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Personalism - An Alternative to Both Right and Left Wing Totalitarianism
Modern individualism represented no real challenge to the intellectual environment in which man tended to be seen as a mere phenomenal being, easily assimilated into nature, the impersonal principle of idealism, the unconscious, the cosmic will, or the collectivities of the family, the state, the nation, the social class. Man was a product of external forces, an insignificant piece in a cosmic puzzle, without dignity, freedom, responsibility, or fundamental existential significance. It was this overall, many-faceted intellectual climate and development that produced the personalist counter-movement throughout the nineteenth century, a movement which, by drawing on other, alternative resources in the thought of the Enlightenment and Romanticism as well as on the classical, medieval Christian, and early modern legacy, sought to rescue the unique position and status of the singular human person.
Maritain, too, wrote of personalism as “a phenomenon of reaction” against the “two opposite errors” of totalitarianism and individualism. Contrary to Hegelian collectivism and the fierce individualism of Nietzsche's superman, these thinkers stressed both the inviolable dignity of the individual person and at the same time his social nature and essential relationality.
Underlying this program was Mounier's bold conception of Christian experience, an experience of “tragic optimism,” colored both by the drama of Christian existence and by the certainty of eschatological victory. The Christian's most important virtue is that of the heroic witness, far from the evasiveness or sentimentality of other, eviscerated strains of Christianity. Thus Mounier's idea of the Christian as the watchful athlete engaged in spiritual combat provided a stark response to Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity as a religion of the weak.
Personalism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
A Reformed European Model, you can find a short summary of personalism in my thesis on pages 47 to 51.
hass-im-netz.info, Informationen gegen Rechtsextremismus online.
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