Personalism is the fundamental philosophical stance that recognizes the person as the irreducible point of departure and goal of all thought and action. The person is not one object among others but the being that holds an incomparable precedence over all other beings — the precedence of the someone over the something.
Within the ontology of personhood, two principal forms of personalism can be distinguished:
Act-Personalism (Scheler) understands the person as the concrete unity of their spiritual acts. The person lives in knowing, loving, willing — the person is this living nexus of enactment. The strength of this approach lies in its closeness to concrete experience; its weakness, in its inability to secure the identity of the person across time when no acts are being carried out.
Substance-Personalism (Stein, Seifert, Spaemann) understands the person as substance — an independently existing spiritual being that bears its acts but is not identical with them. This approach can explain why the person remains the same in sleep, in coma, and in dementia.
The synthesis of both insights is accomplished by the substance-ontological-relational concept of person: the person is substance and act, substantially constituted and relationally ordered toward community. The Personalist Norm (Wojtyła) formulates the ethical consequence: the person must never be a mere means but is always to be affirmed for their own sake.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology. Bexten 2017, ch. 2 (concepts of person) and ch. 3 (Personalist Norm).
Further sources:
- Wojtyła, Karol (1969): Osoba i czyn. Kraków. — Engl.: The Acting Person. Trans. A. Potocki. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979.
- Scheler, Max (1913/16): Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Halle: Niemeyer.
- Spaemann, Robert (1996): Personen. Versuche über den Unterschied zwischen „etwas” und „jemand”. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. (Engl.: Persons. The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.)