I am editing my chapter in the new upcoming Scheler volume. It’s on King and Scheler. Some tangential insights are now evident. The shortcoming of personalism (either Catholic or liberal-Protestant American versions) is in it never having developed a political philosophy on its own, but King certainly is the example of how one might be ethical-in-the-political as a personalist. King stands alongside other personalists like Dorothy Day and being ethical in the political just is religiously motivated activism. William James thought that religion motivated us to do the morally strenuous work that morality called for. Day and King got political because of their ethical commitments; it doesn’t go the other way. Personalists are not ethical because of the political. In this way, whatever the relation between ethics and politics, the personalist maintains no separation but privileges the ethical in all they do.
There’s a sense of an Aristotelian systematicity built into personalism. I usually define personalism as a metaphysical and ethical system in which persons are of infinite dignity and exist in a relational ontology that grounds the same inexhaustible dignity characteristic of its ethics. The central feature of personalist commitment is one shared by Levinas, the fact that a person is unique, singular, and incapable of being treated fairly if we transgress that unique singularity in any way, but respecting it. In this way, the person can never be exhausted by exchange values or regarded as an instrumental means to some other end wherein the person becomes a thing. Persons are no things. Of course, I am rare in the sense that while I started in phenomenological personalism with a dissertation on Scheler, it was largely the study of King’s writings and his connection to Edgar S. Brightman (and a few who attended Boston University that were present at Crozers Theological Seminary where King attended and was introduced to Brightman) that I fully opened more to the the side of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s mysticism and personalism as way to see the concrete effects of such a philosophy.
By contrast, I have been thinking long and hard about how unsatisfying Levinas leaves the relation of ethics and politics separate and he purposefully separates Palestinians as an other in his 1982 radio interview. I don’t know if this amounts to what Judith Butler charges as the Palestinians having no face at all for Levinas (though I am sympathetic to her criticism echoed by many) and certainly philosophies can be more beautiful and complete than those who authored them. For example, we can read Levinas’s ethical philosophy against his own failure to see the Palestinian as an other (it’s this current blindness in the world that goes both ways that started the book project now ratified under contract officially today; I just signed the contract with Palgrave Macmillan for Levinas, Scheler, and the Infinite Value of Persons).
Given the dearth of political philosophy in personalism, I just think that if personalists are going to be political, then the question of community in Scheler, beloved community in King, and the laws of ideal community that Deats, DeWolf and Muelder formulate are a response to the individualistic focus that Brightman articulated. An analogy might be helpful. Consider the weakness of James’s ethics. The weakness of James’s commitment to individualism exists despite the apparent relational ontology that could be pushed to do more for James than he opted to employ. One needs Dewey for a complete picture of the individual-in-community for a fleshed out pragmatist political philosophy in much the same way that personalists need to read some other stuff that answered these tensions in their own tradition by examining philosophies of community. Of course, the problem of religious thinkers is how to negotiate the traditions they navigate with living alongside others in a pluralistic society, the exact question on which Levinas is more blind than helpful. There’s a sense that Levinas knew his failure of his own thought in relation to politics.
At some point, these ramblings will become a book. Thanks for listening…
The Horizon and The Fringe 