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Personalism






  One of the main points of interest of personalism is human subjectivity or self-consciousness, experienced in a person's own acts and inner happenings—in "everything in the human being that is internal, whereby each human being is an eye witness of its own self".



   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 universal reference point.


  In describing experience we are enjoined to remember always the difference between our conceptual suppositions and our genuine evidence. The primary function of logic is the normative clarification of thought, and the function of clear thinking is to bring to the fore knowledge, understanding or appreciation of what we value. Abstractions are tools, not principles of the real.



  The first point is the volitional and practical nature of belief. Persons living on the plane of instinct and hearsay have no intellectual difficulty here, but those entering upon the life of reflection without insight are sure to lose themselves in theoretical impotence and practical impudence. The impotence seen in a paralyzing inability to believe, owing to the fancy that theoretical demonstration must precede belief. The impudence shows itself in ruling out with an airy levity the practical principles by which men and nations live, because they admit of no formal proof. These extremes of unwisdom can be escaped only by an insight into the volitional and practical nature of belief.



   Of the structural fallacies of uncritical thought, spontaneous thought is pretty sure to take itself as the double of reality. Thus arises the fallacy of the universal, the parent of a very large part of popular speculation. And when to this are added the omnipresent imposture and deceit of language, there results a great world of abstract and verbal illusion against which we cannot be too much on our guard, seeing that it is the source both of so much theoretical error and of so much practical menace and aberration.



  Author and psychotherapist Thomas Moore associates spirit with "afterlife, cosmic issues, idealistic values and hopes, and universal truths", while placing soul "in the thick of things: in the repressed, in the shadow, in the messes of life, in illness, and in the pain and confusion of love." Hillman believes that religion and humanistic psychology have tended to the spirit, often at the unfortunate expense of soul. This happens, Moore says, because to transcend the "lowly conditions of the soul ... is to lose touch with the soul, and a split-off spirituality, with no influence from the soul, readily falls into extremes of literalism and destructive fanaticism."




  The Baha'i Faith affirms that the soul is a sign of God, a heavenly gem whose reality the most learned of men has failed to grasp, and whose mystery no mind, however acute, can ever hope to unravel.



   Buddhist teaching holds that a notion of a permanent, abiding self is a delusion that is one of the root causes for human conflict on the emotional, social, and political levels. They add that an understanding of anatta provides an accurate description of the human condition, and that this understanding allows us to pacify our mundane desires.

 

   Personalists 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[Thomas D. Williams, 2009].




   Borden Parker Bowne’s ethical philosophy is characterized by its guarded meliorism, to make things better; an emphasis on practicality and on learning to be circumspect about human nature and possibilities.





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