The Worldview of Personalism and Lotze's Failed Psychology

CHRISTOPHER HOYT, Western Carolina University

The First aim of Bengtsson's book is to reveal the "historical origins of modern personalistic philosophy" (Bengtsson 1), and he makes a convincing case that those origins go back some one hundred years before Bowne, and seventy-five before even Lotze, to the philosophical and theological ideas of F. H. Jacobi. Although Jacobi of course had his own context and influences, Bengtsson argues that he made singular insights into the "problematic meaning" of modern philosophy—into the deepest assumptions and attitudes of modernity itself—and he offered an alternative view that was the wellspring of personalism and cognate schools of thought (Bengtsson 2). Bengtsson's principal method is genealogical; he carefully traces the lineage of personal contacts and intellectual influences that connect Jacobi to nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers in Germany, Sweden, Britain, and America. The history that Bengtsson uncovers is little known, to be sure, and along the way he revives the legacies of men whose names most of us have no more than seen mentioned, despite their considerable standing and achievements in their own times; men like P. D. A. Atterbom and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison.