Understanding human being within the framework of william stern's critical personalism
teleology, holism, and valuation
pp. 209-223
in: Jaan Valsiner, Giuseppina Marsico, Nandita Chaudhary, Virginia Dazzani (eds), Psychology as the science of human being, Berlin, Springer, 2016Abstract
William Stern developed his Critical Personalism as a philosophical foundation for a science of the person. Despite its age, it is a very modern approach to the task of formulating and grounding a methodology tailored to the reality of personal entities. This chapter provides a condensed treatment of certain of the core ideas within the critical personalist framework, followed by a discussion intended to position critical personalism within the larger intellectual landscape, highlighting its fundamental compatibility with humanistic thinking more generally, and with the investigative methods of phenomenology more specifically. Sterns psycho-physically neutral concept of a personal teleology offers solutions to philosophical problems encountered by similarly oriented approaches like Humanistic psychology, with which it shares a person-centred view of values and a holistic concept of human goal-directedness. The compatibility of critical personalism with a phenomenologically oriented psychology in the tradition of Edmund Husserl is shown and the key concept of empathy which was the research interest of a common student of Stern and Husserl, namely Edith Stein, is highlighted and likened to Stern's "understanding introception". Their similar historical relation to a psychology of understanding in the tradition of Dilthey and the intrinsic connection of phenomenological and personalistic ideas in Stern as well as Husserl is shown. An example of a phenomenological investigation by Stern is given.
