Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Legacy of Boston Personalism

Abstract

When the question of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philosophical legacy arises in the academy, so far, the question remains open-ended (though, as I will shortly argue, the question has already been answered by King himself). Beyond his presence in public American consciousness, King left behind speeches, sermons, correspondence, and writings that inspire both philosophical and theological reflection. However, King is also interpreted on the merits of the biases and philosophical traditions that we scholars navigate. Such biases and philosophical traditions mediate our experience of encountering King, and this mediation can impact our understanding of what exactly King's philosophical legacy is.1Accordingly, we should seek to reconstruct King's thoughts in the philosophical vocabulary King employed rather than displacing King from his own agency and the contexts that shaped him.2 In doing so, we prevent mistakes and misunderstandings that plague the public knowledge of King's legacy. And yet, serious misunderstanding occurs every January with light fluff pieces in major newspapers and websites from authors who do not read King's corpus. What's more, some scholars are guilty of this lack of reading King widely. Consider Martha Nussbaum and her glaring error and omission in her recent contribution to a recent book that purports to look at King as a philosopher: “Although a religious man, [King] did not advance in his political writings a comprehensive and religious doctrine, as Gandhi did” (Nussbaum 123). In an otherwise interesting article about political emotions, Nussbaum completely neglects any historical consideration or development where King describes himself as a personalist.3 Like others, Nussbaum disregards King's own self-description. This disregard is tantamount to a silent and implicit racism that results in scholarly efforts that deprive King of his own intellectual agency when interpreting his work. This tendency prevails in both philosophy and theology departments, and this neglect has also been the larger challenge of African American philosophy gaining more acceptance as a field of philosophical inquiry (McClendon and Ferguson 38). My efforts in this article are to put an end to continual misreadings of King. First and foremost, King is a personalist.While this essay defends the personalist interpretation of King, let me lay out briefly those pieces of evidence. The interpretation of King as a personalist rests on four evidential sources: (1) King's own words, (2) family background, (3) influence of personalist ideas on his writings, and (4) the tradition of King's reception by other Boston personalists. First, King describes himself in his own words as a personalist. This is perhaps the biggest piece of evidence for why we should read King as a personalist. Second, King was influenced by personalism before studying Brightman's philosophy with Gregory Davis at Crozers Theological Seminary.4 Before Morehouse College and Crozers Theological Seminary, according to Rufus Burrow, homespun personalism emerges out of King's upbringing within the Black Church. For this reason, scholars should not doubt that King synthesizes personalist influences with how he was raised (Burrow, God and Human Dignity 17–31). Moreover, given that King chose to go to Boston University to study with Brightman and to be where Boston personalism was known to be strong, all of these facts indicate that King was a personalist (Burrow, God and Human Dignity 24).Homespun personalism gave King a vocabulary to bring together and synthesize many intellectual forces in his life, and this synthesis is recognized by other personalists. Walter Muelder is one such personalist. Muelder was Dean of Boston University's School of Theology from 1945–1972 when King attended. Muelder and King exchanged correspondence, and Muelder delivered many lectures, some published and others unpublished, on the personalism of King. The most famous of these lectures is one Muelder gave to Morehouse College in 1983, in which Brightman's moral law system is read into King's own words. Taking this historical background and also that, to this day, some teachers at Morehouse College, like Lawrence Carter, make their students learn the personalist moral law system from Muelder and Brightman, the personalist interpretation of King's work is very well-received and well-supported philosophically.5Let me detail the layout of this essay's organization. In section 2, I explain what personalism is. I focus on the tradition of Boston personalism and avoid both Catholic varieties of phenomenologically based personalism and Thomistic personalism. In section 3, I analyze King's own self-description as a personalist. In section 4, I touch upon how King's own homespun personalism informed the background of his development. In section 5, I explain the entire moral law system. Next, I explain how Walter Muelder reads Brightman's moral law system and its modification into King's own writings in section 6. In section 7, I build upon Muelder and show how someone might regard several examples of how King's phrasing of moral language suggests an implicit commitment to personalism in similar fashion as Muelder did in his lecture. While this effort in this section might appear rather thin, it's meant to correct the problem of King's lack of directly mentioning Brightman and personalism in his speeches and sermons. Even though King never mentions this influence beyond the self-description passage, one can read the personalist influence in the examples provided. Finally, I conclude the essay in section 8.No doubt this may be the first time you have heard the term “personalism.” I will define it in a moment. For now, let's take a look at the examples of how strong the personalist interpretation of King is. Rufus Burrow's God and Human Dignity: Personalism, Theology, and Ethics of Martin Luther King, Jr. is still the best scholarly work on the personalist interpretation of King, and it is built of the same mortar and bricks as the evidence I am presenting here. The personalist thinkers who knew King have maintained and interpreted his writings in this ethico-theological tradition. As I have already mentioned, Walter G. Muelder interpreted specific examples of King's sermons as exemplifying Edgar Sheffield Brightman's moral law system. John J. Ansbro sees Brightman's eleven moral law system principles included in a few of King's books like Why We Can't Wait and The Trumpet of Conscience, and Rufus Burrow reveals Brightman's moral principles implicit in King's anti-militarism in relationship to the Vietnam War.6What's more, I should say that Burrow's book, Personalism: A Critical Introduction is still the best introduction to the entire Boston Personalist tradition, and the intellectual varieties of personalism surveyed therein.7 Since a lengthy treatment of Boston personalism would take too long, let's survey a few historical sources of Boston personalism that underlie the tradition.For now, personalism is simultaneously two things: (1) an ethical system in which the person has infinite worth and dignity, and (2) a metaphysics that insists persons are an irreducible whole and a precondition of experiencing the world. In other words, starting with Borden Parker Bowne (1847–1910), then next with Edgar S. Brightman (1884–1953), and extending all the way through the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), persons have the traits of selfhood, self-knowledge, and self-direction precisely because in the Boston Tradition, persons are identified with the relational processes of consciousness (Burrow, Personalism 103). Next, according to Bowne in his Principle of Ethics, persons possess “an inborn ideal of human worth and dignity,” and this trait extends deeply into how King and Brightman conceived of the person (Bowne 197). The ideal of human worth and dignity of the person starts with Bowne and is never abandoned by Brightman, King, or Muelder.In addition, personalism is simultaneously a set of metaphysical theses that establish the necessity for a moral world order. First, the type of personalism that I will be speaking about may be described as Boston personalism. It has a common ancestry of being part of the liberal theological tradition in New England. Second, personalism has deep roots within abolitionism. Third, Boston University was the only institution in New England in the nineteenth century to be educating Jews, Irish and Italian Catholics, and Black Americans when contrasted against the exclusive White Anglo-Saxon Protestant maleness of Harvard University. Boston personalism's commitments and the sociohistorical acceptance of Boston University are alluring for the young Martin Luther King, Jr., to study with Edgar S. Brightman. In fact, as Walter Muelder details in his article “Philosophical and Theological Influences in the Thought and Action of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” between 1952–1962, “in that decade and beyond, half of all doctorates in religion awarded to Negroes in the U.S.A. were earned at Boston University” (183). Knowing fully well the welcomeness of Boston University, King wrote: My particular interest in Boston University could be summed up in two statements. First, my thinking in philosophical areas had been greatly influenced by some of the faculty members there, particularly Dr. Edgar S. Brightman. For this reason, I longed for the possibility of studying under him. Secondly, one of my professors at Crozer was a graduate of Boston University, and his great influence over me turned my eyes toward his former school. I had gotten some valuable information about Boston University from him, and I was convinced that there were definite advantages there for me.8In the passage above, King is referring to his professor Gregory Davis at Crozer Theological Seminary, and the welcomeness Boston University displayed institutionally for American Blacks (e.g., Boston University was the first university to award a doctorate in theology to a Black man, John Edward Wesleyan Bowen, in 1887, supervised by Borden Parker Bowne). In Davis's classes, King had written many theology papers, and they contained a great many references to Brightman's Philosophy of Religion and other personalist writings.With our very brief survey completed, let's transition our discussion to what Kingian personalism is, by looking to what Burrow claims are the essential propositions of Boston personalism that he finds underlying King's sermons, essay, writings, and addresses. These propositions are as follows: Reality is personal.Persons are the highest intrinsic values.Reality is social.An objective moral order [exists] at the foundation of the universe.[We need] to protest social injustice and to work for the establishment of the community of love. (Burrow, God and Human Dignity 87)Now let me explain what these propositions amount to in King's thought, especially noting the influence Brightman had on King's development.Let us first take up (1) and (3), since they describe what reality is for the personalist: reality is both social and personal. Similar to the phenomenologists, the personal sphere9 of our experience mediates all we know and judge to be real. Persons experience the world in particular relations. By relation, I mean a specific conception of experience in which the mental act side of the subject and the co-relational side of the object to which the subject's mental acts are directed. Both sides of these relations are always unfolding together in an inseparable co-relationality. In this conception, the relations are what make up experience, and any time-slice of experience is a relation.Persons are a precondition for experience. In this way, persons are assumed to be ontologically basic and constitutive of the starting point of all philosophizing. Persons philosophize only from experiencing relation. For this reason, persons are in constant relation to the reality they are experiencing alongside and with other persons. The term “social” describes the fact that existence is shared and relational, constituted by these personal relations occurring within an interpersonal context. Reality is filled with persons all existing in relation to each other and their shared experiences of a common world, meanings, and values. As experiencing beings in constant and unfolding relation to other persons, there are no individual subjects (or selves) isolated from independently persisting objects. Instead, true metaphysical realty consists “in the unifying and self-identifying activity of consciousness. Any other self, hidden behind consciousness is a pure fiction” (Knudson 171). For this reason, King's beloved community ideal is the aggregate total of all interdependence shared as a social reality between persons, and this social reality exists in the reality we all experience, relate to, and are conscious of. As we make decisions about how our shared social reality takes shape, persons either gravitate toward the normative ideal of beloved community, or persons deviate from that ideal. Reality is, then, co-experienced as emerging in a shared sociality of our combined experienced relations and decisions.Let us take up (2) and (4) together: persons are the highest intrinsic values that exist, and a moral foundation exists in the universe. In other words, the moral foundation of the universe persists because both finite persons and the Infinite Person are ontologically basic, and a commitment that all personalists share is that persons are the ones who realize values into being through action. The Infinite Person is the Divine source of all value, and finite persons is the personalist term for all persons except God. Values cannot help but be revealed when we experience interpersonal relations, since they are already pre-reflexively constituted in relations. Put another way, since persons are total self-conscious unities, they constitute their relations and are the origin of meaning, because persons realize value into being. For instance, Randall Auxier stipulates that all personalists consider existence to “take personal form” and consider that the act of valuation, whether it proceeds from the will for one group of personalists or from consciousness as Bowne-Brightman-King tradition, is ontologically constitutive of what it means to be a person and have experience in the first place (62–65). In other words, the personal form is shot through and saturated with value as a condition of personal existence. We cannot help but experience existence as already saturated in values. Put another way, personal form means persons cannot experience existence independently of values. It is nigh impossible. Because reality is onto-relational, reality consists in a give-and-take, a to-and-fro relation in which value emerges between persons, including between finite persons in society and between finite persons and the Infinite Person (God). From those relations, a moral universe is constituted in our experience of it. The moral universe is a consequence of all extant persons and the inescapable way that persons experience the world as already saturated in value.In this moral universe, ethics is not a mere construction of rational reasons, as it were, in near-like Kantian fashion of a supreme principle of morality, but part of the metaphysical vision necessary to sustain a view to what exists as a value-infused reality. Reality is ordered and sustained by God, the Cosmic and Infinite Person. Part of this reality includes what personalists use the word dignity to describe. Dignity is the property of having infinite loving worth. Thus, wrongness and injustice occur in any setting where depersonalizing occurs and dignity is denied. In other words, no person is a thing, and the lesson of slavery and Jim Crow's transhistorical wrongness is in the constant devaluation of persons. Since persons exist as the ontologically basic fact of the universe, reality is a social interdependent whole to which all objectification of the person denies what is basic to reality itself. In that whole, the universe is friendly to the facts that values exist and that persons should have infinite worth. As Brightman expressed, religion is an experience of value primarily, and religion “is a faith in the friendliness of the universe to value” (Brightman, Philosophy of Religion 86).The system of interrelated persons, then, underlies a moral order to the universe for all persons, and as a theistic philosophy, the inherent dignity of persons is guaranteed by an all-loving God. As King observed in his “Ethical Demands for Integration” (1962), “[i]n the final analysis, says the Christian ethic, every man must be respected because God loves him. The worth of an individual does not lie in the measure of his intellect, his racial origin, or his social position.” It is for this reason King continues by saying that “[w]henever this is realized, ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ pass away as determinants in a relationship and ‘son’ and ‘brother’ are substituted” (“Ethical Demands” 122). King points out that the evil system known as colonialism in many parts of the world, which operates under a quiet invisible law, was out of “harmony with the moral laws of the universe” (Strength to Love 37). For King, all oppressive systems are in denial of the absolute and infinite worthinesss of a person's dignity. Hence, the corollary: that racist oppression is out of harmony with the moral laws of the universe. The moral law demands the absolute dignity and infinite worth of all human beings. Personal dignity is a moral absolute independent of any human constructed identity, including race. Many might want, then, to disavow the existence of race as part of our experience, but King's activism corrects the denial of personal dignity at the heart of racism. So we should be careful not to jump the moral ontological gun for a Kingian aspiration of a color-blind and post-racial society when it is the concrete conditions of racial injustice that motivated King's philosophizing in the first place. Kingian personalism is a response to the racist denial of recognized infinite worth and dignity of persons.We should also understand the necessity of not only seeing King as an activist, but the necessity of Boston personalism as a philosophy to animate King's activism. To simply focus on activism and his words as both rhetoric and propaganda for such activism is to leave the ideas that undergird white supremacy unexamined. Unquestioned ideas, like segregation and slavery, can never be defeated. According to King, “even philosophical logic was manipulated to give intellectual credence to the system of slavery. . . . So men conveniently twisted the insights of religion, science, and philosophy to give sanction to the doctrine of white supremacy” (Strength to Love 37). Without articulating a philosophical and intellectual vision, King could not address both the physical forces and the cultural forces of white supremacy simultaneously. For this reason, King sought out the tools of the philosophical theology of Boston personalism.Finally, the last proposition concerns what Burrow regards as King's contribution to personalist thought. King's contribution is that we need to protest social injustice and work to bring about a community of love (what King will eventually call beloved community). While Burrow does talk about how most personalists affirm the dignity of other persons, “more than all of his academic personalist forebears, King applied the principles of personalism in his efforts to achieve a world community of love in which every person will be treated justly, with dignity and respect” (Burrow, God and Human Dignity 71). Because King's personalism addressed racism, the exploitation of the poor, and militarism in US foreign policy, the texture of personalism looks very much different from those varieties in academic works. For this reason, Burrow writes that personalism was something different than a conceptual framework that many of his teachers adhered to. Instead, Boston personalism was “a faith and life that he lived in a way and to a degree that others did not” (Burrow, God and Human Dignity 71). We must remember that to live a life on uncompromising principle is itself exemplified in King's radicalism. In the words of Cornel West, “[t]he radical King was a democratic socialist who sided with the poor and working people in class struggle taking place in capitalist societies. . . . For King, the struggle against the legacy of white supremacy . . . was a profound existential and moral matter of great urgency” (xiii). So when we take a look at what personalism animated, we must remember the profound effect personalism has had here and elsewhere.10 To be inspired by King and to claim the mantle of personalism means that one's actions are consistent with the principles set forth in Brightman's moral law system and in the agapic love of Christ. From both those principles and agapic love, King's personalism is working against and upending white supremacy.11Given that I have reviewed some cursory treatment of Boston personalism, I will now review the largest piece of evidence that King is a dedicated personalist. This piece of evidence is King's own words. In this section, I will analyze the personalist self-description passage. This passage is the single most important passage when looking at how King conceived of his own philosophical commitments. Let me reproduce this famous passage from “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” under discussion here, where King describes himself as a personalist: I studied philosophy and theology at Boston University under Edgar S. Brightman and L. Harold De Wolf. Both men greatly stimulated my thinking. It was mainly under these teachers that I studied personalistic philosophy—the theory that the clue to the meaning of ultimate reality is found in personality. This personalism remains today my basic philosophical position. Personalism's insistence that personality—finite and infinite—is ultimately real strengthened me in two convictions: it gave me a metaphysical and philosophical grounding for the idea of a personal God, and it gave me a metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all human personality. (King, “My Pilgrimage” 55)In other words, in King's self-description, he claims that personalism is his basic philosophical vision in his own words, and that (A) it gave him a metaphysical grounding for theism, and (B) is the basis for the dignity and worth of all personality. When King says that the “clue to the meaning of ultimate reality is found in personality,” he is speaking of personality in an active way, and I should explain how he intends to use the term personality.Personality is not a psychological term, but an ontological term. Ontology is the field of philosophy that studies the category of being, so personality refers to the very basic essence of who and what we as persons are. On this question, it seems, King never abandons the central insight that started with Bowne. For the personalist, being is equated to activity (Burrow, Personalism 92–94). The very being of a person is found in experiencing the relations of life and reflecting upon them. Persons experience relations as the meaning of a particular content, and then a person may reflect on the whole to see if their interpretation of that particular content fits a larger synoptic moral and metaphysical vision. Thus, we might better translate the key to ultimate reality as a type of “personing,” the process of actively being in relation to and experiencing reality. In fact, Brightman sometimes refers to personality as the Experient (e.g., Brightman, Philosophy of Religion 346). To be in relation is to be actively engaged with and therefore experiencing reality such that the moral laws can be discovered in our experience, and in reflecting upon these discovered moral facts, then we see if they cohere with the rest of our wider vision.In experiencing reality, finite persons exist along with the infinite person God in relationship. Consider King's words from his essay “Our God Is Able” in his Strength to Love. Of this relationship, he recalls the ease of life up until the Montgomery bus boycott. Then he vividly recalls a time one night when the personal form of experience acknowledged his relationship with God more deeply than ever before. After receiving another life-threatening phone call that had woken him, King reached his breaking point. After that phone call, King says: I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally, I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing to be a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had almost gone, I determined to take my problem to God. My head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. “I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I've come to the point where I can't face it alone.”At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never before experienced him. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice, saying: “Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth. God will be at your side forever.” Almost at once my fears began to pass from me. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready for anything. The outer situation remained the same, but God had given me an inner calm.Three nights later, our home was bombed. Strangely enough, I accepted the word of the bombing calmly. My experience with God had given me a new strength and trust. I knew now that God is able to give us interior resources to face the storms of life and problems of life. (King, Strength to Love 116–17)In this passage, we can characterize King's relationship with God as a personal experience. In that personal experience, God was known and related to as a person. God as an Infinite Person is evident elsewhere in King's writings. In Strength to Love, King writes: “To know God, a man must possess this latter type of faith [the heart's faith as opposed to intellectual mind's faith], for the mind's faith is centered in a Person. . . . Faith is the opening of all sides [of the Person] and at every level of one's life to the divine inflow” (141). In other words, the personal experience of God cannot help but be a person with whom relation occurs. Love is the medium of that relation in King. For King, love is a mental act that always relates to a personal other. More than that, God is discoverable as the content of personal experience that keeps relating within time to one's life as “divine inflow,” and this divine inflow always manifests as love.One could further extend the commitment to the personal reality of God to what we might call King's personalist political theology, which is derivative certainly of personalism on the metaphysical, theological, and ethical levels we see in the passages above. By “political theology,” I mean the application of theological principles to concrete social and political problems. As the theological and philosophical are intertwined in personalism, to abandon these levels of King's thinking is to not read King at all in his own terms, since it is only from the proper source of that cosmic love that we are called out of our own finitude to serve something more in relationship to the higher ideals of the moral laws. As Rufus Burrow makes clear: Nevertheless, there is no question that King was by his own admission, both a metaphysical and ethical personalist. That is, he believed in a personal God who is the source of all things. In addition, he lived by the conviction that every person is sacred, because every person is loved by God. Therefore, when his house was bombed during the Montgomery Bus Boycott he counseled angry black residents not to retaliate and love their enemies. (Burrow, God and Human Dignity 73)Burrow is maintaining that these personalist convictions immediately gave rise to King's understanding of the Sermon on the Mount as it applied not only when someone threatened his home, but for all the other times when King was tested by that same white racist hatred over and over again. For King, the role these insights play is orthopraxic. Orthopraxy refers to thinking of religion as concerned with right conduct (ortho-right and praxis-conduct) rather than thinking being religious means having the right belief (ortho-right and doxy-belief/opinion). In his unpublished notes of a talk Walter Muelder gave on his memories of King, Muelder defined personalism as “an activist metaphysics of love.”12 Many skeptics of religion regard religion as a matter of ideology and unreflective propositions that make up an orthodoxy. However, when an idea is alive and bears directly on how one practically navigates possibilities for action, then we can see that personalism is a philosophy suggesting a course of action. Personalism, then, is orthopraxic, transforming one's understanding of Christian faith and agapic love into activism. King's contribution to personalism is taking it from the professorial armchair into public life.Next, the metaphysical grounding of dignity comes out of being related to a personal God. For both Brightman and King, reality is intelligible because it is rational, sustained, as it were, in the processes of God as the supreme and cosmic person. In this way, God is the source and sustainer of why values continue to be sustained. God “is the source of all being” who is unceasingly striving for nothing but the best possi