personalism,  a school of philosophy, usually idealist, which asserts that the real is the personal, i.e., that the basic features of personality—consciousness, free self-determination, directedness toward ends, self-identity through time, and value retentiveness—make it the pattern of all reality. In the theistic form that it has often assumed, personalism has sometimes become specifically Christian, holding that not merely the person but the highest individual instance of personhood—Jesus Christ—is the pattern.

Personalism is thus in the tradition of the cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) of René Descartes in holding that, in the subjective flow of lived-through experience, one makes more direct soundings of the real than in anything arriving through the tortuous paths of perceptual processes. The word person comes from the Latin persona, which referred to the mask worn by an actor and thus to his role. Eventually, it came to mean the dignity of a man among men. The person is thus supreme both in reality (as substance) and in value (as dignity).

There are various kinds of personalism. Though most personalists are idealists, believing that reality is either of, in, or for consciousness, there are also realistic personalists, who hold that the natural order, though created by God, is not as such spiritual; and, again, though most personalists are theists, there are also atheistic personalists. Among the idealists there are absolutistic personalists (see absolute Idealism), panpsychistic personalists (see panpsychism), ethical personalists, and personal idealists, for whom reality comprises a society of finite persons or an ultimate person, God.

Though elements of personalistic thought can be discerned in many of the greatest philosophers of the Western tradition and even in the Orient—as, for example, in Rāmānuja, a 12th-century Hindu theist—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a 17th–18th-century German philosopher and mathematician, is usually singled out as the founder of the movement and George Berkeley, the 18th-century Anglo-Irish churchman and epistemologist, as another of its seminal sources.

Personalism has been strongly represented in France, usually under the name of spiritualism. Inspired by Maine de Biran, an 18th–19th-century thinker who had taken as primordial the inner experience of acting against a resisting world, Félix Ravaisson-Mollien, a 19th-century philosopher and archaeologist, drew a radical distinction between the spatial world of static necessary law and the world of living individuals, spontaneous, active, and developing. This led in turn to the personalism of Henri Bergson, a 19th–20th-century intuitionist, who stressed duration as a nonspatial experience in which subjective states both present and past intimately interpenetrate to form the free life of the spiritual person and who posited the élan vital as a cosmic force expressing this life philosophy.

Personalism in the United States matured among 19th–20th-century philosophers of religion, often of the Methodist church, several of whom had studied in Germany under Rudolf Hermann Lotze, an erudite metaphysician and graduate in medicine. George Holmes Howison, for example, stressed the autonomy of the free moral person to the point of making him uncreated and eternal and hence free from an infinite person. Borden Parker Bowne, who made Boston University the citadel of personalism, was explicitly theistic, holding that men are creatures of God with many dimensions—moral, religious, emotional, logical—each worthy of consideration in its own right and each reflecting the rationality of the creator. Nature, too, for him, displays the energy and rational purpose of a God who is immanent in it as well as transcendent over it.

Through Bowne’s disciples Edgar Brightman and Ralph Tyler Flewelling and many others, personalism was influential through the mid-20th century, and its impact upon existentialism and phenomenology has perpetuated its spirit and many of its insights.