The Person or the Information - a Personalistic Polemics With the Paradigm of Information-Based Society

Abstract

For numerous reasons, postmodernism does not uphold the classical holistic conception of reflecting upon the human being. Thus, the problems related to the social realm − as the ones that concern groups of people – are entirely delegated to the domain of sociological studies. In consequence, this approach is devoid of the anthropological foundations of the reflection on the social human being. Sociological research often suffers from prosopoic blindess: the failure to anchor its research in philosophical and personalistic grounds.

The present paper attempts to illustrate this prosopoic blindness through the analysis of the theory of information-based society. To do that, the authors start with presenting the conception of the human being as a person, developed by the thinkers related to the Lublin School of Personalism. Next, the effects of the above-mentioned prosopoic blindness are presented. The first is the degradation of the human being as a personal being by granting the absolute ontological status – if not divine, in fact − to information (or, alternatively, to the access to information). Modes of communication become more important than the personal self-realization of the interlocutors − which should always be seen as the major objective of human dialogue.