Among the thinkers who, in the first half of the twentieth century, sought a way out of the dead end into which Europe's pride had led her, a special place belongs to Emmanuel Mounier — a French Catholic who lived a short and brilliant life and died of a heart attack at forty-five. He received a genuine philosophical education, studied under Henri Bergson, and frequented the home of Jacques Maritain, where he met Nikolai Berdyaev. It was Berdyaev's ideas that made an exceptional impression on the young Mounier: he saw that faith could be something wholly different, alive. In 1930 he began publishing a journal that became the banner of a whole movement.
His cause is personalism, and at its very center stands the person. Mounier refuses to see in man an element of anything whatever — of a religious whole, as in other ages, or of bourgeois society, or of the collective. For the Latin mind the words "personality" and "persona" coincide, whereas for the Eastern mind "persona" means only the mask of the person — and Mounier breaks through precisely to the second, deeper meaning. The person is not reducible to nature, to class, to economics; the crisis of man is overcome only when the person herself is placed at the center both of theoretical thought and of practical action.
The person unfolds in three dimensions. Vocation — a striving toward a higher service; incarnation — a relatedness to the world of things; communion — a relation to other people. The person does not attain herself if she does not partake of a community that transcends her. This only seems a concession to collectivist ideologies — in truth it is a Christian working-out of man's place in the world: the lone sage in a barrel is not yet a man; man reveals himself only in relation to others, in helping them, in caring for them. "I was hungry, and you gave me food": here is the element of freedom, of salvation or of ruin.
A person can be formed, says Mounier, in three ways, and if even one of them is lacking, the person has not come to be. The first is meditation, the search for a vocation, the dialogue of man with himself, the search for that which in the soul calls him to action. The second is incarnation, the realization of oneself in a work in which one is needed by others: this may be one's own children — "that is no small thing" — or it may be the whole world — "that is no great thing." The third, without which nothing is possible, is self-giving, a life for others and not for oneself.
Paraphrasing Descartes, Mounier says: "I love, therefore I am." The strongest human certainty is given in the act of love, and to love is to sacrifice. Without this sacrifice any rational, economic solution of social problems is worthless, for it reaches its goal only where it does not rest at bottom on contempt for the pressing needs of the person. Therefore he rejects both moralism, which promises to heal society through a new man, and Marxism, which promises to save man through the economy, and individualism, in which one's neighbor is only a threat. The person is not limited by others, yet neither does she exist apart from them: only through others does she reveal herself.
Capitalism Mounier calls a double parasitism upon man and nature, a metaphysics of profit, where to have matters more than to be; property, for him, is inseparable from the manner of its use and carries a social responsibility. His ideal is a communitarian society — not a biological community and not a legal society of the liberal type, but a community of love for the near and the far, like a mystical body that cannot be governed by laws alone. He understood that in its fullness it is unrealizable — but that it must stand as the goal toward which real society strains. It is remarkable that these ideas became the foundation of the welfare state that grew up in Europe later.
By his short life — his part in the Resistance, his years under an assumed name, his tireless labor — Mounier gave an impulse to the Europe of the future. His fear was the fear of man's disappearance, breathed in by two world wars, and against this fear he called toward a free, open future, toward a Christianity that sets no seal upon frozen regimes and parties but lives by love of one's neighbor. In this defense of the person against every depersonalization he remains a direct heir of that discovery of free, creative man which was made by Henri Bergson and Nikolai Berdyaev.