The Concept of “Person” between Educational Theory and Practice

I ntroduction Producing data and pursuing the objective to know better what we intend for person and possibly 
discovering a sense giving calmness to our mind in the present tangle of thoughts on our present time, we 
have thought it could be useful to run through the history of a concept , which has taken, nowadays more 
than ever, meanings of different entities. Nothing more effective, rethinking on the past, would be to catch 
spaces and times where the principle regulating the humanum is self-determined, even if with a presence-
absence, in the statement on the person . In it is the center of recapitulation of the “ already historical ” and 
the propulsive and dynamic spur towards the “ not yet ”; as a Kair ó s 1
 renovating its existence miracle in the 
concentration of all the real within the history of the person. Only in the rediscovery of an ontological 
transcendentality will be possible to catch, in the person, the signs of a seal overpassing  physicalness-
materiality and finding in itself the stereotype of each humanitas .
From Greek paideia up to the present times, the debate has never been closed:  how and why to give the 
person the supremacy in philosophical and pedagogical attention? Theories supporting a just theoretical 
dimension of educational contribution and the ones supporting some due practicalness for the idea-
concept of person to be educated clash and meet.
The development of the person, so his/her education, in the new vision of pedagogy is seen in the active 
and present way to care and improve .
The present text, then, cannot have the boldness to cover the historical analysis of this long period, but it 
strives to present some essential points of the evolution of the concept and the controversies born around 
it, to focus, in the European personalism ,  a moment of recapitulation of the long historical trouble and an 
optimal response to philosophical and pedagogical instances of that moment. We have tried to find 
elements to determine the double value (theoretical-practical) of pedagogy, rejecting any possible 
interpretative fundamentalism and receiving the trace already marked by pedagogues and philosophers, in 
a behavior considering the necessary interdisciplinarity which can lead us to a comparison among different 
ideas pursuing the same objective.
The concept of person created by primitive Christianity, reconsidered and widened by the Church Fathers in 
the first centuries; revised by Thomas Aquinas in the re-examination and in the overcoming of Aristotle’s 
categories; brought forth, in history, and accepted by Max Scheler’s Formalism and by Emmanuel Mounier’s 
Personalism with the important contribution  of Jacques Maritain; considered by the rising pedagogic 
personalism as a focal point for the birth of a new metaphysical and ethical vision of man, finds a wide place 
in the statement determining a necessary practicization and ethicization of the concept of person, through 
the personalistic movement . It would not be a mistake to define personalism as a sort of Archimedean point 
from which to leave to travel through the past and to find in it the fragments of what the thought of every 
time has offered thinkers.
So, running along historical data, it has been possible to find the origins of the concept of person and all the 
conceptual variables determining a universal definition.
The historical path is the primary source of any consideration on the possibility to reconstruct the meaning 
of person , the sense of educational care, the catching of the possibility of a transcendentality overpassing 
the characteristics of pure historicity.
1
 We translate it as the present time of opportunity . So, not only chromos indicating time measurable in years, months, days, hours, that is to say a 
scientific measure. Kairòs is the hermeneutical opportunity to understand better man and his humanitas in the dimension of hic et nunc , deriving 
also from St. Augustine’s statement on time, which is fixed in the present reality, as the past is no more and the future is not yet.
In this text, we tried to summarize some historical moments (from the Greek paideia to the new present 
instances) to flow within the sense of humanum and to find its transformations. Wishing to find the deep 
sense of the person in a renewed paideia , careful to the primary need to transform any self into otherness , 
even being aware of the philosophical-anthropological problem slowing a common thought down.
In the double theoretical-practical profile of pedagogy we can find those elements common to personalism , 
pushing the desire of pedagogy for the discovery, in an ethical-practical application, of the revenge on the 
care of the person, without excluding the theoretical value, which is a consistent and inalienable part.
The work of personalism has laid the bases and has established a possibility of research on the value of the 
person as a universal reference in the consideration of history as humanum fieri , and as a new approach to 
the dynamism contained in the principle of personality. Personalism becomes a new hermeneutical 
compass to rediscover the principle of typological recomprehension , dimmed by historical events and by the 
shades of the various philosophical thoughts of previous history.
Re-understand man through the principles gushed from the analysis on the person’s reality; re-establish the 
supremacy of the person on the idea of the person ; re-visit the possibility of giving place to the other to find 
the sense of oneself ; re-educate to the discovery of a transcendent presence occupying the places and 
times of the humanum and transcending the pragmaticity of each experience and becoming concrete in the 
highest of the creature’s expressions: the person .
CHAPTER I
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF PERSONAL DATITY “Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto” (Terence)
1.1. The position of the problem Since the beginning, this dissertation imposes  a great precision to itself in calibrating the reconstructive 
horizon of what is hazarded, even too commonly, in the definition of Person and in the reflection on the 
differences between person and individual .
In fact, there are many difficulties in the distinctive analysis between what datity imposes and the careful 
search for the right hermeneutical horizon, within the understanding and the reflection on the historical 
element and the dimension of the person .
Going through the historical element will lead us to consider well known interpretative differentiations on 
the interdependence between individuality and personality, inducing our interest to search factors being a 
conjunction and an articulation in the difference, that is to say to a holistic or unitotal dimension, then a 
hylomorphic dimension 2
 - if considered just from a philosophical point of view – of man intended as a 
subject including the total humanitas , speculum totius humanitas 3
, precisely.
Man and his humanity, intended as a form determining him, are the basis of the principle of personality and 
individuality, specifically of his datity distinguishing him from any other creature element and making him a 
field of active and passive determination 4
. Within the search, then, we must specify and understand the 
various personalistic movements, which flourished between the two world wars, and their remote historical 
source, whose germination remounts back to the fertile land of Hellenism and of the subsequent Christian 
frame of the first-century and Medieval Church. Movements which saw the concept of person and 
individual being delineated and cleared up, even if within a still heated debate for an attempt of mutual 
interpretation and synoptic understanding of historical data present in the various philosophical, 
anthropological, psychological and pedagogical horizons. The irreducibility of the person to individual will be 
what the personalistic movement of Mounier, the founder father of European personalism, and his 
supporters will consider as a basis for the reconstruction of the social and economical, philosophical and 
pedagogical profile of the Thirties in France and Europe.
In this way, a comparison is self-determined, which presents different philosophical-pedagogical currents 
compared with the new Catholic statement of the supremacy of the person on the individual and on the 
inseparability of the two principles in a whole oriented to the delineation of a new vision, the holistic one. 
On itself, as we had already explained, the concept of person has its derivation root within the Christian 
reflection, in particular with Thomas Aquinas, but already with Augustine of Hippo and the Church Fathers.
So, this remains unchanged, within the post-Thomist reflection, in all lay movements considering the reality 
of man and his subjectivity. We have the task to understand the shades within those currents of thought 
which, from Hellenism, stretch to post-modernism with an only indomitable plot: the education of the 
subject.
2
 We do not intend here the universal hylomorfism of Franciscan philosophical doctrine which affirmed that even in the soul there is matter. A 
doctrine refused, among the others, by Thomas Aquinas.
3
 The mirror of any humanity.
4
 Cfr. M. Foucault, L’archeologia del sapere , Parigi, 1969, quoted by A. Granese in Etica della formazione e dello Sviluppo, “Nuova economia” Società 
globale. Preliminari pedagogici a una ricostruzione filosofica , Anicia, Roma, 2002, pag. 75. For the theme of active and passive determination, see A. 
GRANESE, Etica della formazione e dello sviluppo, “nuova economia”, società globale , Anicia, Roma 2002, pp 21 and following.