The Mystery of Being by Gabriel Marcel

First published:Le Mystère de l’être, 1951 (volume 1, Réflexion et mystère; volume 2, Foi et réalité; English translation, volume 1, Reflection and Mystery, 1950; volume 2, Faith and Reality, 1951)

Type of Philosophy: Ethics, existentialism, metaphysics

Context

Gabriel Marcel is one of the main figures associated with existential thought in France. His two-volume work The Mystery of Being is the final product of a series of Gifford Lectures that were given in 1949 and 1950 at the University of Aberdeen. Characteristic of The Mystery of Being, and one might say of Marcel’s writings in general, is a philosophical approach that is oriented toward concrete descriptions and elucidations instead of systematic delineations. In this respect, the existentialism of Marcel has greater affinities to the thought of Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Jaspers than to that of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Marcel will have nothing to do with the system builders. A philosophical system, even though it may have an existentialist cast, as in Heidegger and Sartre, entails for the Marcel a falsification of lived experience as it is immediately apprehended.

The Concrete

On every page of Marcel’s writings, the reader is forced to acknowledge the author’s concentrated efforts to remain with the concrete. Existential thinking is the thinking of the “involved self.” This involved self is contrasted by the author with the “abstracted self.” The abstracted self, in its movement of detachment, escapes to a privileged and intellectually rarefied sanctuary—an “Olympus of the Spirit”—from which it seeks to formulate a global and inclusive perspective of the whole of reality. Marcel’s concrete philosophical elucidations express a continuing protest against any such Olympian view. “There is not, and there cannot be, any global abstraction, any final terrace to which we can climb by means of abstract thought, there to rest for ever; our condition in this world does remain, in the last analysis, that of a wanderer, an itinerant being, who cannot come to absolute rest except by a fiction, a fiction which it is the duty of philosophic reflection to oppose with all its strength.” A person as an “itinerant being”—or as a wayfarer, as the author has expressed it in the title of another of his works, Homo Viator: Prolégomènes à une métaphyqiue de l’espérance, 1945 (Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, 1951)—is always on the way, passing from one concrete situation to another. At no time can he shed his situationality and view himself and the rest of the world as completed. There is no thought or abstraction that can tear itself loose from the concrete situation of the involved self and lay a claim for universal validity. This, for Marcel, as already for Kierkegaard, is the grievous fault in all varieties of idealism.

Idealism fails to recognize the situational character of all human thinking. The philosophical reflection that the author prescribes is a reflection that retains its existential bond with the concrete situation. The peculiar task of philosophy is that of describing what it means to be in a situation. This task is a phenomenological one—phenomenological in the sense that it takes its point of departure from everyday, lived experience and seeks to follow through the implications that can be drawn from it.

Concrete existence is lost in the abstract movements of a detached reflection, but it is also threatened by the pervasive bureaucratization of modern life. In the chapter entitled “A Broken World,” Marcel develops a penetrating analysis of the dissolution of personality in the face of increased social regimentation. Humans stand in danger of losing their humanity. The modern bureaucratized world tends to identify individuals with the state’s official record of their activities. Personality is reduced to an identity card. In such a situation, people are defined in terms of replaceable functions rather than acknowledged as unique and irreplaceable selves. Creative activities are standardized and consequently depersonalized. Everything, including humans themselves, is reduced to a stultifying law of averages. In one passage, the author speaks of an equality that is obtained by a process of “leveling down” to a point where all creativity vanishes. The language and theme are reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s critique of society in which he indicted the public for having effected a leveling process that virtually made the category of the individual extinct. This theme of depersonalization also links Marcel with two German existentialists, Jaspers and Heidegger. Jaspers described how the masses have become the masters of the people and reduced everything to an appalling mediocrity. Heidegger, in his notion of das Man, expressed basically the same theme. In a later work, Les Hommes contre l’humain (1951; Men Against Humanity, 1952; also known as Man Against Mass Society, 1952), Marcel pays special attention to this phenomenon, elucidating it in a descriptive analysis that is rich and penetrating.

Reflection

The leading question in Marcel’s philosophy of the concrete is the question, “Who am I?” Only through a pursuit of this question can humans be liberated from the objectivizing tendencies in modern thought, and return to the immediacy of their lived experience. Reflection will illuminate this lived experience only as long as it remains a part of life. The author defines two levels of reflection—primary and secondary. Primary reflection is analytical and tends to dissolve the unity of experience as it is existentially disclosed to the involved self. Secondary reflection is recuperative and seeks to reconquer the unity that is lost through primary reflection. It is only with the aid of secondary reflection that humans can penetrate to the depths of the self. The Cartesian Cogito (“I think”) is derived by primary reflection, and therefore it is viewed as a mental object somehow united with the fact of existence. However, this abstract reflection is already at a second remove from the reality of pure immediacy. If the “I exist” is to provide the Archimedean point, then it will need to be retrieved in its indissoluble unity as an immediate datum of secondary reflection. Existence, as Immanuel Kant had already shown in his Kritik der reinen Vernunf (1781; The Critique of Pure Reason, 1838), is not a property or a predicate that can be attached to a mental object. Existence indicates an irreducible status in a given sensory context. Secondary reflection uncovers my existence as it is sensibly experienced in act. This apprehension of my existence in act is what Marcel calls the “existential indubitable.” In asking about myself, I am disclosed as the questioner in the very act of posing the question. It is here that we find ourselves up against existence in its naked “thereness.”

The living body is for the author a central phenomenon in secondary or recuperative reflection. Secondary reflection discloses my existence as an incarnated existence—an existence that is tied to a body that I experience as peculiarly and uniquely my own. The “existential indubitable” is manifested in the experience of my body as it actually lives. Primary reflection tends to dissolve the link between me and my body; it transforms the “me” into a universal consciousness and my body into an objectivized entity that is in fact only one body among many others. The original unity of the experience of myself as body is thus dissolved. Primary reflection takes up the attitude of an objectivizing detachment. The body becomes an anatomical or physiological object, generalized as a datum for scientific investigation.

It becomes evident that the Cartesian dualism of mind and body springs from primary rather than secondary reflection. The body in Descartes’s philosophy is a substantive entity that has been objectivized and viciously abstracted from the concrete experience of the living body as intimately mine. Secondary reflection apprehends my body as an irreducible determinant in my immediate experience. On one hand, my body is disclosed as something that I possess, something that belongs to me. However, as I penetrate deeper, I find that the analogy of ownership does not succeed in fully expressing the incarnated quality of my existence. The analogy of ownership still tends to define the relation of myself to my body as an external one. It defines my body as a possession that is somehow accidental to my inner being. However, this is not so. My body is constitutive of my inner being. Properly speaking, it is not something that I have; it designates who I am:

My body is my body just in so far as I do not consider it in this detached fashion, do not put a gap between myself and it. To put this point in another way, my body is mine in so far as for me my body is not an object but, rather, I am my body.

It is at this point that the author’s distinction between being and having becomes relevant. The phenomenon of being can never be reduced to the phenomenon of having. In having, the bond between the possessor and the possessed is an external relation; in the phenomenon of being, the bond is internal rather than external and is expressed by Marcel in the language of participation. Humans have or possess external objects and qualities, but they participate in being. The implications of this phenomenological distinction for the immediate awareness of the living body are evident. On one level of experience, my body is something that I have or possess. It is a material complex that is attached to myself, and defines me as a self with a body. However, on a deeper level of experience, I am my body, and I am my body in such a way that the simple materiality of my body as a possession is transcended. I exist as body, as an incarnated being for whom the experience of body and the experience of selfhood are inseparable phenomena. Speaking of my body is a way of speaking of myself. The body in such a view is existentialized. It is no longer an object possessed by a subject. It is apprehended as a determinant of subjectivity.

Participation

The immediate encounter with the mystery of being is thus in terms of a lived participation. The idea of participation, says the author, assumed importance for him even in the days of his earliest philosophical gropings. Although the language of participation would seem to betray a Platonic influence, the author makes it clear that the idea of participation includes more than an intellectual assent. Indeed, the foundational mode of participation is feeling, inextricably bound up with a bodily sense. The Platonic dualism of mind and body, with its perfervid intellectualism and depreciation of the senses, could not admit the existential quality of participation that Marcel seeks to establish. Marcel’s favorite illustrations of feeling as a mode of participation are his illustrations of the link between the peasant and the soil, and the sailor and the sea. Here, he says, one can grasp what participation means. The peasant’s attachment to the soil and the sailor’s attachment to the sea transcend all relationships of simple utility. The peasant does not “have” the soil as a simple possession. The soil becomes a part of his being. He becomes existentially identified with the soil. A separation of himself from the soil would entail a loss of identity and a kind of incurable internal bleeding. This bond through participation, expressed in the link between the peasant and the soil, points to the fundamental relation of humans to the mystery of being.

In Marcel’s philosophy of participation, the notions of intersubjectivity, encounter, and community are decisive. In the second volume of The Mystery of Being, the author seeks to replace the Cartesian metaphysics of “I think” (Cogito) with a metaphysics of intersubjectivity that is formulated in terms of “we are.” Philosophical reflection, he argues, must emancipate its inquiry from the solipsism of an isolated epistemological subject or a transcendental ego. My existence is disclosed only in the context of a “living communication” with other selves. “The more I free myself from the prison of ego-centricism,” concludes the author, “the more do I exist.” Embedded in all my existential reflections is a preliminary and precognitive awareness of a communal horizon of which I am inextricably a part. “I concern myself with being only in so far as I have a more or less distinct consciousness of the underlying unity which ties me to other beings of whose reality I already have a preliminary notion.”

The basic phenomenon of communal intersubjectivity is further elucidated in the author’s use of the notion of encounter. The intersubjectivity of human life becomes apparent only in the movements of personal encounter. Now the phenomenon of personal encounter expresses a relationship that is qualitatively different from that which obtains in a relationship between physical objects on the level of thinghood. Selfhood and thinghood constitute distinct modes of being, correspondingly requiring different modes of apprehension or knowledge. Another human self cannot be encountered as a thing. Every human self is a “thou” and must be encountered as a personal center of subjectivity. Only through encounter does one attain knowledge of another self. The French verb reconnaïtre is peculiarly suited to express the movement of encountering. The range of meaning in reconnaïtre is restricted if it is translated in its usual manner as “to recognize.” The French usage denotes acknowledgment as well as recognition. In an encounter, another self is known when he or she is acknowledged as a person. Knowledge is acknowledgment.

Allied with notions of the encounter and reconnaïtre are the notions of disponibilité and indisponibilité, which are elucidated at some length in a previous work by Marcel, Étre et avoir: Philosophie de l’esprit (1935; Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, 1949). The two notions have been rendered into English respectively as availability and unavailability. Marcel suggests, however, that it would be more natural if one spoke of handiness and unhandiness. Self-centered people are unhandy. They do not make themselves and their resources available to other selves. They remain encumbered with themselves, insensitive to openness and transparence. They are incapable of sympathizing with other people, and they lack a requisite fellow feeling for understanding their situation. Handy and available selves are those who can transcend their private, individual lives and become open to a creative communion with other selves. They are ever ready to respond in love and sympathy. No longer enclosed upon themselves, they acknowledge the inner freedom or subjectivity of the other and thus reveal both themselves and the other as something other than object. It is Marcel’s accentuation of the theme of creative intersubjectivity that most clearly contrasts his existential reflections with those of his fellow countryman Jean-Paul Sartre. In the existentialism of Sartre, the final movement culminates in a disharmonious and alienating egocentricism. In the existentialism of Marcel, the last measure and note is one of harmony—creative communality.

Mystery and Problem

The existential reflections in the author’s two-volume work are geared to an elucidation of various facets of the presence of being. Being discloses itself as a mystery—hence, the appropriate title of his lectures, The Mystery of Being. In the concluding chapter of volume 1, the author erects a signpost for philosophical wayfarers to help them in their metaphysical journeyings. This signpost is the distinction between problem and mystery. A mystery is something in which I myself am involved. A problem is something from which I detach myself and I seek to solve. One is involved in mystery, but one solves problems. Mystery has to do with the experience of presence. Problem has to do with the realm of objects that can be grasped through the determination of an objectivizing reason. A problem is subject to an appropriate technique; it can be diagramed, quantified, and manipulated. A mystery by its very character transcends every determinable technique. Being is a mystery rather than a problem, and the moment that it is reduced to a problem its significance vanishes. By turning a mystery into a problem, one degrades it. When the mystery of the being of the self is subject to a problematic approach, which by definition objectivizes its content, then the personal and subjective quality of selfhood is dissolved. When the mystery of evil is translated into a problem of evil, as is the case in most theodicies, then the issue is so falsified as to render impossible any existentially relevant illumination.

In advancing his distinction between mystery and problem, however, Marcel is not delineating a distinction between the unknowable and the knowable. In fact, the unknowable belongs to the domain of the problematic. It points to the limiting horizon of that which can be conceived through objective techniques. The recognition of mystery involves a positive act or responsiveness on the part of self. It expresses a knowledge that is peculiar to its content—an immediate knowledge of participation as contrasted with an objectivizing knowledge of detachment. Knowledge is attainable both in the domain of mystery and in the domain of problem, but the knowledge in each case is irreducibly adapted to its intentional content.

In volume 2, the author concludes his philosophical reflections by showing that his philosophy of being is at the same time a philosophy of freedom. Although the notion of freedom is not given as much attention in the existentialism of Marcel as in that of Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Sartre, it plays a significant role in his elucidations of concrete experience. Freedom is disclosed in the domain of mystery rather than in the domain of problem. Freedom can never be found in a series of external acts. Freedom is found only when the self turns inward and becomes aware of its capacity for commitment and treason. Freedom is disclosed in the subjective movements of promise and betrayal. I am free to bind myself in a promise, and then I am free to betray the one who has taken me into his trust. Freedom is thus disclosed in both its creative and destructive implications. Both fidelity and treason are expressions of a free act. This freedom, which is experienced only in concreto, moves within the mystery of humanity’s inner subjectivity. As a problem, freedom can be nothing more than a series of objectively observable psychological states. As a mystery, freedom constitutes the inner core of the self.

There is an inner connection between faith and freedom, which is elaborated in volume 2. Faith is itself a movement of freedom in the establishment of bonds of commitment—both with other humans and with God. Faith is thus described as trust rather than as intellectual assent to propositional truth. Marcel distinguishes between believing that and believing in. Faith is not a matter of believing that. It is not oriented toward propositions that correspond to some objective reality. Faith is expressed through believing in. To believe in another person is to place confidence in him. In effect, this is to say to the other: “I am sure that you will not betray my hope, that you will respond to it, that you will fulfill it.” Also, to have faith in God is to establish a relationship of trust in him. Humans are free to enter into a covenant with God, invoking a bond of trust and commitment, but they are also free to betray him and revoke the covenant.

Faith and freedom disclose the need for transcendence. Transcendence, for the author, is not simply a horizontal transcendence of going beyond in time—as it is for Heidegger and Sartre. Transcendence has a vertical dimension as well—a going beyond to the eternal. The experience of transcendence is fulfilled only through participation in the life of a transcendent being. Marcel’s philosophy of being, unlike that of Heidegger and Sartre, is not simply a philosophy of human finitude. It seeks to establish a path that reaches beyond the finite and temporal to the transcendent and eternal.

Principal Ideas Advanced

•The peculiar task of philosophy is to describe what it means to be in a particular concrete situation.

•Existential thinking, the thinking of an involved self, is threatened by the interest in abstractions and by bureaucratic societies that reduce individuals to averages.

•Primary reflection is analytical; secondary reflection is recuperative, allowing the self to discover its being in action.

•The immediate encounter with the mystery of being is in terms of a lived participation; being is an internal relation; the self, or the body, is not an object of knowledge, but the subject who knows the self as he or she acts.

•To know others existentially is to encounter them not as things, but in acknowledgment of them as persons.

•Freedom is found when the self turns inward and becomes aware of its capability for commitment and treason.

Bibliography

Cain, Seymour. Gabriel Marcel. New York: Hilary House, 1963. This is a short introduction to the major themes of Marcel’s thinking and proves a good starting point for further study.

Cain, Seymour. Gabriel Marcel’s Theory of Religious Experience. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. An astute, interesting evaluation and interpretation of Marcel’s thought on the religious meaning of human existence.

Gallagher, Kenneth T. The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel. New York: Fordham University Press, 1962. Good overall study of Marcel’s philosophical work, with an introduction by Marcel.

Hanley, Katherine Rose. Dramatic Approaches to Creative Fidelity: A Study in the Theater and Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973). Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987. This is the most extensive attempt in English to relate Marcel’s philosophical and dramatic works.

Keen, Sam. Gabriel Marcel. London: Carey Kingsgate Press, 1966. This work is a good short survey of Marcel’s philosophical work.

McCown, Joe. Availability: Gabriel Marcel and the Phenomenology of Human Openness. Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1978. Explores Marcel’s focus on the concept of availability and its connections to phenomenology and theology.

Moran, Denis P. Gabriel Marcel: Existentialist Philosopher, Dramatist, Educator. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1992. An overview of Marcel’s biography and thought, with extended consideration of the relation of his work as a philosopher and dramatist to educational practice.

Schilpp, Paul Arthur, and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds. The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel. Library of Living Philosophers series. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1984. Contains a number of essays on Marcel’s work, as well as his own 1969 “Autobiographical Essay.”