The

Phenomenology
of the Body
In Gabriel Marcel’s Thought
What is
phenomenology?
✓Phenomenology is simply the philosophy of experience.
✓It assumes the unity first before analyzing the parts or aspects of
this unity.
✓Its way of reasoning is not rigidly deductive or inductive. However,
it simply explicates, unfolds what is already there.
✓It is essentially concerned about the experience and about man. It
concerns not the world of formal constructs but the world as lived
by man.
✓It uses epoche.
 EPOCHE
✓Epoche literally means “bracketing.”
✓Before I can investigate anything, I have to bracket, i.e.,
suspend my natural attitude towards the object I am
investigating. My natural attitude consists of my
prejudices, biases, clear fixed precise, unquestioned,
explicit knowledge of the object.
✓We remain secure in the conceptual level, and unless we
use the epoche, we will never perhaps come to see the
richness, the beauty; the goodness of a person or thing.
EPOCHE
“People help the people
And if you’re homesick
Give me your hand and I’ll hold it.
People help the people
Nothing will drag you down
Oh and if I had a brain, Oh and if I had a brain
I’d be cold as a stone And rich as a fool
Who turned all those good hearts away.”
 EPOCHE

“The heart has its reasons of which

reason knows nothing.”
-Blaise Pascal
 Gabriel marcel
✓He was born in Paris in 1889, the
city where he also died in 1973.
✓The only child of Henri and Laure
Marcel.
✓The death of his mother, in 1893
when Gabriel was not quite four
years old left an indelible
impression on him.
✓He converted to Catholicism in
1929.
Marcel’s phenomenological method
✓Primary Reflection
✓It breaks the unity of experience.
✓It looks at the world or at any
object as a problem, detached
from the self, and fragmented.
✓It is the foundation of scientific
knowledge, for science assumes a
stand where the world is apart
from the subject. The subject
does not enter into the object
investigated.
Marcel’s phenomenological method
✓Secondary Reflection
✓It recaptures the unity of original
experience.
✓It does not go against the data of
primary reflection but goes beyond
it by refusing to accept the data of
primary reflection as final.
✓This level is the area of the
mysterious because here we enter
into the realm of the personal.
✓It needs ingathering, a recollection,
a pulling together of the scattered
fragments of our experience.
Marcel’s phenomenological method
Examples:

✓Who am I?
✓What is a house?
✓What is life?
GUIDE QUESTIONS for group dialectics

✓What is Marcel’s primary reflection of

the body?
GUIDE QUESTIONS for group dialectics

✓Compare the claim “I have a dog” and

“I have a body.”
GUIDE QUESTIONS for group dialectics

✓What is an instrument? Is the body an

instrument? Why?
GUIDE QUESTIONS for group dialectics

✓Is the body a possession? Why?

GUIDE QUESTIONS for group dialectics

✓Explain the paradoxical character of the

experience of my body.
GUIDE QUESTIONS for group dialectics

✓What are the conflicting meanings of

the word “intermediary”? Apply this to
the experience of the body.
GUIDE QUESTIONS for group dialectics

✓What is intersubjectivity? What is the

role of the body in it?
GUIDE QUESTIONS for group dialectics

✓Can the body fully state man’s

subjectivity?
 The
Phenomenology
of the Body
In Gabriel Marcel’s Thought