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THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OFPERSONALISMKEVIN M. DIRKSEN a & PAUL T. SCHOTSMANS b ca UCLA Health System Ethics Centerb Faculty of Medicine , KU Leuvenc Universities of Leuven , Nijmegen, PaduaPublished online: 25 Apr 2013.

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Bijdragen, International Journal in Philosophy and Theology 73(4), 388-403. doi: 10.2143/BIJ.73.4.2959713 © 2012 by Bijdragen, International Journal in Philosophy and Theology. All rights reserved.

THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF PERSONALISM

BORDEN PARKER BOWNE AND THE BOSTON TRADITION ON PERSONAL IDENTITY AND THE MORAL LIFE*

KEVIN M. DIRKSEN & PAUL T. SCHOTSMANS

Introduction

In line with Johan De Tavernier's recently produced historical survey of various articulations of personalism, detailing the origination and contribu­tion of four European voices1, a further examination of the Boston personal­ist corpus is provided in this investigation. Indeed, De Tavernier claims to include 'American personalism', however, the article provides only a mini­mal treatment of personalism in the United States in favour of additional continental reflection. In this investigation, we present a more clarifying account of the tradition of personalism at Boston University. Indeed, we are aware that other personalists like Emmanuel Mounier, Louis Janssens or Karol Wojtyla are much more known to the general public. This is less the case for the Boston personalist approaches. Of this Boston personalism, the historical and conceptual origins of the tradition will be introduced followed by an explication of the concept of person and culminating in the presenta­tion of their ethical system. This introduction may be helpful in completing the understanding of intercontinental theories of personalism, laying at the origin of ethical statements in the 21st century.

* This investigation is indebted to Professor Faramelli: he did not only review projects of this manuscript but provided the initial instruction in the Boston University ethical tradition to the co­author Kevin Dirksen. It is also indebted to Professor De Tavernier for having provided his historical survey of (essentially European) personalism.

1 J. De Tavernier, 'The Historical Roots of Personalism: From Renouvier's Le Personnalisme, Mounier's Manifeste au service du personnalisme and Maritain's Humanisme integral to Janssens' Personne et Societe', in: Ethical Perspectives 16.3, 2009, pp. 361-392.

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Kevin M. Dirksen & Paul T. Schotsmans 389

The Boston Personalist Tradition

The tradition of personalism at Boston University School of Theology began with its founder, Borden Parker Bowne.2 Born on 14 January 1847 in New Jersey, Bowne was a product of Pennington Seminary and New York Univer­sity prior to study in Germany and France.3 His Continental period was impor­tant: he studied in Gottingen with Rudolf Hermann Lotze.4 It was at Boston University, a Methodist institution created for the purpose of providing forma­tion of clergymen in New England, where Bowne spent his entire academic career. There he was professor of philosophy and dean of the graduate school5

from 1876 until his death on 1 April 1910.6 Like many of his successors, Bowne was an ordained minister in the Methodist Church.? Bowne's philosophical system, later called Boston personalism, can be intro­duced by his own hand. In a letter to his wife, Bowne describes himself in the following manner:

It is hard to classify me with accuracy. I am a theistic idealist, a Personalist, a transcen­dental empiricist; an idealistic realist, and a realistic idealist; but all these phrases need to be interpreted. They cannot well me made out from the dictionary. Neither can I be called a disciple of any one. I largely agree with Lotze, but I transcend him, I hold half of Kant's system, but sharply dissent from the rest. There is a strong smack of Berkeley's philosophy, with a complete rejection of his theory of knowledge. I am a Personalist, the first of my clan in any thoroughgoing sense.8

It is this clan which Gary Dorrien understands to have built one of three institu­tions which "anchored the liberal theology movement during its twentieth-century

2 R.E. Auxier, 'An Editorial Statement', in: The Pluralist 1.1, 2006, p. v. 3 H.K. Rowe, Modern Pathfinders of Christianity: The Lives and Deeds of Seven Centuries of

Christian Leaders, Manchester, Ayer Publishing, 1928, p. 242 & K.M. Bowne, 'An Intimate Portrait of Bowne,' in: The Personalist 2.1, 1921, pp. 5-9. Paris, Halle and Giittingen were the three sites of Bowne's study in Europe.

4 W.J. Mandler, British Idealism: A History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 22. In De Tavernier's aforementioned historical survey, he, too, mentions Bowne's study with Lotze.

5 E. Kohak, Philosophy at Boston University: A Remembrance of Things Past, Boston, Boston University Department of Philosophy, 1994. According to Kohak, Bowne's appointment to the chair in philosophy inaugurated the foundation of philosophy at Boston University.

6 Bowne, Intimate Portrait, p. 9. 7 Rowe, Pathfinders of Christianity, p. 245. 8 Bowne, Intimate Portrait, p. 10. For this oft-cited quote, see also: Paul Deats. 'Introduction to

Boston Personalism', The Boston Personalist Tradition in Philosophy, Social Ethics and Theology, (Macon, Georgia, Mercer University Press, 1986), p. 4.

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390 The Historical Roots of Personalism

heyday" .9 Such an achievement was largely thanks to the contributions of Bowne's successors including philosopher Edgar S. Brightman, Methodist bishop Francis J. McConnell and theologian Albert C. Knudson. The philosophical system which developed at Boston University was quite unlike the other two powerhouses of American liberal theology (Union Theo­logical Seminary and the University of Chicago Divinity School) in that it derived its foundation from a single thinker. 10 This single thinker, Bowne, developed a particular style of philosophy, theology and ethics which would be explained and refined by the forenamed and others.

Orienting a Philosophy - between Idealism and Materialism

The start of Bowne's career consisted of issuing repeated critiques against Herbert Spencer's philosophy. Bowne was an early fan of physics and a pro­ponent of Darwin's Origin of Species. He rejected, however, brands of mate­rialist and sensationalist thinking which asserted the existence of matter alone and the exclusion of all experience not based in sensory perception, respec­tively.11 In Spencer, Bowne concluded, existed both. Spencer epitomized a kind of impersonalism which Bowne considered to be dangerous. In the end, it was for Bowne an epistemological problem: "the contentious issue was whether material principles could explain everything. Bowne's contention was that they could not, that there is an order of reality irreducible to the material, an order he called the personal." 12

In postulating an order of reality beyond the material, Bowne evidences his affinity with the philosophy of German idealism. The writings of Hegel com­menced a tradition which asserted the mind's active project in knowledge as a rejection of Enlightenment empiricism and skepticism. The general, philo­sophical orientation of the idealists was also Bowne's own: the active role of the mind in intelligence was a given. However, inherent within idealism was a tendency to stray too far from the world of objects, the phenomenal, and exclusively abstract in the world of the mind, the noumenal.

9 G.J. Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism. Realism, and Modernity, 1900-1950, London, Westminster John Knox Press, 2003, p. 3 & p. 371.

10 Dorrien, Idealism, Realism & Modernity, p. 7 & p. 286. 11 Deats, Intro to Boston, p. 5. Bowne's own words are sufficiently clear: "we find naturalism,

then, entirely in its right when it seeks to give a description of the phenomenal order according to which things have appeared, but we find it as a philosophy exceedingly superficial and uncritical." B.P. Bowne, Personalism, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1908, p. 251.

12 R.C. Prust, 'Soul Talk and Bowne's Ontology of Personhood', in: The Personalist Forum, 13.1, 1997, p. 69.

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Kevin M. Dirksen & Paul T. Schotsmans 391

Bowne understood the conclusions of post-Kantian idealism to result in a realm of endless abstraction via the infinite regress, a common philosophical critique of Bowne's eraP Because of this judgment, Bowne would attempt to keep ele­ments of idealism to a minimum in his philosophical system. Spencer and the materialists could fare no better since the realm of endless abstraction was only matched by materialism's own folly: the inability to organize sensory data into meaningful knowledge. This movement away from and yet between idealism and materialism is narrated nowhere better than in Bowne's chapter "The Failure of Impersonalism" where he charts the manner in which each trajectory may result in an antithetical posture to his own. 14 Since he could not identify with either dominant philosophical pole of his era (idealism or materialism) without succumbing to their deficiencies, Bowne concluded that the only solution was to take the best from each and fashion a philosophy of his own. Despite Bowne's reluctance to identify with the argumentative fringe of ideal­ism, he would not stray too far from its territories while its general impulse continued to catalyze and underwrite Bowne's philosophical accounting of human personality. 15 Additionally, Bowne would find a complete rejection of the materialists to be impossible while the scientific methodologies from which their philosophies were derived to served as his own basis for critiquing certain movements within the Methodist church. 16 Of the two, Bowne can be said to more closely situate with the idealists. More often, Bowne seems to indicate

13 The absolute idealists which Bowne understood to be most at fault were T.H. Green and F.H. Bradley, perhaps better known as representatives of British Hegelianism. For example, Bowne writes: "when the terms are abstractly taken without continual reference to experience, it is easy to develop any number of difficulties and even contradictions in our fundamental ideas. No better proof of this can be found than Mr. Bradley's work on Appearance and Reality." Bowne, Personalism, p. 259.

14 Bowne, Personalism, pp. 217-267. 15 Two matters demand attention. First, the complicated relationship of Bowne with Hegel and

idealism is cursorily depicted nowhere better than with respect to the fluctuating designations he affixed to his own thinking which will be narrated below. Second, Bowne's inability to abandon the idealistic project in full was the very issue which the most influential successor of Brightman, McConnell and Knudson, Walter G. Muelder, would demand needed amendment. Dorrien narrates: "Muelder, studying Troeltsch's historicism, realized that Bowne and Brightman were both ahistorical and individualistic in their focus on the self as conscious experience ... Troeltsch's project was essentially a philosophy of history, but Bowne, Knudson, and Brightman had little historical consciousness. Under Troeltsch's influence, Muelder developed a historical-communitarian theory of personality." G.J. Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, West Sussex, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, p. 309. For a summary of Muelder and his influence on the Boston school, cf. N.J. Faramelli, 'Background Paper on Walter George Muelder', in: 21'1 Century Ministry Booklets 6, 2006, pp. 9-22.

16 Bowne's general orientation in public argumentation was "on the one hand, to unmask the pontifical claims made in his day in the name of Christian supernaturalism, and, on the other, to show that a personalistic-theistic idealism is the more reasonable support for the ideals of the scientific, ethical, and religious life". P.A. Bertocci, 'Borden Parker Bowne and His Personalistic Theistic

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392 The Historical Roots of Personalism

that it was a general idealism which was only qualified or reined in by mate­rialism rather than the inverse. Bowne would finally give up the search for an appropriate way of naming his perceived reconciliation between the philo­sophical orientations by settling on the name 'personalism' Y

The Person in Boston Personalism

This new 'personalism' by which Bowne began to call his system was a fusion of several propositional contributions, including elements of idealistic philosophy, materialist phenomenalism, and Kantian epistemology. This is only a sampling of philosophical heritages inherent within Bowne's system. Dorrien names the theological heritages he witnesses: "theologically, it synthesized the distinctive trademarks of the Kantian, Schleiermacherian, Hegelian, and Ritschlian streams of liberal theology ... with Kant it affirmed the ethical character of true religion; with Scheiermacher it proclaimed that spiritual experience is the basis of religion; with Hegel it insisted that religion is meaningless without metaphysical claims; with the Ritschlian school it embraced the social gospel and the liberal picture of Jesus (p. 307)." Another fascinating parallel is that with the pragmatism of Wil­liam James. Though James was highly critical of abstract idealism (a tradition with which Bowne is occasionally affiliated), the author of "The Varieties of Religious Experience" suggested the importance of Bowne's theorizing on more than one occasion. Excerpts from a letter James wrote to Bowne illustrate this: "It seems to me that you and I are now aiming at exactly the same end ... our emphatic footsteps fall on the same spot. You, starting near the rationalist pole, and boxing the compass, and I traversing the diameter from the empiricist pole, reach practically very similar positions and attitudes. It seems to me that this is full of promise for the future of philosophy (Deats, 6-7)." By amending Kant's system with the addition of intelligent and volitional causality,18 Bowne is able to establish freedom as the basis for personal identity:

Now when we consider our life at all critically, we come upon two facts. First, we have thoughts and feelings and volitions which are inalienably our own. We also have a

Idealism', in: P. Deats & C. Robb (eds.), The Boston Personalist Tradition in Philosophy, Social Ethics and Theology, Macon (GA), Mercer University Press, 1986, p. 57.

17 This was also the name of one of his books which he published two years before death. See further: Bowne, Personalism, 1908.

18 According to John Lavely, a philosopher of the third generation of Boston personalism, Bowne's self-distancing particularly from the foundations of idealism placed him closer to an epis­temology of Kant. J.H. Lavely, 'Personalism's Debt to Kant', in: P. Deats & C. Robb (eds.), The Boston Personalist Tradition in Philosophy, Social Ethics and Theology, Macon (GA), Mercer

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Kevin M. Dirksen & Paul T. Schotsmans 393

measure of self-control, or the power of self-direction. Here, then, we find in our expe­rience a certain selfhood and a relative independence. This fact constitutes our person­ality.19

Here, Bowne begins a discussion about the identity of personhood in a manner not opposed to the Cartesian mantra 'cogito ergo sum', wherein the recognition of one's own active thought is the basis of self-awareness.20 However, he also names feelings in addition to volitions and thoughts as constituting this self­awareness, effectively minimizing the hyper-rationalistic state of being. Feel­ing, in particular, is predicated up the sensory experience of the body, bridging the gap from mind to body. As such, here Bowne passes both Descartes' mind­body dualism and John Locke's consciousness-based critique of Cartesian existence.21 He then names the presence of self-direction or freedom as con­stitutive of personal identity.22 Finally, all discussions of ontological personal­ity must be followed by teleological personality. Bowne writes: "our human life does not begin ready-made but grows, and it not merely grows but it grows out of submoral and subrational conditions. " 23

Bowne's theory of personal identity included ontological and teleological dimensions, though subsequent Boston personalists would develop the latter in greater detaiJ.24 For Bowne, persons are "bodies and souls with intelligence

University Press, 1986, pp. 23-37. Cf. B.P. Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1897, pp. 38-39.

19 B.P. Bowne, Personalism, pp. 280-281. 20 Instead of "I am thinking therefore I am", Bowne might say "I am thinking, volitional and

feeling, therefore I am". For more on the Cartesian person from a personalist perspective, cf. D. Hol­brook, 'Descartes on Persons,' in: The Personalist Forum 8.1, 1992, pp. 9-14.

21 "Person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it: it being impossible for anyone to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive." J. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter 27, Ofldentity and Diversity, p. 9.

22 In the language of 20th century French phenomenology, Paul Ricoeur would call this attestation. Cf. L. Anckaert, 'Respect for the Other: The Place of the 'Thou' in Ricoeur's Ethics', in: H. Opde­beeck (ed.), The Foundation and Application of Moral Philosophy: Ricoeur's Ethical Order, Leuven, Peeters, 2000, pp. 37-50.

23 B.P. Bowne, in: W.E. Steinkraus (ed.), Representative Essays of Borden Parker Bowne, Utica (NY), Meridian Publishing Company, 1984, p. 79.

24 D. Anderson, 'The Legacy of Bowne's Empiricism', in: The Personalist Forum 8.1, 1992, p. 1. Cf. B.P. Bowne, 'The Significance of the Body for Mental Action', in: Methodist Review 68, 1886, pp. 262-272. Anderson goes on to narrate the difference: "On the one hand, he disavowed any form of idealism that made the body a mere temporal prison of, or superfluous attachment to, the soul. One of the most obvious facts of experience [he said] is that the mental life is profoundly dependent upon the physical organism, and more especially upon the brain and the nervous system. In view of this, it was for Bowne not only unfortunate but unempirical that 'spiritualism has tended to ignore the

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394 The Historical Roots of Personalism

and instinct who are here and now endeavoring to make life",25 in whom "the driving force of the project of becoming a person was moral intuition; 26

and whose "purpose is a process of self-realization in historical settings guided by the moral and the rational". 27 The relation of being and becoming, ontology and teleology, presupposes the metaphysical underpinnings of such a person. The most frequent criticism of Bowne is levied against the idealistic emphases within his system. For instance, Harold Oliver claims that the personalism of Bowne and his notion of the person itself carries with it much 'idealistic baggage'.28 Robert Neville's critique is similar: "Bownean personalists reas­sembled the most attractive parts of an expiring German idealism. By implica­tion, they might have done better by at least remaining up to date in their borrowings. " 29 The critique of the tradition in general also applied to the understanding of person, as well. Oliver, again, claims that "for [those person­alists in the Boston "succession"] the term 'personal' ... meant exhaustively 'mental"'. 30 Boston personalists are not the only philosophers to be criticized about their operating definition of personality.31 It is a notion under fire else­where, outside strictly philosophical circles. In biomedical ethics, for instance, not only is the usefulness of the concept's application in a clinical setting questioned, but the stability of the term itself.32

dependence'. On the other hand, in his attacks on materialism he placed himself in opposition to those who understood persons to be collections or congeries of sense-impressions and ideas. As experi­enced, Bowne maintained these 'data' come to us in unified fashion." pp. 1-2.

25 Anderson, Bowne's Empiricism, p. 6. 26 R.L. Littlejohn, 'A Response to Daniel Holbrook's 'Descartes on Persons' and Doug Ander-

son's 'The Legacy of Bowne's Empiricism", in: The Personalist Forum 8.1, 1992, p. 19. 27 Anderson, Bowne's Empiricism, p. 4. 28 H.H. Oliver, 'Relational Personalism', in: The Personalist Forum 5.1, 1989, p. 39. 29 G.J. Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity,

1900-1950, London, Westminster John Knox Press, 2003, p. 343. 30 Oliver, Relational Personalism, p. 28. 31 Such a critique is evident outside of the Boston tradition, yet still within personalist philosophy.

Despite Karol Wojtyla's heavy reliance on the phenomenology of Scheler, for instance, the former critiques the latter due to a neglect of treating the casual nature of human action in relation to personal becoming. Cf. D.M. Savage, 'The Subjective Dimension of Human Work: The Conversion of the Acting Person in Laborem Exercens', in: Karol Wojtyla's Philosophical Legacy, Vol. 35, Washington, D.C., The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2008, pp. 199-220; D.M. Savage, The Subjective Dimension of Human Work: The Conversion of the Acting Person According to Karol Wojtyla/John Paull! and Bernard Lonergan, New York, Peter Lang, 2008.

32 B. Gordijn, 'The Troublesome Concept of the Person', in: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 20, 1999, pp. 347-359 & H. Kuhse, 'Some Reflections on the Problem of Advance Directives, Person­hood and Personal Identity', in: Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal9.4, 1999, pp. 347-364.

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Kevin M. Dirksen & Paul T. Schotsmans 395

The Person in Boston Personalism, Described Further

As a Boston personalist himself, R. Burrow refers to Bertocci as the one to whom we must look for the most thorough, empirically adequate view of person. 33 Peter Bertocci was a third generation Boston personalist who studied not only under Brightman and Knudson at Boston University, but also at Harvard University with Alfred North Whitehead and W. Ernest Hocking.34 The pragmatism and process thought of Whitehead and Hocking pushed Bertocci toward developing the psychological dimensions of personhood.35 Bertocci identified himself as "straddling the borderlines of psychology and philosophy, refusing to allow what are barriers of convenience to separate our thinking about the moral experience of the person". 36 Broadly schooled in the psychology of the day, "he drew upon the work of the psychoanalytical theories of Freud, Jung, Adler, and Homey as well as the humanistic views of Fromm, Maslow, and Gordon Allport. " 37

Bertocci's 'person' was a psychosomatic self, "a complex, self-identifying, continuant unity whose activities involve psychic and physiological events. " 38

As such, his understanding of personhood differed in many respects from the account he inherited, the latter of which was complete with the idealist under­pinnings described above. 39 He defines the person in detail as:

Essentially a self-identifying being-becoming - a complex unity of irreducible activity­potentials: sensing, remembering, imagining, reasoning, feeling, wanting, willing, ought­ing, and aesthetic and religious appreciating. A person is, experiences himself or herself

33 R. Burrow, Jr., 'Response to Robert Neville's Review of The Boston Personalist Tradition', in: The Personalist Forum 5.2, 1989, p. 140.

34 P.A. Bertocci, 'Reflections on the Experience of "Oughting"', in: P. Deats & C. Robb (eds.), The Boston Personalist Tradition in Philosophy, Social Ethics and Theology, Macon (GA), Mercer University Press, 1986, p. 210. Deats identifies the themes inherited from Hocking and Whitehead to be of a certain idealistic variety: absolute and panpsychic, respectively, in: Deats, Intro to Boston, p. 6.

35 Burrow, Jr., Response to Neville, p. 140. 36 Bertocci, Experience of Oughting, p. 211. 37 J. Padgett, 'The Ethical Theory of Peter A. Bertocci', in: The Personalist Forum 7.1, 1991,

pp. 52-53. 38 Padgett, Theory of Bertocci, p. 53. See also: A. Reck, 'The Philosophical Achievement of Peter

A. Bertocci', in: The Personalist Forum 7.1, 1991, p. 81. 39 "I suggest that the understandable concerns to know what values are best and what their status

is in the universe have served to obscure, if not entirely conceal, oughting itself as an intrinsic dimen­sion of the person. I am aware that oughting as authoritative in its own light, along with the irreduc­ible quality of the cognitive ought, is disqualified by philosophers who argue that moral judgments are essentially a matter of acquired attitudes and therefore cannot be held to be true or false", (empha­sis mine) in: Bertocci, Experience of Oughting, p. 214.

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396 The Historical Roots of Personalism

as being, these activity-potentials. A person is not an identical, unchanging being in and through them, but self-identifying as expressed in them.40

A definition with noticeable differences from Bowne and Brightman, Bertocci' s person "does not have, but is its experiences" .41 From an ethical point of view, his understanding "combines a concern for providing insight into the resolution of moral problems along with stressing the values of character and caring" .42

Oliver champions the achievement in formulating a personalism freed from most of its idealistic baggage.43 Though the contribution of Bertocci is highly estimated by Oliver, both he and Neville neglect to see this thought in Bowne himself. Richard Prust details the inherent tension in Bowne between under­standing the person in the language of German idealism and his trending toward a definition more akin to Bertocci.44 Prust describes how "Bowne's interest in underwriting the unity and continuity of personal life can be pro­vided for in an account which identifies a person unambiguously as a charac­ter of action" .45 While Bowne did not reach the definition that the psychoan­alytically-trained Bertocci would later provide, it was an understanding of personality which is hinted at along the way.

The Ethics of Boston Personalism

For the Boston personalists, a discussion of personality is only a prelude for consideration of their conduct in the moral sphere. The Boston personalists

40 Bertocci, Experience of Oughting, p. 212. Cf: P.A. Bertocci, The Person God Is, New York, Humanities Press, 1970, chapters 2-6; P.A. Bertocci, The Goodness of God, Washington, D.C., Uni­versity Press of America, chapters 4 and 8. Bertocci proposes "five basic universal human (instinc­toid) needs ... tissue, defensive, achievement (curiosity and mastery), affiliative (tenderness, sympathy, respect) and creativity. Emphasis is on the complex motivation of human beings", Padgett, Theory of Bertocci, p. 53.

41 Oliver, Relational Personalism, p. 39 42 Padgett, Theory of Bertocci, p. 52. 43 Oliver, Relational Personalism, pp. 38-39. 44 R.C. Prust, 'Soul Talk and Bowne's Ontology of Personhood', in: The Personalist Forum 13.1,

1997, pp. 69-76. Perhaps the passage in which Bowne most evidences this is as follows: "We are not abstract intellects nor abstract wills, but we are living persons, knowing and feeling and having various interests, and in the light of knowledge and under the impulse of our interests trying to find our way, having an order of experience also and seeking to understand it and to guide ourselves so as to extend or enrich that experience, and thus to build ourselves into larger and fuller and more abundant personal life." Bowne, Personalism, p. 263.

45 Prust, Bowne's Ontology, p. 76. However, Prust witnesses a tendency to identify the person both as a grammatical and ontological substantive: a kind of problematic dualism of a different sort than Descartes'. Cf. Prust, Bowne's Ontology, p. 75.

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Kevin M. Dirksen & Paul T. Schotsmans 397

called their ethical system the 'moral laws'. It is a structure of ethical respon­sibility which provides a decision making apparatus to guide the moral person. Consisting of universal propositional constructs organized categorically from the formal to the axiological to the personal, they intend to apply for all per­sons in all times and all places.46 By "moving from the abstract to the concrete, and in a progressive fashion that made each law dependent upon and inclusive of the laws that preceded it" ,47 the laws progressively build and accumula­tively arrive at a kind of model personhood. The particular laws were exegeted and re-presented in a coherent system from the ethics of Bowne by the leading Boston school personalist of the second generation Edgar Sheffield Brightman.48 The tradition of the moral laws resulted from the conviction that "human life must yield to moral criticism and must be guided by moral principles or laws" .49 Brightman understood the locus of human existence to be "that of class war, economic war, international war, and petty feuds ... our world is a world of conflict"; 50 such realities "led Boston Personalists, almost without exception, to deal resolutely with human suffering and anguish, the problem of good-and-evil". 51 Akin to their philoso­phy and theology, the ethics of personalism submit that "all values are of, by, in and for persons" .52 Because of this person-focused valuation, a person­centered ethics followed accordingly.

46 "Such principles are universal and rational. They are not specific cultural prescriptions that apply to the particular experiences of only one society. They are principles of rational development that ought to control in a regulative way the choices of all persons." W.G. Muelder, 'Edgar S. Bright­man: Person and Moral Philosopher', in: P. Deats & C. Robb (eds.), The Boston Personalist Tradi­tion in Philosophy, Social Ethics and Theology, Macon (GA), Mercer University Press, 1986, p. 115.

47 G.J. Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, West Sussex, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, p. 3!8.

48 R. Burrow, Jr., 'Moral Laws in Borden P. Bowne's Principles of Ethics', in: The Personalist Forum 6.2, 1990, pp. 161-181. Most of the moral laws as systematized by Brightman are present in germinal form within Bowne's essay on ethics (B.P. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, New York, Amer­ican Book, 1892). "The consciousness of a difference between right and wrong and the will to do right is the necessary precondition of a discussion or person counting as moral at all. Randall Auxier calls this aspect of Bowne's methodology the 'Bowne move'." Cf. J. Bradford, 'Amelioration and Expansion: Borden Parker Bowne on Moral Theory and Moral Change', in: The Personalist Forum 13: I, 1997, p. 36.

49 P. Deats, 'Conflict and Reconciliation in Communitarian Social Ethics'. in: P. Deats & C. Robb (eds.), The Boston Personalist Tradition in Philosophy, Social Ethics and Theology, Macon (GA), Mercer University Press, 1986, p. 279.

50 E.S. Brightman, Nature and Values, New York, Abingdon, 1945, p. 138. 51 Deats, Intro to Boston, p. 12. It was this precise reality which prompted theological develop­

ment in understanding God's omnipotence and power as self-restricted: a problematic development by and for certain Boston personalists as well as its theological heritage when considered historically.

52 Muelder, Person & Moral Philosopher, p. 115.

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398 The Historical Roots of Personalism

Though Brightman titled his ethics the Moral Laws and called the various universal propositional constructs 'laws', both Burrow, Jr. and Dorrien under­stand the term 'law' to better be described as 'principle' in terms of the way in which Brightman and his followers interpreted the nature of the construct. Burrow, Jr. suggests that "the term law has about it an air of rigidity, a notion quite out of character in personalism". 53 As such, the term "principle" is a much more fluid and flexible term that does not bring to mind the idea of unchangeability and permanence. It is thus a more reasonable one in a philo­sophical system that stresses the processive and active nature of being. 54

They conclude that 'principle' provides a more accurate description of the system's guiding, regulative nature, while law misdirects toward a prescriptive schematic. On this point, Burrow, Jr. continues: "since the term law is confus­ing ... some of Brightman's students substituted the term principle. Because of his own discomfort with the term law, Brightman would likely have welcomed the change ... a salutary one."55 He describes formal laws (logical law and the law of autonomy), axiological laws (consequences, best possible, specification, most inclusive end and ideal control) and personalistic laws (individualism, altruism, ideal personality). The formal laws are the first category in this system, which include the logical law and the law of autonomy. They explicate "the norms to which a reason­able will must conform" .56 First, the logical law calls for uniformity in inten­tion and urges freedom from self-contradiction in action. A person marked by such realities, one of 'formal rightness' and moral consistency, "does not both will and not will the same end. "57 Secondly, the law of autonomy urges the need of persons to act in such a way that the values they hold are represented in the acts they choose. Brightman's discussion of autonomy here (as well as in the previous law) is heavily dependent upon Kantian ethics, 58 though he felt the categorical imperative was lacking in certain respects.59

After the 'formal laws' come the 'axiological laws' which consist of: the axi­ological law, the law of consequences, the law of the best possible, the law of

53 Burrow, Jr., Personalism, p. 205. 54 Burrow, Jr., Personalism, p. 204. 55 Burrow, Jr., Personalism, p. 204. 56 Dorrien, Social Ethics, p. 318. 57 E.S. Brightman, Moral Laws, New York, Abingdon, 1933, p. 98. 58 Lavely, Debt to Kant, p. 33. 59 Lavely, Debt to Kant, p. 33. Brightman understood Kant to be a formalist. He goes on at length

to describe the "defects of purely formal ethics" in Brightman, Moral Laws, pp. 121-124. The defi­ciency of the categorical imperative necessitated the inclusion of axiological and personalistic laws to what was otherwise a highly Kantian-inspired category of formal laws.

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Kevin M. Dirksen & Paul T. Schotsmans 399

specification, the law of the most inclusive end and the law of ideal control. This set of laws explains "the values (ends) that a reasonable will should seek to realize". 60 Brightman on the difference between the 'axiological laws' and 'formal laws' which came before:

The Formal Laws deal with the rational principles of choice; the Axiological Laws deal with the rational principles of values chosen. The Formal Laws prescribe that I shall not entertain contradictory intentions; they command sincerity. The Axiological Laws prescribe that I shall not, however, sincerely seek for contradictory values; they command intelli­gence. Obedience to the Formal Laws is far from guaranteeing obedience to the Axiological. The latter demand a more objective and teleological point of view, more detailed empirical observation of value experience, and more intellectual work in their application.61

Freedom is inherent to both the 'formal laws' and the 'axiological laws': how­ever, it is in the latter where freedom is directed toward choosing specific values in consistent relation. Brightman understood that axiological guidance could only be rendered within a region demarcated by autonomy and the logic of cause and effect. In other words, a person cannot choose the good if real choice or real effects do not exist. The axiological law understands that when a person is choosing the values which are desired, they ought to be "self-consistent, harmonious and coherent, not values which are contradictory or incoherent with one another" .62 Coherency in reason and in action- "the broader logic of the total life"- is, therefore, foun­dational for Boston Personalists.63 Following is the law of consequences which demands not only consideration of the immediate effects of moral activity, but the long-term consequences, as we11.64 Not only within the act itself should both immediate and impending consequences be considered, but also other possible actions or even inactions. According to the law of the best possible, the moral

60 Dorrien, Social Ethics, p. 318. 61 Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 125. 62 Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 125. 63 Lavely, Debt to Kant, p. 37. An entire essay could be devoted to the importance of coherence

in Boston personalism. J.H. Lavely, one of the philosophers of the tradition, explains it best in: Lavely, Philosophical Heritage, pp. 261-265. "Coherence is not to be equated with reason or ration­ality. Rather, reason or rationality is a specification of coherence and like coherence finds its founda­tion and sanction in the nature of the person," p. 265. The person itself can be understood in terms of coherence: "Person is a matrix of a single basic desire, which I prefer to call a desire for coher­ence," pp. 264-265. And fmally: "Coherence is also a universal principle of value. "True value would be a fully coherent fulfilled desire for a fully coherent object." The point is worth emphasizing: coherence is a principle for interpreting existence," p. 261. Lavely cites Brightman above in: E.S. Brightman, A Philosophy of Religion, New York, Prentice-Hall, 1940, p. 536.

64 Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 142.

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400 The Historical Roots of Personalism

permissibility of an act is not enough. Instead, it is necessary to act in such a way that each situation is improved, where possible.65 The law of specification anticipates the importance of the contextual situation of moral activity,66 espe­cially by other Christian ethicists like Joseph Fletcher.67 In the law of the most inclusive end, Brightman introduces the idea of a 'life plan' or narrative by which persons act in an uninterrupted, successive manner.68 Moral action is not a sum-total of the disjointed, atemporal decisions a person makes; rather, the way a person acts in a specific situation should also connect to the life for which a person lives. Coherence ought to comprise the relation between the event and the narrative.69 Finally, the law of ideal control concludes the axiological laws, and by Brightman's own admission, does not suggest another principle or new guidance moral activity: "its function is that of unification and systemization. "70

The final category or "most concrete set"71 is the 'personalistic laws' contain­ing the law of individualism, the law of altruism and the law of the ideal personality. Brightman describes the threefold movement from the formal to the axiological and arriving at the personal as follows:

The Formal Laws dealt solely with the will as subjective fact. The Axiological Laws dealt with the values which the will ought to choose. The Personalistic Laws are more compre­hensive; they deal with the personality as a concrete whole.72

The law of individualism resembles the law of the best possible in its codification; 73 however, Brightman means to create a law which predicates a kind of first person responsibility in a phenomenological sense.74 Two parts

65 Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 156. 66 Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 171. 67 J. Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality, London, Westminster John Knox Press, 1966. 68 Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 183. 69 Cf. six footnotes above. 70 Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 194. 71 Burrow, Jr., Laws in Bowne, p. 161. 72 Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 204. 73 Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 204. 74 The later and more well-known ethical reflections of French phenomenologists Paul Ricoeur and

Emmanuel Levinas are helpful here. Brightman is closer to what Levinas would develop in positing the existence of a kind of moral responsibility in the first person, though would disagree sharply with what Levinas posits as the content. Cf. R. Burggraeve, Emmanuel Levinas et Ia socialite de /'argent. Un philosophe en quete de Ia realite journaliere. La genese de 'Socialite et argent' ou /'ambigui"te de /'argent, Leuven, Peeters, 1997, pp. 79-85. Ricoeur also begins his analysis of moral responsibility in the frrst person, but sees the development of an ethic only in the second person with alterity. The ethical intention which Ricoeur locates in freedom is only attested to and not yet fully manifest in a phenom­enological sense. Brightman also relies heavily on freedom, especially in the formal laws. On the topic, Ricouer submits that "freedom can only attest to itself in the works where it objectifies itself",

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Kevin M. Dirksen & Paul T. Schotsmans 401

comprise the law of altruism. The first evidences a phenomenological move­ment beyond the first person whereby the recognition of others requires that the moral actor be respectful of them "as ends in themselves". 75 Secondly, Brightman provides a practical suggestion that it is both easier to achieve and better to share in the values attained through cooperative moral activity.76 To conclude the personalistic laws, as well as Brightman's moral laws in full, is the law of ideal personality. It is the law to which all the others trend: the summation of the prior moral description. It appends to the system "a defi­nitely concrete unity of purpose, an aesthetic fact which calls on the individual to create out of the materials of his life the plan of a harmonious whole which he aims to realize". 77 The law of ideal personality bears a resemblance to the law of the most inclusive end, although modified by the perspective of person­ality in the particular and the aggregate.78 The final word of Brightman's development of the moral laws points toward the direction in which this ethi­cal systemwould be interpreted by its inheritors: the social dimension. In the law of altruism, Brightman seems to be heading toward the community or further consideration of persons in social settings.79 However, the final law is less communal or social and more akin to the personal atomism character­ized by the law of individualism. Other than any other area, it was here that latter Boston personalists would suggest improvement is needed. Whereas Brightman understood the personalistic laws to be "more comprehensive ... [treating] personality as a concrete whole"80 than the laws which came before, Brightman's intellectual descendents thought it was neither comprehensive enough nor a treatment of personality as a concrete whole. They "judged that

P. Ricoeur, 'The Problem of the Foundation of Moral Philosophy', in: Philosophy Today 22.3, 1978, p. 175. In sum, Brightman's law of individualism resembles first person moral responsibility though: more akin to Levinas than Ricoeur and of a fundamentally different character than either.

75 Again, this is reminiscent of what Levinas would later call responsibility to and for the other. E. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1985, p. 128. In this analysis, we are highly dependent upon Levinas scholar Roger Burggraeve in his yet unpublished essay, A Three-Dimensional Ethics of Responsibility: The Provocative Wisdom of Emmanuel Levinas.

76 Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 223. 77 Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 242. 78 Brightman knew that "for personalism, the whole problem of reality is a social problem; and

every conflict in human relations involves our relations to that 'great socius' whom religion calls God". Dorrien, Idealism, Realism and Modernity, p. 302.

79 This is evident via the second half of the law where he prescribes that the moral person ought to "co-operate with others in the production and enjoyment of shared values". Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 223.

80 Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 204.

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402 The Historical Roots of Personalism

[the individual person as the center of consciousness and will] made personal­ist idealism too individualistic"; therefore, the moral laws, like other areas of Bowne/Brightman-style personalism, demanded growth. As such and in accordance with Brightman's own willingness for the moral laws to be amended,81 several additions were offered. They added the law of development to the axiological laws; a new category of "communitarian laws" (cooperation, social devotion, ideal community); the laws of practice (conflict and reconciliation, fallibility and corrigibility) and the metaphysical law. These moral laws of the Boston personalists are the normative musings of Bowne, as systematized by Brightman and further developed by Muelder and other successors. Clearly, they have swelled in number and perhaps become a potentially unusable construct. However, they remain a century's worth of ethical deliberation following the claim that a detailed, moral methodology is essential to ensure right, coherent relation in society. Just as persons them­selves and their conduct in the ethical realm, they are quite original, eminently complex and varying in form and content: a very human solution for persons in decision making.

Conclusion

It has been established that Bowne created a theoretical framework that became known as Boston personalism. Though he developed an understanding of person and wrote about their conduct in the ethical realm, it was through inheritors of Bowne's system that the person came alive and their ethical existence described. In effect, "Bowne transformed Boston University, had a large impact on Amer­ican Methodism, and was easily the major American Christian thinker of his generation, with a significant ecumenical following. "82 His system flourished through the leadership and development of Brightman, Knudson and McCo­nnell; later by Muelder, Bertocci and others. Recent publications illustrate this influence: we refer to C. Smith, who offers a kind of personalism which is substantiated within the critical realist position in sociology and against episte­mologies grounded in naturalistic phenomenology toward the advancement of

81 Deats, Communitarian Social Ethics, p. 280. 82 Dorrien, Imagining Progressive Religion, p. 293. If Bowne was the major American Christian

thinker of his generation, William James was America's greatest philosopher of the same era. He writes of Bowne: "how the ancient spirit of Methodism evaporates under those wonderfully able rationalistic booklets (which everyone should read) of a philosopher like Professor Bowne." Hartley, Evangelicals at a Crossroads, p. 126.

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Kevin M. Dirksen & Paul T. Schotsmans 403

human dignity "which is ontologically real, analytically irreducible and phenom­enologically apparent". 83 And the influence of Bowne is also very present inside the African American theological context, certainly realized by Rufus Burrow Jr. in his book on Martin Luther King, Jr.84

Like European personalists they all insist on the methaphysical and moral irre­ducibility of the person.85 Personalism influences strongly current intercontinen­tal ethical theories and models, like care ethics and consultation ethics. This illustrates the importance of an intercontinental dialogue on the origins of personalism. A further examination and dialogue between European and North American personalists is therefore indicated and a worthwhile endeavour.

Kevin M. Dirksen is the senior clinical ethics fellow at the UCLA Health System Ethics Center. He completed the Amy and Anne Porath Clinical Ethics Fellowship serving Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica UCLA Medical Center and Orthopedic Hospital, Mattei Children's Hospital and the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Institute in August 2012. He completed the advanced Master of Science degree in biomedical ethics at the KU Leuven, Radboud Uni­versiteit Nijmegen and the Universita degli Studi di Padova in 2011. He also completed a Master of Divinity program specializing in ethics and health at Boston University School of Theology in 2010. His undergraduate training took place at the University of Portland for the Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in philosophy, history and political science in 2007. Address: UCLA Health System Ethics Center, 10833 Le Conte Avenue 17-165 CHS, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.

Paul T. Schotsmans is professor of medical ethics at the Faculty of Medicine, KU Leuven. He is also program director of the Erasmus Mundus Master of Bioethics at the Universities of Leuven, Nijmegen and Padua. He is vice-chair of the Belgian Advisory Committee on Bioeth­ics and member of the Belgian Transplantation Council. He was vice-dean of the Faculty of Medicine of the KU Leuven, president of the European Association of Centers of Medical Eth­ics and member of the Board of the International Association of Bioethics. Address: Centrum voor Biomedische Ethiek en Recht, Kapucijnenvoer 35-box 7001, 3000 Leu­ven, Belgium.

83 C. Smith, What is a Person: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life and the Moral Goode from the Person Up, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010.

84 R. Burrow, Jr., God and Human Dignity: the Personalism, Theology and Ethics of Martin Luther King, Jr., University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.

85 E. Kohak, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 127.

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