Wolf Wolfensberger Summer Institute on Moral Issues

Announcing a 3-day Workshop on

Welcome!

           We are glad you are interested in this Summer Institute three-day workshop!  Below you will find a detailed description of the content and a regitration form following the description. 

The Content Outline

This workshop presents the late Dr. Wolf Wolfensberger's interpretation and synthesis of philosophical and value traditions that have been called "personalism," focusing especially on those from France in the late 19th to early 20th centuries and personalist thinking since then. Personalism, like other philosophies, has implications to a wide range of issues in life and society as this workshop will present, with special emphasis on implications for human services.

There is a long history of personalist thinking, and there are many schools and formulations of personalism. They all tend to emphasize the importance of the human person, especially vis-à-vis structures and absolutisms. The personalism movement that started in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, and that is the particular focus of this event, responded to totalitarian ideologies such as communism and fascism, and to the de-personalizing oppression of industrialized economies. The insights and recommendations of personalists to those concerns of more than one hundred years ago are still very timely. More recently, developments such as media control of society; computer-driven objectification, depersonalization, and centralization; the invasion of people's minds and their privacy, as via surveillance; and the tyranny of political correctness, as in academia - all these make personalist analysis and ideals still very relevant.

Some versions of personalism are more religious than others; some step into the domain of psychology and personality theory. This workshop will mention both religious and psychological ideas, meanings, and implications of personalism, but even people who do not share the religion of some personalist philosophers -¬ even people who do not consider themselves at all religious -- can find much food for thought in personalism ideas.

However, the workshop does not get into heavy-duty or specialized philosophical territory, but stays on the level of 'the intelligent layperson or non-specialist.' No previous versions of this workshop have been criticized as being beyond the grasp of the ordinary intelligent person.

The workshop covers the history and nature of personalism, some of its more prominent thinkers and writers and what they had to say, and many of the teachings of personalism. The bulk of the workshop is devoted to the following 'themes' that Dr. Wolfensberger identified in personalistic thinking:

1. Seeking to grasp the nature of entities (especially human nature), taking this nature into account, and working with it in any enterprise, rather than ignoring the nature of an entity, or trying to defeat it. 
2. The primacy of the spiritual over the material.
3. The intrinsic value and dignity of humans collectively, and of each and every human being, including those who are very reduced or impaired.
4. The uniqueness of each individual human.
5. Human freedom.
6. The "relational" nature of human beings, and implications to sex, family, community and state.
7. The imperative for each person to assume personal moral responsibility in life, and to act morally within any structures to which one belongs, regardless of the sanctions this may draw -- if need be, acting in contradiction or disobedience to authorities that de-dignify the human or try to destroy personal conscience. This assumption of personal responsibility also includes taking direct action to respond to the needs of others without waiting for or putting hopes in organizations or government to do so, as well as recruiting others to embrace the same kinds of actions and stances. All this also implies helping needy, rejected, or devalued people directly, with one's own bodily and mental resources and engagements.
8. What personalism calls 'subsidiarity', which means trying to address problems at the lowest feasible level of complexity, technology, organization, and hierarchy.

As each theme is explained, there will also be elaboration of action implications, and some interpretation of what personalist thinking and analysis would imply to developments that the earlier personalists did not confront or anticipate but that are part of contemporary society -- for instance, modernistic attacks on the value of the person, and contesting the very humanness of some people.

As time permits, a few other personalism ideas/ideals will also be sketched, such as the implications of personalism to economics and to the environment.

Format: The workshop is conducted in lecture style, with a sequential series of presentations that use many word slides and some picture slide illustrations as teaching aids. At the conclusion of each presentation, there is ample time for comments, questions, and discussion on what has been covered. Also, participants are offered a number of reflection questions for their own private meditation on the material that has been presented, and its implications for themselves.  As noted already, there are optional reflection sessions on the evenings of the first two days.