Personalism

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

 

“A philosophy but not a system,” Personalism refuses to trap human beings into any comprehensive determinism, whether natural, historical, or religious. “The existence of free and creative persons” is “its central affirmation,” but neither is it Nietzschean. Although versions of Personalism may include agnosticism, Mounier affirms Christian Personalism. Morally and politically, Christian Personalism beckons men to “the adventure of responsible liberty.” It posits a paradox that needs resolution: that “the personal is the mode of existence proper to man” but it “has ceaselessly to be attained.” It participates in “the human struggle to humanize humanity” against those who would dehumanize it, as the scientific manipulators of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World attempt to do. Personalism comports with the Bible’s personal God, not the ‘god of the philosophers,’ whether Aristotelian or Spinozist. It is not alien to some of the philosophers, however, as Socrates’ “‘Know thyself’ is the first great personalist revolution of which we know” and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics follows in the wake of that adjuration.

Still, “it is Christianity that, first of all, imports into these gropings a decisive notion of the person.” God “through love brings [persons] into existence,” creating the world ex nihilo and peopling it with individuals, each of whom has an “eternal destiny.” He unifies the world, makes it a cosmos, not “through the abstraction of an idea but by an infinite capacity for the individual multiplication of these separate acts of love.” This metaphysic so scandalized the world that Averroës attempted to return to generality, to abstraction, to depersonalization—to the notion of “one common soul for the whole human race.” But “the individual soul is not a crossroads where several participations in general realities meet (matter, ideas, etc.) but an indissoluble whole, in which the unity is prior to the multiplicity because it is rooted in the absolute,” by which Mounier means the God of the Bible and (emphatically) not Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. (Indeed, “Hegel remains the imposing and monstrous architect of all the imperialism of the impersonal idea,” an empire that demands that we “believe in complete subservience of the individual to the State.”)  No “abstract tyranny of a Destiny,” no Platonic or neo-Platonic “heaven of ideas,” no “Impersonal Though indifferent” to individuals and their “destinies”: the personal God “grant[s] man a freedom analogous to his own, by his readiness to be generous to the generous,” to be gracious.

God’s grace forces no one. Rather, “the profound purpose of human existence is not to assimilate itself to the abstract generality of Nature or of the Ideas, but to change  “the heart of its heart,” to convert, to undertake a ‘turning around’ of the soul, a “personal choice” made in “the inviolable domain which no one can judge and of which nobody knows, not even the angels, but God alone,” a transformation to which “man is freely called,” given that “liberty is constitutive of his existence as a creature.” Human liberty entails the freedom to sin, as well, the freedom of a man to “refuse his destiny”; otherwise, the choice wouldn’t be real. 

This inviolability, this “absoluteness of the person” does not isolate him from the world or from other persons. The Trinity itself, the very structure of God (as it were) suggests “an intimate dialogue between persons, and is of its very essence the negation of solitude.” Since “every human being is created in the image of God, every person is called to the formation of one immense Body, mystical and physical, in the charity of Christ.” That is the commonality underlying human individuality, the commonality that makes human beings persons, not atoms. Mystical and physical: Mounier rejects Christian neo-Platonism of the Middle Ages, which in his estimation “hampered full reaffirmation, by the Albertino-Thomist realism, of the dignity of matter and the unity of the human being” as a being created in God’s image and thereby as a person. Glimmers of Personalism, proto-personalism, may be seen in various ways in Occam, Luther, Descartes, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Rousseau in their several critiques of “scholastic decadence,” although Descartes also “bequeaths to us, in his Cogito, the germs of the idealism and metaphysical solipsism,” while Pascal and Kierkegaard succumb to a “lofty and solitary religion” that isolates them from human beings. As a result, “what one might call the Socratic revolution of the XIXth century, the fight against all those modern forces that tend to depersonalize man,” seen in Kierkegaard’ spirituality and Marx’s dialectical materialism—each a rebellion against Hegel but also a failure truly to overcome him—has led to a sharp duality between spirit and matter which Christian Personalism seeks to restore to the harmony God intends. [1]

Not dualism but “the indissoluble union of the soul and the body is the pivot of Christian thinking.” Christianity teaches that thought, soul, the divinely granted breath of life “fuse[s] with the body in existence.” When soul and body strive wrongly, in “the direction opposed to the supernatural vocation of man,” the “destiny” of man, Christianity calls that ‘the flesh’ (not to mention the world and the Devil). The flesh causes a “downward drag” of both body and soul, but when this unity, this person, “collaborate[s]” with the power of the Holy Spirit, it reaches out to “the substantial kingdom of God,” not “some ethereal realm of spirit.” That is, the Kingdom of God will see us not only in renewed souls but in new bodies. “The Christian who speaks of the body or of matter with contempt does so against his own most central tradition,” partaking not of the Gospel but of “the Greek contempt for the material,” transmitted us “under false Christian credentials.” Man is indeed incarnate, but he was so before the Fall, not only after it. His incarnation “is an abiding occasion of perversity,” not perversity per se. (While Marxism correctly regards material poverty as “an aberration,” one that needs correction of “the development of humanity,” that correction will not end all other kinds of aberration, “even upon the natural plane.” Marxism “is a kind of secularization of the central value that the Christian tradition claims for work.”) To exist subjectively and to exist bodily “are one and the same experience,” inasmuch as “I cannot think without being and I cannot be without my body.”

“If we are to render an account of humanity, we must grasp the living reality of man in his total activity.” Unlike other animals, man knows the cosmos and transforms it and, moreover, is capable of loving his neighbor and of loving cooperation with God, understanding both neighbor and God as persons. He can do this not only because he has a soul but because his body itself “takes me constantly outside of myself into the problems of the world and the struggles of mankind,” “pushes me out into space”; my body ages, thus “acquaint[ing] me with duration,” and, because it dies, “confront[ing] me with eternity.” “We bear the weight of [the body’s] bondage,” but we must never ignore that “it is also the basis of all consciousness and of all spiritual life, the omnipresent mediator of the life of the spirit.” This constrained liberty, this liberty limited by an incomplete bondage, perfects itself in struggle. “The right road for man is in this tragic optimism, where he finds his true destiny in a goal of greatness through unending struggle,” with no ‘end of history’ to be delivered by impersonal forces of nature or of history.

Mounier carefully distinguishes personalism from individualism, “the ideology and the prevailing structure of Western bourgeois society in the 18th and 19th centuries,” which conceives of “Man in the abstract, unattached to any natural community, the sovereign lord of a liberty unlimited and undirected; turning towards others with a primary mistrust, calculation and self-vindication; institutions restricted to the assurance that these egoisms should not encroach upon one another, or to their betterment as a purely profitmaking association.” So defined, individualism “is the very antithesis of personalism, and its dearest enemy” because it denies that “the fundamental nature of the person is not originality nor self-knowledge nor individual affirmation.” Personalism affirms not “separation but communication” whereby the individual “make[s] himself available…and thereby more transparent both to himself and to others,” more gracious. Far from limiting the person, as ‘individualists’ suppose, other persons enable each person “to be and to grow.” Borrowing Martin Buber’s language, Mounier affirms that “the thou, which implies the we, is prior to the I—or at least accompanies it.” Failure of communication diminishes me. To avoid such failure, including the corruption of communication seen in lying, sophistry, and rhetorical domination, one must stand ready to go outside of oneself; to see others from their point of view; to share in their destinies, joys, and sorrows, to be liberal in the original sense of the word, generous (“an economics of donation, not of compensation nor of calculation”); and to be faithful in “devotion to the person” in “love and friendship.” “Love is the surest certainty that man knows; the one irrefutable, existential cogito (I love, therefore I am); therefore being is, and life has value (is worth the pain of living).” What “shakes me out of my self-assurance, my habits, my egocentric torpor” is what “most surely reveals me to myself.”

That is, love as agape dislocates as it rewards. Communication is difficult. Misunderstandings happen. Even when they don’t, “there is something in us that deeply opposes every movement toward reciprocity, the kind of fundamental ill-will that we have already mentioned.” Other persons aren’t easy to understand, given the “irreducible opacity about our very manner of existing.” Forming a community—whether a family, a nation, or a religious community—tempts us into “a new egocentricity of its own,” a collective selfishness and shutting-out. While the person “cannot be duplicated or repeated,” he also cannot fully realize his personhood without “the world of persons,” and that goes for communities, too. This means that “there must be some common factor,” some “abiding human nature,” a point that “contemporary thought” inclines to reject in favor of existentialism, historicism, conventionalism, or some other such claim. Contemporary thought “rejects the conception of ‘human nature’ as a prejudice that would limit” the possibilities of human achievement, typically claim that “every man is nothing but what he makes himself.” But personalism, whether Christian or agnostic, affirms “the unity of mankind, both in space and time.” It opposes “the totalitarians’ denigration of political adversaries” because “any man, however different, or even degraded, remains a man.” “This sense of humanity as one and indivisible is strictly implicit in the modern notion of equality,” although many egalitarians don’t recognize that. 

That includes egalitarian ‘idealists,’ who would abolish property. “Man must on no account play at being pure spirit,” however. He needs property, “a certain range of objects, with which [he] can form relations of intimacy somewhat like those that it seeks with other persons, relations of frequency and of long duration.” ‘To be’ and ‘to have’ are not mutually exclusive but “opposites between which our embodied existence is held in tension.” Embodied existence makes it impossible “to be without having”; it also requires a man “to give up [his] isolation, to ‘bear with’ something. The tension comes when he refuses to act generously with what he has, but to do so he must have things in the first place. “Moral idealism is not uncommonly the quest for an existence freed at last from any burden whatever: an aspiration opposed to nature which can end only in ruin, or in anti-humanity.” Rather, “concentrating in order to find oneself; then going forth to enrich and to find oneself again concentrating oneself anew through dispossession; such is the systole and the diastole of the personal life, an everlasting quest for a unity foretold and longed for but never realized.” And while “mystics of personality” forget that their persons are embodied “in the world,” “politicians of the person” incline to think of themselves beings in need of defensive walls against all others. Neither can be a hero, who risks himself in battle, or “a lover giving himself for love,” or a saint “inspired by love for his God.” They are too focused on their own interiority for any of that. 

A true person must ready himself for struggle. “To be a presence in the world is not easy! I am lost if I flee from it, I am also lost if I give myself up to it,” failing sometimes “to say no, to protest, to break away.” “Experience demonstrates that there is no value that is not born of conflict or established without struggle, from the political order to social justice, from sexual love to human unity, or, for Christians, to the Kingdom of God.” Mounier’s person strikes a balance, recognizing that “the machines, the masses, the ruling powers, administration, the universe itself and its forces present themselves to him increasingly as a general menace,” inviting him to succumb to “a kind of social paranoia,” while also recognizing that “love is a struggle,” life ” struggle against death,” spiritual life “a struggle against the inertia of matter and the sloth of the body”—a call for engagement in that very modern world. Christians call for the virtue of fortitude, whose “great aim” is to “overcome the fear of bodily evil,” the “fear of being hit,” still another manifestation of individualism or perhaps merely selfishness equally opposed to liberality and magnanimity. “In modern conditions of comfort and of indulgent care for the feelings, we have long cultivated, under the cover of philosophies of love and of peace, the most monstrous misunderstandings of these elementary truths,” which incline to deny not the wrong use of force but the use of any force at all. On the contrary, “rights themselves are an always precarious effort to rationalize force and incline it towards the rule of love.” Immoral violence must be confronted by violence, Mounier writes, a few years after the Second World War, an event which brought that point to one’s attention. “To try to eradicate aggressiveness altogether from education, or too early to swamp the virile energies of youth in idealistic hopes—this is less likely to realize any ideal than to spoil the fighters for it.” Education entails cultivation, and “to cultivate means to sacrifice”—to weed out, to prune. “Every organization, every technique, every doctrine which tends to deny or diminish this fundamental vocation of the person to exercise responsible choice, whatever advantages it may offer, is a poison more dangerous than despair”; “the most solemn declarations of Rights are speedily transgressed in a state that contains too few men of indomitable character to confirm them, or social structures too weak to guarantee their realization.”

This emphasis on the wholeness of human life, the integration of all its elements into the person, precludes any strict dualism. “As soon as one isolates freedom from the whole structure of the person, it tends toward some aberration.” And while it is true that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, “the indeterminism of modern physics,” refutes materialist determinism, “it does no more” than that. “If freedom were merely an irregularity in the working of the universe, who could prove that it was not reducible to a defect in our perception, or even to some systematic distortion in nature or in man?” Human freedom “is the freedom of a person, moreover of this person,” a naturally constituted and therefore limit being, “situated in the world and in the presence of definite values.” “To be free is, in the first place, to accept this position and base oneself upon it,” exercising choice and accepting the sacrifices choice requires, given our ‘givens’ of body, space, time. “He who is blind to his servitude is the only real slave, even if he is a happy one.” By “values” Mounier means not the arbitrary and/or conventional claims people make when they say that they, or ‘society,’ ‘places a value’ on some thing or some act. Real liberty means “liberation to choose the good,” to be a “responsible man.” Freedom is “the mode and manner in which the person is everything that it is”—its fully developed nature. In this, Christian personalism shows its affinities to Christian Aristotelianism.

And this is a Christian Aristotelianism. It is not mere vitalism, inasmuch as “the life-force never prompts us to anything other than itself,” tempting us to refuse “to accept suffering and death” because animated by “the passion for life at any price.” Not so: as the Personalist Gabriel Marcel writes, “I am more than my life,” more than my biological existence. That is the Christlike stance, but also the stance of the self-described ‘anti-Christ,’ Friedrich Nietzsche. The difference is that, like Christ, and unlike Nietzsche with his amor fati, Personalists “cannot willingly surrender the person to anything impersonal,” instead “deduc[ing] all values from the unique appeal of the one supreme Person.” To those who demand proof “of the transcendent,” Mounier replies, simply that “the transcendent, being inherent in the universe of freedom, is not susceptible of proof,” which requires firm predictability; its only verification “is manifested in the fullness of the personal life.” A person isn’t “tied to a given position like a horse hobbled to a post” but one who can “survey the universe from the angle of his own position, and indefinitely to lengthen to the bonds by which he is attached to it.” The “values” or principles by which he governs his conduct are independent of “the peculiarities of a given subject”—not ‘subjective’ in the sense moral subjectivists propound—but “they are subjective in the sense that they exist only in relation to subjects, that they have to be reborn through persons, yet without being bound to any one of them, mediating between all, drawing them out of their isolation and relating them to the universal”—ultimately, the supreme Person. It is true that “God remains silent; all that is of value in the world is steeped in silence.” What is ruinous is steeped in noise and distraction: “the modern techniques of degradation—financial trickery, bourgeois complaisance and political intimidation”—all “more deadly than weapons of war.” [2]

The Personalist theory of knowledge is rational without being rationalist, not an attempt to find a purely objective truth reducible to logical syllogisms. Spinoza, Adam Smith, and other modern philosophers aspire to a universality that “is not that of a world of persons,” either by attempting to “eliminate the spectator,” the one looking at the world, “in order to uphold the preeminence of the idea” or by positing “an ‘objective’ spectator, one who explains all things, understands all things, and admits everything.” Mounier calls this “the internal weakness in liberalism,” one that Nietzsche saw; “the knowing spirit is not a neutral mirror” but one “linked with a body and a history, called to a destiny, and involved in the situation by all its actions, including its acts of knowledge.”. But this is not to concur with Nietzsche’s attack on objectivity itself and his consequent valorization of the will-to-power. Science has its place, so long as one understands what it can and cannot do. “There is no valid reflection which does not give full weight to scientific knowledge,” but science cannot tell us anything about God, except the impersonal ‘god of the philosophers.’ A person who seeks truth must do what Plato’s Socrates (no mean logician) demands in his allegory of the cave: a conversion, a turning-around of the soul. To link oneself to transcendence and to communication with others requires “the recognition of objectivity,” the fact that there are other persons ‘out there,’ along with the impersonal objects of nature and art. Engagement is no solipsism. “A complete logic needs to formulated upon this basis”; Mounier refers his readers to his Treatise on Character for the beginnings of such a logic. Such a conversion is as necessary in morality as in epistemology. “The moral ‘cogito’ develops through suffering,” through engagement not only with one’s own faults but with other faulty persons. 

More generally, the whole field of action or engagement “presupposes freedom.” Action has four “dimensions”: poesis or making, behavior, “contemplative action,” and “collective action.” Making aims at “dominat[ing] and organiz[ing] external matter.” It requires ‘economy,’ that is, industriousness and efficiency. “But man has no satisfaction in fabrication and organization unless he finds in them his own dignity, the fraternity of his fellow-workers, and some fulfilment above that of utility.” That is, economy requires “the guidance of politics, which relates” its problems “to ethics.” “It is at the level of politics that an economy becomes personalized and its personnel institutionalized.” Behavior or ethical action thus requires a politics that treats human persons as persons, not as instruments. (In this, Mounier taps into not only Existentialist ‘authenticity’ but Kant’s refusal to treat human beings as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves, although as a Christian he insists that treating human beings only as ends in themselves is an attempt to bypass God.) “Contemplative action” means an action not of the mind alone but of the whole person, the Socratic and Christian conversion just mentioned, aiming at “perfection and universality, but by way of finite works and particular actions.” Far from denigrating theory in the attempt to exalt praxis, Mounier observes that “the highest mathematical speculations, the least directly useful…have found the most fruitful applications, and at the same time the most unforeseen.” The same is true of “the two centuries of theological controversy which established the full significance of the Incarnation of Christ,” speculations that “also founded the only fully activist and industrial civilizations.” Further, contemplation may more directly disrupt “existing practice” by action “of the type that we call prophetic,” by “affirm[ing] the absolute in all its trenchancy, by speech, writing or behavior, when its meaning has been blunted by compromises.” Finally, collective action affirming “the community of labor, a common destiny or spiritual community” must never “confuse engagement with regimentation,” as seen in fascism and communism, with their “systems and dogmatisms.” In all of its dimensions, action as personal engagement meets the scorn of fanatics, who despise its hesitation to act without thinking and of politicians who “reproach it as intractable because it never forgets claims that are absolute.” “But courage lies in acceptance of these inconvenient conditions.” 

Mounier criticizes modern education as “the worst possible preparation” for a culture of Personalism. “The universities distribute formal knowledge which predisposes men to ideological dogmatism or, by reaction, to sterile irony” and “spiritual educators” often “base moral edification upon scrupulousness and moral casuistry instead of the cultivation of decision,” of responsible choice in the real world. “The whole climate of education needs to be changed if we no longer want to see, on the plane of action, intellectuals who set an example of blindness and men of conscience who inculcate cowardice.”

“European nihilism,” impelled by the critiques of modern rationalism as seen in the way of life of “the bourgeois world” delivered by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, all deniers of Hegel’s claim to have constructed a philosophic system that marks the end of history because it marks “the end of philosophy,” of philosophizing, of the love of wisdom, the ever-renewed reasoned quest for the truth, “is spreading and organizing its forces in every field left vacant by the retreat of those substantial beliefs which kept our fathers in heart—the Christian faith, the culture of science, of reason and of duty.” Mounier identifies “the great question of the twentieth century” as whether the century “can avoid that dictation by the technocrats, either from the right or the left, which loses sight of man in the organizing of his activities.” Mounier knows what he doesn’t want: “the proletarian condition,” the “anarchic economy of property,” “state monopoly,” and paternalism. He wants “the priority of labor over capital,” abolition of “class distinctions founded upon the division of labor or of wealth,” and “an economy directed to the fulfilment of the totality of personal needs.” He is less sure of how to achieve these ends. Precisely as a Personalist, he must leave such things open to choices made in the future.

He does offer some preliminary reflections. “Politics is not an end in itself, overruling all other aims,” since “the State is meant for man, not man for the State.” Nevertheless, “if politics is not everything, it enters into everything.” Anarchists are mistaken to think that “power wielded by man over man” cannot be reconciled with “the interpersonal relation,” and this is the core of Mounier’s complaint about liberalism, as well; it is too antipolitical. “Anarchism and liberalism forget that since man’s personality is deeply rooted in the natural world it is impossible to exercise power over things without exercising some constraint over man.” But fascism and other forms of absolutism (he pointedly overlooks communism) ham-handedly reject “authority,” by which he means “the final destiny of the person, which power ought to respect and promote.” To do that, power must be used to protect the person “against abuses of power” with a constitution that limits the powers of the State including its police powers, institutes federalism, permits citizens to appeal decisions of the State, establishes an independence of the judiciary, and asserts the right of habeas corpus. Calls for “democracy” must define that term. Mounier defines it as “a form of government erected upon the spontaneity of the masses in order to ensure their participation as subjects in the objective structure of powers”—Aristotle calls that “ruling and being ruled in turn”—a form that prevents “the ‘mob-rule’ at one extreme”—the excesses of the French Revolution seldom drift far from the minds of French political writers—or “the irremovable one-party State at the other”—both “but different forms of irresponsible tyranny.” The “spontaneity of the masses” can be registered through representative government, itself informed by “political education,” typically undertaken by the political parties. With the parliamentary regime of the Fourth Republic now established, Mounier is predictably dissatisfied with the current parties. “Political democracy needs to be wholly reorganized in relation to an effectual economic democracy adapted to the contemporary systems of production.” And although “the Marxist criticism of formal democracy is on the whole unanswerable,” as a Christian Mounier also tacitly rejects real, existing Communism, with its “divinized” Leader and Party. In modern life, “all the regulative ideals that are set forth in the ‘phenomenology’ of religion come back again in novel cults and in generally debased forms, decidedly retrograde in comparison with those of Christianity, precisely because the personal universe and its requirements are eliminated.” 

Mounier hopes that someday “there will no longer be any need to direct attention” to the personal character of human beings and of God, a time when this “will have become the common and accepted knowledge of the situation of mankind.” The Christianity of the Bible prophesies that this will only occur with divine intervention at the end of days. Mounier’s ‘Left’ Catholicism inclines to forget that, although it nobly offers resources with which Christians might endure the interim.

 

Note

1. Leo Strauss regards this dualism as inherent in modern philosophy itself, seen first in Machiavelli’s invitation to the prince to master Fortuna, and in Bacon’s analogous invitation to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate.
2. It is noteworthy that Mounier’s journal, Esprit, became the voice of an anti-American, ‘Left’ Catholicism after World War II. That is, he clearly regarded liberalism as a more insidious threat to France and to humanity generally than Marxism, although that did not commit himself to adherence regimes of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat.’ See Seth D. Armus: “The Eternal Enemy: Emmanuel Mounier’s Esprit and Franch Anti-Americanism.” (French Historical Studies, Volume 24, Number 2, Spring 2001, pp.271-304.)