3 Quotes & Sayings By Emmanuel Mounier

Emmanuel Mounier was born in Lyon on November 30, 1914. He was an extremely brilliant student, but he also suffered from depression. He dropped out of school in 1931 at age 16 and turned to the study of theology at the Catholic Institute in Paris. He attended the Catholic Institute with Félix Guattari. Guattari had come to the Institute with his brother Alexis Guattari, who was also a brilliant student, but he left the Institute without graduating Read more

Emmanuel Mounier left the Institute in 1935 to dedicate himself completely to his studies in theology and philosophy with André Lacan. He became Lacan's research assistant at the ENS (École Normale Supérieure) in 1936 and left it again in 1940 without his doctorate in order to devote himself completely to his work with Lacan. Emmanuel Mounier had a brilliant career in philosophy and theology, but he also suffered from severe depression for most of his life. His wife Jeanne (1938–2009) discovered that he had stopped taking his medication when she found him dead in bed on April 24, 2004.

Emmanuel Mounier died on May 3, 2004 due to complications arising from a stroke he suffered a few months earlier. At the time of his death, Emmanuel Mounier was working on a book called "The Savage Anomaly", which traces three momentous events of modern history: Hitler's rise, Stalin's terror and Mao Zedong's victory over Chiang Kai-shek during the Chinese Civil War of 1945-1949 . In this book Mounier analyzed these events from a philosophical point of view.

In May 2004, Emmanuel Mounier was given a free hand by his publisher to edit this book before its publication under the title "Le Sauvage Anomalie". The last few chapters were published posthumously by Dalloz publishers under the title "Mao Zedong et la Résurrection du tsarisme chinois" . This book is an analysis of Mao Zedong's victory over Chiang Kai-shek during the Chinese Civil War of 1945-1949 from a philosophical point of view .

Emmanuel Mounier died on May 3, 2004 due to complications arising from a stroke he suffered a few months earlier .

1
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. Emmanuel Mounier
2
Personalism therefore includes among its leading ideas, the affirmation of the unity of mankind, both in space and time, which was foreshadowed by certain schools of thought in the latter days of antiquity and confirmed in the Judeo-Christian tradition. For the Christian there are neither citizens nor barbarians, neither bond nor free, neither Jew nor gentile, neither white, black or yellow, but only men created in the image of God and called to salvation in Christ. The conception of a human race with a collective history and destiny, from which no individual destiny can be separated, is one of the sovereign ideas of the Fathers of the Church. In a secularised form, this is the animating principle of eighteenth century cosmopolitanism, and later of Marxism. It is flatly opposed to the ideas of absolute discontinuity between free spirits (as in Sartre) or between civilizations (in Malraux or Frobenius). It is against every form of racialism or of caste, against the ‘elimination of the abnormal’ , the contempt of the foreigner, against the totalitarians’ denigration of political adversaries–in short, it is altogether against the fabrication of scapegoats. Any man, however different, or even degraded, remains a man, for whom we ought to make a human way of life possible. . Emmanuel Mounier