Gabriel Marcel

Gabriel Marcel (born December 7, 1889, Paris, France—died October 8, 1973, Paris) was a French philosopher, dramatist, and critic who was associated with the phenomenological and existentialist movements in 20th-century European philosophy. His work and style are often characterized as theistic or Christian existentialism (a term Marcel disliked, preferring the more neutral description “neo-Socratic” because it captures the dialogical, probing, and sometimes inchoate nature of his reflections).

Early life, philosophical style, and principal works

Marcel’s mother died when he was four years old, and he was raised by his father and his maternal aunt, whom his father later married. Marcel had little religious upbringing but received an excellent education, studying philosophy at the Sorbonne and passing an agrégation (competitive examination) in 1910 that qualified him to teach in secondary schools. Although he produced a stream of philosophical and dramatic works (he wrote more than 30 plays), as well as shorter pieces in reviews and periodicals, Marcel never completed a doctoral dissertation and never held a formal position as a professor, instead working mostly as a lecturer, writer, and critic. He also developed a keen interest in classical music and composed a number of pieces.

Marcel’s philosophical style follows the descriptive method of phenomenology. Eschewing a structured, more systematic approach, Marcel developed a method of discursive probing around the edges of central life experiences that was aimed at uncovering truths about the human condition. Indeed, several of his early works are written in a diary format, an unusual approach for a philosopher. Marcel always insisted on working with concrete examples from ordinary experience as the initial basis for more abstract philosophical analysis. His work is also significantly autobiographical, a fact that reflected his belief that philosophy is as much a personal quest as a disinterested impersonal search for objective truth. In Marcel’s view, philosophical questions involve the questioner in a profound way, an insight that he believed had been lost by much of contemporary philosophy. Marcel’s dramatic works were intended to complement his philosophical thinking; many experiences that he brought to life onstage were subject to more detailed analysis in his philosophical writings.

The most systematic presentation of his ideas is to be found in his two-volume work Mystère de l’être (1951; The Mystery of Being), based on his Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen (1949–50). Other notable works are: Journal métaphysique (1927; Metaphysical Journal); Être et avoir (1935; Being and Having); Du refus à l’invocation (1940; Creative Fidelity); Homo viator: prolégomènes à une métaphysique de l’espérance (1944; Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope); Les Hommes contre l’humain (1951; Man Against Mass Society); Pour une sagesse tragique et son au-delà (1968; Tragic Wisdom and Beyond); several key essays, including “On the Ontological Mystery” (1933); and several significant plays, including Un Homme de Dieu (1922; A Man of God) and Le Monde cassé (1932; The Broken World), both of which have been performed in English.

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Basic philosophical orientation

Marcel was influenced by the phenomenology of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and by his rejection of idealism and Cartesianism, especially early in his career. His basic philosophical orientation was motivated by his dissatisfaction with the approach to philosophy that one finds in René Descartes and in the development of Cartesianism after Descartes. Marcel observed (in Being and Having) that “Cartesianism implies a severance…between intellect and life; its result is a depreciation of the one, and an exaltation of the other, both arbitrary.” Descartes is famous for having purposefully doubted all of his ideas and for splitting the interior self off from the external world; his strategy of methodic doubt was an attempt to restore the link between the mind and reality. According to Marcel, Descartes’s starting point is not an accurate depiction of the self in actual experience, in which there is no division between consciousness and the world. Describing Descartes’s approach as a “spectator” view, Marcel argued that the self should instead be understood as a “participant” in reality—a more accurate understanding of the nature of the self and of its immersion in the world of concrete experience.

Being and having, mystery and problem

Marcel developed his position by introducing a number of important philosophical distinctions for which he became well known. Among them is that between being and having, which was central to his thought. The distinction applies to a number of areas in life, including the experience of human embodiment, the nature of intersubjective relations, and the nature of the human person. Marcel argued that people’s relationships to their own bodies is not one of typical “ownership,” and so the fact of human embodiment presents a difficulty for any philosophy, such as Cartesianism, that wishes to place the fact of embodiment in doubt. It is thus incorrect to understand embodiment in terms of ownership, or to say that people “possess” their bodies as instruments; it is more accurate to say instead that “I am my body,” by which Marcel meant that one cannot look upon one’s body as an object or as a problem to be solved, because the logical detachment that is required to do so cannot be achieved. Indeed, as soon as I consider my body as an object, it ceases to be “my body,” because the nature of conceptual thought requires detachment from the object under analysis. Nor, however, can I regard my bodily experiences as the sum total of my life.

This analysis then opens up the realms of being and having. “Having” involves taking possession of objects, requires detachment from the self, and is the realm in which one seeks conceptual mastery and universal solutions. Marcel acknowledged that, although it is possible to adopt this attitude toward human beings, it is a distortion of the nature of the self. The realm of being, on the other hand, is one in which experience is unified before conceptual analysis, in which the individual participates in reality and has access to experiences that are later distorted at the level of abstract thinking.

Marcel introduced another of his famous distinctions, that between mystery and problem, to further elaborate the notions of being and having. He tended to divide reality into the world of mystery and the world of problems (the world of being and the world of having). These realms further correspond to a distinction between two types of reflection, secondary and primary. In The Mystery of Being, Marcel defined a problem as a task that requires a solution that is available for everybody. What is distinctive about a problem is that it requires an abstraction at the conceptual level from the lived experience of the person who is dealing with the problem. Marcel illustrated this point with an example from his school days, when he was unable to figure out how the wires in an electrical circuit joined together to produce a current. Problems of this sort are objective and universal and can be solved in principle by anyone; they require what Marcel called primary reflection. This is ordinary, everyday reflection; it involves functional, abstract logical analysis and is also the realm of academic disciplines, including theology, science, and philosophy itself. Primary reflection is an essential part of human engagement with reality, a fact Marcel did not wish to deny, but he did wish to challenge the view that it is the only type of reflection or that every human question or concern should be approached by means of primary reflection. He believed that modern philosophy has lost its way because it mistakenly judges that any issue that cannot be analyzed in this abstract, scientific way is not a real area of knowledge.

Marcel argued, however, that there is another realm of human experience—the realm of mystery—that cannot be fully understood by means of primary reflection. A deeper type of reflection will be required in order to gain access to that realm (see below Experience and reflection). In “On the Ontological Mystery,” Marcel characterized a mystery as a “problem that encroaches on its own data.” The point is best understood by saying that, in the case of a mystery, the questioner is directly involved in the question and so is unable to separate from it in order to study it in an objective manner (and thereby seek an “objective” solution that would be accessible to everyone). In the realm of mystery, it is not possible to substitute one person for another without altering the question itself. There are several key areas of mystery in human life, according to Marcel: the embodiment of the human subject; the unity of body and mind; and the central human experiences (often referred to as the “concrete approaches”) of faith, fidelity, hope, and love.

Marcel illustrated these points with several powerful examples. One concerns what philosophers of religion often refer to as the problem of evil, or the problem of how to reconcile the all-good and all-powerful nature of God with the existence of evil in human experience. Marcel wished to distinguish this problem from what he called the mystery of evil—the way in which an experience of evil affects one in one’s personal life and how one might try to cope with it. In the former case, the problem is considered at an abstract level, and, while the discussion is not without value, it leaves out the issue about evil that most troubles people—the concrete experience of evil itself and how to respond to it. In “On the Ontological Mystery,” Marcel observed that “I can only grasp it as evil in the measure in which it touches me—that is to say, in the measure in which I am involved.…Being ‘involved’ is the fundamental fact.” At the level of primary reflection, the philosopher seeks a universal objective solution, but such a solution is not appropriate at the level of existential contact, according to Marcel, because the experience of the individual is necessarily excluded in the move to abstraction.