Arte, persona e comunione:

l’estetica personalista di Emmanuel Mounier

Abstract

This paper examines the intrinsic connection between art and the person in Emmanuel Mounier’s personalist philosophy, where aesthetic experience is not a separate domain but an essential dimension of personal and communal life. Through the creative act, the artist bears witness to the human person’s orientation toward otherness and transcendence. Aesthetic experience is thus relational and personalizing: gratuitousness and self-giving function as spiritual resistance to the impersonal order fostered by modern, capitalist, and individualist culture. Animated by a “restless conscience,” the artist becomes both witness and agent of a personal and communal revolution that seeks to free the human being from material and spiritual alienation. Accordingly, art is at once vocation and commitment, dwelling at the threshold between uniqueness and communion, person and community, action and contemplation, immanence and transcendence. Personalist aesthetics thereby unfolds as an ethics of creation and an anthropology of relation, in which “life in poetry” becomes a gesture of universal communion and a principle of social humanization.