The Pluralist

For many years, modern social science and philosophy have been a battlefield of conflicting visions of the human person. There are many armies involved in this fight—among them the personalists who, even among themselves, represent different approaches to the understanding of the human person.

G. W. Allport states that both philosophy and psychology are interested in the same common subject matter—that is, the human person.¹ Allport's statement in this regard is very clear: personalistic psychology and philosophy must join forces to fight against the reduction of the human person to a mere football or an academic pawn. We have to acknowledge an interior power of self-directedness in the human person.

This article is an attempt to evaluate the relevance of Allport's psychological concept of the human to philosophy, but in particular to philosophical personalism, for, as he says, it is "inconceivable that two intentioned disciplines working on a common subject matter can indefinitely remain apart" (Personality and Social Encounter 36). For him, both psychology and philosophy should cooperate in getting to know the human person better. He puts it as follows:

With the present century, psychologists have accumulated vast stores of research and insight. But unless I am mistaken, philosophical personalists have not used these findings to any extent, as a testing ground for their own theories. And vice versa, nearly all of this psychological accumulation has taken place without the benefit of the hard thinking of those philosophers who have centered their attention to an equal degree upon the person. It seems as though two separate disciplines have evolved around the same subject matter, each with a distinctive contribution but scarcely aware of the other's existence.

(Allport, Personality and Social Encounter 18) [End Page 71]

Allport recognizes the distinctiveness of both approaches to the human person, but he does not speak of separation, and in that sense, leaves room for a collaborative, comprehensive understanding of each other's methodology to give a more exact picture of the human person, which is their common subject matter. He states further that any one-sided approach is inadequate for describing the richness of the human reality and leads to an incomplete understanding of the nature of the human person. As one philosopher puts it, philosophy of itself "cannot give us a complete picture of man. It does not extend to the material aspect of human nature, without which any description of man is incomplete" (Donceel 22).