Personalism

Emmanuel Mounier

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1989
• ISBN:
  9780268161385
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

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).

PART ONE

THE STRUCTURE OF THE PERSONAL UNIVERSE

CHAPTER I

EMBODIED EXISTENCE

MODERN philosophies of spirit divide man and the world between two independent series, material and spiritual. Sometimes they accept, as brute fact, the independence of the two series (psycho-physical parallelism) abandoning matter to its determinism, whilst safeguarding the absolute right of the spirit to legislate within its own domain: the connection between the two worlds then remains unexplained. Sometimes they deny any reality to the material world, to the point of making it a mere reflection of the spirit: the importance of such an apparent world then becomes somewhat of a paradox.

Such schema are rejected from the start by personalist realism.

The person immersed in nature

Man is a body in the same degree that he is a spirit, wholly body and wholly spirit. His most fundamental instincts, eating and reproduction, he has elaborated into the subtle arts of gastronomy and courtship. Yet the great philosopher is attacked by headaches, and St. John of the Cross used to vomit during his ecstasies. My moods and my ideas are shaped by the climate, by geography, by my situation upon the crust of the earth, by my heredity and perhaps beyond all this by unfathomable currents of cosmic rays. Into these influences the supervening psychological and collective determinants are interwoven; there is nothing in me that is not mingled with the earth and the blood. Research has shown us that the great religions spread along the same routes as the great epidemics. Why should we be shocked at this? Missionaries also go on legs, and have to follow the contours of the landscape.

So much for the truth, and it is considerable, of the materialist analysis. But it is nothing new. The indissoluble union of the soul and the body is the pivot of Christian thinking. It does not oppose ‘spirit’ to ‘the body’ or to ‘matter’ in the modern acceptation of the terms. In Christianity the ‘spirit’—in the composite meaning of modern spiritualism, which signifies at once the thought (vovς) the soul (ψνχή) and the breath of life—is fused with the body in existence. When both together strive in the direction opposed to the supernatural vocation of man, Christianity calls this movement ‘the flesh’, and means by that the downward drag of the soul as much as of the body; when it strives towards God, body and soul together collaborate with the power of the spirit (Πνευ̑gμα) in the substantial kingdom of God and not in some ethereal realm of spirit. Though original sin has wounded human nature, it is the composite man in his totality who is stricken; and ever since the time of the Gospels the malice and the perversities of the spirit have attracted more anathemas than those of the flesh in the narrower sense of the word. The Christian who speaks of the body or of matter with contempt does so against his own most central tradition. According to mediaeval theology, we cannot normally attain to the highest spiritual realities or to God himself except by thwarting matter, and by the force we exert against it. But in truth this is the Greek contempt for the material, that has been transmitted from century to century down to our own days, under false Christian credentials.

We have today to overcome this dualism in our way of life as in our thinking. Man is a natural being: by his body he is a part of nature, and the body is everywhere with him: we must now consider what this implies.

Nature—exterior, pre-human, unconscious psychological nature, including impersonal involvement in society—is not the human evil; man’s incarnation is not a fall. But since it is the ground of the impersonal and the objective, it is an abiding occasion of perversity. Poverty, like abundance, can undo us. Man is beleaguered as it were between the one and the other. Marxism is right in thinking that the ending of material poverty is the ending of an aberration, and a necessary stage to the development of humanity. But it is not the ending of all aberration, even upon the natural plane.

The person transcends nature

Man is a natural being. But is he no more than that? Is he altogether a sport of nature? Or does he, plunged into and emerging out of nature, transcend it?

The difficulty is how rightly to think this notion of transcendence. Our minds resist the representation of a reality whose concrete existence is wholly immersed in another but which nevertheless exists on a higher plane. One cannot be on the ground floor and on the sixth story at the same time, as Léon Brunschvig said. But this is using a spatial image to ridicule an experience that is not imaginable in space. The universe is full of men going through the same motions in the same surroundings, but carrying within themselves, and projecting around them, universes as mutually remote as the constellations.

Then let us look at nature. Let us dismiss the materialist myth of an impersonal Being of Nature, with limitless powers. We will also dismiss the romantic myth of a benevolent Mother, sacrosanct and unchangeable, from whom one dare not separate oneself on pain of sacrilege and disaster: both of these myths subject active and personal man to an impersonal fiction. In truth, nature reveals nothing to our rational understanding but an infinitely tangled web of tendencies, and we cannot even tell whether this is reducible, beyond the systems we construct in order to grasp it, to any logical unity at all. By what authority are we ourselves to be reduced to such systems?—to Pavlov’s chains of associated reflexes, for instance?

If we are to render an account of humanity, we must grasp the living reality of man in his total activity. Pavlov’s experiments are artificial creations of the laboratory: their results present us with a mechanistic view because they isolate the subject under conditions that are in themselves wholly mechanical. The man escapes them. “Man is a natural being, but a natural human being,”¹ and the singularity of man is his dual capacity for breaking with nature. He alone knows the universe that enfolds him, and he alone transforms it—he, the most defenceless and the least powerful of the larger animals. What is infinitely more, man is capable of love. The Christian will add, that he is capable of co-operation with God. We must not ignore the salivary reflexes, but neither should we be obsessed by them.

The determinisms that surround us are indeed no idle word. But the notion of determinism, though it has not been dismissed from science as some imagine, is now limited to the description of large-scale material phenomena. Infra-atomic phenomena escape it; biological phenomena surpass it. At the sub-atomic level the physicist finds no more than a “pseudo-causality”, which is such that “the same cause may produce one or another of several possible effects with only a certain probability that such-and-such an effect will be produced and not another.” (L. de Broglie). Man is no longer cramped in a vice of determinism. Though we remain concretely involved in, and restricted by many determinisms, every new law that a scientist discovers adds another note to the gamut of our liberty. So long as the laws of aerodynamics remained unknown, men dreamed of flying: when their dream inserted itself into a system of necessities, they flew. Seven notes make but a restricted register; yet those seven notes have made musical invention possible for several centuries already. Whoever argues from necessities of nature to the denial of human potentialities is either bowing down before a myth or trying to justify his own fatalism.

The emergence of creative personality can be read throughout the history of the world. It appears as a struggle between two contrary tendencies, of which one is a constant trend towards depersonalization. This is seen not only in matter itself, which indeed is impersonality, passivity and indifference, for it subsides into entropy (degradation of energy) and into sameness or repetition as its natural end. It attacks life, reduces its urge, degrades species to the monotonous repetition of the typical, makes discovery degenerate into automatism, curbs vital audacity within systems of security from which inventiveness disappears, prolongs many movements by inertia till they work against their own purpose. Finally, it lowers the tension of social life and the life of the spirit by the relaxations of habit, of routine, of generalized ideas, and of diurnal gossip.

The other tendency is the movement of personalization, which strictly speaking, begins only with man, though one may discern a preparation for it throughout the history of the universe.¹ The phenomena of radio-activity are already announcing a break in the rigid fatalities of matter. Henceforth life takes on the appearance of an accumulation of energy progressively organized into more and more complex nuclei of indeterminacy: a fan of possibilities is thus opened to the free choice of the individual, according to biological predisposition, for the formation of centres of personality. The atomic particle, emptied of all qualities, is no longer identifiable even by its position in space, since the quantum theory forbids us to accord it any precise or lasting localization. An embryonic individuality thus appears even in the atom itself, in the very structure of matter. In the animal, individuality attains to a clearer definition; although nature treats it with scant consideration, multiplying it with prodigality and expending it in massive waste. Two out of two million eggs of a fly hatch and grow into mature individuals. Animals know nothing of reflective consciousness or of conscious reciprocity. The good of the individual is subordinated to that of the species whenever the two conflict. It is in the human person that this series of forms finds, not indeed its explanation but its significance.

The emergence of the personal universe does not arrest the course of natural history, but takes it up into the history of man, without wholly bending it thereto. We sometimes speak of ‘primitive man’ as if he were a being long lost in the mists of prehistory; but if we attained to the vivid and searching experience of personal reality, we should find our origins still very near to us. The worldly and moralistic comedy in which we play our parts is secretly designed by our instincts, our interests and our needs; even what we call the ‘life of the spirit’ devotes a great part of its activity to concealing these unacknowledged actors behind the arras of justification and prestige. Materialism is partly right, so long as it is historical and gives its references, though wrong in the realm of values. For at the stage which humanity has so far attained, and for the great majority, and except for the individual conversions which are always possible (that makes three restrictive conditions), our biological and economic situation still massively manages our behaviour. Numerous individuals and the great movements that some of them have inspired in ages past, doubtless ever since man became man, have broken out of this servitude; again and again, alone or in fellowship, man reaches by a leap the heights of humanity; but man in the mass continues, step by step, his earthbound way towards them. The personal universe does not yet exist except in individual or collective exceptions, in promises yet to be redeemed; yet its progressive conquest is the essential history of mankind.

The consequences of this condition

Certain important consequences follow from the condition we have just defined.

(1) It is pointless to approach either the science of ‘matter’ or the science of ‘spirit’ with disparagements or idealizations that are ineffectual on the plane of reality.

(2) Personalism is not a kind of spiritual doctrine, but rather the reverse. It includes every human problem in the entire range of concrete human life, from the lowliest material conditions to the highest spiritual possibilities. The crusades were at one and the same time, and with differing degrees of justification in each case, outstanding expressions of religious sentiment and economic convulsions in a declining feudalism. It is therefore true that the explanation by instinct (Freud) and by economic analysis (Marx) are valid ways of approach to all human phenomena, including the highest. On the other hand none, not even the most elementary, can be understood apart from the values, the systems and the vicissitudes of that personal universe which is the immanent goal of every human spirit and of the whole travail of nature. Spiritual and moralist doctrines are impotent because they neglect biological and economic necessities; but materialism is no less futile for the opposite reason. As Marx himself said, ‘abstract materialism’ and ‘abstract spiritualism’ come to the same thing; it is not a case of choosing the one or the other, but ‘the truth which unites them both’ beyond their separation. More and more clearly, science and reflection are confronting us with a world that cannot do without man, and with man who cannot do without the world.

(3) We must apply to the plane of action what we have just said about the sphere of understanding. In every practical problem, the solution must be verified at the level of the biological and economic substructures, if the measures proposed for higher reasons are to be viable. Is this child abnormally idle or indolent? Examine his endocrines before you start lecturing him. Do the people grumble? Study their pay packets before denouncing their materialism. And if you want them to show more virtue, first give them that material security which you are passing on from father to son and without which—as you may forget—your own social moderation might be less conspicuous.

Reciprocally, the biological or economic solution of a human problem, closely though it may conform to elementary needs, will be imperfect and precarious if it does not take account of the profounder aspirations of man. The spiritual, too, is a substructure. Psychological and spiritual maladjustments linked to an economic disorder may gradually undermine any solution achieved on the economic plane alone. And the most rational of economic systems, if it be established in disregard of the fundamental requirements of personality, bears within it the germs of its own decay.

Embodied Existence

Personalism thus opposes idealism, whenever idealism: (a) reduces all matter (and the body) to a reflection of the human spirit, absorbing it into itself by a purely mental activity; or (b) resolves the personal subject into a diagram of geometrical or intellectual relations, whence its presence is excluded; or (c) reduces it to a mere receiving-station for objective findings. For personalism, on the contrary:

(1) With however powerful and subtle a light the human mind may be able to penetrate the structure of the material universe, even to its most delicate articulations, materiality still exists, with an existence that is irreducible, autonomous, and opposed to consciousness. It cannot be resolved into relations internal to consciousness. That is the affirmation that Marx-Engels called ‘materialist’. Yet it is in line with the most traditional realism, with a realism which does not refuse to assimilate the valuable findings of idealist criticism. What is alone radically foreign to consciousness is dispersion, pure, blind and unknowable. One cannot speak of any object, still less of a world, except in relation to a consciousness that perceives it. It is therefore useless to seek to reduce matter to a network of relations. What could we make of the relations that were not perceived? The dialectical relation between matter and consciousness is as irreducible as is the existence of the one and of the other.

(2) I am a person from my most elementary existence upward, and my embodied existence, far from de-personalizing me, is a factor essential to my personal status. My body is not one object among others, nor even the nearest object—for how then could it be one with my experience as a subject? In fact the two experiences are not separate: I exist subjectively, I exist bodily are one and the same experience.¹ I cannot think without being and I cannot be without my body, which is my exposition—to myself, to the world, to everyone else: by its means alone can I escape from the solitude of a thinking that would be only thought about thought. By its refusal to leave me wholly transparent to myself, the body takes me constantly out of myself into the problems of the world and the struggles of mankind. By the solicitation of the senses it pushes me out into space, by growing old it acquaints me with duration, and by its death, it confronts me with eternity. We bear the weight of its bondage, but it is also the basis of all consciousness and of all spiritual life, the omnipresent mediator of the life of the spirit. In this sense, we may acknowledge with Marx that “a being which is not objective is not a being”—immediately adding, however, that a being which was nothing but objective would fall short of the full achievement of being, the personal life.

The personalization of...