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 Nietzsche 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 it claims, attempts to deny the power and reality of the body, of that which the human being is capable” (Colson, 2001: 174). The dissociation of the body from itself and the “impulses that flow through it” – impulses that are rendered “comprehensible by a great number of symptoms and signs” – Colson characterises as a separation of the conscious body from its own biochemical and physiological capacities, becoming, “the homonym of the 'person,'” (Klossowski in Colson, 2001: 174). Colson sees this personhood as ultimately a constriction on the, “anarchy of the forces and possibilities that its body contains” within the “narrow circle of law and morality” (Colson, 2001: 174).

This raises a vital point that reflects a central tension in Powys's work – the struggle between his religious aspirations and his embodied experience of lifelong mental and physical illness. Indeed, Klossowski's exposition of personhood begins with the impact of illness on Nietzsche's thought: “The more he listened to his body, the more he came to distrust the person the body supports” (Klossowski, 1997:24). The pain of Nietzsche's illness, as a “language […] trying to make itself heard at the price of reason,” required an active and continual interpretation, such that: “The more these purely corporeal manifestations assert themselves, the more the return of the 'person' seems to be delayed”. The “person” here is presented primarily as exegete of corporeal states, for whom the intensity of pain and pleasure can be not only enigmatic but an effacement (Klossowski, 1997: 27).

Powys extensively documents his struggles with physical and mental illness in Autobiography, including; recurrent, incapacitating stomach ulcers and what Timothy Hyman suggests as bipolar disorder, leading him to veer between extremities of pain and pleasure. These had a profound impact on his spirituality and thought, as Timothy Hyman writes:

So far as religious experience, experience of belief, is concerned, [bipolar] is a condition that both gives and takes away. The sufferer finds that his experience is cyclic, that his most affirmative and integrated moments, his moments of release and happiness, come out of and are inextricably bound up with, his moments of emptiness and despair. It forced Powys early to recognise metaphysical dimensions, but it also made it very hard for him to have any stable or committed belief.

(Hyman, 1977: 43)

Whether or not it can be identified as “bipolar disorder,” the continuing instability of Powys's physical and mental health – and thus his religious experience – is mirrored in the structure of his fictions; as he passes, “between moments of causeless anguish to causeless happiness, just as the general structure of each book moves cyclically between illusion and disillusion” (Hyman, 43). Just as, for Nietzsche, the ailing body subverts the theological unity of personhood, for Powys, sickness problematises the singularity of belief. Rather than discarding the notion of the person, however, Powys engages it through what Colson (drawing on Bourdieu) terms a “practical sense” – this being the, “capacity to perceive what gives us life and thus to evaluate the things and relationships […] that we encounter within the situations that constitute these things and relationships, according to their capacity […] to promote a stronger and freer life” (Colson, 2001: 197) [emphases added].

As such, Powys diverges from the anti-representational imperative that characterises much of the early avant-garde foray into anarchism (inspired by the likes of Nietzsche and Stirner). However, he simultaneously retains their anti-humanistic and somewhat iconoclastic tendencies as his explicitly defiant stance towards the “First Cause” marks him out from many of his personalist contemporaries. Hooker has demonstrated (1992) how Powys's philosophy of personality fundamentally differs from that of the Christian existentialist Berdyaev; whereas the latter saw the personality as a medium of the divine, ultimately denying the material world to seek Christian transfiguration, Powys always regarded the personality as “divine-diabolical” in nature. For Berdyaev, freedom is recognised in God, whereas for Powys the “First Cause” is a tyrannical force, “the great slave-master over personality and nullifier of its magical power. He determines life, ruling out the possibilities that are open to a multiverse of auto-creative minds” (Hooker, 1992: 73). Hooker dates Powys's encounter with Berdyaev's thought to the later 1930s, yet, as early as 1920 Powys had declared in The Complex Vision that, “Personality is the only permanent thing in life” (Powys in Hooker, 1992: 70), suggesting that a spiritual apprehension of personality was a major part of his earlier lecture work.

Powys's “divine-diabolical” conception of personality, drawing on a specifically pluralistic (if not polytheistic) lineage of authors from Homer, to Rabelais, to Walt Whitman, is opposed to what he termed the “new orthodoxy” of Christian Personalists such as Berdyaev and Jacques Maritain. Where they, “round off the system of things in a 'Divine Circle'” (Hooker, 1992: 77), Powys stands for a pluralism that renders Nature (be it human or inhuman) as a positively disruptive force, revealing, “hints and suggestions of an element of accident, of chaos, of anarchy” that rupture any conceivable, closed-off notion of the “Divine Circle” (Powys in Hooker, 1992: 77). This differentiation from Christian Personalism is further elaborated in A Defence of Sensuality (1930), where Powys rejects the Christian notion that Love is the person's only means of “communion” with the universe and, using much of the same holistic imagery as the anarchists, he asserts:

No! It seems to me that this movement towards some ultimate and irreducible thing includes much more of our whole identity than merely love. It is not only the love-necessity in us that thus drives us forward. It is everything in us; it is our whole nature; it is the urge of our whole personality, including our worst as well as our best instincts. It is not an ideal striving or a moral striving: it is the nature urge of all organic sap, like the thrust, both up and down, of a growing plant.

(Powys, 1930: 27) [emphasis added]

and three years later, in A Glastonbury Romance (1933):

There is no ultimate mystery! Such a phrase is meaningless, because the reality of Being is forever changing under the primal and arbitrary will of the First Cause. The mystery of mysteries is Personality, a living Person; and there is that in Personality which is indetermined, unaccountable, changing at every second!...

Apart form Personality, apart from Personal Will, there is no such 'ultimate' as Matter, there is no such 'ultimate' as Spirit. Beyond Life and beyond Death there is Personality, dominating both Life and Death to its own arbitrary and wilful purposes.

(Powys in Hooker. 1992: 70)

That Powys's polytheistic conception of personality can be traced to his experiences of persistent mental and physical illness reveals its underlying ethical dimensions. Whilst it isn't until his later work that he develops a concretely anarchist orientation to this philosophy, much inspired by his correspondence with Emma Goldman, the roots of it can still be perceived in his earlier lecture work and especially his idiosyncratic method of literary interpretation.

Against a Christian conception of personhood which ultimately denies Life, Powys's Personalism, like Nietzsche's bodily “language trying to make itself heard,” points a listening ear towards Life, including its debilitating absurdities, the anarchic mutations of "Nature" that disrupt any singular conception of personhood.