Thursday 14 December 2017

Looking at the Sun: Chapter Summary

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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