Neither Here Nor There:
Personalism, Poetry and Emmanuel Mounier’s Pluralist Society
by Benjamin Bâcle
Although born and bred a Catholic, Emmanuel Mounier did not think that
truth and meaning could be easily grasped via the uncompromising adherence to a
given dogma. Neither did he believe that they could be found in any other
‘absolute’ take on the world. What interested him more than anything was the
person, as the nexus between mind and matter and the locus of an ever-expanding
sense of wonder. What triggered this sense of wonder and transcendence,
according to him, was precisely the particular, as embodied in other persons
and other things: only they could hint at something else, something more,
whereas absolutes and abstract entities could only hinder the dynamic of human knowledge,
morals and love.
By thus defining personhood in relation to its
movement towards others and, more generally, the Other, Mounier made it
possible to view the space between persons, or between persons and things, not
merely as an unfortunate gap, but as something to be approached constructively,
to be appreciated and even celebrated. This goes against a number of persistent
current utilitarian trends in contemporary society: being constantly encouraged
to bridge the gap that separates us from what we wish to be or to attain, we
tend to reduce ‘happiness’ to the maximisation of unexamined pleasure – such as
the external validation procured by fleeting popularity –, and we call
‘success’ the most obvious route to that happiness. This makes acquisitiveness
the order of the day, whatever the cost to self or others.
Mounier’s philosophy points to a way out of our
obsessive quest for external signs of success – whether material or symbolic –
in the hope of maximising our happiness and existence, a quest which amounts to
little more than repeatedly attempting to seize one’s own shadow. The solution
may lie in the development of a poetical attitude towards oneself and the
world, whereby all gaps, separations and distances find themselves populated,
shaped and coloured by an infinitely adaptable set of meanings, sharing the
same positively disposed agnosticism, the same ‘willing suspension of
disbelief’, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge has it. In this context, beauty and
fulfilment would be found in the very places where they are supposed to be
lacking, and the exploitation of Man by Man, for the sake of unrestrained
acquisition, would soon prove futile and progressively dwindle.
This, of course, is completely idealistic. But the
main problem here is, how to foster such a poetical attitude without, at the
same time, crushing it? The very nature of this attitude is to be individual,
idiosyncratic, personal: trying to promote it on a large scale is bound to be counterproductive.
Mounier was particularly wary of industrial-like takes on creativity and
fulfilment, both in a state-controlled environment such as the Soviet Union and
in a corporate environment such as the capitalist West: ‘If art must serve, it
must serve freely.’ Still, by promoting dialogue and understanding between
artists and their contemporaries, Mounier suggests that there may be a
possibility to incite individuals to exert their compassion, their receptive
skills and their talents, in their own way and at their own pace.
The challenge, here, is to avoid forcing a single vision
of what is worthwhile on everyone, while still encouraging a certain way of
being. This is the conundrum faced by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (1859). The beginning of a solution can be found in
Matthew Arnold’s promotion of ‘Culture’, understood, not as a fixed bloc of
knowledge and expertise, but as an ever-expanding and fulfilling curiosity – ‘not
[as] a having and a resting, but [as] a growing and a becoming.’ French poet
André Miguel, in The Poetical Man (L’Homme Poétique), helps get a
better sense of what Arnold (often misinterpreted as putting forward an elitist
view of Culture) may have meant by that. Miguel advocates a poetical ‘way of
life’ whereby the individual becomes infinitely fluid and adaptable to the
infinitely variable circumstances of his or her existence, with an eye for the
‘in-between-ness’ of things as a way out from their reification, towards a
freedom which is never granted. The poetical man or woman is one to whom the
ever-changing beauty and unlikeliness is constantly revealed, whose
consciousness is constantly sharpened by this engagement, and who manages to
express him or herself truly in the process. This may sound like yet another
variation of the same old self-help themes which fill the ‘esoteric literature’
sections of all contemporary bookshops, big and small. But the difference is in
the refusal of any reified form of wisdom: poetry, like Arnold’s Culture, does not
‘rest.’ It is forever solicited, forever responsive, in a myriad of
unpredictable ways. It can never be contained in a given formula.
This last statement raises the question of the
relation between poetry – as defined here – and religion. If religion be
conceived of as a dynamic process unhindered by fixed rituals, it is completely
compatible with poetry as I understand it. Problems arise, however, when the
need for certainty tends to take precedence. Poetry, in my view, thrives on
uncertainty. It can only be re-awakened by its own fallibility. Certainty, on
the contrary, plays on the illusion, denounced by Mounier, that the
transcendental can be apprehended and as it were owned directly. Hope itself,
in this context, becomes formalised, and ultimately almost inevitably faked.
The only way to preserve what can be preserved of hope is to prepare for its
accidental irruption. It is to be as poetical as possible, without ever
thinking of oneself as decidedly such.
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