ONTOLOGICAL PERSONALISM

In the late 1980s a laboratory experiment produced surprising results.  Bacteria which could not feed on lactose were placed in a lactose-only environment.  Surprisingly, general demise was not the outcome. Instead, the bacteria’s genes went into overdrive and it developed an ability to digest what had formerly been indigestible.  

This energetic, survival-directed dynamism offered a path for altering a long-standing philosophical presupposition: most of the material world proceeds by mechanistic rules. Take a spark plug.  If it is deprived of

a source for sparking, nothing happens. Similarly, if the plug has a crack in it, the crack will remain. Nothing in a mechanical device is self-replicating or self-repairing.

The mechanistic pattern typically hit a wall when it came to humans. The wall should have included the biological realm, but strenuous efforts were made to explain the biological via the mechanistic. One dominant notion, for example, was that although genetic changes (mutations) occurred, they were strictly random. Such random variations were then caught up in the mechanistic process whose laws proceeded by necessity, a position explained in a popular book, Chance and Necessity, by the Nobel-winning biologist Jacques Monod. With the biological realm thought to be explicable via mechanical processes, only the human was left as an exception. There resulted a major

bifurcation: the realm of humans and the realm of matter. Stated differently: on one side the personal, on the other, the impersonal.

So strong, though, was the pull of the machine model, that a serious attempt was made even to include humans within its boundaries.  This was the well-known movement of Behaviorism. It proclaimed proclaimed that (a) humans were not different from the natural world, and (b) this meant that what could not be found in the realm of atomic matter (i.e. the “objective” realm) should not be included in descriptions of what was going on in the human realm.   Behaviorism took a chainsaw approach to eliminate what it considered to be little more than

subjective illusions.

John B. Watson stated it clearly and bluntly: “ the Behaviorist must exclude from his scientific vocabulary all subjective terms such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, and even thinking and emotion…”

Standing in sharp opposition to this objectivist, impersonal paradigm is the philosophical movement known as “personalism.” The name, which adopts the personal/impersonal bifurcation, is not that great. Still, the content is worthy of another look. That content, begins, perhaps surprisingly, by sharing a key starting point with behaviorism: the post-Darwinian realization that there is continuity, not a sharp rupture, between humans and the natural world.  What it does next, however, moves it in a different direction.   

The personalist twist: If  humans are indeed continuous with the natural realm, then we can learn something about the natural realm by paying attention to  human experience. That experience is not an alien, mysterious, supervenient irruption. It manifests operative natural processes. As such it can serve to provide indications of characteristics associated with the non-human world. 

“Indications” is an important term. There is no claim that traits associated with humans, say intelligence, purposeful activity, emotional attachment, language, will, in those exact forms, be widely distributed.   There is a middle ground: the old medieval recognition of traits as “analogous.” Traits like awareness, communication, habit, normativity, end-directed flexibility can now be recognized as ‘going all the way down,’ as being generically applicable to our worldd (which includes humans and non humans). The realm of the “impersonal,” far from being prototypical, is now seen as an outlier.  

“Personalism” recently got a big publicity boost: a piece

by David Brooks in the New York Times.  It was entitled: “Personalism: the philosophy we need.” The article did provide a great boost, but the personalism it defended was a truncated one. It highlighted human-human interactions: “Personalism is a philosophic tendency built on the infinite uniqueness and depth of each person.”  

This is good as far as it goes.  It is an understandable emphasis given the name “personalism.” At the same time, it misses the more comprehensive dimension of personalism: offering an ontological, not just an anthropological take on things. The Brooks’ perspective actually undermines the notion of continuity.  It preserves the human/nature discontinuity, a discontinuity which personalism seeks to overcome.   

For more on personalism, and its relationship to food, stay tuned for the next installment. 

For  introductions to personalism, some books offer a good starting place. Central among them:

• Emmanuel Mounier’ general introduction,  Personalism;
• Erazim Kohak’s lyrical The Embers and the Stars;
• and Martin Buber’s classic  I and Thou.