Gabriel Marcel





born December 7, 1889, Paris
died October 8, 1973, Paris

philosopher, dramatist, and critic, usually regarded as the first French Existential philosopher.

Early life and influences
Marcel was the only child of Henry Marcel, a government official, diplomat, and distinguished curator. Gabriel’s mother died suddenly when he was four, leaving him with a sense of deep personal loss and yet of a continuing mysterious presence; the event made death and the irrevocable an early urgent concern for him. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother and his aunt—a devoted woman of stern upright character, who became his father’s second wife and who had a major influence on his early development. He was, much to his distress, the centre of constant familial attention and care, and, despite his brilliant scholastic achievements, his family’s incessant demands for ever better academic performance, together with the rigid, mechanical quality of his schooling, filled him with a lifelong aversion toward depersonalized, forced-fed modes of education. He found some consolation in travelling to foreign places on his vacations, and when his father became French minister to Sweden he accompanied him. These vacations were the beginning of his lifelong passion for travel and of the fulfillment of a deep inner urge to make himself at home in the new and to explore the unfamiliar. In later life he became versed in several foreign languages and literatures and played a significant role in making contemporary foreign writers known in France.

Religion played no role in Marcel’s upbringing. His father was a lapsed Catholic and cultured agnostic, who never bothered to have him baptized, and his aunt-stepmother, of nonreligious Jewish background, was converted to a liberal, humanist type of Protestantism. Reason, science, and the moral conscience were held to be sufficient guides, superseding traditional religion. Despite abundant parental love and solicitude, Marcel, in later life, looked back to this period as one of spiritual “servitude” and “captivity” that impelled him (without his knowing it) into a personal religious quest and to a philosophical inquiry into the conditions of religious faith.

Areas of his work
His search took three paths: music, drama, and philosophy. Hearing, playing, and composing music assumed an important role in the shaping of Marcel’s mind from an early age, and composers such as J.S. Bach and Mozart played a more decisive role in his spiritual development than did great religious writers such as Augustine and Blaise Pascal. As a composer, his favourite mode was improvisation on the piano, for him a communion with a transcendent reality and not the mere expression of his private feelings and impressions. Only a small number of Marcel’s improvisations have been transcribed or recorded; in 1945, however, he became a composer in the ordinary sense, devoting himself to the scored musical interpretation of poetry, ranging from that of Charles Baudelaire to that of Rainer Maria Rilke.

Playwriting provided another early and significant mode of expression. Henry Marcel frequently performed accomplished readings of dramatic works for his family. From an early age, Gabriel invented dialogues with imaginary brothers and sisters, and he wrote his first play at the age of eight. His own family situation had provided the living matrix for his later dramatic presentations of intertwined and irreconcilable aspirations, frustrations, and conflicts of definitely individual characters. The dramatic delineation of the chaotic and unpleasant aspects of human life complemented the expression of a transcendent harmony in his music, and both touched on key experiences and themes which were to be explored later in his philosophical meditations. They were unconsciously concrete illustrations of his philosphy before the fact, not deliberately contrived examples after the fact; they dealt with what were to be Marcel’s main philosophical concerns as they emerged in the dramatic spiritual crises and relations of his full-dimensioned real-life characters, not with a disingenuous manipulation of animated concepts as in the conventional “play of ideas.”

Marcel dealt with themes of spiritual authenticity and inauthenticity, fidelity and infidelity, and the consummation or frustration of personal relationships in his early plays, such as La Grâce, Le Palais de sable, Le Coeur des autres, and L’Iconoclaste. In Le Quatuor en fa dièse his musical, philosophical, and dramatic dispositions merge to render vividly the sense of the interpenetration of persons whose lives are bound up with one another. He appended one of his most significant philosophical essays (“On the Ontological Mystery”) to the play Le Monde cassé, in which the “broken world” of the title is displayed in the empty life and relations of the charming, despairing, and yet still hoping woman who is its protagonist.

Philosophical development
Philosophy, an early passion with Marcel, was the only subject that aroused his whole-hearted participation during his preparatory education. At 18, he was at work on his thesis for a diploma in higher studies, “The Metaphysical Ideas of Coleridge in Their Relations with the Philosophy of Schelling,” and he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. Although he passed examinations to become a teacher of philosophy in secondary schools (1910), he never completed his doctoral dissertation—on the necessary conditions for the intelligibility of religious thought. He taught philosophy only intermittently, usually earning his living as a publisher’s reader, editor, writer, and critic.

At first, philosophy for Marcel meant a highly abstract type of thought that sought to transcend the everyday empirical world. Gradually, over a long period of probing and searching, he came to shape a concrete philosophy that sought to deepen and restore the intimate human experience left behind by abstract thought. This philosophical “conversion” occurred when he was working for the French Red Cross, during World War I, trying to trace soldiers listed as missing. In place of the information on file cards he came to see real, though invisible, persons—presences—and to share in the agony of their grieving relatives. What Marcel called his “metapsychical” experiments—investigations of possible communications by means of telepathy, clairvoyance, prophecy, and spiritualism—also played a role in his philosophical conversion. For him these experiences convincingly challenged the conventional naturalistic and materialistic bent of contemporary philosophy, indicating a realm beyond that of ordinary sense-experience, and promising freedom from conformist biases and prohibitions in his philosophical quest.

Originally Marcel intended to express his philosophical reflections in the conventional treatise form, but as he came to see his philosophical vocation as essentially exploratory and the philosopher’s situation to be always in search and en route (homo viator), he abandoned this format as too didactic. Instead he published his philosophical workbooks, his day-to-day journals of philosophical investigations (such as Metaphysical Journal and the later shorter philosophical diaries in Being and Having and Presence and Immortality). He also wrote essays on particular themes and occasions (as in Homo Viator); these were usually a more rounded development of themes explored initially in various journal entries, such as exile, captivity, separation, fidelity, and hope, which were also a response to the particular situation of the French people during the German occupation of 1940 to 1944.

The decisive event in Marcel’s spiritual life was his conversion to Roman Catholicism on March 23, 1929. The culmination of years of philosophical inquiry into the meanings and conditions of personal existence and faith, the action represented his realization that he had to choose a particular form of faith, that there is no faith in general. Despite his apparent affinity with Protestantism, which seemed more in keeping with his essentially nonconformist character and his need for intellectual freedom, he chose Catholicism, which he came to understand as a universal faith, not a special ecclesiastical institution or a partisan, exclusivist stance. After that decisive occasion he continued as an independent philosopher with a specific spiritual disposition, never as a theological apologist or spokesman for an official Catholic philosophy. And he continued in his plays, as well as in his philosophy, to explore and illuminate the dark and negative aspects of human existence.

Basic themes and method
Marcel’s contribution to modern thought consisted of the exploration and illumination of whole ranges of human experience—trust, fidelity, promise, witness, hope, and despair—which have been dismissed by predominant schools of modern philosophy as not amenable to philosophical consideration. These explorations were buttressed by a remarkable reflective power and intellectual rigour, a metaphysical capacity par excellence.

His early central concept of “participation,” the direct communion with reality, was gradually elaborated to elucidate everything from the elemental awareness of one’s own body and sense-perception to the relation between human beings with ultimate being. The full, open relation between beings, thus conceived, is essentially “dialogical,” the relation between an I and a thou, between the whole of a person and the fullness of what he confronts—another being, a “presence,” and a “mystery,” rather than an “object” of detached perception, thought, and expression. Such a relation requires an opening up to what is other than oneself, disponibilité (approximately “availability,” “readiness,” “permeability”) and also an entering into, involvement, or engagement—dispositions demonstrable in everyday existence. The opposite is also ubiquitous—the refusal to open up and engage oneself, to give credit, to trust or hope, the disposition toward negation, despair, or even suicide. This possibility, for Marcel, is an essential characteristic of the human condition: man may deny as well as affirm his existence and either fulfill or frustrate his need to participate in being.

Marcel’s method of thought and expression in dealing with these matters is an open, intuitive one. He probes the meaning of such terms as hope, fidelity, or witness and sketches the reality that they indicate through a sensitive description of the mind, action, and attitude of the hoper, faithful one, or witness. He makes use of concrete metaphors and real-life instances to evoke and embody the difficult-to-express experiences and realities he is exploring.

In his own unique way, Marcel was an outstanding example of one of the central emphases of mid-20th-century philosophy—Phenomenology. Marcel’s use of this intuitive method was original and was developed independently of the work of the great German Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and his followers, just as his notion of the I–thou relation was developed independently of Martin Buber and other dialogical thinkers, and just as his exploration of Existential themes occurred long before his reading of Kierkegaard and the bursting forth of Existential philosophy on the mid-20th-century European scene. Marcel may justly be called the first French Phenomenologist and the first French Existential philosopher (though he deprecated the term Existentialism).

Marcel was married in 1919 to Jacqueline Boegner (died 1947), whom he called “the absolute companion of my life.” Their only child was an adopted son, Jean-Marie, the relation to whom may have inspired Marcel’s later reflections on “creative paternity” and the spirit of adoption.

Seymour Cain