Boston Personalism(s) generally operate(s) upon the presupposition that “persons are “ontologically basic and constitutive of the starting point of all philosophizing” (Hackett, 49) and that “only personality – finite and infinite – is ultimately real” (King, 30). Not only is reality personal, founded upon the inherent worth and uniqueness of the individual, but an individual experiences reality only through social relations: “relations are what make up experience, and any time-slice of experience is a relation” (Heckett, 49). If social relations constitute the experiences of an interdependent individual, and these experiences constitute reality, then the conditions for social relations themselves perform a constitutive function of reality. The conditions for social relations – such as race, gender, sex, and sexuality – through which we come to know ourselves and others are, then, a condition for the possibility of existence. Does such a move, beyond the “doer”/person to the conditions that shape them – or rather, which form the necessary prerequisites for social existence – bring personalism to the end of its relevance? Or, could its foundational ontological claims be reinterpreted to articulate a sort of “postmodern personalism,” meaning at minimum a recognition of the historical contingency of the concept of the “person” itself? And/or, would such an attempt begin a definitive departure from the Boston movement(s) altogether?
Rather than an ideal personhood which is either denied or upheld, perhaps a postmodern personalism recognizes that there are various forces at work in the construction of the person within each society, and while one might not have recourse to an absolute and universal moral law, one can open discourse through subversion practices that render the category of “person” unstable – or, more accurately, bring to attention the inherent instability and political nature of the category itself (Butler, “V. Identity, Sex, and the Metaphysics of Substance,” 22 - 34). A postmodern personalist could look to this current U.S. administration’s detention of immigrants in Guantanamo, erasure of references to Trans and Queer persons from national monuments and government websites, and their condemnation of persons with disabilities as “threats to the American way of life” and can name the performative function of these “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. I, 140). The performative function of these techniques is a delineation of the conditions under which one is considered a person by the current administration through making hypervisible those deemed “deviant.” As Foucault wrote, one can look to persons deemed “insane” to determine what sanity is for a culture and the mechanisms through which this category is created and enforced (Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 780).
The postmodern personalist still has recourse, like King, to alternative interpretations of value systems that already exist – be that U.S. democracy, Christian religious stories and ethics, and/or other symbolic systems within which they are consciously located. They can name and utilize these alternative interpretations as they make ethical demands without the need for a priori concepts such as an absolute universal God/Divine person or “absolute moral law.” By drawing attention to the diverse institutions through which current political regimes seek to essentialize and solidify the social conditions through which U.S. “persons” (read: white, cis-gender, wealthy, male) come into being, a postmodern personalist destabilizes this hegemonic phantasm altogether without participating in the reifying process through which one tradition’s concept of the personhood/divinity/moral law is elevated as absolutely and universally true. All conceptions are historically contingent, bringing to light not only their instability but also the institutions and mechanisms through which they are enforced.
Works Cited:
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York; London: Routledge, 2007.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume One. The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin Books, 2020.
Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 777–95. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343197.
Hackett, J. Edward. “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Legacy of Boston Personalism.” Pluralist (Champaign, Ill.) 17, no. 3 (2022): 45–70. https://doi.org/10.5406/19446489.17.3.03.
King, Martin Luther, and Clayborne Carson. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. London: IPM [u.a.], 2000.
This paper explores the potential for a "postmodern personalism" by reinterpreting Boston Personalism(s) foundational ontological claims. While Boston Personalism typically centers on the ontological primacy of persons and their social relations, a postmodern approach interrogates the social conditions — such as race, gender, and sexuality — that shape these relations and which define personhood itself. Drawing on Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, this framework highlights how the current U.S. political regime enforces hegemonic norms of personhood, making "deviants" hypervisible to enforce the norm. Rather than requiring recourse to universal moral absolutes, a postmodern personalist can utilize alternative interpretations of the existing value systems within which they are located, such as U.S. democracy or their Christian ethics, to reformulate ethical relations. They destabilize the hegemonic conception of personhood without essentializing alternatives, revealing the historical contingency of all concepts. This approach seeks not to discard personalism but to expand its critical relevance.