PERSONALISM: "MORE" vs "NOTHING BUT"

Emmanuel Mounier, great exponent of personalism, starts his book with this reflection:

“Man is body in the same way as he is spirit, completely body and completely spirit.  Out of the most basic of instincts: eating, reproduction, he develops subtle arts; cuisine,  love.”

As we saw in the previous post, the movement known as "personalism" rejects bifurcations. It assumes human/world continuity.  What is specific to personalism is this: continuity means that humans and their characteristics are not oddballs, “supervening,” as some philosophers put it, on a neutral world of mere matter.  For personalism, it is not “matter,” but

“mattering” that is pervasive. “Mattering,” in turn, rebuffs “impersonalism.” “Impersonalism” connotes a general framework which is fundamentally neutral and indifferent. Personalism offers an alternative: it is difference rather than indifference that takes a central role.  Indeed “mattering” indicates a setting in which differences make a difference in light of activities geared toward what is good. 

Another way of identifying the contrast is to say that “impersonalism” embraces the “nothing but” attitude. 

Personalism, on the other hand embraces the “more” attitude. It resists simplifying entities and events as "nothing but" members of a certain class or category. Each entity, event or activity is always "more" than any interpretive grid or categorization that can be placed on it.  One of Mounier's examples is "modesty." This is not primarily a prudish, puritanical fear of sexuality. It is a statement that the person is more than the sum of physical traits.

Personalism and its emphasis on "more" admits a kind of omnipresent fecundity.  Such fecundity is rooted in a focus on possibilities. Reality is thought to be replete with them, even if many are yet to be recognized and others have yet to be brought to their proper culminations. 

Because of inherited philosophical ideas, we unreflectively assume a “nothing but” world. Such a world is  (a) composed of rudimentary units, discrete atoms, not of interactive systems; and (b) those elementary units follow mechanical rules, ones quite apart from considerations of optimal or preferred states.

Ecology is slowly chipping away at this “nothing but” (i.e. impersonal)  take on things. It emphasizes systems, interactions, and optimal, steady-states preserving themselves within a healthy range of balance. Such systems, we are also now learning, are not just bits of matter acted upon by mechanical rules.  Communication, an event which requires signalling and deciphering signals, is occurring all the time.

Take acacia trees. When giraffes begin to feed on their

leaves, the trees (1) produce a toxin, and (2) emit a gas. The toxin serves a particular function: discouraging further giraffe feeding.  The gas also serves a function, a signalling one. Neighboring trees, even if giraffes are not yet feeding on them, begin to produce a toxin.

What occurs in such a complex of interactions cannot be fully explained in “nothing but” terms. The physico-chemical processes and the end-directed function that occasions them, do not identify an either/or. A more comprehensive articulation will have little to do with the “nothing but” attitude, i.e. nothing but physico-chemical processes OR nothing but teleological signalling. The most fertile methods of inquiry will expect “more” rather than “nothing but.”

The “nothing but” world is not, as its friends will suggest, value-free.  It is associated with a particular value-laden project: manipulation and control.  At the

same time, the human condition is aggrandized. Humans come to be identified with “will.”   “Thus I willed it" becomes a guiding slogan. It's a slogan which situates humans in a superior position from which they can impose their patterns on the neutral “nothing but” stuff that makes up what is now known as the “external” world.  

Because impersonalism transforms the world into what Erazim Kohak called manipulanda (that which exists only to be manipulated), it minimizes any recognition of

surroundings as sacred. This, in turn, could help explain why most personalists have been religious. (A pope, John-Paul II, is probably the most famous example.).  

Quite apart from religiosity, personalism worries that the impersonal take on things actually falsifies the complexity of being in the world.  Whether personalism offers a vibrant enough, generally appealing enough, alternative, remains to be seen. Whatever direction is taken, the “more” dimension, one that recognizes a rich, overflowing fecundity all around, offers a fuller take on things than does the “nothing but” alternative.