Heretical Personalism
The following is a short excerpt from work towards my thesis. I draw on Daniel Colson's A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze (2019) and Pierre Klossowski's N ietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969) to elaborate on John Cowper Powys's relation to personalism and the concept of personhood - finding that his experience with mental and physical illness led him to devise a pluralistic (perhaps panpsychist, perhaps polytheistic) conception of the person. This also impacts his literary criticism and approach to interpretation, something which I think might help in the development of a neurodivergent approach to hermeneutics. The entry for “Person (personalism)” in Colson's A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze (2019) draws on Pierre Klossowski's reading of Nietzsche to define the person as, “the resultant of a long labor of domestication and selection – both physical and spiritual – which, contrary to what i...