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The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Bernard G. Murchland C.S.C.
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Extract

When Jonathan Swift described the episode of Laputa in his Gulliver's Travels his genius for satire took on a prophetic dimension. The Laputans were a strange race of men — a star-gazing, introspective people who decorated their clothing with emblems of the sun, moon, stars, and various musical instruments and served their food in fancy geometrical patterns. They devoted their time to the study of mathematics, astronomy and other subjects devoid of concrete claims and when in public were always accompanied by “flappers” to call them back from the far reaches of abstraction and impracticality. Swift employed great imagination and rich wealth of detail in heaping contempt upon the abstract mind.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , April 1959 , pp. 339 - 356
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1959

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References

1 Marcel, Gabriel, The Philosophy of Existence, tr. by Harari, Manya (London, 1948), p. 93Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., pp. 95–96.

3 Troisfontaines, Roger, De L'Existence à I'Etre, I (Paris, 1953), pp. 17–40Google Scholar.

4 Marcel, , op. cit., pp. 81–82Google Scholar.

5 Quoted by Troisfontaines, Roger, op. cit., pp. 25–26Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., p. 10.

7 Marcel, , The Mystery of Being, I, “Reflection and Mystery,“ tr. by Fraser, G. S. (London, 1950), p. 66Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., p. 83.

9 Ibid., p. 84.

10 Ibid., p. 91.

11 Marcel, , The Philosophy of Existence, p. 12Google Scholar.

12 Marcel, , Being and Having, translation by Farrar, Katherine (London, 1949), p. 133Google Scholar.

13 The distinction betwen problem and mystery corresponds to the distinction between first and second reflection. The transition from one to the other, the leap, takes place in recollection which in turn is rooted in an attitude of admiration. Mystery is the realm of the metaproblematical. When it is objected that, since even the metaproblematical is a content of thought, we must question its mode of existence and assure ourselves that it really does exist, Marcel in “On the Ontological Mystery” answers straightforwardly: “My answer is categorical: To think, or rather, to assert, the metaproblematical is to assert it as indubitably real, as a thing of which I cannot doubt without falling into contradiction. We are in a sphere where it is no longer possible to dissociate the idea itself from the certainty or the degree of certainty which pertains to it. Because this idea is certainty, it is the assurance of itself; it is, in this sense, something other and something more than an idea. As for the term “content of thought” which figured in the objection, it is deceptive in the highest degree. For content is, when all is said and done, derived from experience; whereas it is only by way of liberation and detachment from experience [through recollection] that we can possibly rise to the level of the metaproblematical and of mystery. This liberation must be real; this detachment must be real; they must not be an abstraction, that is to say, a fiction recognized as such.”

14 Roberts, David E., Existentialism and Religious Belief (New York, 1957), p. 290Google Scholar.

15 Marcel, , The Philosophy of Existence, pp. 32–33Google Scholar.

16 A good example of how imprisonment in primary reflection prevents this awareness can be seen in connection with Marcel's treatment of the socalled mind-body problem. Primary reflection tries to treat my body as one among many, and it tries to be detached about the fact that this particular body happens to be mine. It sees that my body follows the same natural laws as all others. Thus information about my behavior might be extended indefinitely without incorporating my own firsthand knowledge of what it is like to be myself. Inasmuch as primary reflection severs the unity of self and body, we cannot look to it to do the reuniting. Philosophy has wasted a great deal of time trying to explain this divorce away by using the analytic methods which caused the divorce in the first place. Here Marcel challenges the whole mode of thinking that tries to regard mind and body as two “somethings” that must be related to each other.

17 Marcel complains that classic ontology has been dominated by static conceptions which stress the perfection and self-sufficiency of Being or God. The kind of fulfillment he envisages is more like the creativity which can go on between persons. It is something lived, rather than something impersonally stated. Traditional ontology and theology have tried to conceive of ens realissimum as made up of attributes which comprise the whole. It is quite against the sense of Marcel's philosophy to try to approach the uniqueness of an individual being — be it God or man — as though it were an additive whole. God is not a quid with a certain number of predicates.

18 Collins, James, “Marcel: Christian Socratic,’ Commonweal, LXVIII (08 29, 1958), 535–539Google Scholar.

19 Marcel, Gabriel, The Philosophy of Existence, p. 96Google Scholar.