Personalism

By Emmanuel Mounier

Book Overview

This volume, first published a year before Mounier's death, is his final definition of personalism. It is an eloquent and lucid statement of a perspective in which "man's supreme adventure is to fight injustice wherever it is found and whatever the consequences" (from the Foreword).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 026800434X
• ISBN13: 9780268004347
• Release Date: August 1989
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.6" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

more of what we need for today's world

Mounier, though a religious Thomist (Christian philosophy based on St. Thomas' writings), speaks to agnostics here primarily, and for their own purposes. The book spoke to me as an existentialist, as it complements the darkness in Sarte, and even Camus (really, very much to my surprise). In answer to the ultimately alienated/isolated Sartesian, and even Camus's frustration with our "adolecent" civilization, Mounier puts forth his own map, attentive to the good senses of his entire reading audience. His "non-system," intentionally not climactic in progression, shouldn't offend even nihilists, as he deals in category's of human development as opposed to aiming at a certain goal or ideals (though it's totally plausible he had ideal goals). Mounier, though certainly somewhat lighter in his thought, satisfies me more than Camus' THE REBEL did earlier; at it's end, Mounier's PERSONALISM thankfully addresses people as they are, since existentialism -- not Camus, but the mainstream -- unfortunately chose to only focus on people's need to separate from the world at large, and then more and more on themselves. Here the author takes a side-step and puts down essentially universal traits, which most people in almost all cultures admire, and whose teachers attempt to incolcate through what Ortega y Gasset and many others have pointed to as modern society's cultural myth (ironically, the most obvious one being Jesus' miracles). Mounier simply articulates what the myths attempt to pass on (i.e. truths into human nature), so the modern person may accept and internalize the ideas. If Camus'd lived, certainly in light of his admiration of the Church, it wouldn't surprise me if he became a Thomist in his old age. Mounier, in his last publication, sums up his life's philosophy and it's as sweet as Camus is savory.

The Only Revolution That Matters

In the final analysis there is only one revolution worth participating in - the personalist revolution. Personalists come in all shapes and sizes and can be found in any creed, ethnicity, class, sexual or gender orientation, and in any walk of life. Atheists like Camus stand shoulder to shoulder with theists like Kierkegaard. What unites them is their basic awareness that the human person is not anything that can be calculated, analyzed, or reduced to a quantum in any way. That is what makes personalism ultimately humane and why most other revolutions are doomed to tyranny or vanity. At the heart of every personalist is someone who has decided to live with their own mystery and so they are capable of the moral inventory and slowly growing self-awareness that make their efforts less susceptible to manipulation by demogogues or attractions to easy solutions - usually involving bloodshed. Personalist revolution is built on the idea that the subterfuges of the human heart are ultimately more decisive in the shaping of human affairs than are historical forces - whether those forces are concieved as the hidden hand of the market or the dialectic. Therefore personal responsibility becomes not only meaningful but inescapable. Mounier's spiritual orientation is only one path open to personalists but only fifth-rate kinds of atheists will be offended by it. Mounier was very open to Marxist thought but the personal creativity required by the personalist revolution and its unending attraction to the concrete and particular, made him inhospitable to orthodox or doctrinaire Marxists who preferred their own variety of ideology to the steady contemplation of the enigmas of the world and of the self. Some of the greatest art of the twentieth century was openly or covertly personalist including the television mini-series, "The Prisoner". In the first episode Number Six, played by the personalist creator of the show Patrick McGoohan, speaks the Personalist Motto to every would-be tyrant or tyrannical system: "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own." Considering the global economic disorder we now live in - a disorder that atomizes pre-existing human and terrestrial structures and commodifies them - Emmanuel Mounier's embodiment of the only revolution that matters becomes more and more relevant.

Mournier's Personalism

Mounier's PersonalismMounier's blueprint for a personalist economy asks everyone to lay aside greed and materialism. It is in harmony with the Beatitudes: "On the plane of individual ethics we believe that a certain kind of poverty is the ideal economic rule of personal life. But by poverty in this sense we do not mean an indiscreet asceticism or a shameful miserliness. We refer rather to a contempt for the material attachments that enslave, a desire for simplicity, a state of adaptability and freedom, which does not exclude magnificence or generosity, nor even some striving for riches, providing such endeavours are not avaricious.." (The Personalist Manifesto, Longmans, Green and Co., 1938p. 192).Mounier felt that the biggest problem of modern capitalism has been proclaiming the primacy of economics over history, over the life of the people, over community, over living out one's faith and one's values. The "extreme importance attaching today to the economic problem among human preoccupation is a sign of social disease."We can readily understand what Mounier means by the primacy of the economic when we think of the tremendous pressure brought upon people to buy and posssess things, live a certain life style and always reach for the highest level of comfort. Social consideration and display are priorities. Even among church people we must let the economic factor dominate or be considered odd. No one in the U.S. is unaware of what putting the primacy of economics in the medical field has done to the availability of good medical care to all.by Louise and Mark Zwick

A philosophy of hope. Completely human & liberating.

Unique in contemporary philosophy, Mounier has inspired the likes of Pope John Paul II with his insights into human freedom, the nature of human existence and his understanding of the integration of all aspects of being human. His writing is poetic and humourous and profoundly liberating. A philosphy of hope.