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