho lic intellectual circles as a result of Wojtyla's work. In Personalism Revisited the summary and assessment of Wojtyla's personalism is done by Sister Mary T.

Clark, in an interesting paper written in 1981, less than three years after Wojtyla became pope. Clark argues that Wojtyla's personalism blends Max Scheler's ethical personalism with Thomistic philosophical anthropology, centered around

interpretations of the central ideas of "transcendence," "integration," and "par ticipation." Clark's essay, previously unpublished, actually has some historical

significance, as an assessment by an important female Roman Catholic intellec tual of the general views of the pope at a time when no one had any sense of how

important he would become as a philosopher. In retrospect, one can now begin to grasp that no pope since Leo XVII has exerted the kind of philosophical influence that is enjoyed by John Paul II. Of special interest in Clark's assess

ment is her discussion of Wojtyla's two forms of participation, "opposition" and

"solidarity." Solidarity was defined as a "constant readiness to accept and to realize one's share in the community and to act for the common good" (333).




A short time later there were a number of people in Poland who took these ideas

very much into their hearts and eventually into the streets, and the full story of

Wojtyla's contribution to the relatively bloodless overthrow of the Communist world is still to be told. That Wojtyla was to the end of world communism what Martin Luther King was to American civil rights seems clear enough, but the historical enormity of the former remains less clear because the distance from these events is still too little to get the full sense of their impact. What is impor tant for present purposes is to recognize the role that philosophical personalism played in each movement, and to point out that perhaps Lavely has understated the historical importance of this viewpoint. It is a viewpoint that makes up for in the quality of its advocates what it lacks in quantity, at least in terms of social

movements and their consequences.

Following the introduction are four parts: (1) "The Personalist Vision"; (2) "The Enlargement of the Vision"; (3) "Problems with Personalism"; and (4) "Related Philosophies." It will not be possible to discuss all of the essays, but the volume communicates a vital and ongoing discussion in which the contribu tors take up, treat, criticize, and add to the themes of the others. I will illustrate this by showing how four essays, one from each section, accomplish this.

The topical aim of Part 1 is to provide some viewpoints on what person alism is (and here we will answer that question, as promised above). Brightman's contribution offers some definitions for personalists, while noting that "defini tions are hypotheses subject to further inquiry." Still, Brightman insists that defi nitions are not mere linguistic devices or rules about how to use word?a definition aims at something real, even if it fails to capture it fully (25). It is not a simple matter to summarize the defined terms that follow, due to their organic interconnections?Brightman was very much under the influence of Alfred North

Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne at the time he wrote this essay in 1946.

Brightman defines "person" as "a self capable of reason (interpretation) and value (satisfactions?empirical or ideal)" (28). The move toward understanding "being as valuing" and ethics as First Philosophy was one Brightman had ac

complished many years before, stated clearly in his 1925 book, Religious Val ues and his 1928 book, A Philosophy of Ideals, and reaching full systematic expression in 1933 in Moral Laws (which was the book that influenced King the

most). Whitehead and process philosophy provided Brightman with a needed

metaphysics to support this conviction about value, but in stark contrast to White

head and Hartshorne, Brightman argued that moral valuings were more funda

mental to philosophical understanding than aesthetic valuings, and that while

the latter might occur first in the order of being, aesthetic feeling and valuing were incapable of idealization without the presence of reason. One could never

succeed in building a moral philosophy or an ethics out of a metaphysics that saw aesthetic valuing and feeling as the ground of moral experience, Brightman had argued. Instead, he offered an account of reason as a favored mode of inter

pretation that idealizes, and then argued that aesthetic valuing came to have its



REVIEW ESSAY 85

meaning in light of the way it relates to moral experience. This is a controversial

idea, to say the least, but it hearkens back to Kant's discussion of beauty as the

symbol of morality in the infamous Paragraph 59 of the Critique of Judgment. This difficult passage has been the source of much debate, and it is what sepa rates the personalism of Brightman from the personalism of Hartshorne. For

Brightman, a person is an interpreting self that idealizes the values it makes and discovers in its felt experience, and a personalist is a philosopher who holds this to be the key to doing good, empirical philosophy. Hartshorne gets his say later in the volume when (in chapter 15) he, along with John Wild in a separate dis cussion (chapter 9), criticize Brightman's final book, Person and Reality, pub lished posthumously in 1958 (Brightman died in 1953).

In the contribution to the volume under review, Brightman is engaged in

resituating the terminology of both process philosophy and phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger specifically) to be more explicitly personalistic about the nature of value, feeling, act, and ideals. This involved a complete reinterpre tation of all the modes of self-existence and of self-experience. Brightman's project was never wholly completed, but it was sufficiently advanced to enable former students and colleagues to bring together his work on the topic in a fairly coherent form in Person and Reality. Hartshorne's and Wild's contributions to this volume assess the success of that endeavor from process and phenomeno logical standpoints, respectively. Hartshorne's essay, "The Structure of

Givenness," begins with a useful account of how he understands the concept of the person and moves on to a critique of Brightman, and then gives an account of the differences between them (primarily treating their differing conceptions of God). I doubt that the differences amount to any great distinction among the two views, apart from the issue of the role of the aesthetic in creating moral values, which Hartshorne does not note. Like Hartshorne, Wild finds much to admire in Brightman's final project, but in the end cannot abide Brightman's "epistemic solipsism" (163), a criticism with which the current reviewer heart

ily agrees. Wild finds Brightman's treatment of "the wholly absent" mystifying, and when one considers the sophistication with which thinkers like Heidegger and Sartre have handled the issue, Brightman's account admittedly looks pale. Finally, Brightman's method cuts things a little too neatly for Wild, "convey [ing] little sense of the real vaguenesses and ambiguities we confront in our lived

experience" (166). Both Hartshorne and Wild criticize Brightman's account of

immediacy or immediate experience, and both see Brightman's approach to method as having created problems for him in this regard. There is justice in these criticisms. Interestingly, however, as one considers the cost to phenom enology and process philosophy of having attempted to give better accounts of immediate experience, by different methods, it begins to become clear that this closer account has come at the cost of being able to provide any persuasive or influential moral philosophy. Moral philosophy was Brightman's true forte, and it is personalism's true strength, as the previous discussion of King and Wojtyla




may have suggested. It is not clear, therefore, who carries the day. If a philoso pher sets out to provide excellent moral philosophy and that philosophy suc ceeds in adding to the world's wisdom and goodness, then perhaps the philosopher has achieved the goal in spite of having no good answers regarding abstract details of immediate experience. Such is one example of the discussions in the

history of the Personalist Discussion Group. The problems with Brightman's version of personalism, because, after

all, Hartshorne and Wild did indeed find genuine problems, have been taken on as challenges to be overcome by later participants in the PDG. In particular I would note that Erazim Kohak took on this challenge from the phenomenologi cal and Husserlian perspective, while Frederick Ferre confronted it from the

process perspective. In their contributions to this volume, Kohak and Ferre both

begin by acknowledging the previous weaknesses of personalism, and proceed to try to remedy them. Kohak provides a rigorous (and even symbolized) argu

ment from Husserlian grounds, with help from the thought of Borden Parker Bowne that "we can most adequately conceive of the cosmos as personal" (75). Here, although he never mentions Wild's critique of Brightman explicitly, Kohak

goes right for the assertions that personalism cannot provide an adequate ac count of immediate experience in phenomenological terms and shows that it can. Kohak then redefines the personal in light of the tragic to show that the

"vaguenesses and ambiguities we confront in our lived experience" are well within the scope of a personalist account of the lifeworld.

Ferre takes a different line, although it is certainly one with which Kohak is familiar: with a more adequate conception of nature, personalist philosophy

will be able to respond to the sorts of criticisms that Hartshorne and Wild have raised against it (Ferre does not address himself explicitly to Hartshorne and

Wild, but clearly has their criticisms in mind, since they are well-known criti

cisms). He points out two strategies, one based on Bowne's work ("extending the ontological horizon," 113-15), and one based on Brightman's ("enlarging the concept of personhood," 115-17), to show that there is some hope for pro

viding a better account of the life world that is still personalistic. Ferre's main concern is to provide personalism with a more adequate moral philosophy, one

that will be better able to deal with environmental issues, but at the same time he

is defending the fundamental view of both Brightman and Bowne that "being is

value," a thesis upon which Ferre later wrote his three-volume magnum opus. In

many ways, Ferre's efforts in this volume and beyond it serve to demonstrate

that a Whiteheadian process philosophy can be synthesized with personalism in

ways that overcome the types of criticisms Hartshorne voiced in the present volume. Kohak's work shows that the same may be done to answer criticisms of

the sort Wild made. The expanding vision of personalism, therefore, as repre sented in Part 2 of this volume, is one that grows in response to the legitimate criticisms it discovers.



REVIEW ESSAY 87

The PDG, therefore, having fostered an openness to serious criticism of its most fundamental assumptions, has clearly served the philosophy of person alism as a goad to growth and improvement. If this volume documents one thing clearly, it is that the dynamic conversation of philosophical minds, sincerely and openly engaged, can lead to the development of more adequate perspec tives. The editors of this volume have done an excellent job of presenting these

essays in ways that make it possible for attentive readers now and in the indefi nite future to see how philosophy can work when it does work. Especially valu able are the four essays that were never previously published (including Mary T. Clark's essay on Wojtyla), and the Kohak essay, which was difficult to find. The future of personalism as a participant in the ongoing philosophical conversation is not in doubt. Wojtyla's work alone will ensure the inclusion of personalism for centuries to come, not to mention the continuing importance of personalists such as Paul Ricouer. The PDG meetings at the Central and Eastern divisions of the APA also continue, and perhaps it will not be too long before there will be a need to bring out a second volume of these, noting that 1982 (Ferre's essay) is the most recent inclusion.

Randall E. Auxier Southern Illinois University Carbondale



Documents

Personalism Revisited: Its Proponents and Criticsby Thomas O. Buford; Harry H. Oliver