by
GABRIEL MARCEL
chapter one
What Can Be Expected of Philosophy
I SHALL BEGIN with a remark I think is important. It would be entirely wrong to think that the question "What can be or what should be expected of philosophy?" can be answered in a way that would apply to any philosopher whatever. It would perhaps be possible to get such an answer if one were asking what can be expected of a scientific discipline or, a fortiori,of a technical procedure. But the words "any philosopher whatever" are probably no more meaningful than the words "any artist whatever" or "any poet whatever." And this is because philosophy, like art or poetry, rests on a foundation of personal involvement, or to use a more profoundly meaningful expression, it has its source in a vocation, where the word "vocation" is taken with all its etymological significance. I think that philosophy, regarded in its essential finality, has to be considered as a personal response to a call.
It goes without saying, of course, that like all other human activities, philosophy can be degraded, it can degenerate more or less into a caricature of itself. This happens, for example,when philosophy is treated as something that can be displayed in a examination. In France,where we have an organized program of studies in philosophy and give a baccalaureate degree, this danger is very much present. There is always the unfortunate possibility that the teacher who has the job of getting a student ready for the final comprehensive examinations will follow the lead of his colleagues in history and the natural sciences, simply preparing the initiate to give answers to the written or oral questions he will have to face. The frightful word "cramming" expresses admirably this sort of intellectual stuffing, which is not only unsympathetic to philosophy but is exactly its contrary. Of course it is possible that those responsible for this cramming job might originally have heard that call which I mentioned above and which I shall try to describe. It is possible that they have heard it, but not certain; and in any case it is certain that very often this increasingly tedious task snuffs out whatever spark of philosophy the professor may have had at the beginning, smothers it as one smothers the last embers of a campfire. Not that this is inevitable. I have known professors who were able to hold onto that special sort of ardor without which philosophy loses its vitality and shrivels to nothing save the mere husks we call words.
But we ought to consider this matter from the point of view of the student or disciple as well. The genuine philosophical relationship, as Plato not only described it but lived it for all time, is that of a flame awakening a flame. In such a relationship anything can happen. For example, it may actually come about that through a relatively dry kind of teaching a young man in whom philosophy exists potentially would, in spite of everything, discover the reality that he longs for and to which I might even say he already belongs in a certain way without knowing it. I can point to my own personal experience here. I had one philosophy professor, a man of great learning, whose teaching was distinguished by remarkable clarity. But now, looking back at his teaching from a distance, objectively, I must admit that it lacked that passion, that inspired warmth without which today I would be tempted to say no philosophical teaching can be alive. Yet my own desire was such that from the very first lesson I was telling my family that I had found my path, that I was going to be a philosopher, and this conviction never flagged.
Under such circumstances, it would obviously be wrong to expect generally valid conclusions following from a broad investigation into the original question of this essay. Indeed it would be wholly consistent with my thinking to say that the very notion of investigation, if it is not closely linked with that of a search, is without a doubt quite foreign to philosophers as such.
At this point an objection something like the following may occur to my readers: "In insisting as you do on the role of personal involvement in philosophical activity, do you not risk depriving philosophy of any objective weight, making it nothing but a game to be played according to individual caprice?" This objection must be faced squarely in order to get rid of a confusion which could lead to the worst misunderstandings.
The confusion I am thinking of has to do with the very idea of subjectivity. Perhaps it will be clearer if we focus our attention on art, which in certain respects is comparable to philosophy. At the the origin of a work of art we find-or we assume-the existence of a personal reaction, an original response to the many and often inarticulate calls that things seem to address to the consciousness or the artist. But I think it would be agreed that this subjective reaction has no artistic value by itself. That value appears only with the structures constituted through what we call the creative process, which offer themselves to the appreciation not only of the subject, in this case the artist, but also of other possible viewers or listeners. Of course, it would be foolish to speak here of universality in an extensive sense, for surely these structures will not be appreciated or even recognized by everyone. Indeed "everyone" is an empty and inappropriate concept here. I remember very well that before the music of Debussy became widely accepted there were a great many people who claimed it lacked any melody; today this affirmation seems odd to us. In a work such as Pelleas et Melisande, for example, there is continuous melody; but it is precisely because it is present everywhere that inexperienced listeners were not able to make it out. For them a melody was something you whistled or hummed on the way out of the theater or concert hall. Of course, it is not enough that form-in this case the melody-be perceived simply as form or structure. It must also be recognized as meaningful, even though the meaning may be immanent, inexpressible in words. Yet it is only on the basis of structure, whatever it might be, that the inter-subjective communion can be established without which it is impossible to speak of value. Of course I can converse with another person about the first movement of Beethoven's Fourteenth Quartet, for example, and we might accomplish considerably more than just making some observations about the tonality or the way the different instruments break in here or there-structural matters which could also be observed by a non-musical deaf person simply by reading the score. If we are sensitive to this music, then through the poor words we are condemned to use we will become aware of a certain quality made present to us through the structure, a certain sadness, a certain distance which is perhaps best expressed by the English word "remoteness"; and we may agree that perhaps never before has the sense of the infinite been so intimately rendered.
I have spent so much time with these examples because I wanted to show that in art, subjectivity tends to pass over into an inter-subjectivity which is entirely different from the objectivity science honors so much, but which nonetheless completely surpasses the limits of the individual consciousness taken in isolation.
Now some analogous observations can be made about what 1 shall call philosophical experience .. Surely there is not and there cannot be any philosophy worthy of the name without a special kind of experience, which I shall try to describe by comparison with something that can be observed in the world of music. There can be no authentic music where there is no ear for hearing. But let us beware of the unfortunate ambiguity of the word "ear." I do not mean simply to repeat the truism that music presupposes the existence of a particular organ of hearing. The word "ear" in its aesthetic sense means something infinitely more subtle, a certain faculty for appreciating relationships, or perhaps again a certain attitude of consciousness in the presence of what is given for hearing. For a person lacking ear in this sense there is no difference between a noise and a sound, and what we call a melody may seem to be just a succession of noises.
The philosophical attitude is perhaps not altogether different from "ear" understood in this way. Notice I am using the word "attitude" now, whereas above I spoke of experience. But there is really no contradiction in this, for the attitude in question can reveal itself only as a certain way that consciousness reacts to what must be called its fundamental situation. Let us now try to specify more precisely the nature of this reaction. It could be defined, it seems to me, as a wonder which tends to become a disquiet. Perhaps, as is so often true, an appeal to negation will best enable us to give an account of this disposition: it consists above all in not taking reality for granted. But what can be meant by reality here? Certainly not this or that particular phenomenon whose explanation might be in question. No, what is meant here is reality as a whole, and it is this ensemble or this totality which is put in question in the philosophical attitude. We ought perhaps also to take special note here of the mysterious relation between the I who questions and the world I am questioning. What am I, I who question? Am I within this world or outside it? In the presence of any given, the philosophical spirit lives this question with anxious impatience.
Let me use an example here which I think is highly significant. A person with a philosophical mind will not simply accept the fact that reality appears to us in an ordered succession of moments. The order here, which may sometimes also appear as disorder, will undoubtedly awaken in him a kind of cautious suspicion, as if he were on ground that did not offer sure footing. He will perhaps ask himself whether the orderly succession is not really a certain mode of appearance for something which under other circumstances could appear quite otherwise; and this question might in turn lead him to ask whether ultimately a thing could exist in itself, beyond any mode of appearance whatever. It could easily be shown that these questions are related to others pertaining to the self that I am and to whom appearances are given. For example, inasmuch as I am the location of appearances, am I not myself existing in some sense at the level of appearance? Following up such reflections would lead perhaps to a philosophy like Bradley's.
Please understand that I do not mean to say that a philosophical mind as such would ask itself questions like this. Remember what I said just above; it is no more legitimate to speak of the philosopher in the abstract-as "any philosopher whatever"than it is to speak of the artist or poet in that way. Such designations are appropriate only in the domain of pure objectivity, in the experimental sciences, for example. If we mix any particles whatever of given chemical substances (chlorine, sodium, etc.) the inevitable result will be a standard reaction which can be verified by any observer whatever. Here, of course, we have the experience for which Kant claimed to have specified the a priori conditions. But the peculiarly philosophical experience, or the experience of the artist, is of an absolutely different kind. One could even say that it takes place on a completely different level of reality.
Now there is something quite remarkable to notice here, and that is that different philosophical (or artistic) experiences can enter into communication with one another. I would even say that a philosophical experience that is not able to welcome an experience other than itself in order to understand or if necessary go beyond it ought to be regarded as negligible. It is essential that philosophical experience, once it is explicitly worked out, confront other experiences which are themselves fully elaborated and generally formulated in systems. One could go further, and say that this confrontation itself is actually part of the experience in question insofar as that experience comes to be clarified and crystallized in concepts. This is especially dear with a thinker like Heidegger, who seems to be engaged in a perpetual dialogue with the philosophers that preceded him: not with all of them, of course, but with those he feels close to-the great pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle, and among the moderns, mainly Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche.
Let me mention something here about Heidegger which is significant for our discussion. Heidegger came to France for the first time in 1955, and was invited to the Chateau Cerisy-la-Salle where several philosophers and students had gathered to hear him. Everyone hoped that he would give explanations of certain passages in his works which were especially difficult to make sense of. What a surprise when, after an introduction to philosophy in general, he set out to comment not on his own works but on certain texts of Kant and Hegel! He explained, to those who expressed their surprise and disappointment, that his method consisted precisely in clarifying his own thought through the encounter with great philosophers he had studied carefully. Of course it is important to see that such efforts by a man of Heidegger's originality always issue in a creative reinterpretation of the philosopher in question; this is especially true with respect to his encounters with the pre-Socratics and with Kant. Moreover, it should be recognized that there are some general problems concerning the history of philosophy itself which are eminently worthy of reflection. Certain philosophers, especially in France, have seen this. Today more than ever before it is acknowledged how necessary, though at the same time how difficult it is to achieve a philosophy of the history of philosophy.
In any case it seems that philosophical experience, even if it necessarily begins as an instrumental solo, needs to become part of a whole symphony. This is true even where such experience stands opposed to the views of other philosophers, for opposition is one form of dependency. Such was the relationship between Kant and David Hume, for example, or closer to our own time, of Bergson and Spencer. If I may mention myself in this context, I might say that my own thought developed in concerted opposition to contemporary Neo-Hegelians, especially Bradley, and to a certain French Neo-Kantianism.
At this point some of my readers may be inclined to object. ''If we understand you correctly." they might say, "you are offering a very strange and misleading answer to the question you raised at the beginning of your inquiry. First you said that philosophy can only exist for someone who has a certain kind of personal experience, or at least has an ear for philosophical thought. Now you say that philosophical experience requires a living communication, a dialogue with other experiences already elaborated, that is, a dialogue with other philosophers. But doesn't this amount to saying· that all philosophy happens within a kind of magic circle of privileged initiates, a sanctuary to which the uninitiated can have no access? Those of us who would actually ask the question ''What can be expected of philosophy?" are interested in what philosophy can bring to the uninitiated, to outsiders such as ourselves. If it is just a game for a few qualified people, then we are not interested in it, any more than someone Who doesn't play chess or know its rules would be interested in watching a chess game:"
This objection forces me to make some clarifications. First of all, I think it would simply be wrong to imagine that there is anything like a dividing wall separating the philosopher and the non-philosopher. There really never has been such a wall, but
today it is especially difficult to see any line of demarcation, since literature-what everybody reads or is supposed to be reading- is so full of philosophical thought. This is true not only of the essay and the novel, but also of the theater and the cinema. To take the work of Sartre, for example: precisely where his drama and fiction leave off and his philosophy begins simply cannot be determined. The same is true of my own dramatic and philosophical writing's. Or take a writer like Paul Valery who, even though he claimed to distrust philosophy, was actually so much a philosopher even in his purely poetic creations that a professional philosopher like Alain could see fit to devote an extended and careful commentary to his great collection of poems, Charmes. But I would go much further and assert that every thinking person, especially in our time, has at least moments where he enjoys an elementary philosophical experience. This experience appears as a kind of vibration in the presence of those great and mysterious realities which give all human life its concrete structure: love, death, the birth of an infant, and the like. There is no doubt in my mind that every personally felt emotion resulting from contact with such realities is like the embryo of philosophical experience. In the great majority of cases, of course, this embryo not only fails to develop into an articulated experience, but even seems to require no such development. Yet it is also true that almost every human being, in certain privileged moments, has experienced this need to be enlightened, to receive an answer to his own questioning. It must be added that this becomes more and more true to the extent that religion as such declines or at least changes to the point where people are less and less satisfied with the ready-made answers which it seems they once accepted without question.
One other thing seems to me important in this regard, and that is that some scraps of philosophical thought conveyed through newspapers, magazines, and ordinary conversations find their way to one extent or another into all minds. Most of the time these scraps could just as well be burned like household garbage, and it is perhaps one of the more important functions of true philosophical thought to carry out this kind of trash burning.
Let us now take up a possible objection which is even more troublesome than the one we have just considered. "You acknowledge that a certain relationship may be established between the 'non-philosopher' and the philosopher. But what philosopher are you talking about? A novice is bewildered and suspicious when he is faced with the great number of existing philosophies, many of which seem to be mutually exclusive. The very fact that he would have to choose among them (leaving aside the question of how and by what criteria the choice might be made) seems irreconcilable with each one's claim to express a truth or truths. Yet on the other hand, doesn't philosophy become a mere game if it gives up such claims to truth? To put the question in another way: How, considering this irreducible plurality, is it possible to speak of philosophy in the singular the way we speak of science in the singular?"
Certainly we cannot avoid such an objection, and the answer to it will have a direct bearing on our original question about what can be expected from philosophy. First of all I think we ought to deal straightforwardly with an image more or less explicitly entertained by those who would raise such an objection. I refer to the image of a shop window or display case where different philosophies would be arranged side by side so that a customer could easily choose among them. One of the surest benefits of a little historical reflection would be the realization this comparison is absurd, for such an arrangement is only for objects, for things, and a philosophy can never be treated as an object or a thing. A philosophy is a kind of experience; it is an adventure taking place within the greater adventure of human thought itself. Or if philosophy is a manifestation of the Spirit and the Word-if it is a theophany-then it is an adventure taking place at the heart of something that transcends human thought.
But from another point of view, anyone who has grasped my remarks at the beginning of this essay will see that a philosophy must always be thought of as a function of a certain inner demand, The history of philosophical doctrines is in large part the history, not yet wholly revealed, of the inner demands of the human spirit. These demands must be effectively related to the general concrete situations that have helped bring them to birth. Indeed, this rerelationship between situation and inner demand is itself an extremely complex one which philosophical reflection must clearly bring to light. There would be no sense in saying that a situation can by itself produce a demand. We are not dealing with a causal relationship here, nor for that matter "With the much simpler one prevailing when we say, for example, that a certain kind of soil favors one type of vegetation over another. The verb "favor" here refers to an extremely complex knot of relations.
Thus for the misleading image of a choice among ideal objects on display we must substitute the image of different levels reached by the human spirit according to the type or inner demand it is responding to. In this way a philosophy based on the inner demands of the person, of personality as such, will stand opposed to Marxism, not necessarily because of its method (for surely the Marxist method can be fruitful when applied within well-defined limits), but because it pretends to be a total and ultimate interpretation of life and history; for Marxism cannot provide anything like an adequate response to these fundamental demands-it can only ignore them.
In this last part of this essay I would like to try to point out the special and insistent form in which I think the philosophical demand appears in our time. I do not deny that I am speaking in my own name here, but I would ask you to recall what I said at the beginning about how there is not and cannot be any philosophical thought without personal involvement. Moreover, I am aware that I will be appealing to those who in a more or less articulate way are experiencing the very demand I want to define. As for the others, they will have to acknowledge this demand at least enough to ask themselves whether they are able to ignore it or reject it completely. Thus what I say here can and must be personal, but at the same time it is more than purely subjective in the sense of simply representing some individual and isolated feeling or some arbitrary wish.
I would like to begin my remarks with a general description of the situation of mankind today, or at least of Western man, whom our observations fit best. I shall quote here from some of my earlier writings. They date from 1933, but I would not retract or change one word of them today.
The characteristic feature of our age seems to me to be what might be called the misplacement of the idea of function, taking function in its current sense which includes both the vital and the social functions.
The individual tends to appear both to himself and to others as an agglomeration of functions. As a result of deep historical causes, which can as yet be understood only in part, he has been led to see himself more and more as a mere assemblage of functions, the hierarchical interrelation of which seems to him questionable or at least subject to conflicting interpretations.
To take the vital functions first. It is hardly necessary to point out the role which historical materialism on the one hand, and Freudian doctrines on the other, have played in restricting the concept of man.
Then there are the social functions-those of the consumer, the producer, the citizen, etc.
Between these two there is, in theory, room for the psychological functions as well; but it is easy to see how these will tend to be interpreted in relation either to the social or the vital functions, so that their independence will be threatened and their specific character put in doubt. In this sense, Comte, served by his total incomprehension of psychical reality, displayed an almost prophetic instinct when he excluded psychology from his classification of sciences.
So far we are still dealing only with abstractions, but nothing is easier than to find concrete illustrations in this field.
Travelling on the Underground, I often wonder -with a kind of dread what can be the inward reality of the life of this or that man employed on the railway-the man who opens the doors, for instance, or the one who punches the tickets. Surely everything both ,within him and outside him conspires to identify this man with his functions-meaning not only with his functions as worker, as trade union member or as voter, but with his vital functions as well. The rather horrible expression "time table" perfectly describes his life. So many hours for each function. Sleep too is a function which must be discharged so that the other functions may be exercised in their turn. The same with pleasure, with relaxation; it is logical that the weekly allowance of recreation should be determined by an expert on hygiene; recreation is a psycho-organic function which must not be neglected any more than, for instance, the function of sex. We need go no further; this sketch is sufficient to suggest the emergence of a kind of vital schedule; the details will vary with the country, the climate, the profession, etc., but what matters is that there is a schedule.
It is true that certain disorderly elements-sickness, accidents of every sort-will break in on the smooth working of the system.. It is therefore natural that the individual should be overhauled at regular intervals like a watch (this is often done in America). The hospital plays the part of the inspection bench or the repair shop. And it is from this same standpoint of function that such essential problems as birth control will be examined.
As for death, it becomes, objectively and functionally, the scrapping of what has ceased to be of use and must be written off as a total loss. (1)
It cannot be denied, I think, that this sobering diagnosis becomes increasingly accurate each day, and as I wrote a little further on:
Besides the sadness felt by the onlooker, there is the dull, intolerable unease of the actor himself who is reduced to living as though he were in fact submerged by his functions .... Life in a world centered on function is liable to despair because in reality this world is empty, it rings hollow; and if it resists this temptation it is only to the extent that there come into play from within it and in its favor certain hidden forces which are beyond its power to conceive or to recognize. (2)
1.Gabriel Marcel, "On the Ontological Mystery," trans. Manya Harari, in The Philosophy of Existentialism (New York: Citadel Press, 1956)
Now for the purposes of our present study this last phrase is of the greatest importance, and in its light it will now be possible to formulate a precise response to our original question.
What can be expected of philosophy at this particular moment of history is first of all that it make clear, as I have just done in a partial but significant way, the danger of dehumanization which accompanies the intensive development of technology in our world. Philosophy must bring to light the profound but usually UN articulated uneasiness man experiences in this technocratic or bureaucratic milieu where what is deepest in him is not only ignored but continually trampled underfoot. And philosophy can be expected, through extremely delicate and careful probing, to locate those secret powers I mentioned just above. What are these powers? It is very hard to name them, first of all because words are most often too withered, too lifeless for the task. But speaking very generally I would say that these powers are radiations of being, and thus it is being, as all the great philosophers of the past have seen (and as Heidegger, the deepest thinker in Germany and perhaps in all of Western Europe, is reminding us today), it is being, I say, which must engage the reflection of the philosopher.
"But," you may ask me, "when you speak of being, aren't you hiding behind an empty abstraction devoid of all concrete meaning?" I must answer that being is really the very opposite of an abstraction, although at the level of language it does almost inevitably become distorted, even to the point of looking like its own opposite. This is the cardinal problem for a philosophy of being, and this is why in the work I have just quoted, which is central to my thought, I insisted on the importance of what I called "concrete approaches." We cannot, I think, install ourselves in being itself, we cannot capture it or seize it, any more than we can see the source giving off light-all we can see are surfaces illuminated by the light. I think that this comparison between being and light is a fundamental one. And I hardly need mention that at this point I am very close to the Gospel of John where he speaks of the "Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." In another book of mine I have spoken of a light which would be joy at being light; to be a human being would be to participate in this light, while failing to do so would mean! sinking to the level of the animal or lower still.
Let me anticipate and quickly answer one final objection which might occur to my readers. "If philosophy answers in this way," the objection might run, "is it not offering something very much like a religious answer? It is very difficult to see what distinction you would make between philosophy and religion." This question is very important, and my answer would be the following: I am deeply convinced that there is and there must be a hidden cooperation between philosophy and religion, but I also believe that the means employed by each is different. Religion can :finally depend only on faith. The instrument of philosophy, on the contrary, is reflection, and I must say that I will always regard with suspicion any philosophical doctrine that claims to rest on intuition. But I have tried elsewhere to show that there are two different but complementary forms of reflection. One of them is purely analytical and reductive-primary reflection-and the other is reconstructive or synthetic. It is this second reflection which dwells on being, depending not on an intuition but on a assurance identical with what we call our soul.
Copyright © 1973 by Northwestern University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-96700 ISBN 0-8101-0414-8 Printed in the United States of America
The first part of this book was originally published in French under the title Pour une sagesse tragique, © Librairie Pion, 1968. The second part was originally published in French under the title Entretins:
Paul Ricoeur, Gabriel Marcel, © 1968 by Editions Aubier-Montaigne.
Stephen Jolin is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Portland; Peter McCormick is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Ottawa.
Acknowledgments / xi Translator's Preface / Pe:er Translator's Introductian Author's Preface / xxxi
TRAGIC \\-Il I / What Can Be Expec-
2 / The Responsibility
/ 16
3 / Authentic Humanism
/ 33
4 / The Questioning of 5 / Truth and Freedom 6 / Truth and Concrete 7 / Life and the Sacred 8 / My Death / 120
9 / The Encounter "ith :::, 10 / Man and His Furore
I I / Philosophical Athei= 12 / Philosophy, Negatin, 1 13 / Passion and Wisdom i
Philosophy / 18, 14 / Toward a Tragic \\-i5dc
CONYTIlSA
PAUL RICOEG Conversation 1 / 217 Conversation 2 / 223 Conversation 3 / 230 Conversation 4 / 237 Conversation 5 / 244 Conversation 6 / 251
