The “Relational Self”: Philosophical-Religious Reflections in Anthropology and Personalism
[“Relacne Ja”: filozoficko-nabozenske uvahy v oblasti antropologie a personalizmu]
Michal Valco – Peter Sturak
DOI: 10.18355/XL.2018.11.01XL.24
Abstract
Countering the forces of depersonalization and dehumanization which ran rampant in the course of the 20th century, the personalist movement (Mounier, Maritain, etc.) has made a solid attempt to lay the foundations for protecting human dignity, reorienting modern philosophical endeavors to focus again on basic questions of anthropology. While appreciating the motives and emphases of personalism in philosophy, the authors of this article argue in favor of the relational aspect in establishing human personhood, one’s dignity and inalienable rights. This notion has been developed by philosophers/theologians of the Eastern/Byzantine intellectual tradition. In addition, we argue that Soren Kierkegaard relational personalist existentialism has the potential to help us understand that human person’s dignity is inalienable and indisputable, for in their necessary albeit often unrecognized relatedness to transcendence, human persons have a transcendent source and destiny.
Key words: Relational personalism, human person, personalism, anthropology, Kierkegaard, Tillich