Gabriel Marcel | |
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| Born | Gabriel Honoré Marcel (1889-12-07)7 December 1889 Paris, France |
| Died | 8 October 1973(1973-10-08) (aged 83) Paris, France |
| Relatives | Henry Marcel (father) |
| Education | |
| Education | University of Paris (MA, 1910) |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | |
| Main interests | |
| Notable works | The Mystery of Being (1951) |
| Notable ideas | "The Other" (autrui), concrete philosophy (philosophie concrète), being vs. having as opposing ways of defining the human person |
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Gabriel Honoré Marcel[a] (7 December 1889 – 8 October 1973) was aFrench philosopher,playwright,music critic and leadingChristian existentialist. The author of over a dozen books and at least thirty plays, Marcel's work focused on the modern individual's struggle in a technologically dehumanizing society. Though often regarded as the first French existentialist, he dissociated himself from figures such asJean-Paul Sartre, preferring the termphilosophy of existence orneo-Socrateanism to define his own thought.The Mystery of Being is a well-known two-volume work authored by Marcel.
Marcel was born on 7 December 1889 inParis, France. His mother, Laure Meyer, who wasJewish, died when he was young, and he was brought up by his aunt and father,Henry Marcel.
Marcel completed his DES thesis[b] (diplôme d'études supérieures [fr], roughly equivalent to anMA thesis) and obtained theagrégation in philosophy from theSorbonne in 1910, at the unusually young age of 20. During the First World War he worked as head of the Information Service, organized by theRed Cross to convey news of injured soldiers to their families.[3] He taught in secondary schools, was a drama critic for various literary journals, and worked as an editor forPlon, the major FrenchCatholic publisher.[4]
Marcel was the son of anagnostic,[3] and was himself not a member of any organized religion until his conversion to Catholicism in 1929. Marcel was opposed toanti-Semitism and supported reaching out to non-Catholics.
He died on 8 October 1973 in Paris.
He is often classified as one of the earliestexistentialists, although he dreaded being placed in the same category asJean-Paul Sartre; Marcel came to prefer the labelneo-Socratic (possibly because ofSøren Kierkegaard, the father ofChristian existentialism, who was a neo-Socratic thinker himself). While Marcel recognized that human interaction often involved objective characterisation of "the other", he still asserted the possibility of "communion" – a state where both individuals can perceive each other's subjectivity.
InThe Existential Background of Human Dignity, Marcel refers to a play he had written in 1913 entitledLe Palais de Sable, in order to provide an example of a person who was unable to treat others as subjects.
Roger Moirans, the central character of the play, is a politician, a conservative who is dedicated to defending the rights of Catholicism against free thought. He has set himself up as the champion of traditional monarchy and has just achieved a great success in the city council, where he has attacked the secularism of public schools. It is natural enough that he should be opposed to the divorce of his daughter Therese, who wants to leave her unfaithful husband and start her life afresh. In this instance, he proves himself virtually heartless; all his tenderness goes out to his second daughter, Clarisse, whom he takes to be spiritually very much like himself. But now Clarisse tells him that she has decided to take the veil and become a Carmelite. Moirans is horrified by the idea that this creature, so lovely, intelligent, and full of life, might go and bury herself in a convent and he decides to do his utmost to make her give up her intention... Clarisse is deeply shocked; her father now appears to her as an impostor, virtually as a deliberate fraud...[5]
In this case, Moirans is unable to treat either of his daughters as a subject, instead rejecting both because each does not conform to her objectified image in his mind. Marcel notes that such objectification "does no less than denude its object of the one thing which he has which is of value, and so it degrades him effectively."[6]
Another related major thread in Marcel was the struggle to protect one's subjectivity from annihilation by modernmaterialism and atechnologically-driven society. Marcel argued that scientific egoism replaces the "mystery" of being with a false scenario of human life composed of technical "problems" and "solutions". For Marcel, the human subject cannot exist in the technological world, instead being replaced by a human object. As he points out inMan Against Mass Society and other works, technology has a privileged authority with which it persuades the subject to accept his place as "he" in the internal dialogue of science; and as a result, man is convinced by science to rejoice in his own annihilation.[7]
For many years, Marcel hosted a weekly philosophy discussion group through which he met and influenced important younger French philosophers such asJean Wahl,Paul Ricœur,Emmanuel Levinas, andJean-Paul Sartre. Marcel was puzzled and disappointed that his reputation was almost entirely based on his philosophical treatises and not on his plays, which he wrote in the hope of appealing to a wider lay audience. He also influencedphenomenologist andThomistic philosopher Karol Wojtyla (laterPope John Paul II), who drew on Marcel's distinction between "being" and "having" in his critique of technological change.[8]
Marcel's major books are theMetaphysical Journal (1927),Being and Having (1933),Homo Viator (1945), andMan Against Mass Society (1955). He gave theGifford Lectures at theUniversity of Aberdeen between 1949 and 1950, which were published asThe Mystery of Being (1951). He also gave theWilliam James Lectures atHarvard in 1961–1962, which were subsequently published asThe Existential Background of Human Dignity.
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