Personalism presumes to benefit from an evaluation and assessment of personal interactions with their cultural values in comparison with those of other cultures, if only to gain a healthy perspective on what it means to be a person in a given cultural moiety. This paper examines a personalist’s partial solution to a commonly expressed problem: that of the individual as opposed to the collectivity. This issue in turn gets involved in two critical discussions in particular: the capitalist versus socialist agendas, and the individualist propensity toward, on the one hand romanticism, and on the other, objectification and rationalism in a veritable cornucopia of personal rights. This paper brings together the viewpoints of Nikolai Berdyaev and Alfred North Whitehead in the regard to which they reflect the lead ideas through their respective personalist philosophies.
Charles Herrman is Senior Research Fellow of AIPCT, and an independent scholar from Austin, Texas. He works extensively in formal ontology (especially with ideas in the vein of Peirce and Whitehead), axiology, the philosophy of history, law, and of culture, and also in logic and the philosophy of mathematics. He has published numerous scholarly articles across several disciplines. His work at the AIPCT has concerned civilizational structures of Honor and Dignity. He provided a seminar in cultural ontology in June 2017 based on a book manuscript he is refining. Some of his recent writing has covered these topics and others, including David Graeber’s contributions to economic and anthropological thought. Some of those writings are available here. He was in residence late July and early August 2023 and provided a seminar which will appear shortly on our YouTube channel.
