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title: Existentialism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
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author:
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published:
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created: 2026-04-13
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description:
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tags:
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- clippings
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- SEP
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- Existentialism
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---
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## Existentialism
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As an intellectual movement that exploded on the scene in mid-twentieth-century France, “existentialism” is often viewed as a historically situated event that emerged against the backdrop of the Second World War, the Nazi death camps, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which created the circumstances for what has been called “the existentialist moment” (Baert 2015), where an entire generation was forced to confront the human condition and the anxiety-provoking givens of death, freedom, and meaninglessness. Although the most popular voices of this movement were French, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as compatriots such as Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the conceptual groundwork of the movement was laid much earlier in the nineteenth century by pioneers like Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche and twentieth-century German philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers as well as prominent Spanish intellectuals José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno. The core ideas have also been illuminated in key literary works. Beyond the plays, short stories, and novels by French luminaries like Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, there were Parisian writers such as Jean Genet and André Gide, the Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, the work of Norwegian authors such as Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun, and the German-language iconoclasts Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke. The movement even found expression across the pond in the work of the “lost generation” of American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, mid-century “beat” authors like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and William S. Burroughs, and the self-proclaimed “American existentialist,” Norman Mailer (Cotkin 2003, 185).
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What distinguishes existentialism from other movements in the intellectual history of the West is how it stretched far beyond the literary and academic worlds. Its ideas are captured in films by Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, and Terrence Malick. Its moods are expressed in the paintings of Edvard Munch, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and Edward Hopper and in the vitiated forms of the sculptor Alberto Giocometti. Its emphasis on freedom and the struggle for self-creation informed the radical and emancipatory politics of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as well as the writings of Black intellectuals such as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Its engagement with the relationship between faith and freedom and the incomprehensibility of God shaped theological debates through the lectures and writings of Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Martin Buber, among others. And, with its penetrating analyses of anxiety and the importance of self-realization, the movement has had a profound impact in the development of humanistic and existential approaches to psychotherapy in the work of a wide range of theorists, including R.D. Laing, Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, and Irvin Yalom.
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With this broad and diverse range of incarnations, it is difficult to explain what the term “existentialism” refers to. The word, first introduced by Marcel in 1943, is certainly not a reference to a coherent system or philosophical school.<sup>[<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/notes.html#note-1">1</a>]</sup> Indeed, the major contributors are anything but systematic and have widely divergent views, and of these, only Sartre and Beauvoir explicitly self-identified as “existentialists.” In surveying its representative thinkers, one finds secular and religious existentialists, philosophers who embrace a conception of radical freedom and others who reject it. And there are those who regard our relations with others as largely mired in conflict and self-deception and others who recognize a deep capacity for self-less love and interdependence. Given these disparate threads and the fact that there is no unifying doctrine, one can nonetheless distill a set of overlapping ideas that bind the movement together.
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- *Nihilism*: The emergence of existentialism as an intellectual movement was influenced by the rise of nihilism in late nineteenth century Europe as the pre-modern religious worldview was replaced with one that was increasingly secular and scientific. This historical transition resulted in the loss of a transcendent moral framework and contributed to the rise of modernity’s signature experiences: anxiety, alienation, boredom, and meaninglessness.
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- *Engagement vs. Detachment*: Against a philosophical tradition that privileges the standpoint of theoretical detachment and objectivity, existentialism generally begins *in medias res*, amidst our own situated, first-person experience. The human condition is revealed through an examination of the ways we concretely engage with the world in our everyday lives and struggle to make sense of and give meaning to our existence.
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- *Existence Precedes Essence*: Existentialists forward a novel conception of the self not as a substance or thing with some pre-given nature (or “essence”) but as a situated activity or way of being whereby we are always in the process of making or creating who we are as our life unfolds. This means our essence is not given in advance; we are contingently thrown into existence and are burdened with the task of creating ourselves through our choices and actions.
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- *Freedom*: Existentialists agree that what distinguishes our existence from that of other beings is that we are self-conscious and exist *for* ourselves, which means we are free and responsible for who we are and what we do. This does not mean we are wholly undetermined but, rather, that we are always *beyond* or *more* *than* ourselves because of our capacity to interpret and give meaning to whatever limits or determines us.
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- *Authenticity*: Existentialists are critical of our ingrained tendency to conform to the norms and expectations of the public world because it prevents us from being authentic or true to ourselves. An authentic life is one that is willing to break with tradition and social convention and courageously affirm the freedom and contingency of our condition. It is generally understood to refer to a life lived with a sense of urgency and commitment based on the meaning-giving projects that matter to each of us as individuals.
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- *Ethics*: Although they reject the idea of moral absolutes and universalizing judgments about right conduct, existentialism should not be dismissed for promoting moral nihilism. For the existentialist, a moral or praiseworthy life is possible. It is one where we acknowledge and own up to our freedom, take full responsibility for our choices, and act in such a way as to help others realize their freedom.
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These ideas serve to structure the entry.
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## 1\. Nihilism and the Crisis of Modernity
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We can find early glimpses of what might be called the “existential attitude” (Solomon 2005) in the Stoic and Epicurean philosophies of antiquity, in the struggle with sin and desire in St. Augustine’s *Confessions*, in the intimate reflections on death and the meaning of life in Michel de Montaigne’s *Essays*, and in the confrontation with the “dreadful silence” of the cosmos in Blaise Pascal’s *Pensées*. But it was not until the nineteenth century that the ideas began to coalesce into a bona fide intellectual movement. By this time, an increasingly secular and scientific worldview was emerging and the traditional religious framework that gave pre-modern life a sense of moral orientation and cohesion was beginning to collapse. Without a north star of moral absolutes to guide us, the modern subject was left abandoned and lost, “wandering,” as Nietzsche writes, “as if through an endless nothing” (1887 \[1974\], §125). But it wasn’t just the rise of modern science and its cold mechanistic view of the world as a value-less aggregate of objects in causal interaction that contributed to the anxiety and forlornness of the modern age. The rise of Protestantism also played a role. With its rejection of hierarchical Church authority, this new form of Christianity emphasized subjective inwardness and created a unique social configuration grounded in principles of individualism, freedom, and self-reliance. The result was the loss of a sense of community and belongingness rooted in the close-knit social bonds of traditional society. And the Protestant shift intensified the Christian attitude of *contemptus mundi* (“contempt for the world”), contributing to feelings of loneliness and creating a perception of public life as a domain that was fundamentally inauthentic and corrupt (Aho 2020; Guignon 2004; Taylor 1989).
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Along with these historical developments, social transformations associated with the Industrial Revolution and the formation of the modern state were emerging. With newly mechanized working conditions and bureaucratic forms of administration, an increasingly impersonal and alienating social order was established. When Ortega y Gasset introduces his notion of “the mass man,” he captures the automation and lifeless conformism of the machine age, where everybody “feels just like everybody else and is nevertheless not concerned about it” (1930 \[1993, 15\]). In their conceptions of “the public” (Kierkegaard), “the herd” (Nietzsche), and “the They” (Heidegger), existentialists offer powerful critiques of the leveled down and routinized ways of being that characterize mass society. And the novels and short stories of Dostoevsky, Camus, and Kafka capture the bourgeois emptiness and boredom of the managerial class and the paranoia and distrust that emerges when life is regulated and controlled by faceless bureaucrats.
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These social transformations created the conditions for nihilism, where modern humanity suddenly found itself adrift and confused, unsure of which path to take or where to look for a stable and enduring sense of truth and meaning. The condition of nihilism involves the shocking recognition that there is no overarching reason, order, or purpose to our existence, that it is all fundamentally meaningless and absurd. Of all the existentialists, Nietzsche was the most influential and prophetic in diagnosing and conceptualizing the crisis. With the death of God and the loss of moral absolutes, we are exposed to existence “in its most terrible form … without meaning or aim” (Nietzsche 1887 \[1974\], §55). And it is against this anomic background that the question of existence, of what it means to be, becomes so urgent. But it is a question that requires taking a radically different standpoint than the one privileged by the philosophical tradition.
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## 2\. Engagement vs. Detachment
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From Plato onward, Western philosophy has generally prioritized a methodology grounded in a perspective of rational detachment and objectivity to arrive at truths that are immutable and timeless. By practicing what Merleau-Ponty disparagingly calls, “high-altitude thinking” (1964 \[1968\], 73), the philosopher adopts a perspective that is detached and impersonal, a “God’s eye view” or “view from nowhere” uncorrupted by the contingencies of our emotions, our embodiment, or the prejudices of our time and place. In this way the philosopher can grasp the “reality” behind the flux of “appearances,” the essential and timeless nature of things “under the perspective of eternity” (*sub specie aeternitatis*). Existentialism offers a thoroughgoing rejection of this view, arguing that we cannot look down on the human condition from a detached, third-person perspective because we are already thrown into the self-interpreting event or activity of existing, an activity that is always embodied, felt, and historically situated. Existence, then, is generally grasped not just through dispassionate theorizing but through a careful analysis of first-person experience, of the concrete, flesh and blood particulars of everyday life and the feelings, relationships, and commitments that make us who we are. It is a philosophy that begins from the standpoint of the *engagé*, of the individual who is engaged in life and who confronts the givens of existence.
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### 2.1 Subjective Truth
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The existentialist critique of theoretical detachment was pioneered by Kierkegaard whose scorn was directed primarily at G.W. F. Hegel, a philosopher who adopted the “perspective of eternity” to build a metaphysical system that would provide complete knowledge of reality. By taking a disengaged and panoptic view, Kierkegaard argues Hegel’s system invariably covers over the deeply personal project of being human and the specific needs and concerns of the existing individual. In his words, “it makes the subject accidental, and thereby transforms existence into something indifferent, something vanishing” (1846 \[1941, 173\]). In response, Kierkegaard reverses the traditional orientation that privileges objectivity by claiming that, when it comes to the question of existence, one’s own subjective truth is “ *the highest truth attainable* ” (1846 \[1941, 182\]). This means the abstract truths of philosophical detachment are always subordinate to the concrete truths of the existing individual. “The real subject,” writes Kierkegaard, “is not the cognitive subject … the real subject is the ethically existing subject” (1846 \[1941, 281\]). And subjective truth cannot be reasoned about or explained logically; it emerges out of the situated commitments, affects, and needs of the individual. For this reason, it does not disclose timeless and objective truths; it discloses “a truth which is true for me” (1835 \[1959, 44\]). For Kierkegaard, to live this truth invariably results in feelings of anxiety and confusion because it is objectively uncertain; it has no rational justification, and no one else can understand or relate to it. It is an ineffable truth that is felt rather than known. In this sense, the existing individual “discovers something that thought cannot think” (Kierkegaard 1844 \[1936, 29\]). But prioritizing the contingent and unrationalizable truths of existence does not mean Kierkegaard is forwarding a position of “irrationalism.” He is claiming, rather, that the standpoint of rational detachment cannot help us access the self-defining commitments and projects that matter to the existing individual. Truths of flesh and blood cannot be reduced to systematic explanation because such truths do not provide us with objective knowledge. Rather, they lay bare the passionate and urgent sense of how we should live our lives. They tell the individual: “what I am to *do*, not what I am to know” (Kierkegaard, 1835 \[1959, 44\]).
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### 2.2 Perspectivism
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Nietzsche echoes Kierkegaard’s misgivings about methodological detachment and philosophical systems but he does so by forwarding a pragmatic and perspectival account of truth. He argues that philosophers don’t discover objective truths by means of detached reasoning because truth claims are always shaped by and embedded in specific sociohistorical contexts. Truths, for Nietzsche, are best understood as social constructs; they are created or invented by a historical people, and they endure only so long as they are socially useful. On Nietzsche’s account, truths are passed down historically for generations to the point where they are uncritically accepted as “facts.” But from the standpoint of perspectivism, “facts are precisely what there is not, \[there are\] only interpretations. \[The world\] has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings” (Nietzsche 1901 \[1968\], §481). Nietzsche’s genealogy is one that shows how the history of Western philosophy is largely a history of forgetting how truths are invented. “It is only by means of forgetfulness,” he writes, “that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a ‘truth’” (Nietzsche 1889a \[1990a\], §93). This means human beings are already bound up in socially constructed perspectives that they cannot disengage or detach from. To exist, then, is to live in one’s “own perspectival forms, and *only* in them. We cannot see around our own corner” (Nietzsche 1887 \[1974\], §374). There is no aperspectival “reality.” The epistemological distinction between “appearance” and “reality” is a pseudo-problem that is always parasitic on the perspectival forms that we inhabit.
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Nietzsche goes on to suggest there is a psychological motivation in our shared belief in objective truth. It shelters us from the terrifying contingency and mutability of existence. Nietzsche understands that human beings are vulnerable and frightened creatures, and the belief in truth—even though it is an illusion—has social and pragmatic utility by providing a measure of coherence and reliability. We need these truths for psychological protection, to help us cope with an otherwise chaotic and precarious existence. “Truth,” therefore, “is that sort of error without which a certain species of life could not live” (Nietzsche 1901 \[1968\], §493).
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### 2.3 Being-in-the-World
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In *Being and Time*, Heidegger will expand on this critique of detachment and objectivity by developing his own phenomenological analysis of existence or “being-in-the-world” (*In-der-Welt-sein*). Following the core maxim of phenomenology introduced by his teacher Husserl, Heidegger’s philosophy attempts to return “to the things themselves,” to not explain but *describe* how things are given, reveal themselves, and make sense to us in our average everyday lives. Employing the word “Dasein,” a colloquial German term that refers to the kind of “existence” or “being” unique to humans, Heidegger makes it clear he is not interested in a systematic explanation of *what we are*, as if existence referred to the objective presence of a substance—e.g., a rational animal, an *ego cogito*, or an ensouled body. As a phenomenologist, he is concerned with *how we are*. In his version of phenomenology, Dasein is viewed not as a substance with what-like characteristics but as a self-interpreting, meaning-giving activity. Dasein refers to “the subject’s *way of being* ” (Heidegger 1927 \[1982, 123\]), someone who is always already involved and engaged with the equipment, institutions, and practices of a shared world and that embodies a tacit understanding of how to be in that world.
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Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world articulates three related ideas that will become central to twentieth-century existentialism and phenomenology. First, it offers a thoroughgoing rejection of the Cartesian view of the self or “I” as a discrete mental container of “inner” thoughts and beliefs that is somehow separate and distinct from “outer” objects in the world. There is no inner-outer dualism because the self is not a disembodied mind or consciousness. It is the activity of existing, a relational activity that is structurally bound up in the world. Thus, “self and world belong together in the single entity, the Dasein” (Heidegger 1927 \[1982, 297\]). Second, Heidegger compels us to rethink what we mean by “world.” From a phenomenological perspective, the world is not a geometrical space nor is it the sum of objects. It is the relational setting of our lives, the shared context of meaning that we are already involved in. And our involvement in the world allows objects to count and matter to us in particular ways. Third, Heidegger suggests that being-in-the-world is a meaning-giving activity. When we engage with and handle objects in the world, we give them meaning; we encounter them *as meaningful*. What appears to us in the immediacy of lived experience is always shaped by the public meanings we grow into. The fact that our existence is “fraught with meaning” suggests that experience has an intentional structure; it is always directed towards objects; it is *about* or *of* something (Heidegger 1919 \[2002, 60\]). The experience of hearing, for example, is not a representation of bare sense data because sounds are invariably colored by the context of meaning we are thrown into. We hear some- *thing*: we hear “the thunder *of* the heavens, the rustling *of* the woods, the rumbling *of* the motors, the noises *of* the city” (Heidegger 1950 \[1971, 65\], emphasis added). Meaning, on this view, is not generated by detached cognitive associations. It emerges against the background of our functional involvement in the world, in the way we are situated and engaged in a shared network of equipment, roles, institutions, and projects. And this engagement reveals a kind of pre-reflective competence or practical “know how” (*können*) that can never be made theoretically explicit.
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### 2.4 Embodiment
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We see, then, that in their critique of third-person detachment existentialists forward the idea that we are already “caught up in the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1945 \[1962, 5\]). And an essential aspect of being caught up in this way is the experience of one’s own embodiment and the crucial role that bodily orientation, affectivity, perception, and motility play in our everyday being-in-the-world. In this way, philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Marcel challenge the traditional interpretation of the body. Against the standard “Cartesian account,” the body is not regarded as a discrete, causally determined object, extended in space, and set apart from the disinterested gaze of the cognizing mind. The body is not something I have. It is a site of affectivity and meaning. It is who *I am*. And I cannot obtain objective knowledge of my body because I am already living through it; it is the experiential medium of my existence. “The body,” as Sartre puts it, “is *lived* and not *known*.” (1943 \[1956, 427\]) <sup>[<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/notes.html#note-2">2</a>]</sup>
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By building on the analysis of the lived body (*corps propre*, *corps vécu*, *corps vivant*, *Leib*), existentialists reveal how our moods, perceptions, and experiences are already bound up in worldly meanings, how we internalize these meanings, and how this act of internalization shapes the way we live, how we handle the tools of daily life, maneuver through lived space, relate to others, and interpret and perform our identities. In her pathbreaking work *The Second Sex*, Beauvoir illuminates this point by showing how a woman tends to internalize the dominant androcentric worldview, resulting in a representation of herself as subordinate, weak, and inferior. She is the “second sex” not because she is born with a particular biological body, but because she inhabits, enacts, and embodies the oppressive meanings and practices unique to her patriarchal situation. As Beauvoir famously puts it, the woman “is not *born*, but rather *becomes* a woman.” This is because “the body is not a thing; it is a situation… subject to taboos \[and\] laws… It is a reference to certain values from which \[she\] evaluates \[herself\]” (1949 \[1952, 34, 36\]).
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The existentialist’s distinction between the object-body and the lived-body has made it possible for contemporary philosophers and social theorists to engage the lived experience of those who have been historically marginalized by the western tradition. By rejecting the standpoint of theoretical detachment and focusing on the structures of embodiment and being-in-the-world, influential thinkers such as Franz Fanon (1952 \[1967\]), Iris Marion Young (1984 \[2000\]), and Judith Butler (1990), among others, have explored different ways in which we enact and embody forms of oppression and how this can shape our self-image and inhibit the experience of movement, spatial orientation, and other forms of bodily comportment. These investigations help to broaden and pluralize our understanding of the human condition by shedding light on a diverse range of embodied perspectives, from ethnicity and race, sex and gender, and age and physical ability. And insofar as these analyses help capture what is distinct about the meaning-giving activity of humans, they illuminate what is arguably the unifying principle of existentialism: “existence precedes essence.”
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## 3\. Existence Precedes Essence
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This principle was initially introduced early on in Heidegger’s *Being and Time* when he writes, “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence” (1927 \[1962, 42\]).<sup>[<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/notes.html#note-3">3</a>]</sup> Sartre will later repackage this line with the pithy adage, “existence precedes essence” (1946 \[2001, 292\]). What this statement suggests is that there is no pre-given or essential nature that determines us, which means that we are always *other than* ourselves, that we don’t fully coincide with who we are. We exist *for ourselves* as self-making or self-defining beings, and we are always in the process of making or defining ourselves through the situated choices we make as our lives unfold. This is, according to Sartre, “the first principle of existentialism,” and it “means, first, that man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself” (1946 \[2001, 292–3\]). The point here is that there can be no complete or definitive account of being human because there is nothing that grounds or secures our existence. Existence is fundamentally unsettled and incomplete because we are always projecting forward into possibilities, “hurling ourselves toward a future” as we imagine and re-imagine who we will be. Existence, then, is not a static thing; it is a dynamic process of self-making.
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Acknowledging existence as a self-making process does not mean the existentialist is denying that there are determinate aspects or “facts” about our situation that limit and constrain us. This is our givenness (or “facticity”), and it includes aspects of our being such as our embodiment and spatiality, our creaturely appetites and desires, and the socio-historical context we find ourselves in. But what distinguishes us as humans is that we have the capacity to rise above or “transcend” these facts in the way we relate to, interpret, and make sense of them. If I am compelled by a strong desire for sex, alcohol, or cigarettes, for instance, I do not out of necessity have to act on these desires. I have the freedom to question them and give them meaning, and the meanings I attribute to them shape my choices and the direction my life will take going forward.
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This means, unlike other organisms, we are self-conscious beings who can surpass our facticity by calling it into question, interpreting it in different ways, and making decisions about how to deal with it in the future. This is what Kierkegaard means when he describes existence as “a relation that relates to itself” (1849 \[1989, 43\]). Existence is a reflexive or relational tension between “facticity” and “transcendence,” where we are constrained by our facticity but simultaneously endowed with the freedom to exceed or transcend it. The human being is, as Ortega y Gasset writes, “a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it” (1941, 111). We are not wholly determined by our nature because our nature is always a question or an issue for us. We have the capacity to reflect on and care about it. And the way we care about our nature informs how we create ourselves. Sartre will go so far as to say that human existence is fundamentally “indefinable” and that “there is no human nature” because there is no aspect of our facticity that can fully describe us. Our facticity reveals itself to us only through the self-defining meanings and values that we give to it. “If man \[…\] is indefinable, it is because at first he is *nothing*. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be” (1946 \[2001, 293\]). This idea that facticity can always be nullified or negated by our choices reveals the key to understanding the existentialist conception of freedom.
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## 4\. Freedom
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Recognizing that there is no pre-given essence that determines existence, the existentialist makes it clear that it is up to the individual to make his, her, or their own identity through choices and actions. Sartre explains that the coward, for instance, is not the way he is because of an unstable childhood or a particular genetic makeup. The coward “makes himself a coward” by means of his decisions (1946 \[2001, 301\]). In this way, the existentialist generally affirms the view that the human being has free will, is able to make decisions, and can be held responsible for their actions.<sup>[<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/notes.html#note-4">4</a>]</sup> But, as we will see, this does not mean that we can do whatever we want. It means, rather, that existence is structured by our capacity to give meaning to our situation based on the actions and choices we make as our lives unfold. Insofar as we exist, we are envisioning a certain kind of life, assigning a value to our identity, and making ourselves into the kind of person we are.
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When we become aware of our freedom as an inescapable given of the human condition, the awareness is often accompanied by anxiety because we realize that we alone are responsible for our choices and the projects we undertake. There is no moral absolute, divine will, or natural law that can provide guidance or justify our actions. We are, in this sense, condemned to be free because “there are no excuses behind us nor justifications before us” (Sartre 1946 \[2001, 296\]).
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### 4.1 The Anxiety of Choice
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In the canon of existentialist literature, no writer captures this idea better than Dostoevsky in his *Notes from the Underground*. The nameless “underground man” rebels against an increasingly scientized, rational, and mechanistic picture of human behavior promoted by Russian social reformers in the 1860s, where everything a person does was thought to be determined by causal laws. For the underground man, this view reduces the human being to a mechanical cog or “a piano key” (1864 \[2009, 18\]), and it undermines the one value that gives existence its meaning and dignity, that is, the capacity to choose and create our own lives.<sup>[<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/notes.html#note-5">5</a>]</sup> To affirm his freedom, the underground man responds to this situation through self-immolating acts of revolt, doing the opposite of whatever the determinations of rationality, social convention, or the laws of nature demand. When he has a toothache, he refuses to see the doctor; when he is at a party with former school mates, he behaves in outrageous and humiliating ways; when the prostitute Liza reaches out to him in tenderness, he lashes out at her in rage. In this sense, the underground man is an anti-hero. He recognizes that freedom is the highest value, the “most advantageous advantage” (1864 \[2009, 17\]) for human beings, but at the same time he realizes there is no way of knowing what might come of our choices; they may, as they do for the underground man, result in our own self-destruction. As Dostoevsky writes: “What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And the choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice” (1864 \[2009, 20\]).
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This account of freedom suggests that my being (or identity) is always penetrated by the possibility of its own negation because I can always question myself and assign new meanings to and interpretations of who I am in the future. My self-interpretation is always insecure or unstable. I may interpret myself as a philosophy professor today, but I am also *not* a professor insofar as I can freely choose to reject this identity and resign from my job tomorrow. In this sense, I am no-thing, a “being-possible.” As Sartre puts it: “human existence is constituted as a being *which is what it is not* and *which is not what it is* ” (1943 \[1956, 107\]). For the existentialist, anxiety discloses this predicament to me, revealing that I’ve been abandoned to a realm of possibilities, where I face a dizzying array of options, and I alone am answerable to whatever options I choose. Understood this way, anxiety is not directed at some external object or event in the world. If I am an incarnation of freedom, it is directed *at me*; I am the source of it.
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### 4.2 Mediated Freedom
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In *Being and Nothingness*, Sartre forwards an account of “radical” or “absolute” freedom, an unconditioned “freedom-in-consciousness” where we make or create ourselves *ex nihilo*, through the sheer “upsurge” of choice alone. But in the wake of Marxist criticism in the 1940s and 1950s, his views changed; he realized that this early account was far too abstract, interiorized, and influenced by Cartesian assumptions.<sup>[<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/notes.html#note-6">6</a>]</sup> It failed to engage the social, historical, and material conditions that invariably limit and constrain our freedom. He came to recognize that our choices and actions are always mediated by the world, by the sociohistorical situation we’ve been thrown into. He sees that the idea of radical, unconditioned freedom “is nonsense. The truth is that existence ‘is-in-society’ as it ‘is-in-the-world’” (Sartre 1952 \[1963, 590\]). Freedom must be understood as “freedom-in-situation.” It is true that we are free to create ourselves, but it is also true that we are already created by our situation. “Man,” is best understood as “a totally conditioned social being who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him” (Sartre 1972 \[2008, 35\]).
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Sartre’s Marxist inspired conception of situated or mediated freedom is one that had already been forwarded and developed by Beauvoir in her major treatises *The Second Sex* and *The Coming of Age* and in her novels such as *The Blood of Others* (1945 \[1970\]) and *The Mandarins* (1954 \[1991\]). The view is also developed by her compatriot Merleau-Ponty. In *Phenomenology of Perception*, for example, Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that the options we choose to act on do not emerge out of nothing. They are already embedded in a sociohistorical situation “before any personal decision has been made.” (1945 \[1962, 449\]) The ways in which we create or make ourselves, then, are always circumscribed by the meanings of our situation. We are simultaneously self-making and already made. “We exist in both ways at once,” writes Merleau-Ponty. “We choose the world, and the world chooses us.” (1945 \[1962, 453–454\]). As we will see in section 6.3, the recognition of the extent to which freedom is mediated by the material conditions of our situation opened existentialism to a broader engagement with the social sphere and the structures of oppression and violence that shape our experience and self-understanding.
|
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|
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## 5\. Authenticity
|
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|
||||
Existentialism is well known for its critique of mass society and our tendency to conform to the levelled-down norms and expectations of the public. Rather than living our own lives, we tend to get pulled along by the crowd, doing what “they” do. As Heidegger writes, “We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they *take* pleasure. We read, see, and judge about literature and art as *they* see and judge … we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking. The ‘they’… prescribes the kind of being of everydayness” (1927 \[1962, 126–7\]). Living this way can be comforting, creating the illusion that we are living well because we are doing what everyone else does. But for the existentialist, this conformist way of being is a manifestation of inauthenticity or self-deception because it shows how we are unwilling or unable to face up to the freedom and contingency of our condition; it reveals the extent to which we are afraid of being an individual, of being true to ourselves, and of making our own life-defining choices.
|
||||
|
||||
In *The Sickness unto Death*, Kierkegaard describes inauthenticity in terms of fleeing from ourselves, of “not wanting to be oneself, \[of\] wanting to be rid of oneself” (1849 \[1989, 43\]). Insofar as we let others decide our lives for us, we live a life that is bereft of passion, a life of “bloodless indolence,” where we are unwilling or unable to “make a real commitment.” (Kierkegaard 1846 \[1946, 266–67\]). Similarly, Heidegger will refer to this condition as a form of estrangement that “alienates Dasein from itself,” where we exist as a “they-self” (*Man-selbst*) that drifts along in lockstep with others. (1927 \[1962, 254–55\]) And this self-estrangement is numbing or “tranquilizing” (*beruhigend*) because it covers over the anxiety of own freedom and finitude.
|
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|
||||
Sartre and Beauvoir refer to inauthenticity in terms of “bad faith” (*mauvaise foi*), where we either deny or over-identify with one of the two aspects of human existence, either facticity or transcendence. I am in bad faith, for example, when I over-identify with my factical situation and deny my freedom to act on and transform this situation. I am also in bad faith when I over-identify with freedom and deny my past conduct and the fact that my choices are limited and constrained by my situation. Sartre and Beauvoir recognize that the self is never wholly free or wholly determined; it is structurally unstable, it is a “double- property … that is at once a facticity and a transcendence” (Sartre 1943 \[1956, 98\]). When we cling to one or the other of these poles, we are denying this “double-property,” and this is a denial of the fundamental ambiguity and instability at the core of the human condition.
|
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|
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### 5.1 The Power of Moods
|
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|
||||
For the existentialists, the possibility of breaking free from engrained patterns of self-deception is generally not something that is accomplished by means of detached reflection. It emerges in the wake of powerful emotional experiences or moods. When the existentialist refers to feelings of “nausea” (Sartre), “absurdity” (Camus), “anxiety” (Kierkegaard), “guilt” (Heidegger), or “mystery” (Marcel) they are describing uncanny affects that have the power to shake us out of our complacency, where the secure and familiar world breaks apart and collapses, and we are forced to confront the question of existence. Jaspers refers to these moments as “limit” or “boundary situations” (*Grenzsituationen*)—situations “when everything that is said to be valuable and true collapses before our eyes” (1932 \[1956, 117\]).
|
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|
||||
Although terrifying, the existentialist makes it clear that we should not close our eyes or flee from these experiences because they are structural to the human condition. They are, as Jaspers puts it, “impassable, unchangeable situations that belong to human existence as such” (1913 \[1997, 330\]). Instead of turning away from this basic anxiety, the existentialist asks us to turn toward and face it, because it is amidst a collapsing world that the ultimate questions emerge: *Who am I?* and *What now?* In this way, the existentialist sees the experience of anxiety and its related moods as an opportunity for personal growth and transformation. World-shattering moods open me up to the possibility of being authentic, of accepting and affirming the unsettling givens of my condition, of being released from distractions and trivialities, and of recognizing the self-defining projects that matter to me as an individual.
|
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|
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### 5.2 Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith
|
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|
||||
For Kierkegaard, the authentic individual is someone that is “willing to be one’s own self.” (1843 \[1989, 43\]) He, she, or they recognize(s) that there is more to life than following the crowd or chasing surface pleasures. Such a life is invariably scattered and disjointed, pulled apart by temporal desires and the fleeting fads and fashions of the public. Authenticity requires a passionate, “personality defining” (*personligheds definerende*) decision or commitment that binds together and unifies the fragmented and disjointed moments of our life into a focused and coherent whole. The “unifying power” of commitment is embodied in, what Kierkegaard calls, an attitude of “earnestness” (*alvor*), a sober recognition that existence is a serious affair, not a pleasure-seeking masquerade. But authenticity cannot be achieved simply by means of renouncing temporal pleasures and doing one’s duty according to some universal moral principle—such as the Ten Commandments or Kant’s Categorical Imperative. This is because, for Kierkegaard, the subjective truth of the individual is higher than the universal truths of morality. And this means there may be times in our lives where we must suspend our obligation to the ethical sphere and accept the terrible fact that it may be more important to be authentic (to be true to oneself) than it is to be moral (to do what is right.)
|
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|
||||
In *Fear and Trembling*, Kierkegaard draws on the biblical figure of Abraham to make this point. As a father, Abraham has a moral duty to love and protect his son, but when God demands that he break this commandment and kill Isaac, he is confronted with a personal truth that is higher than the universal. In committing himself to this truth, Abraham becomes a “knight of faith” by “leaping” (*springer*) into a paradox, one where the truth of “the singular individual is higher than the universal” (1843 \[1985, 84\]). As a religious existentialist, Kierkegaard contends that this is what is required to enter the sphere of faith and become a Christian. It has nothing to do with membership in a congregation or obedience to doctrinal statements. It is, rather, a willingness to commit to a truth that is fundamentally irrational and absurd. How, for example, can one make rational sense of God’s command to Abraham to kill his own son? “The problem,” writes Kierkegaard, “is not to understand Christianity, but to understand that it cannot be understood” (1835–1854 \[1959, 146\]).<sup>[<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/notes.html#note-7">7</a>]</sup> An authentic or religious life, then, is always accompanied by anxiety and loneliness because the leap individualizes us; it cuts us off from the comforting truths of the public and its blanket conceptions of right and wrong. It compels us to follow a path that no one else may understand. Abraham’s decision is, for this reason, fraught with despair. In his willingness to suspend his moral duty, he appears “insane” because he “cannot make himself understood to anyone.” (1985 (1843\], 103)
|
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|
||||
But with the despair of faith comes feelings of intensity, even joy, as we recognize the absurdity of religious existence, that the eternal or divine is not found in some otherworldly realm, it is bound up in the temporal; that it is *this life*, the finite, that has infinite significance. Freed from the temptations of the crowd and of blind obedience to moral principles, the knight of faith “takes delight in everything he sees” because he is now fully aware of the majesty and richness of finitude. For him, “finitude tastes just as good as to one who has never known anything higher” (1843 \[1985, 69–70\]).
|
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|
||||
### 5.3 Nietzsche’s Overman
|
||||
|
||||
Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche is critical of our tendency to follow the herd and cling to universal moral principles. He forwards a conception of authenticity that accepts our nihilistic predicament and rises above Christian values of good and evil. He sees these values as representative of a tame and submissive way of being, a “slave morality” (*Sklavenmoral*) that is subservient to authority and bereft of any originality or style. Nietzsche contrasts this with a “master morality” (*Herrenmoral*) embodied in those who have the courage to face, even affirm, the cruel and tragic aspects of life and the self-directed power to create their own meanings and values against the backdrop of God’s death. Nietzsche refers to the individual who can overcome the meek and slavish values of tradition for the sake of self-creation as an “Overman” (*Übermensch*), an aristocratic figure who embodies the freedom, courage, and strength to be original, that is, to “give style” to life. “Such spirits,” writes Nietzsche, “are always out of fashion or explain themselves and their surroundings as *free* nature—wild, arbitrary, fantastic, and surprising” (1887 \[1974\], §290).
|
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|
||||
The key to living with style is, for Nietzsche, a radical acceptance of one’s existence and the world *as it is*, embracing all our strengths and weaknesses and all the blessed and cursed events that have been and will be. The Overman is a “yes-sayer” who affirms every aspect of his life, “every truth, even the simple, bitter, ugly, unchristian, immoral truths” (1887 \[1996\], §1). In *The Gay Science*, Nietzsche captures this attitude with a famous thought experiment called the “doctrine of eternal recurrence.” Here, he asks if we have the audacity to live the same life we are living now over and over for eternity. “And there will be nothing new about it,” he explains, “but every pain and every pleasure, and every thought and sigh, and everything unspeakably small and great in your life must come back to you and all in the same series and sequence.” On Nietzsche’s view, most of us would recoil in horror at the prospect of eternally suffering through the same boredom, failures, and disappointments. But overflowing with *amor fati* (love of one’s fate), the Overman welcomes this possibility, proclaiming, “I have never heard anything more godlike” (1887 \[1974\], §341). Camus describes this attitude as a form of rebellion against servile and conformist ways of being. Like the Overman, “the rebel” is someone “born of abundance and fullness of spirit,” and he embodies “the unreserved affirmation of human imperfection and suffering, of evil and murder, of all that is problematic and strange in our existence. It is born of an arrested wish to be what one is in a world that is what it is” (1951 \[1956, 72\]).
|
||||
|
||||
But not everyone has the inborn power to rebel against tradition and creatively express their unique style of living. For Nietzsche, only “the highest types” can manifest this kind of freedom and capacity for self-overcoming. To this end, his account of authenticity is unapologetically elitist and anti-democratic. Most of us are too mired in self-deception, too frightened and weak to break with the herd and become who we are. “Only a very few people can be free,” writes Nietzsche, “It is a prerogative of the strong” (1886 \[1998\], §29).
|
||||
|
||||
### 5.4 Heidegger’s Resolute Dasein
|
||||
|
||||
Heidegger devotes much of the second half of *Being and Time* to an analysis of authenticity, employing the German term *Eigentlichkeit* —formed from the stem of the adjective *eigen* (“own” or “property”)—that literally means “being own’s own” or “ownnness.” But he sets up his analysis of authenticity by first claiming that self-deception or “inauthenticity” is unavoidable; it is a structure of the human condition, one that he refers to as “falling” (*Verfallen*). What this means is that in our everyday lives we invariably conform (or “fall prey”) to the norms and values of the public world. This results in a kind of complacency and indifference about the question of existence, where we are not our own selves, where “everyone is the other, and no one is himself” (1927 \[1962, 128\]). Falling creates the illusion that our existence (or being-in-the-world) is secure and thing-like because we are doing what everyone else does. But, for Heidegger, there is nothing that fundamentally secures our existence. As a self-making activity, I am not a stable thing. I am nothing, a “not yet” (*noch nicht*) that is always unsettled, always in the process of making myself. The awareness of our own unsettledness emerges in moments of anxiety when the familiar and routinized world “collapses into itself” (1927 \[1962, 186\]), and I “die” (*sterben*) because I am no longer able-to-be, that is, to understand or make sense of who I am.<sup>[<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/notes.html#note-8">8</a>]</sup>
|
||||
|
||||
Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger interprets anxiety as an individualizing mood, one that momentarily “snatches one back” from the tranquilizing routines of “the They,” leaving us vulnerable and exposed to confront our lives (1927 \[1962, 384\]). And this is potentially liberating because it can temporarily free us from patterns of self-deception, providing insight, a “moment of vision” (*Augenblick*) that can give our lives a renewed sense of urgency and focus. But this experience of individuation does not detach me from the world, turning me into a radical subject or “free floating ‘I’” (1927 \[1962, 298\]). Heidegger claims that our self-defining choices are always guided in advance by our historical embeddedness, what he calls “historicity” (*Geschichtlichkeit*). The meanings we choose to give to our lives, then, are not created out of thin air; they have already been interpreted and made intelligible by a historical community or “people” (*Volk*).<sup>[<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/notes.html#note-9">9</a>]</sup> The moment of vision shakes me out of my fallen, everyday existence and allows me to come back to my historical world with fresh eyes, to seize hold of the publicly interpreted meanings that matter to me and make them “mine” (*Jemeinig*).
|
||||
|
||||
Heidegger refers to this authentic attitude in terms of “resoluteness” (*Entschlossenheit*), where I “pull \[myself\] together,” giving life a sense of cohesion and focus that was missing when I was lost and scattered in “the They.” But being resolute does not mean that I stubbornly cling to whatever possibilities I happen to choose. For Heidegger, authenticity demands an openness and flexibility with how I interpret myself.<sup>[<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/notes.html#note-10">10</a>]</sup> Understanding that existence is a situated process of self-making, whatever values or meanings I commit myself to, I must also be willing to let go or give up on them depending on the circumstances of my life, that is, to “hold \[myself\] free for the possibility of *taking it back* ” (1927 \[1962, 308\]). Resoluteness, on this view, does not mean “becoming rigid” and holding fast to a chosen identity because my self-understanding is always insecure; it can die at any time. For this reason, authenticity requires “readiness” or “anticipation” (*Vorgriff*), where we passionately hold ourselves open and free for the inescapable breakdowns and emergencies of life. It is, in Heidegger’s words, “an impassioned freedom towards death—a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the ‘They’” (1927 \[1962, 266\]).
|
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|
||||
### 5.5 Self-Recovery in Sartre and Beauvoir
|
||||
|
||||
Sartre and Beauvoir follow Heidegger in viewing self-deception as structural to the human condition. It is, as Sartre writes, “an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human being” (1943 \[1956, 116\]). Although I can certainly deceive myself by over-identifying with freedom and denying the extent to which my possibilities are constrained by facticity, the most common and familiar form of bad faith is when I over-identify with my facticity, as if I were a fully realized object or thing, a being “in-itself” (*en-soi*). This form of self-deception is understandable as it creates the consoling impression that there is something secure and thing-like about my identity, that “I am what I am,” and there is nothing that can change me. But to live this way is to deny my freedom and transcendence, that I am self-making, that I live *for myself* —or, in the vernacular of Sartre and Beauvoir, “for-itself” (*pour-soi*). Human beings are, on their view, always in the process of making or constituting themselves, modifying and negating their being through moment-to-moment choices and actions. This means my identity is never fixed or stable because I can always choose to take a new path or interpret myself in other ways. Regardless of how I see myself at a given time—as a professor, a father, or a political activist—I am also “not” that person, because my identity is never realized and complete; I am always free to negate a given identity and define myself differently in the future. This means I am “what I *am not* ” (1943 \[1956, 103\]). And this situation appears to undermine the prospect of authenticity altogether. If the self is always unstable, always in question, how can I ever be genuine or true to myself?
|
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|
||||
In *Being and Nothingness*, Sartre provides an answer, referring to authenticity in terms of a “recovery” (*récupération*) of a self or way of being “that was previously corrupted” (1943 \[1956, 116\]).<sup>[<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/notes.html#note-11">11</a>]</sup> But this act of “self-recovery” has nothing to do with creating or holding on to a particular identity. It involves, rather, a clear-eyed awareness and acceptance of the instability and ambiguity of the human condition. And, along with this acceptance, a willingness to act in the face of this ambiguity and to take responsibility, however horrible, for wherever these actions might lead. As Sartre writes, “authenticity consists in a lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks it involves, in accepting it \[…\] sometimes with horror and hate” (1946 \[1948, 90\]). But just because existence is fundamentally ambiguous does not mean that our chosen projects are meaningless or absurd. My projects have meaning and value because I chose these projects, but the meaning is contingent; it is never enduring or stable. In *The Ethics of Ambiguity*, Beauvoir explains: “The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed” (1947 \[1948, 129\]). The point of authenticity, then, is not to be concerned with *who I am* —because, at bottom, I am nothing. It is to be concerned with *what I do*. As Sartre writes, “Authenticity reveals that the only meaningful project is that of *doing* (not that of being)” (1948 \[1992, 475\]). For Sartre and Beauvoir, to be authentic is to recover and accept the ambiguous tension of the self, that: *we are who we are not* —and— *we* *are not who are*. And by means of this recovery, recognize that the task of existence involves acting and doing, that is, realizing our freedom through projects in the world but also, as we will see, taking responsibility for how these projects might enhance or diminish freedom for others.
|
||||
|
||||
## 6\. Ethics
|
||||
|
||||
Existentialist ethics generally begins with the idea that there is no external moral order or table of values that exists a priori. “It must be understood,” as Beauvoir writes in *The Ethics of Ambiguity*, “that the passion in which man has acquiesced finds no external justification. No outside appeal, no objective necessity permits of its being called useful.” But this does not mean that the existentialists are promoting a form of moral nihilism. Beauvoir admits it is true that the human being “has no reason to will itself. *But* this does not mean that it cannot justify itself, that it cannot *give itself* reasons for being that it does not *have*.” It is human existence itself “which makes values spring up in the world on the basis of which it will be able to judge the enterprise in which it will be engaged.” (1947 \[1948, 12, 15\]).<sup>[<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/notes.html#note-12">12</a>]</sup> There is, then, a coherent account of ethical responsibility grounded in freedom, not as a theoretical abstraction but as a concrete expression of transcendence, and the obligation to help others realize their own freedom so that I can realize mine. When I acknowledge that freedom is my essence, I must also acknowledge that it is the essence of others and work, to the best of my ability, to help them realize it. My freedom, then, is not free-floating; it is invariably bound up in the freedom of others. As Sartre puts it: “We want freedom for freedom’s sake and in every particular circumstance. And in wanting freedom we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that freedom of others depends on ours \[…\] I am obliged to want others to have freedom at the same time that I want my own freedom” (1945 \[2001, 306\]).
|
||||
|
||||
### 6.1 Authentic Being-for-Others
|
||||
|
||||
Sartre and Beauvoir argue that we generally exist as “a being-for-others” (*un être-pour-autrui*), which is to say that I understand or see myself in the way that I do through “the look” (*le regard*) of the Other. And the look has the power to strip away my freedom and turn me into an object. Human relations, on this account, are best understood as a form of conflict, a dyadic power struggle where I try to assert my freedom and subjectivity by turning the Other into an object, while the Other tries to do the same to me. “While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other,” writes Sartre, “the Other is trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me… Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others” (1943 \[1956, 475\]). This struggle for self-assertion leads to Sartre’s famous claim in his play *Huis Clos* (No Exit) that “Hell is— *other people* ” (1944 \[1989, 45\]).
|
||||
|
||||
But the struggle to objectify and possess the Other by stripping them of their freedom is a manifestation of inauthentic being-for-others. There is an authentic counterpart. Beauvoir, for example, explores what it means to develop and cultivate freedom for others with her account of “authentic love” (*l’amour authentique*), describing it as a relationship where we acknowledge and nurture the other’s freedom and transcendence while at the same time resisting the temptations of bad faith, that is, to see the Other as an object or thing to be manipulated and possessed. As a moral stance, authentic being-for-others is a form of reciprocity that involves “the mutual recognition of two freedoms \[…\] \[where\] neither would give up transcendence \[and\] neither would be mutilated” (1949 \[1952, 667\]). In this way authenticity and morality belong together, whereby we have a shared obligation to liberate or free each other so that we can create ourselves and take responsibility for the life we lead. Therefore, as Beauvoir puts it, “to will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision” (1947 \[1948, 24\]).
|
||||
|
||||
Heidegger develops a similar idea in *Being and Time* with his account of “liberating concern” (*befreiend Fürsorge*), a form of care where the central aim is to free the Other from patterns of self-deception so that they can anxiously face and create their own existence. It is a relational stance that “helps the Other become transparent to himself in his care and to become *free* for it” (1927 \[1962, 122\]). When we care in this way, we resist the temptation to “leap-in” (*einspringen*) for the Other, as if the Other were a dependent thing or object that needs to be sheltered from the unsettling question of existence. Heidegger refers to this sheltering tendency in terms of a kind of tacit mastery or “domination” (*Beherrschung*) that strips the Other of the anxious responsibility they have for their own life. Instead of leaping-in for the Other and disburdening them of their responsibility, an authentic relation is one that “leaps-ahead” (*vorausspringt*) of the Other, giving them back their anxiety and the freedom to care for and confront their condition. As Heidegger writes, we leap-ahead of the Other, “not in order to take away his ‘care’ but rather to give it back to them authentically as such for the first time” (1927 \[1962, 122\]). Here, we see the development of an ethical maxim: to act in such a way as to will the realization of your own freedom and the realization of freedom for others.
|
||||
|
||||
### 6.2 The Ethics of Recognition
|
||||
|
||||
There is also heterodox current among some religious existentialists, one that suggests that moral demands are placed on us when we recognize ourselves not as voluntaristic subjects—or, in the words of Iris Murdoch, “brave naked wills” (1983, 46) severed from bonds of community and attachment—but as relational beings who are fundamentally bound together in mutual vulnerability. And this recognition may serve as the foundation for an ethics by pulling us out of our everyday self-absorption and awakening us, not to our freedom, but to our essential dependency.
|
||||
|
||||
Speaking through the religious elder Father Zossima in *The Brothers Karamazov*, Dostoevsky offers a powerful indictment of the “terrible individualism” that he sees as endemic to modernity, where unfettered freedom and self-affirmation have become the highest values. Such a view leads not to self-actualization but to loneliness and despair. The modern man, says Zossima, “is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in men and in humanity \[…\] but this terrible individualism must inevitably have an end, and all will suddenly understand how unnaturally they are separated from one another” (1879 \[1957–80, 279\]). Against the vision of the willful subject who makes choices without evaluative limits or constraints, Dostoevsky suggests it is only in recognizing the Other as dependent and vulnerable that we can come to recognize ourselves. True freedom emerges when we release ourselves from the bondage of our own egoistic striving and adopt an attitude of humility and self-sacrifice. The aim is to show that the human being is not an isolated will but a frail and defenseless being that is dependent on the self-less love, compassion, and charity of others.<sup>[<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/notes.html#note-13">13</a>]</sup> When we free ourselves from the temptations of individualism in this way, Zossima says a moral demand is placed on us, one where we begin to see that “we are all responsible to all and for all” (1879–80 \[1957, 228).
|
||||
|
||||
The Jewish existentialist Martin Buber expands on this idea in his masterwork *I and Thou*. He claims that in our everyday lives we generally relate to others from an instrumental and objectifying standpoint, what he calls the “I-It” (*Ich-Es*) relation, where the other is encountered as a thing (or “it”) to be manipulated and controlled for one’s own use. This relation is comforting because it creates the illusion that we have control of our situation. But there are moments in our lives when this illusion collapses, and we become vulnerable to the other, not as an “it” but as a “you.” In the “I-You” (*Ich-Du*) relation, all the egoistic defenses we rely on to conceal our essential dependency and openness to the Other break down. Buber refers to this as an experience of grace, where the Other is revealed to me as a whole person, defenseless and exposed, and I am revealed in the same way. It is a moment where “two human beings reveal the You to one another” (1923 \[1970, 95\]). In this way, anxiety isn’t a radically individualizing affair, where the forlorn subject is cut off from the relational world to confront their own freedom. For Buber, exposure to the I-You relation shakes us out of our own egoistic concerns and awakens us to the fact that we are not isolated individuals but beings who are always in living relation with others. With this experience “the barriers of the individual are breached,” and this creates an affective union, a “bridge from self-being to self-being across the abyss of dread” (1938 \[1965\], 201, 207\]).
|
||||
|
||||
### 6.3 The Ethics of Engagement
|
||||
|
||||
The Nazi occupation of France, his own experience as a prisoner of war, and the attacks on his philosophy from influential Marxist critics, compelled Sartre to shift his focus from the individual to the social. Following the war, he, along with Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir, launched the influential journal of social criticism *Le Temps Modernes* (Modern Times), and Sartre made his aims clear in the first issue, writing: “Our intention is to help effect certain changes in the Society that surrounds us… one is responsible for what one is … Totally committed and totally freed. And yet it is the free man who must be *delivered*, by enlarging his possibilities of choice” (Sartre 1945 \[1988, 264–65\]). Here we see existentialists making the connection that for the Other to realize their freedom, philosophy must engage the “bases and structures” that limit and constrain them. This is because these structures are not philosophical abstractions; they “are lived as schematic determinates of the individual’s future” (Sartre 1957 \[1968, 94\]). Society, here, is viewed not as an aggregate of voluntaristic subjects; it is the mediating background of our lives, and if we are going to create a situation of freedom and “enlarge the possibilities of choice,” we must recognize how this background can be violent and oppressive—especially to historically marginalized and undervalued people—and to act in such a way as to transform it.
|
||||
|
||||
Of all the major developers of existentialism, it is unquestionably Beauvoir who offered the most sustained and influential analyses of oppression and of possibilities for emancipation, not only in her feminist masterwork *The Second Sex*, but in her bleak account of the dehumanization of the elderly in *The Coming of Age* (1970 \[1996\]) and her reflections on the experience of Black populations in the Jim Crow South in her memoir *America Day by Day* (1954 \[1999\]). In these works, Beauvoir illuminates how socioeconomic and political structures can restrict the human capacity for freedom and transcendence, how they have the power to “freeze” the Other, strip away possibilities for agency and self-creation, and trap them in “immanence.” But in these works, Beauvoir makes it clear that this situation is not a destiny. Human beings have no essential nature; no one is born inferior or submissive. We are constituted intersubjectively by growing into, internalizing, and enacting ready-made structures of oppression. But insofar as these structures are constituted and maintained by the choices and actions of individuals, they are not fixed and static. Like human beings, they too are subject to change. Here we see how the recognition that existence precedes essence moves from the ontological realm to the ethical, it becomes a call to action, to engage and transform the material conditions that limit the possibilities of choice for those who are oppressed and marginalized.
|
||||
|
||||
In this way, postwar existentialism began to engage the realities of the social sphere and the painful “isms”—classism, racism, colonialism, sexism, anti-Semitism—haunting the western world. It was a philosophy that had come to recognize, in Sartre’s words, that “the individual interiorizes his social determinations; he interiorizes the relations of production, the family of his childhood, the historical past, the contemporary in institutions, and he then re-exteriorizes these acts and options which necessarily refer us back to them” (1972 \[2008, 35\]). And insofar as these social determinations are not fixed and timeless but contingent human constructs, they can be resisted and transformed to free others.
|
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## 7\. Contemporary Relevance
|
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|
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Existentialism has had a profound impact on how philosophers conceptualize and understand the human condition, with rich accounts of affectivity and embodiment, facticity (or worldliness), and the ways in which we are constituted intersubjectively. It has opened new paths for philosophy to engage with concrete and acute human problems, from sexuality, race, disability, and old age to broader issues of social and political violence and oppressive relations in general. And the movement continues to thrive in the academy today. Not only is the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) flourishing as the second largest philosophical organization in the English-speaking world, with smaller research groups (or “Circles”) devoted to every major figure. There is a cascade of scholarship published every year in leading journals and academic presses that captures the enduring relevance of existentialist thought, including important new work engaging the significance of French existentialism as an ethical theory (Webber 2018), reframing our conceptions of virtue and human flourishing (McMullin 2019), and even addressing current analytic debates in philosophies of life-extension, anti-natalism, and transhumanism (Buben 2022). Indeed, the core ideas and major figures of existentialism are not just alive and well; they are shaping developments in a diverse range of areas across the humanities and social sciences.
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|
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### 7.1 Post-Structuralism
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|
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The legacy is most clearly present in the European philosophies that proceeded it. Existentialism’s critique of foundationalism and the authority of reason as well as its rejection of universalism, essentialism, and “grand narratives” (or metanarratives) all had a decisive impact on post-structural philosophies in France. Nietzsche and Heidegger in particular served as decisive influences on the project of “de-centering the subject” in Jacques Derrida’s method of deconstruction and in Michel Foucault’s genealogy of power, demonstrating how the subject is not the privileged center or origin of truth and knowledge. The subject is, rather, shaped in advance by sociohistorical structures, an overlapping network of norms and practices, linguistic conventions, and shared meanings, and this shaping takes place in a way that we are never fully conscious of.<sup>[<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/notes.html#note-14">14</a>]</sup> The individual, on this view, is more of a placeholder or crossing point in these anonymous structures, where the subject exists as “the inscribed surface of events \[…\] totally imprinted by history” (Foucault 1977, 148). Of course, existentialists reject the idea that this historical imprinting or “decentering” is total or absolute. They are, after all, still committed to the value of freedom and authenticity, but they recognize that freedom is never unconditioned. Beyond the philosophies of Heidegger and Nietzsche, we see this recognition in Merleau-Ponty’s conception of mediated freedom, in Sartre’s postwar account of “freedom-in-situation,” and in what Beauvoir calls “ *la force des choses* ” (the power of circumstances). The recognition of historicity as an impersonal force that structures our identity had such an impact on Foucault’s work that he once remarked: “My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger” (Foucault 1985, cited in Dreyfus 1995, 9).
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### 7.2 Narrative and Hermeneutic Philosophy
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In viewing the self not as a substance or thing but as a self-interpreting, meaning-giving activity that is always already bound up in the world, existentialism has also informed key developments in narrative and hermeneutic philosophy. Prominent anglophone philosophers such as Harry Frankfurt (1971), Charles Taylor (1985), and Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) have drawn on classical existentialism to illuminate how we exist in the meanings and self-interpretations that we create for ourselves. My sense of who I am is constituted by an ongoing process of choosing, pulling together, and consolidating the roles, projects, and meanings that matter to me and that are made available by the sociohistorical situation I find myself in. On this view, the story I create for myself is held together by the narrative unity and cohesion that I give to it. This is what Taylor means when he says that we can only understand or “grasp our lives in a narrative” (1989, 47). And this conception of narrative identity not only offers a response to overly reductive conceptions of the self that are grounded in the substance ontologies of mind and body; it demonstrates an attentiveness to the ambiguous tension of our condition, that our choices are both self-fashioning and socially embedded, that we simultaneously make ourselves and are already made.
|
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### 7.3 Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science
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|
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Beginning with Hubert Dreyfus’s (1972) groundbreaking critique of Artificial Intelligence (AI), philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists have been drawing on existentialist philosophy—especially Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty—to challenge the overly mentalistic picture of selfhood and agency that modern philosophy inherits from Descartes and Kant and to dismantle traditional representational theories of knowledge. Key works by Shaun Gallagher (2005), Thomas Fuchs, (2018), and Dan Zahavi (2005) have replaced the picture of the disembodied mind with the now widely accepted notion of the embedded, enactive, and embodied self. This is a rejection of the long-held assumption that human action must somehow be represented or “mirrored” in the mind. Existentialism illuminates how—as a situated way of being-in-the-world—human beings already embody a tacit understanding of the world in a way that we are not and can never be thematically conscious of. This means we do not understand things as discrete objects. We understand things in terms of how we use and handle them and in terms of the purposive, meaning-giving roles these things play in our everyday lives. The traditional view of the mind as something resembling the rule-governed processes of a computer program have continually failed to capture this ambiguous and embodied sense of being-in-the-world.
|
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|
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### 7.4 Critical Phenomenology
|
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|
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The attentiveness to conditions of oppression, subjugation, and violence among postwar existentialists in France has had a decisive impact on recent developments in critical phenomenology by giving voice to those who have been historically marginalized or undervalued in the western tradition. Beauvoir’s pioneering account of the woman’s experience in *The Second Sex* is well known for laying the conceptual foundations for second wave feminism, and her late career phenomenology of aging broke new ground by shedding light on the existence of older persons and exposing the toxic ageism in contemporary capitalist societies. Together with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, her ideas would inform Franz Fanon’s *Black Skin, White Masks* (1952 \[1967\]), a seminal work that disclosed the dehumanizing experience of colonized Black populations and helped give birth to Africana critical theory or “black existentialism” (Gordon 2000). The focus on the ways in which structures of discrimination along with the limits of our own embodiment can constrain our capacities for freedom and transcendence has, in turn, influenced recent phenomenological accounts of intersectionality and the lived experience of, among others, indigenous peoples, immigrants, and exiles (Coulthard 2014; Ortega 2016), queer and trans identities (Ahmed 2006; Salamon 2010), those who are imprisoned or in solitary confinement (Guenther 2013; Leder 2016), and the elderly, disabled, and chronically ill (Aho 2022; Reynolds 2022; Dickel 2022).
|
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|
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### 7.5 Comparative and Environmental Philosophy
|
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|
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Interpreting existence in terms of the situated activity of being-in-the-world not only serves as a rejection of substance ontology and the metaphysical dualisms (subject-object; mind-body; inner-outer) that we inherit from Cartesian and empiricist epistemologies; it also reveals deep affinities with the nonduality of Buddhism and other incarnations of Eastern thought. (Loy 2018; Kalmanson 2020) And the recognition of our enmeshment in the world has informed a range of important advances in the philosophy of place, deep ecology, and eco-phenomenology (Brown & Toadvine 2003; Malpas 2017; Morton 2016; Rentmeester 2016). These endeavors have exposed the limitations of the scientific worldview and our uncritical dependence on technological innovation to address the current ecological crisis. Modern science generally assumes a binary paradigm of the subject as separate and distinct from a value-less domain of objects (or nature), a domain that can, in turn, be mastered and controlled by technoscience. In this way, it betrays our ordinary experience, that in our day-to-day lives we are not atomistic, self-certain subjects but beings that are fundamentally entwined with the world and the meaning and value that this intertwining brings to our experience. For the existentialist, then, extricating ourselves from environmental doom requires not a technoscientific fix but an ontological transformation in our own self-understanding, an awaking to the reality of our interdependence with nature, that the earth is not *apart from* us but rather *part of* us.
|
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|
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### 7.6 Philosophy of Health and Illness
|
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|
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Outside of the humanities and social sciences, existentialism has also had a deep and lasting impact on the allied health professions. The role it has played in the development of existential and humanistic approaches to psychotherapy (Cooper 2003; Spinneli 2007; van Deurzen 2015) and to phenomenological psychopathology (Parnas & Gallagher 2015; Ratcliffe 2015; Stanghellini et al. 2019) is well-known, but in recent years we have seen its influence emerge in a range of different areas, from narrative medicine to nursing, and from gerontology to palliative care. To this end, existentialism has informed a move away from the reductive and objectifying tendencies of modern biomedicine to recover the first-person experience of health and illness, viewing the body not so much as a biophysical machine that needs to be adjusted and maintained but as the experiential and interpretative medium of our existence. This shift has not only allowed clinicians to challenge the emergent tendency to medicalize ever-expanding swaths of the human condition; it makes it possible for the clinician to better understand the patient’s experience by getting a sense of “what it means” and “what it feels like” to suffer when the body breaks down (Aho 2018; Slatman 2014; Svenaeus 2022; Zeiler & Käll 2014).
|
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|
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### 7.7 A New Generation
|
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|
||||
Beyond its ascendency in the healing arts, its myriad cultural influences, and its wide-ranging impact on the humanities and social sciences, the enduring legacy of existentialism is perhaps most visible in the classroom. Existentialist-themed courses are often among the most popular in the philosophy curriculum as young students confront, for the first time, the unsettling questions of freedom and the meaning of their own existence. And these questions have never been more pressing as they develop against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate change, species extinction, global pandemics, and the reemergence of authoritarian and fascist politics. Amidst these planetary emergencies, a new generation is facing the predicament of nihilism and the death of God and owning up to the uncanny truth of the human condition: that existence precedes essence.
|
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|
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||||
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|
||||
|
||||
## Academic Tools
|
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|
||||
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|
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## Other Internet Resources
|
||||
|
||||
- Crowell, Steven, “Existentialism”, *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy* (Winter 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = < [https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/existentialism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/existentialism/) >. \[This was the previous entry on this topic in the *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy* – see the [version history](https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=existentialism).\]
|
||||
- [Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosoph](https://www.spep.org/)
|
||||
- [The Society for Existential Analysis](http://existentialanalysis.org.uk/)
|
||||
- [Existentialism](https://iep.utm.edu/existent/), entry at the *Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy*
|
||||
- [Norther American Sartre Society](https://www.northamericansartresociety.org/)
|
||||
- [The Albert Camus Society](https://camus-society.com/)
|
||||
- Web sites on Simone de Beauvoir
|
||||
- [Simone de Beauvoir](https://iep.utm.edu/simone-de-beauvoir/), entry at the *Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy*
|
||||
- [The International Simone de Beauvoir Society](https://beauvoir.weebly.com/)
|
||||
- [The International Merleau-Ponty Circle](https://www.merleauponty.org/)
|
||||
- [The North American Nietzsche Society](http://www.northamericannietzschesociety.com/)
|
||||
- [Karl Jaspers Society of North America](https://www.bu.edu/paideia/kjsna/)
|
||||
- Web sites on Heidegger
|
||||
- [Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology](https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/society-for-interdisciplinary-feminist-phenomenology/)
|
||||
- [The Caribbean Philosophical Association](https://caribbeanphilosophy.org/)
|
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- [The North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics](https://nasph.org/)
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- [Phenomenological Reviews](https://reviews.ophen.org/)
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@@ -0,0 +1,315 @@
|
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---
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title: Personalism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
|
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source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personalism/
|
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author:
|
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published:
|
||||
created: 2026-04-13
|
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description:
|
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tags:
|
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- clippings
|
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- SEP
|
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---
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## Personalism
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|
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*First published Thu Nov 12, 2009; substantive revision Wed Apr 1, 2026*
|
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Although it was only in the first half of the twentieth century that the term ‘personalism’ became known as a designation of philosophical schools and systems, personalist thought had developed throughout the nineteenth century as a reaction to perceived depersonalizing elements in Enlightenment rationalism, pantheism, Hegelian absolute idealism, individualism as well as collectivism in politics, and materialist, psychological, and evolutionary determinism. In its various strains, personalism always underscores the centrality of the person as the primary locus of interest and importance for philosophical, theological, and humanistic studies. It is an approach or system of thought that tends to regard the person as the ultimate explanatory, epistemological, ontological, and axiological principle of all reality, although these areas of thought are not stressed equally by all personalists and there is tension between idealist, phenomenological, existentialist, and Thomist versions of personalism.
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## 1\. What is personalism?
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||||
Personalism exists in many different versions, which makes it somewhat difficult to define as a philosophical and theological movement. Many philosophical schools have at their core one particular thinker or even one central work which serves as a canonical touchstone. Personalism is a more diffused and eclectic movement and has no such common reference point. It is, in point of fact, more proper to speak of many *personalisms* than one personalism. In 1947 Jacques Maritain could write that there are at least “a dozen personalist doctrines, which at times have nothing more in common than the word ‘person.’” Moreover, because of their emphasis on the subjectivity of the person, some of the more important exponents of personalism have not undertaken systematic treatises of their theories.
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It is perhaps more proper to speak of personalism as a “current” or a broader “worldview”, since it represents more than one school or one doctrine while at the same time the most important forms of personalism do display some central and essential commonalities. Most important of the latter is the general affirmation of the centrality of the person for philosophical thought. Personalism posits ultimate reality and value in personhood – human as well as (at least for most personalists) divine. It emphasizes the significance, uniqueness and inviolability of the person, as well as the person’s essentially relational or social dimension. The title “personalism” can therefore legitimately be applied to any school of thought that focuses on the centrality of persons and their unique status among beings in general, and personalists normally acknowledge the indirect contributions of a wide range of thinkers throughout the history of philosophy who did not regard themselves as personalists. Personalists believe that the person should be the ontological and epistemological starting point of philosophical reflection. Many are concerned to investigate the experience, the status, and the dignity of the human being as person, and regard this as the starting-point for all subsequent philosophical analysis.
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Personalists regard personhood (or “personality”) as the fundamental notion, as that which gives meaning to all of reality and constitutes its supreme value. Personhood carries with it an inviolable dignity that merits unconditional respect. Personalism has for the most part not been primarily a theoretical philosophy of the person. Although it does defend a unique theoretical understanding of the person, this understanding is in itself such as to support the prioritization of practical or moral philosophy, while at the same time the moral experience of the person is such as to decisively determine the theoretical understanding. For personalists, a person combines subjectivity and objectivity, causal activity and receptivity, unicity and relation, identity and creativity. Stressing the moral nature of the person, or the person as the subject and object of free activity, personalism tends to focus on practical, moral action and ethical questions.
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Some personalists are idealists, believing that reality and its sense is constituted by consciousness, while others espouse philosophical realism and argue that the natural order is independent of human consciousness. For taxonomic convenience, the many strains of personalism can be grouped into two fundamental categories: personalism in a strict sense and personalism in a broader sense. Strict personalism places the person at the center of a philosophical system that originates from an “intuition” of the person himself, and then goes on to analyse the personal reality and the personal experience that are the objects of this intuition. The method of the main twentieth-century European version of this strict personalism draws extensively from phenomenology and existentialism, departing from traditional metaphysics and constituting a separate philosophical system. In the idealistic version of personalism, it becomes more obvious, however, that the deeper sources of strict personalism are often to be found in the early critical reception of German idealism and in some aspects of moral sense philosophy. The original intuition is really that of self-awareness, by which one grasps not least values and essential meanings through unmediated experience. The knowledge produced by reflecting on this experience is nothing more than an explicitation of the original intuition, which in turn generates an awareness of a framework for moral action. The intuition of the person as the center of values and meaning is not exhausted, however, in phenomenological or existential analyses. These analyses often point beyond themselves, indicating a constitutive transcendence of the person himself, irreducible either to its specific manifestations or to the sum-total of those manifestations. Despite their differences, both the American school of Bowne and his first followers and the European personalism of Emmanuel Mounier represent personalism in this strict sense.
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|
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Personalism in the broader sense does not consider the person as the object of an original intuition, nor does it conceive of philosophical research as beginning with an analysis of immediate personal experience and its context. Rather, in the scope of a general metaphysics the person manifests his singular value and essential role. Thus the person occupies the central place in philosophical discourse, but this discourse is not reduced to an explicitation or development of an original intuition of the person. The person does not justify metaphysics but rather metaphysics justifies the person and his various operations. Instead of constituting an autonomous metaphysics, personalism in the broader sense offers an anthropological-ontological shift in perspective within an existing metaphysics and draws out the ethical consequences of this shift. Perhaps the best known strain of personalism in the broad sense is so-called “Thomistic personalism.” Represented by such figures as Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon, Étienne Gilson, Robert Spaemann, and Karol Wojtyła, Thomistic personalism draws on principles of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophical and theological anthropology in what it sees as a coherent development of inchoate elements of Aquinas’s thought.
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|
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As a philosophical school, personalism finds its foundations in human reason and experience, though historically personalism has nearly always been united to Biblical theism. Von Balthasar suggests that “Without the biblical background it \[personalism\] is inconceivable.” Yet while most personalists are theists, belief in God is not necessary to all personalist philosophies, and some profess an atheist personalism.
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|
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Though generally considered a philosophical school, the personalist approach is often applied to other disciplines as well, yielding a plethora of titles such as theological personalism, economic personalism, ecological personalism and psychological personalism (along with their inversions: “personalistic theology,” “personalistic economics,” “personalistic psychology”) and so forth.
|
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|
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## 2\. Personalism’s historical antecedents
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|
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The term “personalism” made its world debut in Germany, where “der Personalismus” was first used by F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) in his book *Über die Religion* in 1799. Amos Bronson Alcott seems to have been the first American to use the term, calling it in an 1863 essay “the doctrine that the ultimate reality of the world is a Divine Person who sustains the universe by a continuous act of creative will.” The term “American personalism” was coined by Walt Whitman (1819–1892) in his essay “Personalism,” which was published in *The Galaxy* in May 1868. In 1903 Charles Renouvier published *Le Personnalisme*, thereby introducing the word into the French as well. The word “personalism” first appeared as an encyclopedic entry in Volume IX of Hastings’s *Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics* in 1915 in an article by Ralph T. Flewelling.
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According to Albert C. Knudson, personalism is “the ripe fruit of more than two millenniums of intellectual toil, the apex of a pyramid whose base was laid by Plato and Aristotle.” Catholic personalists emphasize more specifically the decisive role of medieval thought, and in particular scholasticism, for the development of personalism. Étienne Gilson, for instance, has observed that where Plato locates the center of reality in ideas with concrete instantiations of these being merely accidental, and Aristotle places emphasis not on numerical individuals but on the universal specific form, Thomas Aquinas saw the individual person as unique among beings because of reason and self-mastery. Though none goes so far as to call Aquinas a personalist, some suggest that he furnished the necessary soil in which personalistic theory could take root. In this regard, Karol Wojtyła wrote in his 1961 essay “Thomistic Personalism” that Aquinas “provided at least a point of departure for personalism in general.”
|
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|
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The term *person* comes from the Latin *persona*, whose origins are traceable to Greek drama, where the πρόσωπον, or mask, became identified with the role an actor would assume in a given production. Such usage is carried over today in the word “persona,” referring to characters in fictional literature or drama, or second identities which people adopt for behavior in given social contexts. Its introduction into the mainstream of intellectual parlance, however, came with theological discourse during the patristic period, notably the attempts to clarify or define central truths of the Christian faith. These discussions focused primarily on two doctrines: the Trinity (three “persons” in one God) and the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity (the “hypostatic” union of two natures – divine and human – in one “person”). Confusion marred these discussions because of ambiguities in the philosophical and theological terminology, such that, for example, the thesis – ascribed to Sabellius – would be advanced that in God there was one ύπόστασις and three πρόσωπα, where ύπόστασις conveyed the meaning of “person” and πρόσωπα bore the sense of “roles” or “modes” of being. In order to present these mysteries with precision, the concept of person and the relationship of person to nature needed clarification. The debates culminated in the First Council of Nicaea (325) and the First Council of Constantinople (381), and in the drafting and propagation of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed.
|
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|
||||
Though the philosophical concept of person first developed in this theological context, with reference to the persons of the Trinity, the general Greek philosophical concepts involved in these Trinitological origins facilitated its application to human beings as well. Philosophical personalism may or may not appropriate the theological suppositions with which the early usage of the term “person” is laden. The classic, basic, and purely philosophical definition which is still accepted by personalists, as far as it goes, was given early on by Boethius (ca. 480–524): “persona est naturae rationalis individua substantia.” This definition consists of two parts. The essential starting point is a subsistent individual: a singular, existing *suppositum* or ύπόστασις. Here the adjective “individual” distinguishes an existing substance from common or second substance. The second element of the definition – *naturae rationalis* – qualifies the notion of individual substance: the person is an individual possessing a *rational nature*. It is this rational, spiritual nature that gives rise to the different qualities that distinguish the person, qualities to which personalists attach decisive importance.
|
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|
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The Trinitological concept of the person was far from the modern meaning that the term assumes in personalism, and Boethius’ definition too indicates only in the barest abstract outline the deep and comprehensive signification that personalism ascribes to it. As accepted by personalism, it is the result of a long and complex cumulative development, resulting in a rich, if somewhat elusive, concept which in some respects wholly inverts the original connotations of exteriority in the early meanings of “mask” and “role”: person comes rather to denote the innermost spiritual and most authentic kernel of the unique individual, while retaining a radical openness to the external. Already in the course of the Middle Ages, further definitions were provided, and not just by Aquinas. Not least the Augustinian example of experienced interiority and reflexivity, the idea of form as the principle of individuation, and the late medieval and Franciscan emphasis on will and singularity entered into early modern thinking about the person, and combined with the stronger focus on human personality that was characteristic of Renaissance humanism.
|
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|
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Along these lines, the early modern concepts of subjectivity and self-consciousness added new elements to the definition and understanding of the central concept in personalism, or even substantially altered it. Immanuel Kant’s epistemic dualism, underscoring the importance of both subject and object in knowledge, opened the door both to the idealistic form of personalism and to the phenomenology and existentialism that became so important for twentieth-century personalism. Kant also contributed significantly to the personalist understanding of human dignity. Unlike Hobbes, for whom “the worth of a man” is “his price,” and dignity is “the publique worth of a man,” Kant regarded dignity as “intrinsic worth.” In his *Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten*, he posited a dichotomy between price and dignity, whereby “something that has a price can be exchanged for something else of equal value; whereas that which exceeds all price and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity.” His celebrated practical categorical imperative – *Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only* – was incorporated nearly verbatim into Karol Wojtyła’s “personalist principle.”
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|
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Personalism in the sense of a distinct philosophy or worldview focusing on the full, accumulated import of the concept of the person, however, emerged only in the context of the broad critical reaction against what can be called the various *impersonalistic* philosophies which came to dominate the Enlightenment and Romanticism in the form of rationalistic and romantic forms of pantheism and idealism, from Spinoza to Hegel. Key figures in this reaction were Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), the initiator of the so-called *Pantheismusstreit* in the 1780s, and F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), who in his later work rejected the impersonalist positions of his early idealist systems. But these were only the most important figures in a broad movement that included many other philosophers, primarily the so-called speculative theists, as well as theologians, both Catholic and Protestant. The modified idealistic, theistic personalism developed in this counter-movement became decisive, not least via its late German representative, Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817–81), not only for the American, idealistic personalism of Bowne, but also for the parallel, British idealistic personalism whose leading representative was Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison (1856–1931). Although the continental European personalists of the twentieth century would reject Hegelian idealism and turn instead to phenomenology, existentialism, and Thomism, the outline of the personalistic criticism of impersonal modes of thought was already clearly and consistently developed by the thinkers here mentioned, ever since the last decades of the eighteenth century.
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Personalism thus arose as a reaction to impersonalist modes of thought which were perceived as dehumanizing. The impersonal dynamic of modern pantheism and monism in both their rationalistic and Romantic forms underlie many of the modern philosophies that personalism turns against, idealistic as well as materialistic. The radical idealism of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) held that Kant’s noumenal reality is not an unknowable substratum of appearances, but a dynamic process, which in thought and in reality passes from thesis to antithesis, and finally resolves itself in synthesis. This process is absolute mind, the state, religion, philosophy. Hegel’s idealism saw history as an unfolding of absolute spirit through a necessary dialectical process, and this framework left little room for the freedom or significance of individual persons. Through the Young Hegelians, this impersonalist form of idealism was soon transformed into equally impersonalist forms of materialism, culminating in Marxism, which regards the essence of man as his true collectivity; impersonalist determinism, in the form of Communism, decisively determined twentieth-century political totalitarianism. In other thinkers, idealism tended to merge with increasingly naturalistic forms of nationalism and racialism, giving rise to other new political movements in the twentieth century that elevated alternative collectivities above the person, such as national socialism. Prominent for his personalist-based opposition to Nazism was the German Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, whose memoirs (1994 \[2014\]) on the subject were collected and published in 1994 and translated 20 years later (see von Hildebrand 1994 \[2014\]). Personalism always resisted the absorption of the individual into the collectivity by asserting the inherent worth of the singular person. The person should never be a mere means to an end, subordinated to the will and purposes of another. The state exists for persons, and not persons for the state. In this regard, personalism stands as a foil to totalitarianisms that value persons only for their worth to the community, and insists instead on their inherent dignity. Thus Ralph Tyler Flewelling could write in his 1943 essay “Personalism” that “the person is the supreme essence of democracy and hostile to totalitarianisms of every sort.” Personalism’s insistence on personal freedom and responsibility, self-determination, creativity, and subjectivity all bear out this deep-seated resistance to collectivism.
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Parallel to the development and transformation of Hegelianism, other theories of human nature were developed in the course of the nineteenth century that blurred or cancelled the distinction between man and the rest of nature, and downplayed or denied man’s unique individual value, spiritual nature, and free will. These theories too, directly or indirectly, contributed to twentieth-century totalitarianism. The philosophical positivism of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) affirmed as a historical law that every science (and the human race itself) passes through three successive stages, the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive, each superior to the last. Comte insisted so much on the reality and predominance of society that this became for him the true subject, while the individual was regarded as an abstraction. Darwinism, as well, uprooted the classical understanding of human beings as essentially superior to the rest of creation by offering a theory whereby man would be simply the most advanced life form along an unbroken continuum, and the difference between man and irrational animals would merely be one of degree, not of kind.
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The emerging personalist philosophy, however, rejected impersonalism not only in the form of idealistic or materialistic determinism and collectivism, but also in the form of the radical individualism that was equally a product of modern rationalism and romanticism, and which, through, for instance, certain forms of liberalism and anarchism, was also characteristic of the nineteenth century. From the beginning, personalism proclaimed in its own way the communitarian values of solidarity and inter-relation. In their insistence on inviolable dignity, personalists resisted a utilitarianism which would make one person merely “useful” for another. Whereas individualism tends to seek the self above all and often views others as means to one’s own profit, personalism seeks to make of the self a gift to another. “Thus,” Emmanuel Mounier wrote in his 1946 work *Le personnalisme*, “if the first condition of individualism is the centralization of the individual in himself, the first condition of personalism is his decentralization, in order to set him in the open perspectives of personal life.” Where individualism hopes to find personal realization in self-interest, personalism asserts the need for relational openness to others, even as a condition for one’s own realization.
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In “Thomistic Personalism,” Karol Wojtyła characterized the two extremes of individualism and collectivism in the following way: “On the one hand, persons may easily place their own individual good above the common good of the collectivity, attempting to subordinate the collectivity to themselves and use it for their individual good. This is the error of individualism, which gave rise to liberalism in modern history and to capitalism in economics. On the other hand, society, in aiming at the alleged good of the whole, may attempt to subordinate persons to itself in such a way that the true good of persons is excluded and they themselves fall prey to the collectivity. This is the error of totalitarianism, which in modern times has borne the worst possible fruit.”
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According to Rocco Sacconaghi, the radical forms of collectivism and individualism against which personalism grew are not phenomena of the past. “We are facing a previously unknown intertwinement of hyper-collectivism (in terms of the annulment of the individual in the mass) and hyper-individualism (in the form of severe social isolation and the progressive fragmentation of individual values)” (Sacconaghi 2023).
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The existentialism that gave such important impulses to much continental European personalism in the twentieth century developed in certain respects in the line of the later Shelling’s philosophy, and traces even of Jacobi’s criticism of impersonal pantheism can be found in it. With Schelling, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) opposed Hegel’s idealism and underscored the value of the individual person, both for philosophy and for life in general. He accused idealism of emptying life of meaning by neglecting the reality of human existence. Whereas Kierkegaard and some later existentialists (Marcel, Sartre, Camus, Blondel) focused on issues central to the meaning of human existence (love, marriage, death, faith, morality, etc.), other thinkers continued to focus on the more direct exploration of the meaning and nature of the person himself, and it was these thinkers that came to be known as, and to call themselves, personalists.
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The philosophy of Friedrich W. Nietzsche (1844–1900) gave its own, distinct expression to these themes, showing, as many of the romantic poets and philosophers had done before him, and despite his criticism of romanticism, that the new individualism was in reality closely interrelated with the general impersonalism of the dominant strain of romanticism: from the exaltation of the individualist ego, the step was never far to its extinction in a larger impersonal whole of any of the many available varieties. Modern individualism represented no real challenge to the intellectual environment in which man tended to be seen as a mere phenomenal being, easily assimilated into nature, the impersonal principle of idealism, the unconscious, the cosmic will, or the collectivities of the family, the state, the nation, the social class. Man was a product of external forces, an insignificant piece in a cosmic puzzle, without dignity, freedom, responsibility, or fundamental existential significance. It was this overall, many-faceted intellectual climate and development that produced the personalist counter-movement throughout the nineteenth century, a movement which, by drawing on other, alternative resources in the thought of the Enlightenment and Romanticism as well as on the classical, medieval Christian, and early modern legacy, sought to rescue the unique position and status of the singular human person.
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The personalist Jean Lacroix is justified in declaring personalism to be an “anti-ideology,” awoken by social and political situations that are alienating to the human person; in the face of such impersonalist forces, personalism reaffirms the absolute dignity and interrelationality of the human person. In *The Person and the Common Good*, Maritain, too, wrote of personalism as “a phenomenon of reaction” against the “two opposite errors” of totalitarianism and individualism. Contrary to Hegelian collectivism and the fierce individualism of Nietzsche’s superman, these thinkers stressed both the inviolable dignity of the individual person and at the same time his social nature and essential relationality.
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## 3\. European personalism
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In the twentieth century personalists gathered especially around three European centers of higher learning: Paris, Munich, and Lublin. Until recently, the best known and most prolific of these three schools was the Parisian group. Between the First and Second World Wars the French personalist movement revolved around a monthly journal, *Esprit*, founded by Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950) and a group of friends in 1932. In the face of economic collapse and political and moral disorientation, these French personalists proposed the human person as the criterion according to which a solution to the crisis was to be fashioned. The new, irreducible key to thought, especially regarding social organization, was to be the human person. In his programmatic essay *Refaire la Renaissance*, which appeared in the first issue of *Esprit*, Mounier proposed the need to disassociate the spiritual world from the debased, materialistic bourgeoisie. In substance much in line with the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century origins of personalism, Mounier, before the Second World War, turned sharply against the impersonalistic development of individualistic, parliamentary democracy and the mass culture that had come to shape the countries of Western Europe. Both personalism’s nineteenth-century background and this fact about the leading twentieth-century European personalist indicate that for personalism, a simple, uncritical endorsement of liberal democracy is not a sufficient guarantee against totalitarianism, since liberal democracy too tends to absorb the impersonalist ideas and the deep, historical impersonalist dynamic clearly perceived and analysed by personalistic thinkers long before Mounier.
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Political and traditionalist religious reaction was not an alternative for Mounier. There had to be a real revolution, consisting in the creation of a new humanism, where the bourgeois ideal of “having” would yield to Christian “being,” a being in communion with others. The spiritual revolution envisioned by Mounier was to be above all the work of committed witnesses to the truth, who through their own interior renewal and living faith would galvanize the masses into a new communal structure. Such a revolution entailed a triple commitment: denunciation, meditation, and technical planning. Underlying this program was Mounier’s bold conception of Christian experience, an experience of “tragic optimism,” colored both by the drama of Christian existence and by the certainty of eschatological victory. The Christian’s most important virtue is that of the heroic witness, far from the evasiveness or sentimentality of other, eviscerated strains of Christianity. Thus Mounier’s idea of the Christian as the watchful athlete engaged in spiritual combat provided a stark response to Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity as a religion of the weak. His assertion that there is no true progress without the dimension of transcendence countered the Marxist search for an earthly paradise through class struggle. His acceptance of the importance of psychology while reemphasizing man’s freedom and responsibility furnished an answer to Freud’s instinct-centered psychoanalysis.
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Mounier’s work attracted the attention of important French thinkers such as Gabriel Marcel, Denis de Rougemont, and Jacques Maritain, who through their research, lectures, and writings helped develop French personalist thought. Maritain, who worked with Mounier for a number of years, was responsible for bringing French personalism to the United States. After the war, European personalism, led by Mounier himself, adapted to and took a more uncritical view of liberal democracy, and Maritain played a role in drafting the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Like other Thomistic personalists, Maritain criticized the frailty of certain widespread strains of Scholasticism, and appealed to the important role of intuitive experience in philosophy.
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The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), whose philosophy was profoundly influenced by Husserlian phenomenology, while never identifying himself as a personalist, shared many of the concerns and interests dear to personalists, and both benefited from and contributed to the development of personalistic thought in France. Gabriel Marcel was one of Ricoeur’s philosophical mentors, and Ricoeur was also deeply influenced by his contact with Emmanuel Mounier, especially in the postwar years, 1946–1951. He contributed essays to *Esprit* as well as the journal *Le Christianisme social*. Ricoeur drew on many of the themes most precious to Mounier, such as the nature of human freedom and the centrality of the human person vis-à-vis the state, though his own later development of these themes departed considerably from Mounier’s. He also shared personalism’s rejection of materialism and of Cartesian dualism, and a rejection of abstractions in favor of concrete human reality. Perhaps the single greatest element of Mounier’s personalism adopted by Ricoeur, in fact, was the impermissibility of withdrawal from political and social engagement.
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Personalism in Germany was closely wedded to another philosophical school, phenomenology, developed by Austrian-born Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Like existentialism and French personalism, phenomenological realism was partly a response to German idealism, though it bore a distinctive focus on epistemological questions. In his *Logische Untersuchungen*, published in 1900, as well as his later *Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie* (1913), Husserl laid out his phenomenological method, and through it he attracted the first students of his school. The distinguishing characteristic of phenomenology is not doctrinal, but methodological. Seeking to avoid the imposition of preconceived notions or structures on reality, phenomenology goes “back to the thing” (*zurück zum Gegenstand*) by bracketing (*epoché*) all philosophical presuppositions about the world, man, and the rest of reality. This direct observation and consultation of reality eschews the problems of deductive reasoning by focusing on the intellectual act of intuition, or direct apprehension of reality. The eidetic reduction focuses on the essential structures of what appears (phenomenon), so that one is dealing neither with empirical observation nor with a description of Platonic forms, but with the phenomenon’s meaning. Phenomenologists identified the object of intuition as the essences of things, ideal objects, and structures of intentionality and consciousness. In so doing, they sought to overcome the Kantian noumenon/phenomenon dichotomy as well as the errors of positivism and nominalism.
|
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|
||||
Though in his later life Husserl leaned toward philosophical idealism, in his earlier life and in *Logische Untersuchungen* he embraced philosophical realism. A realist phenomenology stresses phenomenology’s contribution to perennial philosophy, and seeks to explore through experience the ultimate structures of being. By going back to the thing itself, phenomenology aimed at eluding the errors of both empiricism (reducing reality to the measurable) and idealism (rarefying reality into abstraction and subjectivism). Among Husserl’s students were Max Scheler (1874–1928), Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977), Roman Ingarden (1893–1970) and Edith Stein (1891–1942), all of whom influenced the development of personalist thought. Husserl’s later turn to Idealism, which came about in the 1920s, precipitated a break with many of his disciples, who came to believe that he had abandoned his original commitment to reconnect philosophical reflection and objective reality. They therefore struck out on their own, each creating an original body of work in pursuit of Husserl’s original intention. Stein, for instance, looked to phenomenological method as a complement to Thomism, and von Hildebrand introduced phenomenology into ethics in a personalistic synthesis, for example in his 1921 work *Morality and the Knowledge of Moral Values*.
|
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||||
The third and youngest of the three centers of European personalistic thought grew up around the Catholic University of Lublin. After studying with Husserl, Roman Ingarden took phenomenology and interest in personalist topics back to his native Poland in the early 1940s, and there he met a young priest by the name of Karol Wojtyła, whom he encouraged to read Max Scheler. Wojtyła became interested in Scheler’s phenomenology and ended up doing his doctoral dissertation on Scheler’s ethics of values, which he presented in 1953. Having previously received an Aristotelian-Thomistic formation, Wojtyła drew from his studies of the phenomenological method to develop a creative and original personalistic synthesis, complementing Thomistic metaphysics and anthropology with insights from phenomenology. He subsequently took a post as professor of ethics at the Theological Faculty of Krakow and Lublin’s Catholic University, where he founded the Polish personalist school. Wojtyła, who was also influenced by the writings of another of Husserl’s disciples, von Hildebrand, produced two significant personalist books, *Love and Responsibility* (1960) and *Person and Act* (1962), as well as numerous essays, lectures and articles. His later election as pope contributed strongly to the spread of personalist thought, especially among Catholic thinkers. As Pope he continued to employ personalist arguments in his magisterial teaching, and spurred new interest in personalist theories. John Paul called for “theological renewal based on the personalistic nature of man” and explicitly invoked the personalist argument in his encyclical letters *Laborem Exercens* (1981) and *Ut Unum Sint* (1995) as well as his 1994 *Letter to Families*.
|
||||
|
||||
Personalism has also been represented, to varying degrees, in other European countries, including Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.
|
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|
||||
## 4\. American personalism
|
||||
|
||||
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 nineteenth-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 referring all moral truth to 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”.
|
||||
|
||||
Boston University was long considered the hub of American personalism, under the auspices of philosophy professor Borden Parker Bowne. Bowne was a Methodist minister who had studied under Rudolf Hermann Lotze in Germany. Lotze, a student of the speculative theist Christian Hermann Weisse (1801–66) who assimilated much of the later Schelling’s criticism of Hegel, sought, like the speculative theists, to modify Hegelian idealism by maintaining that the real is always concrete and individual, transforming Hegel’s absolute idealism into a personal idealism. Adding elements also from recent trends in psychology, Bowne developed a distinct and explicitly personalist position, which assumed the character of a philosophical school. His late book *Personalism*, published in 1908, is a popular summary of his philosophy which introduced the term ‘personalism’ into American philosophical and theological discourse.
|
||||
|
||||
Bowne gathered a group of talented disciples who carried on his work in a second generation. The most important among these were Edgar Sheffield Brightman, Albert C. Knudson (1873–1953), Francis J. McConnell (1871–1953), George Albert Coe (1861–1951), and Ralph T. Flewelling (1871–1960). While Howison had established the personalist tradition at the University of California, Berkeley, Flewelling took personalism to the University of Southern California, which became the second important twentieth-century center of personalist thought in the United States. Flewelling also founded *The Personalist*, the journal that would serve as the forum for American personalism. In 1915, he published *Personalism and the Problems of Philosophy: An Appreciation of the Work of Borden Parker Bowne*. At Boston University, Brightman continued the studies in personalism, in time holding the Borden Parker Bowne chair of philosophy, while Knudson, having first taught classes in the Old Testament, moved into personalist theology. Meanwhile Walter George Muelder (1907–), professor of social ethics and Christian theology at Boston University and the University of Southern California, helped bridge the gap between the Bostonian and Californian schools, calling his doctrine “Communitarian Personalism.”
|
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|
||||
The Boston personalist school has continued to influence American culture, sometimes in unexpected ways. A third generation of American personalists, represented by such figures as Peter A. Bertocci (1910–1989) and W. Gordon Allport of Harvard, a student of William Stern, further developed the psychological dimension of personalism. Martin Luther King studied under the personalists at Boston University, and credited the experience with shaping his worldview: “I studied philosophy and theology at Boston University under Edgar S. Brightman and L. Harold DeWolf…It was mainly under these teachers that I studied Personalistic philosophy – the theory that the clue to the meaning of ultimate reality is found in personality. This personal idealism remains today my basic philosophical position. Personalism’s insistence that only personality – finite and infinite – is ultimately real strengthened me in two convictions: it gave me metaphysical and philosophical grounding for the idea of a personal God, and it gave me a metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all human personality.”
|
||||
|
||||
It is important to note, however, that American personalism cannot be reduced to the Boston University school. It flourished also at Harvard University. Not only is this where Howison came from, but the work of leading Harvard philosophers such as William James (1842–1910), Josiah Royce (1855–1916), William Ernest Hocking (1873–1966), and Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) displays strong personalist elements. All of them, with the sole exception of Royce, even called themselves personalists.
|
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|
||||
## 5\. Eastern personalism
|
||||
|
||||
In some respects close parallels to or equivalents of Western personalism are present in Islamic, Buddhist, Vedantic, and Chinese thought, although comparative work in this field is confronted with often formidable problems of translation and interpretation.
|
||||
|
||||
With regard to Islam, it should first of all be pointed out that classic Islamic philosophy, with its roots in classical Greek philosophy, is not Eastern in the same sense as Buddhist, Vedantic, Chinese, and Japanese thought. It shares roots with Augustinianism and Thomism, and thus with some of the traditions that have been central to the development of personalism in the West. On the other hand, it has been observed that there is no conceptual equivalent of the Western philosophical concept of “person” in Arabic and in classic Islamic philosophy, something which would seem to confirm the importance of the specifically Christian, to a considerable extent Trinitological, terminological and conceptual origins of the term. But as there are other sources of personalism than the Trinitological thought that was decisive for the early formation of the concept (when, it should also be remembered, it was not yet fully personalistic in the modern sense), and as these sources have also produced Jewish versions of personalism, the historical absence of a conceptual equivalent in Arabic has not precluded the development of Islamic personalism. Themes with regard to the self and the nature of God which are very similar to those of Western personalists are found in a modern Muslim thinker like Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938). Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi (1922–1993) explicitly sought to develop a Muslim version of personalism, and was influenced not least by Mounier.
|
||||
|
||||
No precise conceptual counterpart of “person” is found in the more properly Eastern traditions of thought either, traditions which do not share the Greek philosophical roots. When we speak of personalism in the case of these traditions, it is in the sense of themes and positions, elaborated in terms of other concepts, closer to such Western ones as “self” and “individual”, which are part of Western personalism and enter into the definition of the modern concept of person.
|
||||
|
||||
The term ‘personalism’ has, for instance, been applied to the early Buddhist school called *puggalavada*, which takes positions with regard to the identity and continuity of the individual self which differ from what has traditionally been considered the orthodox ones of Theravada Buddhism. Other versions of these positions are found later in some of the currents of Mahayana thought.
|
||||
|
||||
More unambiguous parallels are found, however, in Vedanta. The *vishishtadvaita* (qualified non-dualism) school turned against *advaita* ’s radical non-dualism, and insisted not only on what in English works by representatives of this school and later schools which are similarly critical of *advaita*, is often explicitly termed the personal concept of *brahman* or the absolute, but also on a personal understanding of the individual beings that are conceived as fragmentary selves (*jivatmas*) that are “parts” – at the same time one with and distinct transformations – of *brahman*. As the different classical *darshanas* of Indian thought are not wholly isolated and receive influences from each other, elements of Samkhya thought are also taken up in personalistic Vedanta, as are still further elements of Yoga, and of the traditional Hindu scriptural legacy. It is the clarity, the traditional primordiality, and the fundamental nature of the teaching of the permanent self, the *atman*, in Vedanta, and not least in the schools critical of *advaita*, which make this personalism more unambiguous than *puggalavada* ’s in Buddhism.
|
||||
|
||||
A striking feature of the debates within Vedanta between the non-dualist, impersonalist schools and the theistic, personalist ones is the partial similarities with and parallels to the opposition between nineteenth-century representatives absolute idealism and personalistic idealism in the West, despite the distance between them in time and space, the mutual independence, and the different conceptual contexts. But while there is a long-standing scholarly tradition of comparative work on *advaita* Vedanta and absolute idealism (not least in F. H. Bradley’s version), only very little such work has as yet been done on the *vishishtadvaita* and similar personalist Vedantic schools and the early, idealistic personalists in the West.
|
||||
|
||||
What most clearly distinguishes Vedantic personalism from Western personalism is that the former builds on the fundamental teaching of *all* Vedanta that the true self exists beyond the limitations of the transient body and the mind, and beyond the tendency – called in Sanskrit the *ahamkara*, literally, the “I-maker” – to identify with these, whereas Western personalism is often characteristically defined in terms which from the perspective of Vedanta must be seen as pertaining to the mental level, or sometimes, in particular in the twentieth century, to the physical body.
|
||||
|
||||
This does not mean, however, that according to personalistic Vedanta the body should be ignored or devalued. It is from its perspective primarily the erroneous identification with the mind that is harmful to the body, as it indeed is to the proper use of the mind itself. The actualization of our true and higher nature as consciousness, as the *sat-cit-ananda* (being/eternity, knowledge, and bliss) that are the nature of the *atman-brahman*, brings light to both the body and the mind, including all the faculties so closely analysed by Western personalists, like will, imagination, and reason. Thus it at least indirectly supports, to the extent it is needed, the moral character-formation on the humanistic level which is emphasized by Western personalism.
|
||||
|
||||
Most traditional Chinese and Japanese thought shares with personalism an emphasis on the need for concrete, practical transformation of character as a prerequisite for insight. In the Chinese and Japanese versions of Buddhism, the Indian tradition of devising specific practices and exercises for this purpose was continued, but gradually disconnected from the parallel and very strong theoretical and metaphysical legacy of India. This development can be said to culminate in Zen. But the emphasis on the practical is found also in Taoism, which contributed to the development of Zen. At the same time all of these schools share an understanding of the ultimate or true reality as rather impersonal than personal, which makes them further removed from personalism than Vedanta.
|
||||
|
||||
Confucianism shares with the other Chinese and Japanese traditions the emphasis on the practical. Contrary to them, however, it is focused much more exclusively on the “humanistic” level, on moral character-formation, and the requirements of the social order. While its humanistic orientation is in line with personalism, Confucianism is, however, more concerned with the practical attainment of the general ideals of true humanity and gentlemanliness as understood in traditional China, than with the personal individuality and uniqueness which Western personalists stress as related to, and often indeed as inseparable from, a true understanding and affirmation of universal values. Neo-Confucianism, as developed by Chu Hsi (1130–1200), introduced strong metaphysical elements, but the understanding of the metaphysical principles or laws, *li*, was still a generalist one. Other Neo-Confucians differed to some extent in this respect, and, as Confucianism is a living tradition in today’s China, new thinkers keep developing versions of it which are closer to personalism. This, and the importance of humanist character-formation, speaks in favour of the designation of Confucianism in general as a personalistic philosophy. But there are also some considerations that speak against it, both general ones regarding some aspects of historical Chinese society, and, in view of Chu Hsi’s version of Neo-Confucianism, metaphysical ones.
|
||||
|
||||
## 6\. Characteristics of personalist thought
|
||||
|
||||
Though personalism comprises many different forms and emphases, certain distinctive characteristics can be discerned that generally hold for personalism as such. These include an insistence on the radical difference between persons and non-persons and on the irreducibility of the person to impersonal spiritual or material factors, an affirmation of the dignity of persons, a concern for the person’s subjectivity and self-determination, and particular emphasis on the intersubjective (relational) nature of the person.
|
||||
|
||||
### 6.1 Human beings, animals, and nature
|
||||
|
||||
Personalists have generally insisted on the falsity of Darwin’s claim that man’s difference from other terrestrial beings is one of degree and not of kind. Human exceptionalism has defined most personalist thought. Obviously, such exceptionalism is not exclusive to personalism, but represents, rather, a standard assumption of classical philosophical anthropology. In 1625, for instance, Grotius wrote: “Man is, to be sure, an animal, but an animal of a superior kind, much farther removed from all other animals than the different kinds of animals are from one another” (*De iure belli ac pacis*, Prolegomena, 11).
|
||||
|
||||
According to a typical personalist conception, the fundamental classification of all beings is the distinction between persons and non-persons. For many personalists, what makes man “unlike” other animals is different from what makes a baboon different from a giraffe, or even from what makes a baboon different from a rock. Thus, in the words of Jacques Maritain: “Whenever we say that man is a person, we mean that he is more than a mere parcel of matter, more than an individual element in nature, such as is an atom, a blade of grass, a fly or an elephant…Man is an animal and an individual, but unlike other animals or individuals.” Or as William Stern wrote, in his introduction to *Person und Sache* (vol. 2): “Despite any similarities by which persons are identified as members of humankind, a particular race or gender, etc., despite any broad or narrow regularities which are involved in any personal events, a primal uniqueness always remains, through which every person is a world of its own with regard to other persons.”
|
||||
|
||||
Here personalists react not only to the main forms of idealism, the materialism, and the determinism of the nineteenth century, but even to the objectivism of Aristotle. Following his methodology for defining a species in terms of its proximate genus and specific difference, Aristotle had defined man as a rational animal (*ho anthropos zoon noetikon*) (Aristotle, *Hist. Anim*. I, 1: 488a7; *Nichomachean Ethics* I, 5: 1097b11; VIII, 12: 1162a16; IX, 9: 1169b18; *Politics*, I, 2: 1253a3). Personalists, while accepting this definition, as far as it goes, see such a construction as an unacceptable reduction of the human person to the objective world. This objective, cosmological view of man as an animal with the distinguishing feature of reason – by which man is primarily an object alongside other objects in the world to which he physically belongs – would be only partly valid, and insufficient. In an effort to interpret the subjectivity that is proper to the person, personalism expresses a belief in both the non-material dimension and the primordial uniqueness of the human being, and thus in the basic irreducibility of the human being to the natural world.
|
||||
|
||||
Many personalists see human beings as dealing with all other realities as objects (something related intentionally to a subject), but affirm a substantive difference between the human person and all other objects. The person alone is “somebody” rather than merely “something”, and this sets him apart from every other entity in the visible world. No precise and general position specific to personalists with regard to the nature of animals can be discerned. But the sharp distinction between “somebody” and “something,” in particular as applied to such other sentient beings, reflects both the influence on personalism of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and at least some of the general impact or spirit of distinctly modern, Cartesian rationalism, which latter is of course not unaffected by inherited Christian dualisms. Only the human being is typically conceived by personalism as simultaneously object and subject, while at the same time this is held to be true for all persons, irrespective of age, intelligence, qualities, etc. For personalists, personal subjectivity assures that the human being’s proper essence cannot be reduced to and exhaustively explained by the proximate genus and specific difference. Subjectivity becomes, then, a kind of synonym for the irreducible in the human being.
|
||||
|
||||
But the broader, realist personalism does posit, in the classical and scholastic tradition, the essential difference between man and all other objects on man’s ability to reason (and its corollary of language), which differentiates a person from the whole world of objective entities. Since it is precisely his intellectual and spiritual nature that makes subjectivity possible, one can say that in the subjectivity of the human person is also something objective. Yet these personalists insist on the clear separation between non-personal beings and this subjectivity of the person which is derivative of his rational nature in a broader or higher sense. Regardless of how, more precisely, animals are to be understood, the person differs from even the most advanced among them by a specific kind of inner self, an inner life, which, ideally, revolves around his pursuit of truth and goodness, and generates person-specific theoretical and moral questions and concerns.
|
||||
|
||||
A more recent area of debate involves the personalization of artificial intelligence and the persuasive way in which AI can mimic important aspects of human personhood, such as language, discursive reasoning, and agency. Personalists argue that the human person is irreducible to data, while a personalist AI framework prioritizes human responsibility, solidarity, and the common good, resisting the reduction of human decision-making to, or substitution by, algorithms. Personalists warn against treating people as objects, data points, or merely “rational” inputs, while underscoring distinctively human experiences and achievements such as wonder, awe, curiosity, compassion, and wisdom.
|
||||
|
||||
Other strains of personalism, such as that represented by the dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber, pay less attention to the difference between persons and non-persons and underscore instead the way one relates to all of reality. Buber separates the way of dealing with other realities into two, which he terms “I-Thou” and “I-It” relationships, the first reflecting a fundamental openness to the reality of the other and the latter reflecting an objectivization and subordination of the other to oneself. According to Buber, we engage others either as an *It*, forming an *I-It* primary word, or as a *Thou*, forming the *I-Thou* primary word. Yet whereas some personalists would assert that such an *I-Thou* relationship is the only appropriate way of dealing with *persons*, and the *I-It* relationship the only appropriate way of dealing with *things*, Buber presents the *I-Thou* relationship as the ideal for the human person’s dealing with all reality, personal and non-personal alike. And though this *I-Thou* relation will take on different characteristics according to the sphere in which the relation arises (nature, men, spiritual beings), for Buber the fundamental difference lies within the human person himself and in the attitude with which he engages reality.
|
||||
|
||||
Some personalists have come to take a critical view of the starkly formulated human exceptionalism, and to go further than Buber in not just reconsidering the attitude of the human being, but also the rigid dualism involved in the view of everything that is not human (and divine) persons as just soulless, impersonal “objects”. The Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák is an example of an in important respects personalist thinker who has tried to rethink both our attitude to and our understanding of nature in this respect. The various effort to overcome the impersonal objectification of nature and other life-forms, and to conceive of a more thoroughgoingly personal universe, partly resemble the positions of some of the early idealistic personalists in the nineteenth century. Just like these personalists had sometimes incorporated the accumulated and interrelated insights of self-consciousness, subjectivity, interiority, individuality/singularity, will, imagination, and historicity in a way which the still in some respects often somewhat one-sidedly generalist Thomistic currents of personalism had not, they also came closer to a view of nature that rectifies the overly rigid dualisms of a created world at such distance from its creator as to be almost independent, and man as almost equally sharply separated from the rest of creation. The human form of life is clearly exceptional in that it allows a much higher degree of development of personality in every respect, but to regard as a corollary of this insight the position that plants and even animals are mere impersonal objects, without consciousness and their own kind of subjectivity, seems to be regarded as increasingly problematic among personalists.
|
||||
|
||||
A not unimportant part of personalism’s human exceptionalism reflects these cleavages of a world in which the presence of the divine is no longer sensed and perceived in nature. The modern desacralized world, as articulated by Cartesianism but prepared by Ockham and even in some respects by Aquinas, is also in reality in important respects an impersonalized world. While guarding against the new impersonalism and moral ambiguity of the romantic pantheists, the early personalists of the nineteenth century at least perceived clearly the problems with the stark dualisms of much Christian theology as well as of modern rationalism, the Enlightenment, and scientism.
|
||||
|
||||
### 6.2 The dignity of the person
|
||||
|
||||
In stressing the uniqueness of persons vis-à-vis all other entities, personalists influenced by Thomism designate the essential dividing line of reality as that which separates personal and non-personal being. Dealings with persons, therefore, require a different ethical paradigm from that used to describe dealings with non-personal realities. The “rules” of dealing with non-personal reality do not hold when dealing with persons, and vice-versa. This radical dichotomy between persons and non-persons is essentially ontological, or transcendental-constitutive, but produces immediate consequences on the ethical level.
|
||||
|
||||
At the center of this personalism stands an affirmation of the dignity of the person, the quality, insisted on already by medieval thinkers, which constitutes the unique excellence of personhood and which gives rise to specific moral requirements. Dignity refers to the inherent value of the person, as a “someone” and not merely “something,” and this confers an absoluteness not found in other beings. Here classical-realist personalists reject the Hobbesian notion of dignity as the price set on an individual by the commonwealth, and ally themselves rather with Kant in his assertion that dignity is inherent and sets itself beyond all price. The language of dignity rules out the possibility of involving persons in a trade-off, as if their worth were a function of their utility. Every person without exception is of inestimable worth, and no one is dispensable or interchangeable. The person can never be lost or assimilated fully into the collectivity, because his interrelatedness with other persons is defined by his possession of a unique, irreplaceable value. The agreement with Kant in this regard can be said to constitute a bridge between personalism in the broader sense and personalism in the narrow sense.
|
||||
|
||||
Attributing a unique dignity or worth to the human person also throws light on the cardinal virtue of justice. Rendering “to each his due” hinges on one’s understanding of what each deserves, and this cannot be correctly ascertained without taking into account the dignity and worth that are at the same time general qualities of all persons, and inseparable from the singularity of each of them. Personalists in the broader sense therefore lay special stress on what persons deserve by the very fact of their personhood, and on the difference between acting toward a person and acting toward any other reality. When the person is the object of one’s action, a whole ethical structure enters into play that is absent when the object of one’s action is a thing. How persons should be treated forms an independent ethical category, separate in essence and not only in degree from how non-persons (things) are to be treated. Whereas traditional ethical systems stress the internal mechanisms of the moral agent (conscience, obligation, sin, virtue, etc.) and the effect that free actions have on moral character, personalists add to this a particular concern for the transcendent character of human action and the dignity of the one being acted upon. The person’s absolute character provides for the possibility of absolute moral norms when dealing with persons.
|
||||
|
||||
For personalists, human dignity as such does not depend on variables such as native intelligence, athletic ability or social prowess. Nor can it result merely from good conduct or moral merit. It must rather be rooted in human nature itself, so that on the deepest level, despite the variations of moral conduct and the resultant differences in moral character, all members of the species share this dignity. The difference between being *something* and *someone* has been seen as so radical that it does not admit of degrees. Most personalists have denied that personhood is something that can be gradually attained. It is like a binary function (1 or 0) or a toggle switch (on or off), that admits no middle ground.
|
||||
|
||||
But as we have seen, these positions can be related to a not wholly unproblematic view of non-human nature. Personalists in the narrow sense accept, as far as it goes, the view of the dignity of man as found in Kant’s ethics or practical philosophy, but modify and add to it not least from the perspective of a more thoroughgoingly personalist understanding of the importance of individual uniqueness. And since they do not merely emphasize the importance of the person within the framework of a pre-existing metaphysics and a philosophical and theological anthropology, there is available to them a theoretical space for conceiving of the non-human world of “somethings” in a less objectifying and exploitative manner. The early, idealistic personalists were much more inclined to see external nature too as ultimately expressive of personal reality, and to account for its impersonal appearance in terms of the limitations of finite perception.
|
||||
|
||||
### 6.3 Interiority and subjectivity
|
||||
|
||||
Personalists assert that only persons are truly “subjects.” This is not to say that in the syntactic sense other entities do not “act” or “produce” or “cause,” but properly speaking they do not possess subjectivity. In the modern sense, subjectivity depends primarily on the unity of self-consciousness, and on interiority, freedom, and personal autonomy. Though non-personal beings may “act” in the syntactic sense, they are not truly subjects of action since the cause of their action is extrinsic to them. Despite the difference with regard to the ultimate nature of the “non-personal” between some personalists in the narrow sense and personalists in the broader sense, there is in this area a considerable overlap between the two forms of personalism. For theistic personalists, personal subjectivity embraces the moral and religious dimensions, which are part and parcel of the person’s nature as a conscious, intelligent, free, willing subject in relation with God and others. As free, thinking subjects, persons also exercise creativity through their thought, imagination, and action, a creativity which affects both the surrounding world and the person himself. Furthermore, personalists have observed that the lived experience of the human person, as a conscious and self-conscious being, discloses not only *actions* but also inner *happenings* that depend upon the self. These experiences, lived in a conscious way, go into the makeup and uniqueness of the person as well. As regards the ethical question, not only are persons free and responsible moral subjects, but their subjectivity also conditions others’ ethical responsibility toward them.
|
||||
|
||||
What we perceive as “things” can be examined and known from the outside, as what is regarded as “objects.” In a sense, they stand in front of us, they present themselves to us, but always as outside of us. They can be described, qualified, and classified. Classical-realist personalists accept the legitimacy, even necessity, of knowing man too in this way. From this objective viewpoint it is possible to discern some of the superiority of the human being to the rest of reality. Yet in the human person, a thoroughly unique dimension presents itself, a dimension not found in the rest of reality. Human persons experience themselves first of all not as objects but as subjects, not from the outside but from the inside, and thus they are present to themselves in a way that no other reality can be present to them. But here the influence and value of the phenomenological method, as well as of aspects of the earlier idealistic tradition, often makes itself especially felt in personalism and adds to the classical-realist analysis. The essence of the person is explored as an intuition from the inside, rather than as a deduction from a system of thought or through empirical observation in the ordinary sense. The human being must be treated as a subject, must be understood in terms of the modern view of specifically human subjectivity as determined by consciousness. But this contribution is not conceived by personalists as simply replacing in every respect earlier, more objectivist notions of man, but quite as much as complementing them. “A being that continually transforms nature, raising it in some sense to that being’s own level, must feel higher than nature — and must *be* higher than it” wrote Wojtyla in “On the Dignity of the Human Person,” adding that who the human being essentially is “derives essentially from within that being.”
|
||||
|
||||
This conscious self-presence is the interiority of the human person, and it is so central to the meaning of the concept of person that one can say that personality signifies interiority to self. Because of the person’s subjectivity, he is not only acted upon and moved by external forces, but also acts from within, from the core of his own subjectivity. Since he is the author of his actions, he possesses an identity of his own making, which cannot be reduced to objective analysis and thus resists definition. This resistance to definition, this irreducibility, do not mean that the person’s subjectivity and lived experience are unknowable, but rather that we must come to know them differently, by a method that merely reveals and discloses their essence. In lived experience of self-possession and self-governance, one experiences that one is a person and a subject, and through sympathy and empathy one experiences the personhood of others*.* To apply the early terminology with some added modern meanings, the person comprises both an objective subsistence (ύπόστασις) and a subjective subsistence (πρόσωπον).
|
||||
|
||||
A conclusion of personalism is that the experience of the human being cannot be derived by way of cosmological reduction. We must pause at the irreducible, at that which is unique and unrepeatable in each human being, that by virtue of which he or she is not just a particular human being – an individual of a certain species – but a personal subject. This is the only way to come to a true understanding of the human being. Obviously the framework of the irreducible is not exhaustive of the human condition, and such an understanding must be supplemented by a cosmological perspective. Nevertheless, personalists would say it is impossible to come to a true understanding of the person while neglecting his subjectivity.
|
||||
|
||||
The focus on the subjectivity of persons explains many personalists’ insistence on the difference between the concept of “person” and that of “individual.” In *L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale*, Gilson wrote that “every human person is first an individual, but he is much more than an individual, since one only speaks of a person, as of a personage, when the individual substance under consideration possesses in his own right a certain dignity.” The major distinction is that an *individual* represents a single unit in a homogenous set, interchangeable with any other member of the set, whereas a *person* is characterized by his uniqueness and irreplaceability.
|
||||
|
||||
In his essay “On the Concept of Person,” Von Balthasar wrote: “Few words have as many layers of meaning as *person*. On the surface it means just any human being, any countable individual. Its deeper senses, however, point to the individual’s uniqueness which cannot be interchanged and therefore cannot be counted.” In this deeper sense persons cannot, properly speaking, be counted, because a single person is not merely one in a series within which each member is identical to the rest for all practical purposes and thus exchangeable for any other. One can count apples, because one apple is as good as another (i.e., what matters is not that it is *this* apple, but simply that it is *an* apple), but one cannot count *persons* in this way. One could count human beings, as individuals of the same species, but the word *person* emphasizes the uniqueness of each member of the human species, his incommensurability and incommunicability. Von Balthasar goes on to say: “If one distinguishes between *individual* and *person* (and we should for the sake of clarity), then a special dignity is ascribed to the person, which the individual as such does not possess…We will speak of a ‘person’…when considering the uniqueness, the incomparability and therefore irreplaceability of the individual.”
|
||||
|
||||
As valid as these philosophical distinctions are, whether one speaks of a human individual or a human person, these are simply two names applied to the same reality. Personalists are quick to assert that personality is not superadded to humanity, but is inherent to the essence of every human being, since it is rooted in human nature itself. “Human person” and “human individual,” while underscoring different dimensions of a human being, are synonymous in everyday language and have the same referent. Some thinkers have proposed a real distinction between a human person and a human individual. From their perspective, personhood would be an acquired “extra” for a human being, a status reached not simply by being an individual of the species, but by entering into certain relationships with other persons in a conscious, intentional way. In other words, while all human persons would be human individuals, the reverse would not be true.
|
||||
|
||||
Personalists typically reject this, and insist that each living human being normally possesses – actually and not merely potentially, although the importance of further development or actualization is strongly stressed – the definitional and constitutive consciousness, intentionality, will etc., the radical capacity to reason, laugh, love, and choose. These are not just some abstractly conceivable common characteristics of a species, but aspects of the unique, individual, organic functioning of every human being. In this way, personalists see personhood as subsisting even while its operations come and go with many changing factors such as immaturity, injury, sleep, and senility.
|
||||
|
||||
### 6.4 Self-determination
|
||||
|
||||
Man’s intellectual nature, which according to Boethius is the distinguishing characteristic of personhood, is also the font of freedom, subjectivity, agency, immortality, and man’s cognitive and moral life. It is as a rational being, and therefore as a person, that the individual can distinguish true from false and good from evil. Therefore science and morality are proper to persons. Because the person possesses a spiritual nature, the source of its action is internal to itself and not extrinsic. Nonpersonal beings possess no true agency and are not truly subjects of action since the principle of their acts is extrinsic to them. Thus Aquinas affirmed in his *Summa Theologiae* that “man differs from irrational animals in this, that he is master of his actions.”
|
||||
|
||||
Personalists insist that in his contact with the world the human person acts not in a purely mechanical or deterministic way, but from the inner self, as a subjective “I,” with the power of self-determination. Possession of free will means that the human person is his own master (*sui iuris*). Self-mastery and freedom characterize personal beings; a free being is a person. The person’s power of self-determination explains the non-transferable nature of personality. His incommunicability does not only refer to the person’s uniqueness and unrepeatability. What is incommunicable or inalienable in a person is intrinsic to that person’s inner self and to the power of self-determination. No one can substitute his act of will for another’s. Moreover, personal flourishing cannot be given from without but must come as a result of personal choice.
|
||||
|
||||
In what does self-determination consist? A classic distinction separates “human acts” (*actus humani*) from so-called “acts of man” (*actus hominis*). An act of man describes something that “happens” in the subject whereas a properly human act ascribes free and responsible authorship of the act to the subject. The element of interior causality is referred to as self-determination. This self-determination involves a sense of efficacy on the part of the acting subject, who recognizes that “I act” means that “I am the efficient cause” of my action. One’s sense of efficacy as an acting person in relation to the action performed is in turn closely connected to one’s sense of responsibility for the activity. This experience on the phenomenological level draws attention to the will as the person’s power of self-determination, while at the same time making clear that self-determination is a property of the person himself, and not just of the will. It is the freedom of the person as such, through his will.
|
||||
|
||||
Yet self-determination does not only describe the causality of the action, but also of the one acting. In acting, the person not only directs himself toward a value, he determines *himself* as well. He is not only the efficient cause of his actions, but is also in some sense the creator of himself, especially his moral self. By choosing to carry out good or bad actions, man makes himself a morally good or bad human being. Action is organically linked to becoming. By free moral action the personal subject becomes good or bad as a human being. When a person acts, he acts intentionally toward an object, a value which attracts the will to itself. At the same time, self-determination points inward toward the subject himself. As a result of this, the human being is capable of existing and acting “for itself,” or is capable of a certain *autoteleology*. This means that the person determines not only his own ends but also becomes an end for himself. The person is not only responsible for his actions, he is also responsible for himself, for his moral character and identity. Freedom means that one is responsible for one’s choices but also for one’s self.
|
||||
|
||||
Freedom and self-determination also bear a close relation to another characteristic of the person’s spiritual nature: creativity. Freedom as a property of the person allows the person to create through thought and action. The will is not simply the executor of the intellect’s reasoned conclusions. The intellect presents a variety of goods to be realized, none of which imposes itself in such a way as to be necessarily desired or chosen above the others. The person himself decides spontaneously and freely, and thus determines his own moral value and identity. “This particular good I am choosing has value for me according to the ‘me’ that I freely desire and choose to be.”
|
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|
||||
### 6.5 Relationality and communion
|
||||
|
||||
Personalists stress the person’s nature as a social being. According to personalists, the person never exists in isolation, and moreover persons find their human perfection only in communion with other persons. Interpersonal relations are never superfluous or optional to the person, but are indicated by his nature and an essential component of his fulfillment.
|
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|
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Relation is proper only to the person. Personalism has endeavored to highlight this aspect of personhood and bring it to the fore. It is central to personalism’s reaction against and endeavor to overcome the polarization of individualism on the one hand and collectivism on the other. Personalists consider human beings as a “beings for others” or “beings with others.” Relationship is not an optional accessory for the human person, but is essential to his personhood. He is a being-for-relation.
|
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|
||||
Personalists recognize that as much as he may strive for independence, the human person necessarily relies on others. He depends on other persons for his survival and development, and this interdependence is a hallmark of human existence. Beyond this, the human person also tends toward society as a basic human value. Such society is not only a matter of utility or convenience but reflects an innate tendency of the person to seek out his fellows and enter into spiritual association with them. The trait of sociableness has been observed since the earliest philosophers, and reflects both man’s dependence on other people for his subsistence and development and his natural tendency to deeper communion.
|
||||
|
||||
Some personalists note that man’s social nature and his vocation to inter-personal communion are not the same thing. Their capacity for rational community and friendship is one of the things that make human beings social. But the person’s capacity for communion is according to these personalists deeper than mere sociability. “Society,” in fact, is sometimes analogously applied to non-personal beings that live and interact as a group rather than in isolation from one another, whereas the word ‘communion’ could never be understood in this way. *Communio* does not simply refer to something common, but rather to a mode of being and acting in common through which the persons involved mutually confirm and affirm one another, a mode of being and acting that promotes the personal fulfillment of each of them by virtue of their mutual relationship. This mode of being and acting is an exclusive property of persons.
|
||||
|
||||
Personalists see the human person’s vocation to communion as rooted in rational nature, through the person’s subjectivity and self-determination. Far from closing the person in on himself, these characteristics of the person’s spiritual nature dispose him to communication with other persons. For most personalists, the subjectivity of the person has nothing in common with the isolated unity of the Leibnizian monad but requires the communication of knowledge and love.
|
||||
|
||||
This communication, in turn, depends on the person’s self-determination with its distinctive structure of self-possession and self-governance. As a free, willing subject, the person cannot be possessed by another, unless he chooses to make a gift of himself to another. Personalists assert that the person belongs to himself in a way that no other thing or animal can. Self-possession does not imply isolation. On the contrary, both self-possession and self-governance imply a special disposition to make “a gift of oneself.” Only if one possesses oneself can one give oneself and do this in a disinterested way. And only if one governs oneself can one make a disinterested gift of oneself. This vocation to self-giving is so essential to the constitution of the person that it is precisely when one becomes a gift for others that one most fully becomes oneself. Without a disinterested gift of self man cannot achieve the finality that is proper to a human being by virtue of his being a person, and cannot fully discover his true self.
|
||||
|
||||
For personalists, this “law of the gift” shows that the relation and the society of which the person alone is capable, and which are necessary for his realization as a person, consist not only in association, but in love. They consist in a love which gives and gives itself, which receives not only things but other persons as well. Only persons can give love and only persons can receive love.
|
||||
|
||||
## Bibliography
|
||||
|
||||
### Primary Literature
|
||||
|
||||
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|
||||
- Brightman Edgar S., 1932, *Is God a Person?*, New York: Association Press.
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||||
- –––, 1943, *Personalism in Theology: A Symposium in Honor of Albert Cornelius Knudson*, Boston: Boston University Press.
|
||||
- –––, 1952, *Persons and Values*, Boston: Boston University Press.
|
||||
- Buber, Martin, 1923, *Ich und Du* (*I and Thou*), Ronald Gregor Smith (trans.), second edition, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1987.
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||||
- Flewelling, Ralph Tyler, 1926, *Creative Personality*, Introduction by H. Wildon Carr, New York: Macmillan Co.
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||||
- Flewelling, Ralph Tyler and Rudolf Eucken, 1915, *Personalism and the Problems of Philosophy: An Appreciation of the Work of Borden Parker Bowne*, New York/Cincinnati: The Methodist Book Concern.
|
||||
- Gilson, Étienne, 1932, *L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale*, Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin. (See especially ch. 10, “Le personnalisme chrétien”: 195–215.)
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||||
- Guardini, Romano, 1955, *Welt und Person*, *Versuche zur christlichen Lehre vom Menschen*, Würzburg: Werkbund-Verlag.
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||||
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||||
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|
||||
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||||
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||||
- Kohák, Erazim, 1984, *The Embers and the Stars. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature*, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
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||||
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||||
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||||
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||||
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||||
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||||
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||||
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||||
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|
||||
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||||
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||||
- Sokolowski, Robert, 2008, *Phenomenology of the Human Person*, New York: Cambridge.
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||||
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||||
- –––, 1923/1924, *Person und Sache: System des kritischen Personalismus*, Leipzig: J. A. Barth.
|
||||
- Tillich, Paul, 1955, *Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality*, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
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||||
- Von Hildebrand, Dietrich, 1953 \[1973\], *Ethics*, Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press.
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||||
- Von Hildebrand, Dietrich, Alice von Hildebrand, und Rudolf Ebneth, 1994 \[2014\], *Memoiren und Aufsätze gegen den Nationalsozialismus 1933–1938*, Ernst Wenisch (ed.), Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag; English translation, 2014, *My Battle Against Hitler: Faith, Truth, and Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich*, John H. Crosby and John F. Crosby (trans. and eds.), New York: Image.
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||||
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|
||||
- –––, 1960 \[1995\], *Milosc I Odpowiedzialnosc* (*Love and Responsibility*), H. T. Willetts (trans.), New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
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||||
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|
||||
- –––, 1993b, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” Theresa Sandok (trans.), in *Person and Community: Selected Essays* (*Catholic Thought from Lublin*: Volume 4), Andrew N. Woznicki (ed.), New York: Peter Lang, 209–17.
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||||
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|
||||
|
||||
### Secondary Literature
|
||||
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
- Beauregard, James, Giusy Gallo, Claudia Stancati (eds.), 2020, *The Person at the Crossroads: A Philosophical Approach*, Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press.
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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||||
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|
||||
- Lemmons, R. Mary Hayden, 2011, *Ultimate Normative Foundations: The Case for Aquinas’s Personalist Natural Law*, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
|
||||
- Liebman, Charles S. and Stephen M. Cohen, 1990, *Two Worlds of Judaism: The Israeli and American Experiences*, New Haven: Yale University Press.
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
- Rigobello, Armando, 1978, *Il Personalismo*, Rome: Città Nuova.
|
||||
- –––, 1958, *Introduzione a una logica del personalismo*, Padova: Liviana.
|
||||
- Sacconaghi, Rocco, 2023, “Rethinking Personalism: A Speculative Approach,” in *Person: Encounters, Paradigms, Commitment and Applications*, Wilmington: Vernon Press.
|
||||
- Spader, Peter H., 2002, *Scheler’s Ethical Personalism. Its Logic, Development, and Promise*, New York: Fordham University Press.
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
- Waldstein, Michael, 2006, *Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body*, Boston: Pauline Books & Media.
|
||||
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|
||||
- Werkmeister, William H., 1949, “The Personalism of Bowne,” in *A History of Philosophical Ideas in America*, New York: Ronald Press, 103–121.
|
||||
- Williams, Thomas D., 2005, *Who Is My Neighbor? Personalism and the Foundations of Human Rights*, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press.
|
||||
- –––, 2004, “What is Thomistic Personalism?,” *Alpha Omega*, 7(2): 163–197.
|
||||
- Yannaras, Christos, 1987 \[2007\], *To prosopo kai o eros*, (*Person and Eros*), Norman Russell (trans.), Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press.
|
||||
|
||||
## Academic Tools
|
||||
|
||||
> | | [How to cite this entry](https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=personalism). |
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> | | [Preview the PDF version of this entry](https://leibniz.stanford.edu/friends/preview/personalism/) at the [Friends of the SEP Society](https://leibniz.stanford.edu/friends/). |
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> | | [Enhanced bibliography for this entry](https://philpapers.org/sep/personalism/) at [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/), with links to its database. |
|
||||
|
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## Other Internet Resources
|
||||
|
||||
### Online books
|
||||
|
||||
- Bowne, Borden Parker, [*Personalism*](http://www.archive.org/stream/personalism00bownuoft#page/n1/mode/2up).
|
||||
- Buford, Thomas O. and Harold H. Oliver, [*Personalism Revisited: Its Proponents and Critics*](http://books.google.it/books?id=w8C6MsXnmM8C&printsec=frontcover&hl=en&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false).
|
||||
- Burrow, Rufus Jr., [*Personalism: A Critical Introduction*](http://books.google.com/books?id=QZ26UpzbcrgC&pg=PP1&dq=personalism&ei=I23gSuSmEpK0NoCCyaEC#v=onepage&q=&f=false).
|
||||
- Chazarreta Rourke, Rosita A., [*A Theory of Personalism*](http://books.google.com/books?id=KHOsv-sPDQ8C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false).
|
||||
- McLean, George F. (ed.), [*Personalist Ethics and Human Subjectivity*](http://books.google.com/books?id=VJg6QsO3KXgC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false).
|
||||
- Williams, Thomas D., [*Who Is My Neighbor? Personalism and the Foundations of Human Rights*](http://books.google.it/books?id=ldVpoPNxIEQC&pg=PA105&dq=thomistic+personalism&hl=en&sa=X&ei=03ybUerzIofLOOfxgOAD&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false).
|
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|
||||
### Online articles
|
||||
|
||||
- Berdyaev, N.A., [Personalism and Marxism](https://web.archive.org/web/20221014000501/http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1935_400.html), manuscript.
|
||||
- Buford, Thomas O., [Personalism](http://www.american-philosophy.org/events/documents/Buford_Personalism.pdf), manuscript in PDF.
|
||||
- Cole, Graham and Michael Schluter, [From Personalism to Relationism: Commonalities and Distinctives](http://www.jubilee-centre.org/personalism-relationism-commonalities-distinctives-g-cole-m-schluter/), manuscript in PDF.
|
||||
- DeMarco, Donald, [The Christian Personalism of Jacques Maritain](http://www.ewtn.com/library/THEOLOGY/FR91201.HTM), manuscript.
|
||||
- [Personalism](http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/452990/personalism), entry in the *Encyclopædia Britannica Online*.
|
||||
- [Personalism](http://www.iep.utm.edu/personal/), entry by Thomas Buford, in the *Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy*.
|
||||
- De Tavernier, Johan, [The Historical Roots of Personalism](http://www.ethical-perspectives.be/viewpic.php?LAN=E&TABLE=EP&ID=1208), paper (PDF) in *Ethical Perspectives*, 16(3) (2009): 361–392.
|
||||
- Williams, Thomas D., [What Is Thomistic Personalism?](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9ac5/c203acaabbaf9e3f438fa8490a653fbdc54f.pdf?_ga=2.189116331.1222629154.1570032856-1204823184.1570032856), paper (PDF) in *Alpha Omega*, VII/2 (2004): 163–197.
|
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