Reply to Phillip Ferreira

JAN OLOF BENGTSSON, Lund University

Personalism in all of its forms turns against the reduction of the person to or dissolution of the person in matter as well as in ideas. In my book, I argue that both of these reductions are often related to pantheistic modes of thought. In the course of modernity, such modes became increasingly prominent, not least due to the influence of Spinoza, whose philosophy displayed the characteristic ambiguity of modern pantheism in that it could be interpreted as either idealistic or materialistic. In the Enlightenment period, pantheism assumed rationalistic forms, inclining sometimes toward deism, sometimes toward materialism. German idealism retained much of the rationalism and was perceived to reduce the person to ideas rather than matter, but the broadly Spinozistic ambiguity persisted so that it did not take long before, at the hands of the Left Hegelians, it was itself transformed into materialism. The romantic era also added irrationalistic forms of pantheism. On my analysis, modern personalism began as a reaction against the threat against the person in all of these forms of pantheism.