Category Archives: humanities

Personalism

What is “personalism”?

Last December’s series on existential humanism stated the concept of person to be a subset of human.

What does an ideology of persons–personalism–look like?

People may be said to be:

  1. Physical – People’s bodies are composed of matter. Further, people interact with other physical objects.
  2. Biological – People breathe, eat, and drink; and a great many of them fornicate and reproduce.
  3. Temporal – People are born, they live, and they die; they experience time.
  4. Cultural – People are embedded in cultures characterized by unique but shared ways of being.
  5. Social – People participate in societies consisting of concrete relations between themselves and others.
  6. Economic – People are agents who trade goods and services with one another in marketplaces.
  7. Technological – People invent and utilize tools to perform tasks they were previously unable or less able to accomplish.
  8. Artistic – People express themselves through the creation of original works such as paintings and songs.
  9. Intellectual – People aim to comprehend reality and achieve accurate understandings of it.
  10. Moral – People have unique and shared ideas of wrong versus right action.
  11. Spiritual – People seek enlightenment, wisdom, and contact with the divine or supernatural via practices such as meditation and prayer.
  12. Religious – People worship what they deem as sacred (e.g., God or Gods) through rituals and organized communion.
  13. Political – People negotiate and have interests that are in line or at odds with those of others.
  14. Athletic – Whether for fitness or organized play, people exercise their bodies and minds.
  15. Professional – People work toward particular goals, including money and satisfaction.
  16. Recreational – People enjoy leisurely activities such as taking walks and attending parties.
  17. Linguistic – People communicate via representational symbol systems characterized by semantics, syntax, and pragmatics.
  18. Psychological – People have minds and engage in behaviors. More specifically, they think, feel, are motivated, have personalities, interact with situations, sense, perceive, experience.

For the full source paper discussing the above list, visit: https://psyarxiv.com/fnjte/

Existentialism by Suraj (Pt. I)

Existentialism’s prime question is of what “it” means.

What is it? It could simply denote existentialism. This much might be somewhat circular. For if existentialism is concerned dearly with “meaning”, then it is foremost concerned with it’s own being. 

Existential circularity need not be equated with the fallacious logical kind. Its status for all existent beings shall become the foregoing analysis’ next focus.

Textual analysis (or hermeneutic work) as “all subjective”

This belief is rather easily explained away (though, sadly: not so easily disposed of, for the complacent offenders and “their” n=30 “subjects”!). It stems merely from a lack of correct understanding of differing methodologies, and their correspondences with prima facie differing practices.

Take my words, here. You are reading them. But are you reading me–my intent, my desires; and so on? If not, you are committing what I take to be the essential fallacy of the most literalizing scientists and analytic philosophers, who all fail to appreciate the proper way to arrive at another person’s meaning. For, if one does not understand what something means to the speaker–or, indeed, to any of their possibly-billions of listeners–one will forever be trapped and mired in his, her, or hir own “subjective” (in this case, impoverished as-such) meaning, distinct from and un-legitimized by one’s fellow beings in the world. Indeed: what a “meaning”!

For such a person, inter-subjectivity forever remains a mystery; coherent sociality at all willfully mystifies them, and what is left to mystify one will ultimately block one from becoming the best they can possibly be–whether “for themselves, or others”. (These quotes are necessary: for they hint at the absolute absurdity of the classical I-,-rather-than-thou formulation!)

In short, the one who instinctively dismisses hermeneutic work as “all subjective–and therefore useless” operates with a distinct lack of empathy: of caring for the immeasurable relativity of meaning among their “fellow” beings; of enriching subjectivity, generally; of truly understanding and connecting–and, henceforth, of caring for “him-, “her-, or “hir-self”.

Cling not to the dreaded “to the man!” “fallacy” quite so dearly, my friend–dialogical achievement is necessarily both art and science! Admit to a broader set of fallacies than have been so thoughtlessly inculcated: and tuck away that dirtied monologizing monocle, if only for the mere moment, good madams and sirs–