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THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF

PERSONALISM
a

KEVIN M. DIRKSEN & PAUL T. SCHOTSMANS

a

UCLA Health System Ethics Center

Faculty of Medicine , KU Leuven

b c

Universities of Leuven , Nijmegen, Padua

Published online: 25 Apr 2013.

To cite this article: KEVIN M. DIRKSEN & PAUL T. SCHOTSMANS (2012) THE HISTORICAL
ROOTS OF PERSONALISM, Bijdragen: International Journal for Philosophy and
Theology, 73:4, 388-403
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2143/BIJ.73.4.2959713

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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

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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 voices 1, 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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389

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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

R.E. Auxier, 'An Editorial Statement', in: The Pluralist 1.1, 2006, p. v.
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.
3

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The Historical Roots of Personalism

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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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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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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

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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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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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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 Anderson'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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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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The Historical Roots of Personalism

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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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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 development 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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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,5 8 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.

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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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.

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.
61

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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.

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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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.7 6 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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[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.

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.
82

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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.