E. Mounier: “Me Among Others”

Emmanuel Mounier. Treatise on Character (fragments) / Translation and commentaries by Irena S. Vdovina

Abstract

The introductory article analyzes the ideas of the founder of French personalism, Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950), about human community (“life among others”), which he considered to be the primary, fundamental property of man and the main subject of philosophy. The thinker began to study “life among others” in the work “A Treatise on Character”, which he began to write during the years of the German occupation in a prison cell, where he was placed following the prohibition of the Esprit magazine he created and directed. Mounier pays special attention to the issues of humanism as a life experience of human communication, the unity of humanity existing in space and time. He begins his research by analyzing the behavior of a child and continues it until
a person grows up, assigning the main role here to education, designed to prepare a person for living together with other people. The main topics in understanding the experience of human communication are included in the titles of the chapters of the book “A Treatise on Character”: “I am among others”, “Renunciation of the other”, “Use of the other”, “Presence of the other”, the abbreviated translation of which is presented below. The translation ends with E. Mounier’s interpretation of the idea of hospitality as the willingness of one person to open their doors to another, to open up to him, without which, the philosopher believes, human society cannot survive.