MOUNIER, EMMANUEL
(1905–1950)

Emmanuel Mounier, the French personalist philosopher, was born in Grenoble. He studied philosophy from 1924 to 1927 in Grenoble and in Paris, where he was successful in the agrégation examination of 1928. After teaching philosophy in schools during 1931 and 1932, he collaborated with others in bringing out a work on the thought of Charles Péguy, whom Mounier as a Roman Catholic greatly admired. This collaboration was extended to plans for a review to carry on Péguy's work, and Esprit was launched in October 1932. Mounier continued to edit the review in the face of difficulties, not least of which was the feeling of some Catholics that his position was virtually Marxist. He taught at the French lycée in Brussels from 1933 to 1939. He was called up for military service on the outbreak of war and was demobilized shortly after the fall of France in 1940. Mounier contrived to continue the production of Esprit until August 1941, when the Vichy government banned it.

Suspected of subversive connections, he spent some months in prison in 1942, but was eventually acquitted and settled with his family, incognito, near Montélimar. Mounier returned to Paris in 1945, and until his death he continued to produce books and a resuscitated Esprit, inspired by the times and his personalist response to them.

Mounier is the chief representative of the movement known as personalism. It is closely related, in the ideas it propounds, to existentialism. Personalism, however, is distinctively Christian and sees the personal "vocation" as seeking communication between unique persons, whereas existentialism is often divorced from religious belief, rejects the possibility of shared values, and is often strongly pessimistic concerning human relationships.

Mounier held that the person is entirely distinct from the political individual, who is "an abstract, legal, self-seeking entity, asserting his rights and presenting a mere caricature of the person." The person is "a spiritual being … subsisting by his adherence to a hierarchy of values freely adopted, assimilated, and lived through, thanks to a responsible commitment and a constant process of conversion."

The "unique vocation" of the person has little more specifiable content than Jean-Paul Sartre's "original project." Mounier, however, insisted on the distinctive character of legitimate commitment, which is both personalist and communautaire, or directed toward a fellowship of other persons. Man's chief task, Mounier wrote in Qu'est-ce que le personnalisme?, is not to master nature but increasingly to bring about communication leading to universal understanding.

Personalism is a natural product of the kind of French philosophy that has, since Maine de Biran, stressed the notion of a self that in some measure owes its being to an external reality which it apprehends or upon which it acts. Such thinking led Mounier to say that "as the philosopher who first shuts himself up within thought will never find a door leading to being, so he who first shuts himself up in the self will never find a path to others." Mounier criticized René Descartes, despite his modernity, for first adumbrating the solipsism that has since hung over modern man. In the economic field, bourgeois values "exalt the isolated individual and strengthen that economic and spiritual individualism" that still bedevils us. Mounier pointed the way from spiritually sterile self-absorption to the apprehension of reality in the form of not-self, particularly in the form of the other person with whom we communicate. The primitive experience of the person is the experience of the second person. The thou, including the we, precedes the I, or at least accompanies it. Mounier's objection to egoism was not only to economic individualism but also to its subtler forms, such as a fastidious withdrawal from modern vulgarity into the purity of the self. All true living is a transaction with the reality of the world and others in a process of mutual enrichment. There is no true inwardness that is not nourished by its interaction with an outer reality. "We must find our way out of our inwardness in order to sustain that inwardness."

See also Descartes, René; Egoism and Altruism; Existentialism; Maine de Biran; Marxist Philosophy; Personalism; Sartre, Jean-Paul.

Bibliography

works by mounier

La pensée de Charles Péguy. Paris: Plon, 1931.

Révolution personnaliste et communautaire. Paris, 1935.

De la propriété capitaliste à la propriété humaine. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1936.

Manifeste au service du personnalisme. Paris, 1936.

L'affrontement chrétien. Neuchâtel, 1944.

Introduction aux existentialismes. Paris, 1946.

Liberté sous condition. Paris, 1946.

Traité du caractère. Paris: Éditions du seuil, 1946.

Qu'est-ce que le personnalisme? Paris, 1947.

L'eveil de l'Afrique noire. Paris, 1948.

Le personnalisme. Paris, 1949.

Carnets de route. 3 vols. Paris, 1950–1953.

Oeuvres. 4 vols. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1961–63.

translations

A Personalist Manifesto. London, New York: Longmans, Green, 1938.

Be Not Afraid: Studies in Personalist Sociology. London: Rockliff, 1951.

Personalism. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1952.

The Spoil of the Violent. West Nyack, NY: Cross Currents, 1955.

The Character of Man. London: Rockliff, 1956.

works on mounier

Amato, Joseph Anthony. Mounier and Maritain: A French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1975.

Cantin, Eileen. Mounier: A Personalist View of History. New York: Paulist Press, 1973.

Copleston, Frederick. Contemporary Philosophy, 109–115. London: Burns and Oates, 1956.

Guissard, Lucien. Mounier. Paris, 1962.

Hellman, J. Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 1930–1950. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981.

Lurol, G. Mounier. Paris: Édition universitaires, 1990.

Moix, Candide. La pensée d'Emmanuel Mounier. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1960.

Colin Smith (1967)

Bibliography updated by Thomas Nenon (2005)