A few years ago — June 14, 2018, to be exact — David Brooks had a column in the New York Times entitled, “Personalism: The Philosophy We Need.” Because personalism is one of the philosophies that I teach at St. John’s University, I read the essay as soon as I saw the title.
Not only is personalism a philosophy I teach, but it is also the philosophy that I have embraced in recent years as my own.
I tell students, mostly first-year students, in a course I teach entitled, “Introduction to the Philosophy of Person,” that if they wish to put a tag on the philosophy I am presenting to them, it might be described as “existential personalism.”
In the elective course on the philosophy of personalism that I teach to students, many of whom major in philosophy, I make Brooks’ essay required reading.
I am hoping that the essay will help students see the importance of philosophy.
Clearly and succinctly, Brooks presents the main insights of personalism.
Brooks writes the following:
The first responsibility of personalism is to see each other person in his or her full depth. This is astonishingly hard to do. As we go through our busy days it’s normal to want to establish I-It relationships with the security guard in your building or the office worker down the hall. Life is busy and sometimes we just need to reduce people to their superficial function.
But personalism asks, as much as possible, for I-Thou encounters…
The second responsibility of personalism is self-gifting.
Personalists believe that people are ‘open wholes.’ They find their perfection in communion with other whole persons. The crucial questions in life are not ‘what’ questions — what do I do? They are ‘who’ questions — who do I follow, who do I serve, who do I Iove?
The reason for life, Jacques Maritain wrote, is ‘self-mastery for the purpose of self-giving.’ It’s to give yourself as a gift to people and causes you … to receive such gifts … It is through this love that each person brings unity to his or her fragmented personality. Through this love, people touch the full personhood in others and purify the full personhood in themselves.
The third responsibility of personalism is availability: to be open for this kind of giving and friendship. This is a tough one, too; life is busy, and being available for people takes time and intentionality. …
The big point is that today’s social fragmentation didn’t spring from shallow roots. It sprang from worldviews that amputated people from their own depths and divided them into simplistic, flattened identities. That has to change. As Charles Peguy said, ‘The revolution is moral or not at all.’
Re-reading Brooks’ essay at this time is especially interesting to me because my guess is that after writing the essay in 2018, Brooks may have read more personalist philosophers because his latest book, “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen” (New York: Random House, 2023, pp. 306, $30.00) is filled with insights from the philosophy of personalism. Some personalist philosophers are not easy reading.
This is at least partly due to the fact that they are writing about the mystery of the human person and often about the mystery of God. One of Brooks’ talents is the ability to present difficult concepts clearly. A strong background in philosophy is not necessary to understand Brooks’ book. I would not hesitate to recommend “How to Know a Person” to anyone who is interested in reflecting on contemporary culture, and I plan to recommend it to anyone I know who might be interested in personalism. Brooks writes the following:
“In this age of creeping dehumanization, I’ve become obsessed with social skills: how to get better at treating people with consideration; how to get better at understanding people right around us. I’ve come to believe that the quality of our lives and the health of our society depends to a large degree, on how well we treat each other in the minute interactions of our daily lives.” (p. 9)
I had to read that statement of Brooks several times. My first reaction was that he was overstating the importance of “minute interactions.” Could they be as important as he believes?
As I reflected on his statement, I came to agree completely with him. Each of us has a special gift to give, and that gift is the unique person each of us is.
That self-gift can make an important difference in our own lives and the lives of others.
I think of every self-gift, every act of love as though it is like throwing a pebble into a brook.
We have no idea how far the ripples will go. There are no small or unimportant self-gifts.
I believe that every self-gift, and every act of love can have cosmic significance.
Father Lauder is a philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica. He presents two 15-minute talks from his lecture series on the Catholic Novel, 10:30 a.m. Monday through Friday on NET-TV.