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Gabriel Marcel
A comprehensive study of the thought of this French philosopher, the foremost Christian existentialist of this century.
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 25, 1979
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October 27, 2019
I esteem and love the writing of Gabriel Marcel and hope to continue exploring and studying his thought indefinitely. I read Man Against Mass Society last year and followed it with this book and Marcel's two volume Gifford lectures, The Mystery of Being this year. Next I plan to read Homo Viator. He is a spiritual, existential and Christian philosopher of a high order but also remarkably accessible. I put off writing even about this book about his thought because there is so much resonant and fructifying material and summarizing it seems like a sterilizing of oneself against its effects. But it has been months. I hope to study him in depth including possibly returning to this fine little synopsis of this rich thinkers work.
Clearly Cain marks Marcel's essay "On the Ontological Mystery" as a summing up of Marcel's mature thought. He also identifies Marcel's essays "Existence and Objectivity" and "Concrete Mystery" as of first importance for anyone who wants to understand Marcel's thought.
Experience is deeper, higher, and fuller than abstract thought and something to be aimed at rather than a starting point to get away from.
"Participation for Marcel is the immediate communion between real, determinate, distinct beings, who yet retain their distinctness and determinateness. It is the elemental experience of being with others, not the mental grasp or noetic vision of ideas or essences; the global experience of 'we are,' not the partial function of 'I think.' This primal immediacy cannot be observed, grasped, or verified from the outside; it cannot be translated into ideas and images, but only lived and relived, evoked and recalled. The participation through beings is knowable only through participation, through sympathetic mediation and communion." Pgs. 23-24
Modern Cartesian extremism still follows the vicious error of disassociating mind and body, cutting the mind off from "the full integral self" and from the world to which the self belongs.
Here is one of those convicting passages that I should cherish as revealing something missing in me: "…we are worth proportionately less as our affirmation of existence is more restricted, more pallid, more hesitant." Pg. 29.
“When I act, I destroy the fiction of ‘ideal disincarnation’ and regain the body/self unity that is broken by analysis into a duality of instrumentalist and instrument.” (pg. 33). And, I might add, that is when I stub my toe, or fail at some major life decision.
“Only as the other is truly thou for me, do I truly become I for myself, for the thou discovers me to myself. I am truly I only over against a thou for whom I also am truly a thou.” pg. 36
Clearly Cain marks Marcel's essay "On the Ontological Mystery" as a summing up of Marcel's mature thought. He also identifies Marcel's essays "Existence and Objectivity" and "Concrete Mystery" as of first importance for anyone who wants to understand Marcel's thought.
Experience is deeper, higher, and fuller than abstract thought and something to be aimed at rather than a starting point to get away from.
"Participation for Marcel is the immediate communion between real, determinate, distinct beings, who yet retain their distinctness and determinateness. It is the elemental experience of being with others, not the mental grasp or noetic vision of ideas or essences; the global experience of 'we are,' not the partial function of 'I think.' This primal immediacy cannot be observed, grasped, or verified from the outside; it cannot be translated into ideas and images, but only lived and relived, evoked and recalled. The participation through beings is knowable only through participation, through sympathetic mediation and communion." Pgs. 23-24
Modern Cartesian extremism still follows the vicious error of disassociating mind and body, cutting the mind off from "the full integral self" and from the world to which the self belongs.
Here is one of those convicting passages that I should cherish as revealing something missing in me: "…we are worth proportionately less as our affirmation of existence is more restricted, more pallid, more hesitant." Pg. 29.
“When I act, I destroy the fiction of ‘ideal disincarnation’ and regain the body/self unity that is broken by analysis into a duality of instrumentalist and instrument.” (pg. 33). And, I might add, that is when I stub my toe, or fail at some major life decision.
“Only as the other is truly thou for me, do I truly become I for myself, for the thou discovers me to myself. I am truly I only over against a thou for whom I also am truly a thou.” pg. 36
Displaying 1 of 1 review