Mounier’s utopia” “

“Listing on the internet” all the “personalist families” scattered all over the world, “united in the distinction based on their respective linguistic areas”: that’s the proposal made by ATTILIO Danese , editor of the review “Prospettiva Persona” in Teramo (Italy), during the first international Conference dedicated by Italy to Emmanuel Mounier on the centenary of his birth. The 3-day conference, held at the Pontifical Salesian University in Rome, was attended by over 550 delegates from 99 countries. “Mounier’s heroism – said Father Mario Toso , rector of the university – was at once contemplative and active. It transformed and innovated, through the action for justice. It was a free and conscious humanism in which the arduousness of gift and responsibility, suffering and setback are embraced with open eyes, personally accepted and experienced without renouncing joy”. The conference gave rise to the drafting of a letter, proposed for the introduction of the cause of beatification of the French philosopher. Below we present a few ideas that emerged from the conference. FrancE: THE ACTUALITY OF A “MAN OF HIS TIME”. Thanks to his “passion for the real”, Mounier offered a “philosophy of the city” which “prepares man for politics” and offers an interpretation of his time which “in spite of errors and hesitations” remains “a thought of extraordinary actuality”, in fields that range from bioethics to the new technologies, from individualism to the “culture of prosperity”, from interreligious and multicultural dialogue to the ecological question”, said Jean-Dominique Durand, of the University of Lyon. According to Mounier, “personalism is not a system: it is the antithesis of a closed philosophy, it is an attitude, a style, a spirit”. “Réfaire la Renaissance” meant, in his view, “returning to the cosmopolitanism that characterized that historical period”: not by chance, the subtitle of the review “Esprit”, founded by Mounier in 1932, is “revue internationale”. OLIVIER MONGIN, editor of “Esprit”, underlined the particular “style” that still distinguishes the review today. Reviewing the life and work of the founder, and the actuality that his thought still has in France, he stressed that “his whole thought was based on the observations of the ‘thoughts’ and phenomena of his time”. PolAND: personalism AS “ANTI-IDEOLOGY”. A “voice of opposition” to the post-war government, which had assumed “attitudes in which the human person found no adequate defence, indeed was sometimes downright ignored”: that was the voice of personalism as an “historic event” in Poland, said Krzyszof Gozowski, of the Catholic University of Lublin. According to Gozowski, it was precisely from this nature as “anti-ideology” that derived the extraordinarily wide development of personalism in his country, beginning from the university of Lublin itself. After the fall of the totalitarian system, he said, personalism has become a kind of “scientific ecumenism” and a “challenge to the new figures of nihilistic humanism”. An illustrious “personalist” is no doubt John Paul II himself, who was convinced “right from the start” of his pontificate (but also of his study of philosophy) that “personal and social, economic and political life, and culture as a whole, must be based on the truth of man, while all the deviations and crises are a consequence of an anthropological error”. FROM EUROPE TO LATIN AMERICA. “But I believe in utopia, not as an escape but as a way of planning with a will of iron. Sooner or later this will bear fruit”. With this quotation of Mounier Balduino Antonio Andeola, of the University of Porto Alegre (Brazil), ended his intervention on the “fruits” that Mounier’s thought continues to yield in Latin America today, a world that enables each to realize himself freely as a person”. Maria Villela-Petit, of the National Centre of Scientific Research in Paris, summed up the heritage of Mounier in Brazil in similar terms. The “teaching method” of the father of personalism, she added, “coordinated and guided the efforts of those involved in the realization of educational programmes for the very poor”, thanks to a “view of history” – like that of Mounier – in which the person and the community are revealed as the two dynamic poles capable of guiding in a more genuinely human way the great historic transformation of the world that is the ‘globalization’ of man”.