Existential phenomenology and historical perspective on the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier

Abstract

This paper seeks to present the existential phenomenology practiced by the Emmanuel Mounier personalist thinking in his effort of elaborating a person anthropology that, inserted on the true history, responds to a transcendent appeal. Hence, Mounier was a thinker more concerned with the meaning of human existence, of the personal being, than withthe technicality of the epistemic process. This epistemological requirement means, in personalism, the attempt to elaborate a phenomenology of existence, in which the person is reference. Human existence is the starting point and the fundamental postulate of personalism. The person is not understood by personalism as a reality disconnected of the world, but as a historically embodied reality. The condition of being "set", ie, embodied in its time, in its history, inter vening in it and transforming it continuously, is the wayman is realized as a person, because what fundamentally characterizes him is his ability to rupture the determinism and assert his personality.