Life
Gabriel Marcel is difficult to categorize as a philosopher. He was idiosyncratic in his writing, intentionally avoiding systematic formulations. At the heart of his writing is concrete experience, and such experience provides the way for man to find his place in the universe. Marcel's emphasis of being over knowledge stands in stark contrast to our increasingly scientific age. For this reason, his criticisms are particularly relevant and must be carefully weighed.
Marcel was born in Paris on December 7, 1889, the son of a state official. His early life was marked by tragedy as his mother died when he was only four. His father took Marcel’s aunt as his second wife. Both his father and stepmother were religiously agnostic, the former an unbelieving aesthete, the latter an unbelieving moralist. Marcel was greatly influenced by his deceased mother. He tells us, “that all my childhood, that probably my entire life has been dominated by the death of my mother, an absolutely sudden death which was to unsettle all our existences.”(1)
Marcel characterized his childhood as a ‘desolate universe’. (2) His desolation was caused by the absence of his mother and the sense of irrevocable loss. In addition, his education was “impersonal” and “objectivist”, and his family placed great emphasis on academic success. This arid and impersonal existence contributed to Marcel’s passion for “the faraway, the alien, and the remote.” As a result, Marcel convinced his family members to take him on journeys throughout Europe, some devised through his own imagination.
Exasperated by an education, which devalued personal growth in favor of academic success, Marcel pursued philosophical idealism. Marcel’s brilliance allowed him to transcend the problems of his personal life by seeking refuge in abstract thought. World War I proved to be a turning-point, not only in Marcel’s thought, but also his personal life. He served as a Red Cross official in the War, and relayed information concerning missing soldiers to the next of kin. His idealism did not survive in the face of constant tragedy. In fact, he became suspicious of idealism, and instead pursued concrete, existential philosophy.
Marcel did not convert to Christianity until he was forty years old. However, he did have a concern to establish the validity of religious thought long before his conversion. He began by exploring how, “…immediate existence, then the concrete faith-relation, could be grasped by the mind, hypothetically, without any personal commitment to a particular faith; but he realized later that the faith he intended was Christian faith, and that by religious history he meant Christian history.(3) Marcel’s conversion came through a “seemingly slight” event. After he had reviewed Francois Mauriac’s Dieu et mammon, the author wrote Marcel a letter which ended with the question, “But, then why aren’t you one of us?” Marcel did not so much consider this appeal as coming from Mauriac as from God. He responded by embracing Catholicism.
Marcel was struck by tragedy again in 1947. His wife of nearly thirty years, Jacqueline Boegner, died of an incurable disease. This loss echoed the tragedy of his childhood, and again his life was dominated by her absence.
Marcel was primarily not an academic figure. Although he spent brief stints at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, 1951-1952, and Harvard University, 1961-1962, teaching philosophy, his income was mostly dependant on his free-lance writing. He is well known not only for several dramatic works, but also for his work as an editor, critic, and lecturer. Marcel died October 8th, 1973.
Philosophy
Marcel was concerned that scientific thinking had bankrupted human experience. Scientific thinking, with its reductionism and technicality, avoids the mystery of life in favor of ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’. In modernity, man has, “…become unsure of his own essence and a stranger to himself.”(4) He has divorced himself from fundamental experience by turning to objective analysis. As a result, “the dignity and sacredness of being” is replaced by “the idea of function.” Man views himself as a functional being, incorporated into biological, mental, and social systems. As a result, “the capacity to love, to admire and to hope” are lost as man loses his desire “…to transcend his situation of alienation and captivity.”(5)
Behind this technological mentality lies the danger of man being tempted, “…to view himself as the sole giver and creator of meaning and value.”(6) In this view, the world is merely raw materials at men’s disposal, transformable to satisfy their desires. People then regard and admire their own technological creations, ascribing glory to themselves instead of the Creator. Unfortunately, this trust in technological advances diminishes our experience of authentic life.
Finally, Marcel saw that the dual approaches of abstraction and possession lay at the root of social problems. While both abstraction and possession are part of life, they can grow out of proportion and dominate, and ultimately destroy, man’s being. By abstracting, man forgets the concreteness of experience, or those aspects which do not neatly fit into categories. As a result, man adopts a resentment towards experience, and this attitude is entirely opposed to “admiration, humility, and charity.” By possessing, man gains, “…the power to retain, conserve, protect and dispose of ,”(7) an object. The insistence upon possessing things through a process of objectification limits concrete reality and its “mysterious fullness.”
Marcel's criticisms are particularly relevant in light of the growth of science and technology since his death. Through his writing, we can better understand the sense of alienation and lack of richness that characterizes human experience of our scientific age.
Endnotes
1. Cain, Seymour. Gabriel Marcel’s Theory of Religious Experience. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. 2.
2. Keen, Sam. Gabriel Marcel. Richmond: John Knox Press, 1967. 2.
3. Cain, 11.
4. Keen, 9.
5. Ibid., 10.
6. Ibid., 11.
7. Ibid., 15.
