Who, then, was Gabriel Marcel, and why spend time on a philosopher who, unlike his contemporaries, never refused to recognize the “ontological” mystery?
It could have been that my conversion was like an answer from Heaven to a prayer that [my mother] made without knowing that some days later she would leave this earth. Shaken up by what [my aunt] had shared with me, I walked through Paris, given over to a kind of ecstasy. —Gabriel Marcel, Awakenings
A paradox resides at the heart of the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel. That paradox is this: “Elusiveness is an essential constituent of his thought, and any exposition which [seeks] to eliminate it would be self-defeating.” [And yet] any competent and coherent study of Marcel’s thought… requires a deep dive into this paradox. —Kenneth T. Gallagher, The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel
I. By way of an introduction….
I mentioned to a Catholic colleague one time my interest in “Christian Existentialism” about which I was learning from reading Gabriel Marcel. My colleague frowned a bit and then knee-jerk argued that he had never heard of Marcel but bristled at the phrase “Christian Existentialism.” And with some good cause since much of what we know of “existentialism” is its characterization of the alienated and isolated self, the death of God, and lived experience as having no exit what with life something to be tolerated and that intimate relationships with others should be avoided.
In other words, ugly modern stuff.
To be more clear, I noted for my college that much of modern philosophy is more likely than not to be “fanaticized” and that such is the equivalent of existential “man” in conflict with mass society, the “I” against the “Other” which culturally has been brought into deep relief since the “Other” is a materialistic philosophy that turns men into “things.”
I explained to my colleague that after his conversion to Catholicism in 1929, Marcel became an acute critic of “Atheistic Existentialism,” to put a name to the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre—what the philosopher Iris Murdoch called “the French flu.”
That brief likely did not satisfy my colleague and I suspect we left matters in the air even though I qualified for his benefit “Christian Existentialism” with something of a synonym, “Theistic Existentialism.”
Such huffiness occurs sometimes in the hallways of one’s academic life propounding my own guilt.
II. What, then, is Christian or Theistic Existentialism?
In the simplest terms, if that’s possible, Christian Existentialism reverses the phrase “existence precedes essence” with “essence precedes existence,” changing the premises from mere subjectivity to the Christian transcendent union of God and mankind in the person of Jesus Christ. Christian Existentialism is thus diametrically opposed to Sartre’s maxim that man is nothing but what he makes of himself.
If there’s a similarity between the two phrases it occurs with the argument that each person makes independent choices that constitute existence. And each person suffers anxiety from the decision or indecision of choices that become commitments which have the potential of falling into despair or, better to say in a more orthodox manner, falling into sin. The difference between the two is that with Sartre a decision made may or may not add purpose to our lives whereas Christian Existentialism argues that a decision is very often a leap of faith and equally often much like Biblical figures, Abraham and Mary, who become models for the purposes of our lives.
What’s also relevant here is how often Augustine shares his existential “angst” in his Confessions which suggests ancient possibilities, Augustine a proto-Christian Existentialist. Thus there are theological systems—including Marcel’s— which in some way or another are in debt to existentialism even if some fail adequately to analyze the basic concepts involved. Karl Barth comes to mind when in his commentary
The Epistle to the Romans he seems to argue that finite reason cannot hope to grasp the totality of divinity which then also seems to repudiate rational foundations for Christianity which one finds in the rational theology of Roman Catholicism and in the idealism of nineteenth-century Protestant thought.
And, as I hope to prove, Marcel is prescient in that regard with his theatrical writings in which characters suffer deep anxiety if not dread. That being the case, Marcel’s discussions of anxiety, guilt, and man’s relation to God use existential concepts which reflect elements of that fashionable philosophical character.
III. The striking thing about the Precious Blood is the bond it established between love and suffering in our experience, a bond that has become so close that we have come to think of suffering accepted with joy as the most authentic sign of love with any depth at all…. —Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having
Who, then, was Gabriel Marcel, and why spend time on a philosopher who, unlike his contemporaries, never refused to recognize the “ontological” mystery?
French, of course, born December 7, 1889 and died October 8, 1973 suggesting a remarkable span of decades. His mother, who was Jewish, died when Marcel was young and left him to be raised by a Protestant aunt. His father, largely absent, was a diplomat who would at times bring the young Marcel with him on his frequent travels which allowed him to compare Sweden with delight and less delight with fashionable Paris.
The majority of his education was at the Sorbonne where he earned a degree in philosophy which would be an equivalent to an MA. One of his influences was, obviously, Henri Bergson.
During the First World War, Marcel worked as an official for the Red Cross which involved locating missing soldiers. Awakenings, his autobiography, notes that the experiences were shaking and brought home to Marcel the tragic character of human existence more so since the war became an object of desolate horror. His autobiography notes that at this time he began a journal later becoming the structure for his 1927 Metaphysical Journal the backbone of which is his criticism of objectivism so popularized in the 1940s and 1950s by Ayn Rand and her unconventional claims that selfishness if a virtue and altruism a vice. [1]
The word “awakening” is also prescient since it eventually led Marcel to argue for the failure of abstract philosophy in which rationalism and science had become more important than immediate experience and intuition for understanding reality. Abstract philosophy, in other words, failed to cope with the tragic character of human existence so revealed to Marcel during the First World War.[2]
So, again, the turning point in Marcel’s life came in 1929 with his “awakenings,” his conversion to Catholicism which one would assume led to a change in the direction of his thought but led only, as it were, to intensify his conviction that philosophy must take into consideration a reality interior to faith and hope. The simplest point here is to remember that existentialism in the popular mind is almost immediately associated with Sartre but to which Marcel with his “awakenings” is again diametrically opposed. And much like Kierkegaard, especially, his Philosophical Fragments, Marcel was unsystematic and with points of departure as diverse as a playwright, a concert pianist, and varieties of philosophical writings with enduring themes: freedom, creative fidelity, presence, hope, and the self.
The notion of existentialism intensified his life but to define his opposition Marcel preferred the term “Neo-Socratic” for his particular thought relative to existentialism although the aim is surely to move beyond Socrates. And so again, like Kierkegaard, Marcel was arguing against the Enlightenment view that God, nature, knowledge and man could be combined into one philosophical world view. His counter-intuitive view was that knowledge of God was a spiritual condition that only God can give at an “awakening” moment which arrives with decisive existential significance.
“Neo-Socratic” is also not just a catch-phrase but is used, often, to aid our understanding of Kierkegaard. The basic premise is, of course, that Kierkegaard used Socrates as his model as did Marcel. What Socrates was to Athenian society, a stinging gadfly, was to make the philosopher into someone with an expansive conversation for all mankind but with profound objections to any totalizing philosophical system. In the case of Marcel, the result is a mixture of genres and a deep commitment to interdisciplinary dialogue. In other words, philosophy is not a singular stagnant kind of operation which had come to characterize much of “modern” philosophical debate. Thus merely to read Marcel’s philosophical texts is to divorce the reader from his writing on aesthetics or from his experiments in music or his dramatic writings.
Turn we, then, to an entry point for Marcel.
IV. Marcel’s Metaphysical Journal….
Marcel notes in his preface to the Metaphysical Journal that when stating his ideas in the journal he had little notion that it would be published one day as a sort of entry point in light of his later writings. The Journal is the place where he began to denounce the fatal consequence of the spirit of abstraction, notable, he adds, in politics and that he was in fragments arguing that the abstracting mind leads to fanaticism, to idolatry, and that such idolatry is invariably accompanied by the paroxysms of objectivism, Marxist materialism and Nazi racism.
At another entry point, Marcel adds, interestingly, that he had once been asked by one of his students whether his philosophy could be considered as a kind of neo-scholasticism. The expression struck him very much and on reflection Marcel wondered whether the phrase could be applied to him since the terms existentialism allows brought with them the worst of misunderstandings. A short while later the label Christian existentialism was applied to him. Then in the 1950s and looking backward, Marcel notes that he had labored to maintain a state of openness in contradistinction to a systemized dogmatics closed in on itself.
In his Awakenings, then, much of which serves as bookend to the Metaphysical Journal, Marcel early asks his reader to excuse the meandering character of his thoughts even though they shed light on the narrow relations that bind his work to his life and his character. Marcel is also particular at this moment by arguing that those who look upon him simply as an existential philosopher and who as a Christian sharpens his critical knife as an to opponent of Sartre. He writes that in 1927 he was becoming aware of what was specific in his contribution to contemporary philosophy. The book is called a journal because it’s diary-like and with significant autobiographical references and thus with Awakenings valuable documents for any one who wishes to study the development of Marcel’s thought and those who influenced his thought.
When he published the Metaphysical Journal in 1929, he dedicated the book to Bergson but also interestingly, to William Ernest Hocking and his The Meaning of God in Human Experience; likely a forgotten book these days, but once thought of in much the same way one thinks of wisdom literature which teaches how to engage theologically with a world created by divine wisdom and which is knowable through observation and experience.[3] The problem for Hocking and for Marcel is that new experiences lead to new knowledge which can impact our traditional theological understandings. The Book of Job comes to mind which in destabilizing “norms” led to results that can be “scary.”
The ideas that can be gathered from the Metaphysical Journal, however, are pertinent to the modern age when Marcel emphasizes the inadequacy of materialistic life and the inability of contemporary philosophy (which he believes had become something like a spectator sport) to capture the intimacy of key human experiences and so the need for a philosophy that captures the deeper kinds of “reflection.” By contemporary philosophy he means the moral relativism and spiritual nihilism invasive to the modernist. Marcel notes that during the years prior to World War I he, too, had been captive to post-Kantian German philosophy in its most abstract form. True, he again admits, that he was an impatient person and inclined to revolt but even in his revolt he did not have the philosophical equipment to transform his vague uneasiness of mind which as the Journal again indicates became in time a relentless struggle against the perils of so much modern thought about which he analogizes as something akin to rancid butter, or overripe fruit.
In his Journal, therefore, Marcel is early seeking after a much more transcendent dimension to human experience but which cannot be defined without an intimate understanding of tragic loss, that most profound of human subjective experiences. To that end, the Journal offers insights into Marcel’s argument which becomes much more presciently aware in his dramatic pieces: and that the human self is not a mere observer of reality but an immersive participant in reality—that world of concrete experience.
Such might be an awkward way of proceeding with a philosopher who is also a concert pianist, and a dramatist, but Marcel declares in the Journal and in Awakenings that the historical origins of philosophy, centuries ago, began with an attitude of humility, of “ontological humility” according to Gallagher.[4] It’s source is not in meekness or simple modesty but for Marcel an existential attitude toward the death of “Being” with an equally profound awareness of finitude which suggests an “arousing” awareness of the limits of every man’s essence and existence.
“Arousing out of” becomes, then, a salient phrase but suffice it to point out that the ontological aspect of Marcel’s metaphysical orientation can unabashedly be called “Augustinian”
V. Christian Existentialism and the unique power of aesthetic experience….
Marcel understood that his music and his dramatic productions were invested with a particular authority with both moral and ontological implications. The greatest works of music, for example, of which Bach and Beethoven were prime examples, invoked for Marcel a certain communion which he believed invoked in turn a participation as if one were somehow paradoxically “on the inside.” That seems vague, of course, unless one also argues that philosophical knowledge is less a matter of abstraction, mere calculating objective notes upon a page, and more a matter of meditation and contemplation and revelation and thus a matter more of the soul and less the mins, so to speak. With that in mind, Marcel’s thesis—which stands in opposition to modern existentialism—is that his philosophy would be incomplete without the insight in his music and his plays.
As for his aesthetics, then, for Marcel, who was again both a classical composer and concert pianist, he credits music with an impetus for a response which Marcel argues is less a vapid abstraction and more a moment deeply akin to an ontological revelation: e.g., one cannot be a mere passive spectator but must clearly respond and participate. What’s interesting here, in other words, and sets Marcel apart from his existential contemporaries, is that music, or any art, owns a metaphysical “aura” which Marcel also calls a “shimmering revelation.” It’s not inadvertent, then, to suggest that for Marcel—as may also be the case with Proust—that if mankind had no speech music would be speech. Marcel likely borrows from Bergson’s theory that music adds to the responder layers of duration and time leading to a “plane of immanence” unless, of course the musicians are playing out of tune.
For Marcel, aesthetics bears moral and ontological implications which suggests in turn his disagreement with Walter Pater’s notion of a an aesthetic response as a burning with a hard gemlike flame. Beauty, rather feeds and fructifies reason and morality and leads to the Platonic argument that the true hides behind the beautiful which in turn argues that for Marcel music and drama offer compensatory (if not disciplinary) power to make his philosophy more capable of explanation and understanding.
There’s a passage in his Man Against Mass Society, for example, where Marcel argues that music, say from a Bach concert, restores to one a feeling that is like an assurance of what an honor it is to be a man, but with that assurance breaths a certainty beyond the simple limits of an emotion but is radiant and filled with light. [5]
At issue, however, is the notion that music has largely not been an attentive feature for most philosophers. Schopenhauer is an exception with his notion that music is the most metaphysical art duplicating the basic structure of the world. And Bergson, again, in his An Introduction to Metaphysics argues that the experience of music conveys absolute knowledge by directly entering into the experience which I suggest is the case with the Ava Maria opening piano and cello musical phrases as one might experience from attending an evening concert with Kathryn Stott and Yo-yo Ma.
One might argue, therefore, that Marcel’s aesthetic theory could be summarized by arguing that music is invested with a supreme authority such that a single musical phrase is beyond explanation. If so, and beyond explanation, such would also argue that it’s also beyond knowledge but also breathing a certainty which is infinitely beyond the limits of a simple emotion deriving from a particular temperament or sensitivity.
The phrase is not mine but drawn from an essay by the Reverend Dr. Robert W. Vallee titled “The Aesthetic Theory of Gabriel Marcel” in which the author argues that beauty fructifies reason and morality and that aesthetic experience is one of Marcel’s favorite modes of approaching the ontological mystery.[6] More so Marcel’s larger theme is that aesthetics opens a shared discourse with religion and value which in turn suggests that aesthetics is much more than a subordinate auxiliary to philosophy but is truly a metaphysical discourse with its own standing. His example is again music which is a manner of thinking which has the power to invoke directly a certain communion.
Here, by way of analogy, Marcel would likely ask his reader to consider whether such is possible by a computer which can be programmed and can play every note back without error but is incapable of improvisation. To reduce music to a series of programmed notes is to suggest, regardless of how exact, a failure to creative fidelity, a failure to understand the beauty of improvisation which owns an ontological mystery and if so might also present truth in its Christian existential fullness.
My own sense from reading Marcel—and that of a novice— is that with his “awakening” conversion he found it necessary to argue that faith is not an irrational leap but an apprehension of God as an Absolute Presence with whom we need “arousingly” to develop a”Neo-Socratic” dialogue much like the distinction Martin Buber makes with his relation of an I to a Thou. Unlike the existentialism from Sartre and the modern age entirely ignoring God and leaving man unfulfilled, Buber and Marcel argue that when we make contact with other people, say small talk in a diner, which is often improvisational, we form a relationship which is a mutual exchange of ideas and consciousness unless we treat those other people as objects. But if we believe that in talking to another person what we experience with that person’s spirit should be much like a dialogue bringing us closer to God. This is so since interacting with each other brings us closer to God when we treat all human beings equally and see them as images of God, a “Thou” and not an “It.” Not to do so leaves us unfulfilled and hollow.
VI. Here it might be best to consider one of Marcel’s dramatic works, his The Broken World….
What’s unusual here is that Marcel, perhaps like Sartre, believed a synonymity to exist between his philosophical works and his dramatic works of which there are some 30 stage plays and over 20 television plays. There’s a major theme present and that is the notion that we live in a broken world which suggests being lost in the modern world, Sartre’s world, but complicated by what Marcel believed is the increasing degradation of the person by the increasing bureaucratization of modern culture. His The Broken World is a four-act play written during those dramatic years of 1932-33.
Christiane Chesnay, the 33 year old heroine, is married to Lawrence, a technocrat bureaucrat lacking in personality. Christiane, on the other hand, is actively engaged with many of her friends. The circle of characters belong to a class of elites but for whom the sense of their existence is simply to enjoy life if not pursue it with 1930s abandon. As such, then, there is little question of morality but only the question of free choice. One can imagine life lived to the intoxicating rhythms of jazz and tangos and a free-spiritedness that mocks anything conventional. The action takes place in Paris in 1932.
More so, the circles in which Christiane moves frequently express disdain for anything conventional or traditional. She writes a novel in the form of letters which make her appear to be liberated. Other friends are equally so: Denise Furstlin, a friend to Christiane since childhood, flaunts her drug-addled lover in front of her husband who cannot object since his own preference is for young boys.
Denise is, however, of the impression that much of this life is attractive but does not satisfy. She says she feels as if she is living in a broken world.
It’s a metaphor for a modern world fractured and without coherent unity and leaves an emptiness in her personal life filled only with artificial posturing and with what appears to be “no exit” and thus bleak prospects.
Which leaves the reader here for the moment. Marcel writes of the modern dilemma, especially the abstract dilemmas, tawdry and unclean as they may be but without flinching. If he were not an apologist for grace and parousia, Marcel would make no covenant with a spiritual vista and a continuity of hope. But Marcel is at war with illusion and confusion and the contradictions he finds in the modern world and the egalitarian bigotry he finds in his own French world.
Marcel’s intention, therefore, in The Broken World, is artfully to compose a drama full of intrigue but as the various acts develop what begins to emerge is a sense of mystery in the spiritual sense and first to Denise who sees the broken world as cruel and cold but with no hope, she commits suicide. Christiane, feeling abandoned, longs for love and contemplates suicide but is held back by her fear of what happens in the after life which seems to be enough to hold her back from suicide.
Her prospects, though, are bleak.
Act four begins four months later and with a long discussion between Genevieve Forgue, a childhood friend, and Christiane in which Genevieve asks Christiane if she had ever thought of going to Soelsmes, a Benedictine Abbey in north-western France. She responds that she’s a non-believer. Genevieve asks whether Christiane has accepted her life. It’s a gentle nudge and leads to a surprise ending.
After Genevieve leaves, Christiane and Lawrence remain together but the impression is that Christiane has had an “awakening”; the impression has been that the broken world is that of life hovering over a void but has also exposed the possibility of the intervention of a mysterious power beyond everyday natural events which also suggests that she won’t continue to founder in complete confusion. or continued living in an artificial hell.
She must fight off the despair.
Her conversation with Genevieve reveals that she had spent the last months with her brother, Jacques Decroy, a Benedictine monk whom Genevieve makes clear had suffered and prayed so that Christiane might have a spiritual “awakening.” When she learns this she doesn’t stiffen at such an idea as she may have in the past but enters into a mysterious world where prayer and self-sacrifice make sense.
Christine enters this “awakening” world with a question: “[Are] such things real?” A light breaks through and at play’s end her face shines with the spirit of truth and her belief she has an intercessor close to God, namely Jacques.
There is a communion sinners and there is a communion of saints.
It’s what Marcel calls the mystery of presence, the grace of God operating through the intermediary of loved ones.
Marcel’s drama can stand on its own, independent of his apologetic. But underlying the four acts is the philosophical question of what does it mean to exist?
VII. The Ontological Mystery—in place of a conclusion….
The usual problem in cases like Marcel is to find the pin to label him. In the first chapter to his The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, Kenneth T. Gallagher writes that “Nothing could be more uncustomary than the thought of Gabriel Marcel: there seems to be no direct precedent for it in the entire history of philosophy. Presenting elements of phenomenology , existentialism, idealism, and empiricism all consorting together in symbolic bliss, it completely defies classification….What is the method which Gabriel Marcel follows in philosophy? What is the method which accounts for the haunting note of conviction which his thought carries?” [7]
As Gallagher makes clear, then, Marcel’s “philosophical” reputation has been linked with “theistic existentialism” but because of ambiguities with the term has again led to an unfortunate alignment in the popular mind with Sartre with whom again Marcel was almost diametrically opposed even if both are concerned with the fundamental problems of man’s existence in this painful world.
Can we, however, point to a beginning?
Well, as we like to say, it depends. Gallagher makes it clear that there is no formulated proposition. The first translation of Being and Having, however, appeared in1949, and again is not organized like a conventional philosophical treatise. “Being” and “Having”are two modes of comportment meaning, of course, behavior and bearing. The consequences are disastrous if the two “modes” “comport” with atheistic existentialism. Marcel begins with a theistic assurance which he says underlies all questions and makes all questions possible: The soul which despair shuts itself up against can be “awakened” to the central and mysterious assurance in which we believe and have found the principle of all that is faithful and hopeful.
Gallagher goes on to suggest that this “theistic” assurance in Marcel is not a formulated philosophical proposition but what he calls a “presence.” “It is not an affirmation that we make we but an affirmation by which we are made. It’s not an assertion which we pronounce as an “I am” which is to be in the presence of being.
Which of course is obscure even when he adds that to know one’s self as “being” is to know “being” as present to us not as if it were communicable information but as a “forefeeling.” He adds that “forefeeling” is “the first intelligible emanation from the act of “being.”
The language is typical Marcel.
Even so, such phrases as “being” and “becoming” are congenial to existential atheism which encapsulates such notions as nature and essence, being true to ourselves and with a sense of the future which can be transforming through self-actualization but with no transcendent junction between God and human in the person of Jesus Christ.
The key word for Marcel is “emanation,” by which he means an abstract but perceptible feeling that issues from a source, from a presence, from a God-head.
Thus it’s wise to consider Marcel’s The Existential Background of Human Dignity based upon Marcel’s William James Lectures at Harvard University in 1963 and a decade before his death.
His philosophical itinerary, so to speak, turns toward the fundamental problems of man’s existence in today’s technocratic bureaucratic, nay, painful world. The point being that the lectures are much less speculative questions than they are Marcel’s personal encounters which bring into play the existential destiny of an individual and Marcel’s conviction that he believed as a philosopher a special responsibility to restore the image of man to his true dignity and thus to save him from a specious modernity.
It’s in Chapter V, “The Ontological Mystery” which Marcel suggests owns a starting point and upon which he states his “thesis”: the necessity of restoring to human experience its ontological weight which compels him by the very fact of its obscurity and paradox to make an indispensable clarification lest the words become literally meaningless.
Marcel proceeds then to clarify what he means by ontological weight by suggesting that ontological weight means “the weight of Being or weight with respect to Being ( which remains incomprehensible if one includes the meaning of the word Being simply as a mode of experience without falling into the temptation to “psychologize.” [8]
Rather, Marcel adds that each of us every day may meet another human being who will appear to be much farther ahead than any of us along that way of which we can see only the beginning, as when we seek our way in a fog. Here he asks his reader to allow him to adopt what he calls a personal form of expression in describing this other human being as someone presenting himself to us as a witness who attests by his presence that mode of being to us toward which we are groping and trying to carry with us all those who are close to us.
But what is attested to in this manner? What is disclosed, he goes on to suggest, is that this other person bears in himself a certain life and that he radiates this life like a light. But again, he assets, we must be careful not to succumb to the temptation to psychologize. The distinction for Marcel came upon him in the winter of 1932 which was revealed to him in a flash of insight. He was taking a walk in Paris when the insight came suddenly to him as an “awakening” and a mystery of “Being” whose essence was before him and which he describes as listening to the voices and appeals comprising that symphony of “Being”. Marcel finds it difficult to be more precise except to say that the “awakening” was a supra-rational unity beyond images, words, and concepts which was more problematic because of the difficulty in disentangling the skein of thoughts which could not be fully apprehended except as a whole.
With that in mind, Marcel argues that such would remain unintelligible unless we come to understand the fundamental act which in 1933 in the Metaphysical Journal he referenced throughout as “meditation,” which is also designated by the word “recollection” and an act which had received too little attention by philosophers but needs to be understood as the act by which he recovers his “Being” as a unified whole. This reprise, this inner reflection, this principle of unity, he adds, is that upon which the very possibility of memory depends and the source of illumination, of “awakening” and corresponds to an advance of the spirit. Furthermore, in an attempt to bring together what Marcel calls certain random points, he argues that this experience, this contact with the source of illumination shared by other spiritual beings aids us in making our way toward what he calls “plentitude” for the full life.
This spiritual itinerary is the means by which we oppose the danger of losing ourselves in the modern bureaucratic technocratic world which fails to sustain us, that broken world which has lost its inner unity and its living center.
Near the conclusion of Chapter V, “The Ontological Mystery,”
Marcel references his own dramatic production The Broken World. Jacques, who died in his monastery, had felt responsible for Christiane and prayed that she would not become a victim in this broken world. Little by little, then, Christiane begins to change, little by little, as if a light is entering her awakening soul; thus, from an invisible world an “awakening” communion begins to exist that she had never suspected.
It’s an encounter, a light rising in the soul, to which an atheistic existentialist would object as to its plausibility. And although there is nothing to suggest that the accord will last, for Marcel his Christian theistic existentialism is an illuminating means for resolving the tragic problems posed for modern man even if all of life, before, during, and after is an incessant interplay of light and shadow infusing the whole of our existence, ontologically speaking.
Gallagher published his The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel in 1962. In the “Preface” he states that the principal aim “of a book on the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel ought to send the reader back to the original works in all their non-expoundable concreteness.”
There’s a “fortuity,” however, in that after the preface the forward is by Marcel himself and a few months before his death. Marcel writes in appropriate “theistic existentialism,” if not appropriate “Christian Existentialism,” that we do not belong to ourselves: this is certainly the sum and substance if not of wisdom, at least of any spirituality worthy of the name.”
As he writes the preface, he notes that he had been re-immersing himself in the very last works of Beethoven, which he writes in his opinion mark a level of musical perfection which he also writes represent for him the extreme limits of what he had sought to achieve, transfiguration, the sort of transmutation of human experience which is antipodal to a purely abstract or conceptual thought but welling up as an inexhaustible gift from a soul.
He adds only one more “reflection” which if it were from the Metaphysical Journal would be dated March 26, 1962 :[9]
The more technical development quickens and spreads . . . the more there yawns that eternal void which [I] have striven to fill. He hopes there are in the world a few readers to welcome what he would not like to call a message—for this word is misused—but rather a sympathetic stimulation, emanating often enough from suffering and frustration. He has, he continues “found a grace, which has been disposed to him by powers it appears presumptuous to name.”
But in the time he has remaining, he writes that he is grateful he has time to take his bearings to better find his way in the world which is taking shape before his eyes.
How better it is to remain faithful to the “awakenings” which have been central to one’s life rather than a future about which the moderns tell us we know nothing.
Notes:
[1] In the simplest terms, objectivism lays stress on what is external to the mind rather than thoughts or feelings, subjective experience. Objectivism is fully secular which means not faith-based and not living according to divine decree. It’s been called a philosophy for living on earth with the claim that all principles should be derived from the observable facts of reality found in nature which is all there is since there is nothing outside of nature which would be outside of existence.
[2] Abstract philosophy, to add to the mix, argues for a process of forming a concept by identifying common features among, say, a group of individuals. The consequence is to produce a generalized idea. One should quickly note the closeness between abstract philosophy and psychological abstraction. The issue complicates when abstract philosophy prioritizes so-called materialist values or ideas such as economic growth, gender equality, and freedom of speech which when politically applied in one’s pre-adult years gradually transform the “norms” of a society..
[3] In his introduction to The Existential Background to Human Dignity, Marcel notes that he corresponded with Hocking for at least forty years and in 1959 had the good fortune to meet him in his home and which led to one of the most enriching contemplative moments in his life from a man “who, through the visible world, has never ceased to have the presentiment of what is eternal” (1).
[4] Gallagher, 5.
[5] See Gabriel Marcel, Man against Mass Society, St. Augustine’s Press, 2008, especially Part Two, Chapter V, “The Reintegration of Honour.” It’s a short chapter in which Marcel narrates coming from an evening at an excellent Bach concert. This honor is an awareness and also a genuinely spiritual principle and which goes a against pride and the so-called directing classes. More so, honor itself is compatible with the fundamental principles of the Christian faith and thus linked with gratitude which assumes an ontological character. Marcel adds that Reason, though it recognizes itself, has been overwhelmed by the music of Bach, expands itself. and welcomes that light; for in its depths, reason has presentiment, though a very indistinct one, that this light is of the same nature as reason itself [and] makes it a point of honor to proclaim [an] identity. One might paraphrase by suggesting that the music of Bach is drawn from the very life of the soul (188-193).
[6] See The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 2000, 162.
[7] Gallagher, i.
[8] The Existential Background of Human Dignity, 67.
[9] Gallagher, , vii, ff.
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The featured image (detail) is a photograph, “Prijswinnaars Carl von Weizsäcker en Gabriël Marcel” (1969). This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.