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Appraisal Volume 13, No. 1, Spring 2023ISSN 2514-5584
Neopragmatism and personalismHenrieta Serban
AbstractIn this investigation, neopragmatism is not something entirely different from classic pragmatism, but it only turns to new aspects that were not previously considered by pragmatism. Neopragmatism places a supplementary accent on language, meaning and experience - lived and sensed experience. The human being is a complete, tridimensional, semiotic animal, presenting the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic dimensions. At the same time the person unveils along the same co-ordinates. This conception about the human being is specific for both neopragmatism and personalism. In this respect, the common ground between phenomenology and pragmatism (I address several similarities between Husserl and Peirce) is relevant for a discussion of personalism. The person is the human being of expression and meaning (Ernst Cassirer and Lucian Blaga), who is different from the 'individual' in several important aspects, although the person is subject to rights and inherent dignity as is the individual, when conceived in political philosophy. I find a particularly interesting aspect in relating neopragmatism and personalism: The person is always a surprising, paradoxical and active participant in an ontological circle of actualisation and becoming which renders any philosophical discussion of 'new' asked personality, post personalism, deeply related to human expressivity, actualisation and becoming, is defined by the idea of authenticity behind the mask, unveiled in expressivity, in artworks.
Keywords:pragmatism, personalism, phenomenology, Husserl, Peirce.
Philosophical traditions are deeply expressive and meaningful; therefore, often, they function as interlocutors for one another the same way persons are. In this paper the central metaphor of the resounding man is meant to reveal a specific and meaningfully predicating concept of person situated at the intersection of, or, within the "conversation" among (neo)pragmatism, (post) personalism and phenomenology.
Neopragmatism is a more recent philosophical tradition than pragmatism, on which it is nevertheless based. To define pragmatism, we have to emphasize first that agency in the world is related to the possibilities of knowledge and the resulting knowledge. The person is the agent: a human being, a self, relating to herself, to the world and, eventually, to a community. In my view, considering in correlation personalism and neopragmatism, knowledge of self and the world is not so far apart from creation and creativity. The starting point of pragmatism is identified in Charles Peirce's 1878 work, How to Make Our Ideas Clear, Charles Morris (1901-1979) defines pragmatics in The Foundation of Theory of Signs (1938), as the study of 'the relations between signs and their interpreters'.[1] The semiotic, social, educational implications of philosophy become central to this approach.[2] The human being, the self is engaged in the creation and the analysis of meaning via signs and symbols. For the pragmatic philosophers, knowledge and epistemology are no longer directions for an 'elite philosophy,' which for us does not necessarily mean that their theoretical importance is meant to disappear. Classical pragmatism is represented by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and William James (1842–1910) for the modern pragmatism and they remain very significant even for the neopragmatic directions as in the case of John Dewey (1859–1952), Jane Addams (1860–1935, Nobel Peace Prize in 1931), and George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). John Dewey brings to pragmatism particularly current concerns for democracy and democratic education with connections and continuations in important contemporary philosophical works, such as those of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) and Richard Rorty (1931-2007). These timeline landmarks emphasize that the interest for pragmaticism has been interlocked with an interest for the complexities of the human being, although maybe not in a linear or unitary manner. The philosophical contributions of a pragmatic and 'pragmaticist' tradition in philosophy (indebted to the perspective of C. S. Peirce, 1990) and of the neopragmatic or neopragmaticist type are part of a larger picture composed of much more numerous visions than those mentioned here.[3] On the other hand, neopragmatism is characterized by contextualism and contingency; it develops anti-essentialism and anti-representationalism through prominent representatives such as Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam (1926-2016) and Robert Brandom (b. 1950); however, although I am acknowledging their important contributions, I shall not approach here these thought trajectories, for brevity reasons, since this is just a study. Pragmaticism in Peirce's terminology, or pragmatism as is widely termed can be defined as one strain of philosophy of action that capitalizes on rationalism in/of everyday life, which it associates in neopragmatism via a series of themes about contingency and responsibility (toward the self and toward others). Such themes are very important for personalism, too. Pragmatism implies a specific combination of fallibilism and intellectualism followed by the role of putting truth into perspective, as contextualized truth and not as absolute truth. Within the context described by this approach, Peirce (1990) outlines the "pragmatic maxim": the meanings of philosophical hypotheses can be clarified only by correlation with practice and, more precisely, with the practical consequences they produce. In other terms, the meanings of the philosophical hypotheses are consequential, or, resounding. The same goes for persons: in personalism, the person is resounding, too, the person makes a difference, the person creates meaning relevant for life and the others by expression of an interior, via lived life, in the outside world. We consider the interests of neopragmatism and personalism connected to a 'subjective turn' – a return to examining the importance of the person oriented in the world by self-expression, via creativity and knowledge. The subjective turn could be better understood through neopragmatism, seen as a philosophy of meaning and truth, as well as of purpose; and even through phenomenology, as a philosophy of appearances which do not necessarily contradict the essences anymore. The purpose of whatever-is unveils for the most part via the how-is-it of the what-is-it, due to a perspective, or a certain starting point, or a situation, generated or infused with meaning due to a subjectivity (and personalist action). The confluence between the phenomenological and semiotic aspects that we consider valuable for the neopragmatic profile of subjectivity has a main founding in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) – his philosophy has placed in relation the things, the appearance of things to someone, the meaning, intuition and logic. We emphasize via Husserlian phenomenological approach, first, the meaningful unity of the person, second, the idea that there cannot be subjectivity without an ascendant of objectiveness inscribed in that very subjectivity and third, the confluences between phenomenology and pragmaticism, relevant for the understanding of the person. The person found in personalism at the centre of a philosophical system reunites aspects pertaining to phenomenology and pragmatism: personalist philosophy originates from an "intuition" about the person herself, about the personal reality and the personal experience that steams from the objects of this intuition. Deeper roots of personalism are present in existentialism and in German idealism, in the reactions to it as well as in ethics and in a philosophy of the moral sense. Self-awareness is with necessity central to personalism, as the highway of the significant values and meanings derived from unmediated experience. Producing knowledge, the person comes to terms with her or his original intuitions (as in phenomenology and existentialism), while validating frameworks for desirable action, moral action inclusively. It is important to emphasize that these intuitions cannot be disconnected from the value-meaning relationship, specific for the human being. However, the personalist value-meaning relationship is not merely gnoseological and ethical. It is artistic, too. The cultural life of man reunites human knowledge, human ethics and human art. They are not entirely separated human universes, but they have in common this crucial value-meaning connection relevant both for the human interiority and for the human external world. It is in this sense that another etymological explanation of the term 'person' comes from the Latin per sonare. It opens a more meaningful perspective than the theatrical persona – actional but masked, hidden, not truly revealed. The person is, in the interpretative perspective defended here, open by per sonare, expressive in all the actional, gnoseological or ethical endeavours. The person is a resounding interior reaching out to the world. Edmund Husserl has in attention "the return from the naïve existential, objectivism, toward transcendental subjectivism, a return which is more Kantian than Cartesian[4], in order to remedy the state of subordination of philosophy to science. However, this remedies to a certain extent the subordination of the person to either logic and reason or to psychology and dissolving psychologism. The pure self should constitute the starting point and the foundation, as well for philosophy as for the sciences and also, Husserl believes, for the 'very existence of the objective world'. This scientific and ontic foundation of the world is called transcendental and it is the result of a transcendental experience that is maintained at the level of pure possibility, of the prescriptions of the a priori rules for realities, the respective theory is called 'phenomenological science'. It does not refer to, says Husserl the empty identity of 'I exist', but it contains the data of the transcendental experience included in a universal and apodictic structure of the self, regarding, for instance, the temporal and apodictic form of the experience of the self.[5] As a result, human existence cannot be conceived as something explainable by science alone and human action correlates to an 'interiority" which calls for a complex view of subjectivity. A main concept of Husserl's phenomenology is intentionality or the directed character of our experience about things.[6] Experience is about something and it is a property of human conscience and of the manner in which we become conscious about our conscience, ensuring the possibility of a conscience about something.
Things are from their appearance to someone, yet, that appearance carries meaning, too. Phenomenological description of objects is a different interpretation from the simple description by considering the context of the experience of the respective thing, as well as the conditions of possibility of the experience. Phenomena presuppose, for Husserl, as well contents that describe the manner of being for things (in Husserl's terms, this is the 'noematic' aspect) and acts accompanied by subjective modalities of conscience (that presuppose the conscience and consciousness of something; that is, the ''noetic). As a consequence, a situation is organized through intentionality (Sachlage) and in correlation with a state of things (Sachverhalt). Schematics sustain reasoning and inferences. In Husserl, the object is involved in the conscience and the schematics and the organization in the description of the object belong to conscience. For this reason, a great part of the object and context perception is accomplished through the representational schemes. The Husserlian method is the placement in between brackets of objects, things, or the world to arrive at the pure object, pure thing, pure world, at whatever the world (the thought things) transfers at the level of consciousness, along with thought, in an idealist and subjective manner. As Alexandru Surdu, who has mentioned per sonare as etymological a root for person at one occasion, has also shown in his works: Husserl speaks explicitly about the 'transcendental constitution of an object', namely, about its reconstitution so that it corresponds to a certain category of objects, intentional objects. The typical structure or the formal general type is analogous rather to a skeleton that is going to be completed with ontic, psychical, logical determinations, according to the domain of intentionality that can take in attention natural objects or nature as a whole, psycho-physical beings, people, social communities, objects of culture, or, as Husserl says, an objective world in general, considered in a pure manner, as a world of a possible conscience. This is a world which is constituted in a pure manner, as an object of conscience, in the transcendental self.[7] We see in this quotation how the self becomes a joint channel for subjectivity and objectivity, in the sense that objectivity and subjectivity are no longer the structuralist opposites. After all, it is the subject who puts selected aspects in between brackets. The method of placing things in between brackets leads Husserl to a form of accentuated subjective idealism, to a 'pure ego'. As well, the 'real world', as the 'real existence', is transferred into the world of the subjective conscience, into a world of the self, overrated.
He [Husserl] understands the role of Reality, of the scientific character and, especially, in the elaboration of the Real Existence, only that, starting from the self, he won't rely on an authentic brute Existence, but he would deduct it, too, from the conscience of the self. This is going to determine as well the corresponding diminishing of the function that the Being should play, as well in the psychological, as in the logical understanding. For the psychic is exercised through the action of every objectifying stimulus on the conscience, while the logical is involved through the action of the conscious man on the exterior objects. Besides these, an effective construction of the Real Existence cannot be. Through a pure psychology and a pure logic of a pure self only a pure world can be built, more precisely, a pure idea about the world.[8] Husserlian investigation is a conceptualisation based on intuitions and categorical intuitions meant to restore a state of things (Sachverhalt). And this is not reserved for an elite, but it is within reach for any person with good intellective and rational capacities. It is a person, a healthy and normal person who is presupposed to follow the categories formed, also such schematics and manners of organizations due to the formal categories. The interpretation as is usually conceived takes a second place in relation to the interest for the morphologies of formal and ontological-formal categories, in comparison to the preoccupation for the logic of the consequences and of the non-contradictions and against the meta-logical aspects involved in the construction of a theory of the theories.[9]
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) elaborated, independently from Husserl, a phenomenology as logic: a 'study that observed various elements implicated by what we are experimenting', by what they have in commune within the classes that they compose, in what they have different and in what they have relational, in order to "unveil the fundamental structure (emphasis added) of the experience that we experiment" (that is, not of the abstract experience).[10] Investigating pragmatism and phenomenology, Herbert Spiegelberg found in his work from 1957[11] four common aspects for the phenomenological perspectives of Husserl and Peirce: 1. Both entertain a fresh and intuitive type of approach, both are introspective and descriptive in relation to whatever was observed, without theoretical preconceptions. 2. Both deliberately ignore the reality-unreality dichotomy. 3. The insistence regarding the radical differences between phenomenology and psychology. 4. The pretention that their phenomenology (distinct from psychology) could be able to play a role a scientific rigorous role as well for philosophy, as for logic.[12] Also, Charles Dougherty identified in 'The common root of Husserl's and Peirce's phenomenologies', 1980, two common phenomenological sources for the two visions: 'the recognition of the active collaboration of the mind in the process of knowledge' and the 'use of a method for the separation of the parts that are not independent from a whole', something that Husserl called boundless free variation, and Peirce, prescission.[13] The person should be seen as whole, too, as the 'open totality'.[14] governed by 'integrative concepts'.[15] The object of study of phenomenology is in Peirce phaneron, derived from the Greek term phaneron which means manifest (character) and this is the reason why, for Peirce, an adequate name for phenomenology would be 'phaneroscopy' (a term formed to imply a thorough investigation of the phaneron). A phaneronis composed by 'whatever is present in mind in any sense and in any modality, indifferently if that would be fact or phantasm'.[16] Prescission is the preferred technique in the phenomenology of Peirce meant to separate (to distinguish in order to accomplish an inventory) off the identifiable component elements in what is manifest from what we experiment, in phaneron. Prescission is accompanied by other forms of phenomenological separation; the dissociation and the discrimination. Dissociation emphasizes 'the consciousness about a thing without the necessity of a simultaneous consciousness about another thing'.[17] When something is presented dissociated, it registers this way, dissociated, in the manner in which it is 'proposed' by experience. The dissociation is a more powerful technique; the discrimination is weaker, but more subtle, dealing with the distinctions identified in meaning. In my view, expression comes to restore the unity of the separated elements. The human person has the need or at least the nostalgia of the wholeness – the call of the gestalt. The resounding being aims to do exactly that: attempt at restoration of being and authenticity via expressivity of personal meaning.[18] In Peirce, all the above logical operations are not reserved for the few, but for all interested and able to grasp semiotics and the Peircean idea that semiotics is a discipline which studies the semiotic phenomena and not only signs, conveying an understanding of the formation of relations, for the organisation of a system and for the dependence, among the systemic elements. Interpretation and interpreter become very important in this philosophical endeavour. Most persons understand that the world can be explained as a system of such organized systemic elements.[19] The semiotic model of Charles Sanders Peirce is normative and formal, not descriptive and it surprises the signs in action. As a consequence, any knowledge model is founded on the "living" sign (we might say), that is a sign described as functional, active and involved in processes of signification and not on an inertial or abstract sign. A remarkable facet of the dynamism of the semiosis (which is, in essence, the source of dynamism in the person) is surprised at the level of the three types of interpreting agents (interpreters, or 'interpretants', in Peirce's terms): a. the immediate or emotional interpreter (for example, the one who is happy seeing a flower); b. the dynamic interpreter who relates her emotion with one or more reasoning models for the evaluation of the situation and for the personal positioning in relation with that (for instance, wondering why and when did it flourish, how to enjoy it more, how to take care that it lasts longer, or, that it flourishes more frequently etc., how to care for it better, how did I not see the bud etc.); c. the final interpreter takes a decision, actions and is influenced in her daily behaviour (or, for instance, in the habits formed). The action is present explicitly or implicitly in all the hypostases of the process of semiosis. Again, in phenomenology, pragmaticism and personalism we notice the centrality of the agency of the human being, as person. Charles Peirce as the founder of pragmatism introduced the term pragmaticism derived from the Greek notion of 'pragma' (work, action, enterprise). This is relevant for the tradition of pragmatism since we should comprehend persons as actional expressive beings, through and beyond the metaphorical, theatrical and limited understanding of persons as "personas". Expression is action and action is expression. People are resounding. Through 'the idea about object' Peirce understands the effects of the respective object (in a similar manner to considering the effects in the famous saying 'we know the tree after the fruits').[20] These effects are in relation to the experience of the knowing subject, which may be individual or collective – the experience of the community. In this sense, the validity of a logical inference depends on the experience of the knowing subject. Whatever is valid for one may not be valid also for another, in function of the experience of the community to which she belongs in a deeper sense of being 'formed' and 'naturalized' there. Here is essential the establishing of a human purpose clearly stated. In the case of usual knowledge, we do not proceed in a formal-synthetical manner. Any result can be doubted and it happens to be caught by doubt. Contemporary philosophy stimulates the investigation and leads eventually to a conviction. But this conviction is merely an opinion.[21] Differently from Husserl, Peirce emphasizes the problem of pragmatism, which stays in the orientation of pragmatism (we are talking here about Peircean pragmatism) toward opinions and convictions based on opinions, not necessarily true, but functional (from this aspect emerging also the possibilities of pragmatism). The logical and philosophical interpreter, who is critical and self-critical, is rather absent.
A false, but functional, useful attitude might be maintained indefinitely. 'Truth is subordinated to use' in this paradigm, underlines Alexandru Surdu, observing that this leads to complaisance and adaptation and, possibly, satisfaction – at a sub-philosophical level. Nevertheless, the understanding of pragmatism through the lenses of the usefulness and limit us all to the aspects less interesting of pragmatism. Thus, in this perspective the importance of truth as verifiable truth is eluded. Fact is that the rational being can understand completely the bases and the purpose of truth, as well as the fact that, at the same time, this orientation of pragmatism wants a 'workable' truth, disinterested by the grand Truth, eliminates the inadequacy, the revolt, the tyranny of the authoritarian point of view, the totalitarian dictate, occasioning an opening either toward the pluralism of opinions (I. Berlin). From the perspective of Charles Peirce, man is a selfish being. Peirce's selfish man asks 'What good is this truth for me?' 'The model of truth as 'working truth' has its benefices, more than the 'utility truth' and it is suitable for the egotistic and pragmatic Peircean man. However, the variety of the human types makes possible as well the inquiring, atypical and even unadaptable versions of the human being, which, from our perspective, bring into the community other effects of the selfishness (some of these being, paradoxically, positive) and of the derivative forms of selfishness (such as envy and the desire for attention), leading thus, maybe unintentional, to new ideas, and thus to new perspectives of the world, new semiosis processes. From the perspective of pragmatism man is a complete, tridimensional, semiotic and actional animal, presenting the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic dimensions[22] This conception about the human being is also specific for neopragmatism. We can deduct from here that the epistemic "products" of a complete semiotic being are going to have (at least) a tridimensional structure, following the components enumerated above. The confluences between phenomenology and pragmatism are the confluences of a philosophy of subjectivity with increased epistemological relevance. From the perspective of phenomenology, man is an actional being able to access to categories a to a conscious knowledgeable standing via relations established among general characteristics about objects and the world. In Romania, Alexandru Surdu (2003) refers to pragmatism 'along the lines of English empiricism, Existence with knowledge.'[23] With the contribution of William James, what is true must be both verifiable and verified.[24] Neopragmatism, in the perspective of the same author, begins with J. Dewey as instrumental thinking, or as intellectualism concerned with the possible and actual consequences[25] and continues with Papinini, Vaihinger, Quine, and then Apel[26], who emphasized 'scientific community of interpretation', with an impersonal subject of knowledge and a transcendental dimension.[27] Alexandru Boboc (2009) identified a 'pragmatic turn' a thought-action-language[28] unit, following the philosophy of Wittgenstein, ordered by the idea of language games[29], by the action theory of language[30] and ordinary language[31]: 'In short, the main thesis is the following: the meaning of an "act of speech" is its function; like the function of any linguistic expression, it is based on linguistic conventions, which, as they relate to modes of action, not to singular actions, become general rules.' In a doctrine of 'those-who-are-not-in-their-place,' Austin establishes a number of rules that, if violated, 'our factual utterance will be (in one way or another) unfortunate'.[32] 'The meaning-function correlation is one of the updates of the language-thinking-action correlation, central in pragmatism and perpetuated in neopragmatism, with a plethora of nuances and conceptual reforms, including areas of philosophy of knowledge and epistemology. One should notice that all these aspects emerging from the pragmatic turn are relevant for nowadays personalism, too. Almost as much as they interact, persons create. Via creations, persons validate and reassume their selves, their world and the others, in the sense of a holistic manner of belonging, in fact, metaphorically put, 'reducing the distance' between themselves and the others or the world. It is both liberation and connection overcoming the primal egotistic sense of self-centricity. Such a nuanced and enlarged view of personalism is called by Patrick Howe post personalism.[33] In a slightly different perspective of personalism the person is more than the object of original intuition and personal experience, but a singular value with an essential role, with an even stronger accent on ethics and an anthropological-ontological personalist turn, orienting the metaphysics about person toward the ethical aspects of a 'personal ontology' with distinct dimensions of personal knowledge, meaning and art, and, or, culture. The human being is a 'resounding being'. Paraphrasing Lucian Blaga's idea, noticing that in a word is not resounding only its meaning, but an entire universe; as in a shell, the entire sea, we can emphasize (via this dialogue among various philosophical traditions) that in a person is not resound merely an identity, but an entire universe that is centred on that specific and also dynamic resounding, forming, reforming or deforming identity. The actional person brings entire universes into existence, via creativity, expression, sensitivities and thought. On this foundation we may emphasize that experience and experienced phenomena, the objects, and eventually human life, matter. For instance, in the philosophical system of Lucian Blaga, we have in man a cultural mutation, singular in the universe. Everything "irradiates" culture and this takes place due to man, in Lucian Blaga: knowledge, science and art. This is the sense in which man cannot but create culture and history, since human creation are meaningful in the fullest sense.[34] As an illustration, we can recall that in his work titled Luciferian knowledge (1933) Lucian Blaga makes a distinction between 'paradisiac knowledge' and 'Luciferian knowledge'. In both cases, the 'substance' of knowledge is not reduced by (or to) its manifestations. Paradisiac knowledge comes from the mundane understanding of the term, and it is more based on the Kantian categories, while the Luciferian knowledge, revelatory, transcends the actual, concrete and pragmatic world, using the abyssal or stylistic categories. The object of Luciferian Knowledge provides 'fanic' dimensions (that-can-be-shown, in time) and "cryptic" dimensions (that-are-concealed). There is a stylistic field even in science and knowledge. As Angela Botez has noticed in the Preface to Lucian Blaga: Selected Philosophical Extracts, the concept of 'stylistic field' in Blaga and the concept of 'pattern', in Thomas Kuhn, are similar, as is the role of science in the two perspectives: 'The role of science [compared to art as product of human behaviour] should be seen within the intellectual history of mankind. And if science is an active factor that we cannot see how it could be totally separated from the context'. Historical phenomena, too, keep a stylistic hallmark that defines them, owed to the categories of the unconscious, termed by the philosopher as 'abyssal categories'. Blaga's historical being is forbidden access to absolute, but through the various creations, as particular expressions of universality this being has access to universes of knowledge and culture.[35] This very limitation the human being is openness to relativity and creativity.[36] The human tendency towards historicism represents specifically the endeavour of conscious human agency to capitalize upon contingencies, not to bow to contingencies or get crushed by contingency, but to create and recreate, to change the contingencies and his universe – the world. Most relevant for the study of persons, we were approaching above the pragmatic turn in the sense of a rhetorical turn, in the sense of a centrality of expressivity with the human being. Ernst Cassirer's symbolical man and Lucian Blaga metaphorizing man (most interesting are the revealing metaphors produced by man which set apart an intersection between art and revelatory knowledge, scientific or not. These descriptions of man contribute to the big picture of the expressive and 'resounding' man, although Cassirer and Blaga are not exactly pragmaticists, nor truly personalists, nor phenomenologists in a total and mainstream understanding. The human being, understood in depth and complexity, is always a person.[37] Scholars who study the person and place the human being in a privileged position considered a key ontological and epistemological starting point of philosophical reflection and understanding are personalists. Often, the focus of personalism is to examine the experience and the experienced convictions, emotions and world in integrity and in their expressive universes, the status, and the dignity of the human being as person, with the deepest roots in the 'resounding', expressive nature of man. Resounding is action, meaningful action which comprehension captures the person in depth. The important lesson of the analysis of these 'turns' consists especially in understanding the modernist sources of neopragmatic challenges, detecting a holistic approach to the subject-centred, rationality, fashioned by historicity, by interests and affections, by the ethics of the right answer, by the ideas around a humanism without a 'new man' or Übermensch. The human being is comprehended in personalism as a complex and becoming being, an open totality, constantly under change governed by personal awareness and constantly under renewal due to the above-mentioned value-meaning relations that builds the human being in a most profound manner. Values, meanings, shared values, duties and higher purpose are specific to a person and not to the 'new man' or Übermensch, who are at the end of their becoming, final and finite, or simply, done. The person is a promising and evolving phenomenon with a rich potential for actualization and renewal within an ethical circle of becoming impossible to predict. Therefore, personhood or subjectivity mean much more than individualism. This is true especially in our interpretation of individualism as separation, focused on interest and individual rights, disconnected from relationship and communion, disconnected from community and shared values, from duties and higher purpose, thus the individual being caught, by choice, in an ontology of limited and prescribed meanings. This expressive and resounding being is also a person most likely to live a mark in this world, to be meaningful in her own right and also for the others, to be a creator and a maker. Therefore, the metaphor of the resounding being represents a valuable interpretative framework to consider personalism in connection with pragmatism and, as well, neopragmatism in correlation with postpersonalism, in order to construe the person open to experience, choice and possibilities. The resounding being is a person not as much by following a role (a persona, a mask), as she or he is a person by creating and feeling a sphere of meaning that can be shared and telling for others, too. A person is definable, yet, undefined; a work in progress and in terms of meaning, purpose, culture and civilisation, art and history, a person is a resource as much as a source. BibliographyApel, Karl-Otto,
Notes
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