Gabriel Marcel

The philosophical approach known as existentialism is commonly recognized for its

view that life’s experiences and interactions are meaningless. Many existentialist
thinkers are led to conclude that life is only something to be tolerated, and that close
or intimate relationships with others should be avoided. Heard distinctly among this
despair and dread was the original philosophical voice of Gabriel Marcel. Marcel, a
World War I non-combatant veteran, pursued the life of an intellectual, and enjoyed
success as a playwright, literary critic, and concert pianist. He was trained in
philosophy by Henri Bergson, among others. A prolific life-long writer, his early
works reflected his interest in idealism. As Marcel developed philosophically,
however, his work was marked by an emphasis on the concrete, on lived
experience. After converting to Catholicism in 1929, he became a noted opponent of
atheistic existentialism, and primarily that of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre’s
characterizations of the isolated self, the death of God, and lived experience as having
“no exit” especially disgusted Marcel. Regardless of his point of departure, Marcel
throughout his life balked at the designation of his philosophy as, “Theistic
existentialism.” He argued that, though theism was consistent with his
existentialism, it was not an essential characteristic of it.
Marcel’s conception of freedom is the most philosophically enduring of all of his
themes, although the last decade has seen a resurgence of attention paid to Marcel’s
metaphysics and epistemology. A decidedly unsystematic thinker, it is difficult to
categorize Marcel’s work, in large part because the main Marcelian themes are so
interconnected. A close read, however, shows that in addition to that of freedom,
Marcel’s important philosophical contributions were on the themes of participation,
creative fidelity, exigence, and presence.

Gabriel Marcel was born in Paris in 1889, the city where he also died in 1973. Marcel
was the only child of Henri and Laure Marcel. His father was a French diplomat to
Sweden and was committed to educating his son through frequent travel across
Europe. The death of his mother, in 1893 when Gabriel was not quite four years old
left an indelible impression on him. He was raised primarily by his mother’s sister,
whom his father married two years after Laure’s passing, and though “Auntie” loved
her nephew and gave him the best formal education, Gabriel loathed the structure of
the classroom, and became excited about the intellectual life only after entering
Sorbonne, from which he graduated in 1910.

Marcel was not a “dogmatic pacifist,” but experiences in World War I as a non-
combatant solidified to Marcel the, “Desolate aspect that it [war] became an object
of indignation, a horror without equal,” (AE 20) and contributed to a life-long
fascination with death. It was during the war that many of the important
philosophical themes in Marcel’s later work would take root, and indeed, during the
war, Marcel began writing in a journal that served as a framework for his first
book, Metaphysical Journal (1927).
After the war, Marcel married Jaqueline Boegner, and he taught at a secondary
school in Paris. It was in these early wedded years that Marcel became engaged as a
playwright, philosopher, and literary critic. The couple continued to travel, they
adopted a son, Jean Marie, and Marcel developed friendships with important
thinkers of the day. Marcel gave talks throughout Europe as a result of these
contacts, and was regarded as a keen mind and a type of renaissance figure, excelling
in music, drama, philosophy, theology, and politics. As for his literary works, Marcel
in total published more than 30 plays, a number of which have been translated in
English and produced in the United States. Marcel was acutely aware, however, that
his dramatic work did not enjoy the popularity of his philosophical work, but he
believed nonetheless that both were, “Capable of moving and often of absorbing
readers very different from one another, living in the most diverse countries—beings
whom it is not a question of counting precisely because they are human beings and
belong as such to an order where number loses all meaning,” (AE, 27).

Although Marcel did not pursue anything more permanent than intermittent
teaching posts at secondary schools, he did hold prestigious lectureships, giving the
Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen in 1949-50 and the William James Lectures at Harvard
in 1961. His most significant philosophical works include Being and
Having (1949), The Mystery of Being, Volume I and II (1950-51), Man against Mass
Society (1962) and Creative Fidelity (1964). During his latter years, he emerged as a
vocal political thinker, and played a crucial role in organizing and advocating the
international Moral Re-Armament movement of the 1960s. (Marcel was pleased to
be awarded the Peace Prize of the Börsenverein des Buchhandels in 1964.)
Throughout his life, Marcel sought out, and was sought out by, various influential
thinkers, including Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Maritain, Charles Du Bos, Gustave Thibon,
and Emmanuel Levinas. In spite of the many whom he positively influenced, Marcel
became known for his very public disagreements with Jean-Paul Sartre. In fact, the
acrimony between the two became such that the two would attend performances of
the other’s plays, only to storm out midway. Perhaps the most fundamental
ideological disagreement between the two was over the notion of autonomy. For
Marcel, autonomy is a discovery of the self as a being receptive to others, rather than
as a power to be exerted. Marcel’s autonomy is rooted in a commitment to
participation with others (see 3 below), and is unique in that the participative subject
is committed by being encountered, or approached by, another individual’s
need. Sartre’s notion of commitment is based on the strength of the solitary
decisions made by individuals who have committed themselves fully to personal
independence. Yet, Marcel took commitment to be primarily the response to the
appeal directed to the self as an individual (A 179) so that the self is free to respond
to another on account of their mutual needs. The feud between the two, though
heated, had the effect of casting a shadow over Marcel’s work as “mysticism” rather
than philosophy, a stigma that Marcel would work for the rest of his life to dispute.

A strange inner mutation is spreading throughout humanity, according to

Marcel. As odd as it first seems, this mutation is evoked by the awareness that
members of humanity are contingent on conditions which make up the framework
for their very existence. Man recognizes that at root, he is an existing thing, but he
somehow feels compelled to prove his life is more significant than that. He begins
to believe that the things he surrounds himself with can make his life more
meaningful or valuable. This belief, says Marcel, has thrown man into a ghostly state
of quandary caused by a desire to possess rather than to be. All people become a
master of defining their individual selves by either their possessions or by their
professions. Meaning is forced into life through these venues. Even more,
individuals begin to believe that their lives have worth because they are tied to these
things, these objects. This devolution creates a situation in which individuals
experience the self only as a statement, as an object, “I am x.”
The objectification of the self through one’s possessions robs one of her freedom, and
separates her from the experiences of her own participation in being. The idolatrous
world of perverted possession must be abandoned if the true reality of humanity is
to be reached (SZ 285). Perhaps most known for his views on freedom, Marcel gave
to existentialism a view of freedom that marries the absolute indeterminacy of
traditional existentialism with Marcel’s view that transcendence out of facticity can
only come by depending upon others with the same goals. The result is a type of
freedom-by-degrees in which all people are free, since to be free is to be self-
governing, but not all people experience freedom that can lead them out of
objectification. The experience of freedom cannot be achieved unless the subject
extricates herself from the grip of egocentrism, since freedom is not simply doing
what desire dictates. The person who sees herself as autonomous within herself has
a freedom based on ill-fated egocentrism. She errs in believing freedom to be rooted
on independence.

Freedom is defined by Marcel in both a negative and positive sense. Negatively,

freedom is, “The absence of whatever resembles an alienation from oneself,” and
positively as when, “The motives of my action are within the limits of what I can
legitimately consider as the structural traits of my self,” (TF, 232). Freedom, then,
is always about the possibilities of the self, understood within the confines of
relationships with others. As an existentialist, Marcel’s freedom is tied to the raw
experiences of the body. However, the phenomenology of Marcelian freedom is
characterized by his insistence that freedom is something to be experienced, and the
self is fully free when it is submerged in the possibilities of the self and the needs of
others. Although all humans have basic, autonomous freedom (Marcel thought of
this as “capricious” freedom), in virtue of their embodiment and consciousness; only
those persons who seek to experience being by freely engaging with other free beings
can break out of the facticity of the body and into the fulfillment of being. The free
act is significant because it contributes to defining the self, “By freedom I am given
back to myself,” (VII vii).
At first glance, Marcelian freedom is paradoxical: the more one enters into a self-
centered project, the less legitimate it is to say that the act is free, whereas the more
the self is engaged with other free individuals, the more the self is free. However, the
phenomenological experience of freedom is less paradoxical when it is seen through
the lens of the engagement of freedom. Ontologically, we rarely have experiences of
the singular self; instead, our experiences are bound to those with whom we
interact. Freedom based on the very participation that the free act seeks to affirm is
the ground of the true experience of freedom towards which Marcel gravitates.
Marcel was an early proponent of what would become a major Sartrean existential
tenet: I am my body. For Marcel, the body does not have instrumental value, nor is
it simply a part or extension of the self. Instead, the self cannot be eradicated from
the body. It is impossible for the self to conceive of the body in any way at all except
for as a distinct entity identified with the self (CF 23). Existence is prior, and
existence is prior to any abstracting that we do on the basis of our
perception. Existence is indubitable, and existence is in opposition to the
abstraction of objectivity (TW 225). That we are body, of course, naturally lends us
to think of the body in terms of object. But individuals who resort to seeing the self
and the world in terms of functionality are ontologically deficient because not only
can they not properly respond to the needs of others, but they have become isolated
and independent from others. It is our active freedom that prevents us from the
snare of objectifying the self, and which brings us into relationships with others.

When we are able to act freely, we can move away from the isolated perspective of
the problematic man (“I am body only,”) to that of the participative subject (“I am a
being among beings”) who is capable of interaction with others in the
world. Marcelian participation is possible through a special type of reflection in
which the subject views herself as a being among beings, rather than as an
object. This reflection is secondary reflection, and is distinguished from both primary
reflection and mere contemplation. Primary reflection explains the relationship of
an individual to the world based on her existence as an object in the world, whereas
secondary reflection takes as its point of departure the being of the individual among
others. The goal of primary reflection, then, is to problematize the self and its
relation to the world, and so it seeks to reduce and conquer particular things. Marcel
rejects primary reflection as applicable to ontological matters because he believes it
cannot understand the main metaphysical issue involved in existence: the
incommunicable experience of the body as mine. Neither does mere contemplation
suffice to explain this phenomenon. Contemplation is existentially significant,
because it indicates the act by which the self concentrates its attention on its self, but
such an act without secondary reflection would result in the same egocentrism that
Marcel attempts to avoid through his work.
Secondary reflection has as its goal the explication of existence, which cannot be
separated from the individual, who is in turn situated among others. For Marcel, an
understanding of one’s being is only possible through secondary reflection, since it
is a reflection whereby the self asks itself how and from what starting point the self
is able to proceed (E 14). The existential impetus of secondary reflection cannot be
overemphasized for Marcel: Participation which involves the presence of the self to
the world is only possible if the temptation to assume the self is wholly distinct from
the world is overcome (CF 22). The existential upshot is that secondary reflection
allows the individual to seek out others, and it dissolves the dualism of primary
reflection by realizing the lived body’s relation to the ego.

Reflexive reflection is the reflection of the exigent self (see 5 below). It occurs when
the subject is in communion with others, and is free and also dependent upon others
(as discussed in 2). Reflexive reflection is an inward looking that allows the self to
be receptive to the call of others. Yet, Marcel does not call on the participative
subject to be reflective for receptivity’s sake. Rather, the self cannot fully understand
the existential position without orientating itself to something other than the self.

For Marcel, to exist only as body is to exist problematically. To exist existentially is

to exist as a thinking, emotive, being, dependent upon the human creative
impulse. He believed that, “As soon as there is creation, we are in the realm of
being,” and also that, “There is no sense using the word ‘being’ except where creation
is in view,” (PGM xiii). The person who is given in a situation to creative
development experiences life qualitatively at a higher mode of being than those for
whom experiences are another facet of their functionality. Marcel argues that, “A
really alive person is not merely someone who has a taste for life, but somebody who
spreads that taste, showering it, as it were, around him; and a person who is really
alive in this way has, quite apart from any tangible achievements of his, something
essentially creative about him,” (VI, 139). This is not to say, of course, that the
creative impulse is measurable by what we produce. Whereas works of art most
explicitly express creative energy, inasmuch as we give ourselves to each other, acts
of love, admiration, and friendship also describe the creative act. In fact,
participation with others is initiated through acts of feeling which not only allow the
subject to experience the body as his own, but which enable him to respond to others
as embodied, sensing, creative, participative beings as well. To feel is a mode of
participation, a creative act which draws the subject closer to an experience of the
self as a being-among-beings, although higher degrees of participation are achieved
by one whose acts demonstrate a commitment to that experience. So, to create is to
reject the reduction of the self to the level of abstraction—of object, “The denial of
the more than human by the less than human,” (CF 10).
If the creative élan is a move away from the objectification of humanity, it must be
essentially tied relationally to others. Creative fidelity, then, entails a commitment
to acts which draw the subject closer to others, and this must be balanced with a
proper respect for the self. Self-love, self-satisfaction, complacency, or even self-
anger are attitudes which can paralyze one’s existential progress and mitigate against
the creative impulse. To be tenacious in the pursuit– the fidelity aspect– is the most
crucial part of the creative impulse, since creation is a natural outflow of being
embodied. One can create, and create destructively. To move towards a greater
sense of being, one must have creative fidelity. Fidelity exists only when it triumphs
over the gap in presence from one being to another—when it helps others relate, and
so defies absences in presence (CF 152).
It is not enough to be constant, since constancy is tenacity towards a specific goal,
which requires neither presence nor an openness to change. Rather, creative fidelity
implies that there is presence, if it is true that faithfulness requires being available
(in the Marcelian sense, see 5) to another even when it is difficult. (Interestingly,
Marcel’s notion of fidelity means more than someone’s merely not being
unfaithful. A spouse, for example, might not physically cheat on her husband, but
on Marcel’s view, if she remains unavailable to her partner, she can only be called
“constant”. She cannot be called “faithful”.) Additionally, fidelity requires that a
subject be open to changing her mind, actions, and beliefs if those things do not
contribute to a better grasp of what it means to be. Since fidelity is a predicate that
is best ascribed by others to us, it follows that receptivity to the views of others’ is a
natural component of fidelity.

But what is it that Marcel thinks we ought to be faithful towards? It isn’t simply to
pursue the impetus of the exigent life, although that is involved. More concretely,
creative fidelity is a fidelity towards being free, and that freedom involves making
decisions about what is important, rather than living in a state of stasis. Marcel
railed against indecision with respect to what is essential, even though such
indecision, “Seems to be the mark and privilege of the illumined mind,” (CF 190)
because truly free people are not entrapped by their beliefs, but are liberated by living
out their consequences (see 2).