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.

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.