Emmanuel Mounier
(Grenoble, 1905-Châtenay-Malabris, 1950) French philosopher, promoter of a current of Christian thought called personalism.Emmanuel Mounier studied in Grenoble and at the Sorbonne, beginning his activity as a scholar with a work on Charles Péguy ( La pensée de Charles Péguy , Paris, 1931), the author of whom only poetic work was known at the time and whose depth and complexity of thought revealed.In 1932 he resigned from teaching philosophy at Saint-Omer to go to Paris.He was twenty-seven years old and with a group of young people who were experiencing the same crisis, he gave life in that year to the magazine Esprit , around which the movement was later organized that has remained as one of the most significant expressions of contemporary Catholic thought.
Emmanuel Mounier
Mounier's Catholicism is totally immersed in a yearning for renewal, and his vast work as a writer and animator is based on the need to break the static forms in which bourgeois culture and society have crystallized.The aim that was imposed before such a broad attempt at critical review was a complete reexamination of contemporary culture, accompanied by a "direct analysis of the movement of history." From here was born the great mass of work that the magazine Esprit was developing from 1932, dedicating some of its numbers, which continue to be fundamental, to the problems of property and work, of conscience Christianity and authority.
In this same field were born in essay De la proprieté capitaliste à la proprieté humaine , of 1936, and the Manifeste au service du personalisme , of the same year.These works, together with the volume Révolution personnaliste et communautaire , from the previous year, constitute the fulcrum of Mounier's political, social and religious thought.Personalism, for Mounier, is not a philosophical system or a "political machine", but a way of looking at human problems and inciting men "not to defend themselves, but to think and create." It was intended to be, in Mounier's thought, a liberation from those two "alienations" that he sees on the one hand in existentialism (Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre) and on the other in Marxism, and he tried to act not "in" politics, but "about" politics.
To the individualistic society born (in opposition to the spirit of Christianity) of the morality of the Dutch and Florentine merchants and financiers and that has its metaphysics in Volterianism, he opposed a "communal" society.In it, an organized and total democracy will replace a merely political and colonialist democracy.In a world dominated by unscrupulousness and greed for money, spiritualism must not cave in or entrench itself in the defense of abstract values.
On the other hand, in Marxism, alongside an attempt to "think human and global reality as a whole", motifs of "archaic materialism" are present.For Mounier, new ideas aimed at creating a free world on the ruins of dissolving society only move to the left.But Marxism makes the mistake of confusing the "spiritual" with the "reactionary" and of letting go of certain dimensions (interiority and transcendence) that are also a constitutive part of human reality.
During World War II, the magazine Esprit was suppressed and Mounier was taken to jail by the Vichy government.Mounier went on a hunger strike and reaffirmed his ideals of freedom before the judges.In 1944 the magazine resumed its publication; in the same year she gave birth to L'affrontement chrétien .A year later Liberté sous conditions and Traité du caractère appeared.In 1947 his best-known volume came out: Qu'est-ce que le personnalisme? In 1949 and 1950 La petite peur de XXème siècle and Feu la Chrétienté.
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