THE PURPOSE OF THIS BLOG IS TO FOSTER A GREATER APPRECIATION FOR THE PHILOSOPHY OF GABRIEL MARCEL FOR THE PURPOSE OF UNDERSTANDING THE PREDICAMENT OF MODERN MAN

Monday, May 7, 2007

PAUL RICOEUR and GABRIEL MARCEL CONVERSATION

" Tragic Wisdom and Beyond " by Gabriel Marcel ( pages 251-256 )

Paul Ricoeur: With our sixth and last conversation, M. Marcel, the moment has come to make our most strenuous effort to grasp the profound unity of your work. Certainly, as we have remarked, there is no Marcellian system. Yet perhaps we can discern the living unity governing all the themes of your philosophy7. What we are looking for is the ridge common to all those slopes of your work which we have considered separately--the ontological, the dramatic, the existential, and the ethical. Do you think that this unity can be expressed in the only designation you have accepted, I believe it was in the preface to The Mystery of Being, that of Neo-Socratism?

Gabriel Marcel: Yes, but notice that this term wasn't mine. Joseph Chenu, who is now professor in Morocco, suggested it once when he was coming regularly to participate in my seminars. That was just after the Second World War. Actually I think this characterization is perhaps the least misleading one, although of course I strongly dislike all "isms." The expression "Neo-Socratism" does seem to emphasize the central role interrogation plays in my thought, the fact that often my primary concern has been to find an adequate way to pose problems before attempting to solve them.

This expression also indicates the fact that despite the illusions of my adolescence, I eventually found it necessary to renounce absolutely the idea of building a system My way of itself, no longer considering the other except in relation to itself. But the possibility of opening to others (that is, in a completely different language, charity) is clearly one of the key certitudes I have come to. I think that it is on the level of agape, on the level of charity or intersubjectivity, that experience undergoes a certain transformation in that it takes on the value of a test.

Paul Ricoeur: Yes, and it is in this way that your meditation on mystery differs as much as possible from any movement of flight or of exile. We have spoken of Socrates. You are Socratic but certainly not Platonic, if "Platonism" means being carried off to an "elsewhere" or to an "over there." The problem of intersubjectivity, the problem of others, has ceaselessly brought you toward the inexhaustible wealth of the concrete. It is the act of recognizing others which ceaselessly leads us to experience and makes experience a test.

About Me

If my heart can become pure and simple, like that of a child, I think there probably can be no greater happiness than this. (Kitaro Nishida)