Being and Having

by Gabriel Marcel

I hope that this book will be widely read, and I especially commend it to four classes of
I. For myself I have come across nothing more important than M. Marcel’s writings here and elsewhere on the problem of metaphysics. I say problem for we are all of us these days in the end puzzled as to what exactly metaphysics is.
The strict Thomist has his so has the so too the Biblical theologian who is much too ready to find in the decay of ontology an argument for the authenticity of ‘Biblical perspectives’. M. Marcel was trained in the tradition of and he knew the influence both of Bergsen and of W. E. Hocking. His conversation with himself certainly betrays their but it is of far wider significance. Professor Ayer and Dr. E. L. Mascall have their answer to the question what ontology they have their formulae. Marcel probes beneath these answers; for him ontology is much more than a body of doctrine. It is the intellectual expression of the human situation; what is expressed in the syllogisms of, for instance, Père Garrigou-Lagrange, is valid only in so far as it catches and summarises the very being of man and the universe, as that being is lived through and met with by man in his pilgrimage through life.
I find as I read M. Marcel that the frontiers are blurred reflection, metaphysics, spirituality. And that is the strength of his seemingly inconsequent method. In a way he is too wise to suppose that the arguments of the philosophia perennis are enough in their abstract form to convince a man; they only carry conviction in relation to a whole experience of life of which they are the expression. The issues between the Thomist, the positivist, the idealist are not issues simply of doctrine but of life; and to see what they are, one must probe, stretching language beyond the frontiers of poetry, somehow to convey the issues as things through which men live.
2. The book should be studied closely by the moralist whether he be philosopher or moral theologian. Where some of the most familiar ethical ideas are concerned, Marcel reminds us of their ‘inside’ when we so often in our discussion think simply of their ‘outside’. What is a promise? We have our answer pat, our formula which permits us to go on with the discussion of our obligations to keep the promises we have made and so on. We don’t wait to probe. I find myself inevitably using that word ‘probe’ again and again in connection with M. for what he does is to probe the unsuspected profundities of the familiar. Most professional students of ethics are morally philistine, men who give little time to penetrating the ‘inside’ of the ideas they are handling. And there Marcel pulls them up short.
3. The book should be widely read by the many Christian ‘fellow-travellers’ of today, those who follow, as it were, afar off the Christian way without themselves coming yet to the point of an act of faith in the Crucified. Its very incompleteness will respond to their groping anxiety, and it will enrich their vision of life. And this it can do because it eschews dogmatic exposition seeking rather to shew the inside of the truly Christian way of life. Fidelity, hope, charity, mystery—these are fundamental categories of the Christian and of all these Marcel has much to say, which is in every way fresh and yet at the same time rooted in the tradition of Catholic Christianity.
The reader of such a work as Albert Camus’ La Peste, with its preoccupation with the problem of an atheistic sanctity, will understand M. Marcel. In a way he challenges the possibility of Camus’ vision; and he does so not on dogmatic grounds but by an analysis of holiness and goodness which shews indirectly their inseparability from acknowledgment of the all-embracing mystery of God. An age which has known evil as ours has and does still know it, is inevitably interested in goodness; and it is with goodness, as something inevitably issuing out of...

Genres: Philosophy, France, Religion, 20th Century, Theology, Nonfiction

246 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) was a philosopher, drama critic, playwright and musician. He converted to Catholicism in 1929 and his philosophy was later described as “Christian Existentialism” (most famously in Jean-Paul Sartre's “Existentialism is a Humanism”) a term he initially endorsed but later repudiated. In addition to his numerous philosophical publications, he was the author of some thirty dramatic works. Marcel gave the Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen in 1949–1950, which appeared in print as the two-volume The Mystery of Being, and the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1961–1962, which were collected and published as The Existential Background of Human Dignity.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Summertime of 1969, the summer I first read this book, was enormously stressful for me.

Back then, Marcel’s message of the Thomist primacy of Being over Having in religious life, meant little - but it helped start me on a lifelong quest for Peace.

Of course the stress helped!

I had a full-time job cataloguing books in a university library, and in the evenings I was attending a full-credit French course.

Thankfully I had access to so many great books - but, you see, that was in fact a problem.

For during my past semester I had neglected to complete a required essay.

Now, my seminars with Dr. George Whalley that semester had been the year’s big highlight. Dr. Whalley, an eminent Canadian writer, scholar and highly respected Coleridgean, had so much sheer presence it was intimidating.

Fearfully, I just swept the essay under the carpet - and simply let the whole matter lapse till the summer.

But I soon became engulfed in my new job and coursework... till the day of that fateful TELEGRAM.

Yes, you guessed it - the redoubtable professor had sent a Cable to my parents’ place. My family was understandably deeply concerned as to its content.

When I got home that day, I ripped it open. It started with a bit of warm praise for a talk I had given on Coleridgean Metaphysics...

You know how to cut a guy to the quick?

Flatter him, THEN give him your ultimatum!

So it was with me. It was now IMPERATIVE that the essay be written.

It floored me.

And in stark, dry panic my CREATIVITY dried up as well. For weeks I considered my options, but couldn’t write a word.

So I gathered my strength and my wits together and told the good professor by phone that I had to travel down to see him and TALK about it.

And I did.

It worked.

My long evening conversation with this eminent man turned out to be, for him, the equivalent of defending a Master’s Thesis. So he gave me a decent mark for that course, in the end!

All’s well that ends well.

That evening, though, as we talked afterwards about our reading, I asked him if he had read THIS book. He told me ingenuously that he had picked it up one night after classes - AND HAD TO STAY UP UNTIL HE’D FINISHED IT.

Wow.

How many guys do you know who have stayed up all night reading a Metaphysical Diary?

He was pretty special.

And not the wrathful arbiter of my life I had made him out to be.

And he inspired me (and, in fact, upon my successful graduation, advised me by letter) to devote my life to a previously unheard of “quiet excellence.”

So many WWII Veterans like him stuck to their formal regimen.

He was quite a guy.

Those were his final words to me - and the last time I ever heard from him.

For he was cut down by cancer a few years later.

He wrote to the end.

He published an ode to his cancer nurse before that moment came - he talks in this poem of how mortal illness made him feel translucent with fever, but how wonderfully his caregiver smiled at him!

He was always thinking of others from the heart.

And he always lived in the Present.

Like Gabriel Marcel...

But his last words have stuck with me all my life.

Just like Marcel says in this book:

BEING right here and now is SO much better than HAVING dreams that don’t come true.

They were both so right.

NEVER fret about those Mountains in the distance.

Just make your little, ordinary life and words - Here and Now - PERFECT.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

For those thinking of reading the book, in ways which (coincidentally?) fit the themes of the book, it's written oddly, with a lot of material that may seem hard to digest, kind of a lot to swim through, and then at the end there are a few essays that make a lot of the material "suddenly" connect and seem relevant.

Ideas: Marcel's distinction between being and having (including idea of disposability), mystery vs. problem, the reference to Peter Wust's idea of Astonishment.

[Sylvia Flora · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the book:
"What I wrote yesterday needs to be qualified. It is true of the stage I am in at present, but I know that this stage is still rudimentary.

I heard once more the 'Missa Solemnis,' conducted by Weingartner, and was as deeply moved as when I heard it in 1918. There is no work that I feel is more in turn with my thoughts. It is a luminous commentary upon them."

This is just a taste of the first half of Marcel's de facto treatise on his existential views. Though, to be fair, he denied being an "existentialist," and wanted to be known more for his plays than philosophical/metaphysical writings. However, in this part-diary, part expose and lecture-series, Marcel bears on some difficult metaphysical issues: being and ownership, the body and fidelity, solving problems and exploring mysteries...

Overall enjoyable, if a little slow in the lectures. I wish it had been fully a diary form...

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

MARCEL’S “METAPHYSICAL DIARY” FROM 1928-1933

Gabriel Honoré Marcel (1889-1973) was a French philosopher, playwright, music critic and Christian existentialist.

He suggests, “Deep down beneath the critical attitude toward the Gospel stories, is the implicit assertion, ‘It oughtn’t to have happened like that.’ In other words, we inwardly sketch the idea … of what revelation ought to have been like… It seems to me that this laying down of law by the individual consciousness ought to be rejected in principle. The Gospel words, in fact: ‘become as little children.’ Glorious words, but quite unintelligible to anyone who believes that there is an intrinsic value in maturity.” (Pg. 22)

He says, “I return to the problem of hope. It seems to me that the conditions that make it possible to hope are strictly the same as those which make it possible to despair. Death considered as the springboard of an absolute hope. A world where death was missing would be a world where hope only existed in the larval stage.” (Pg. 93)

He states, “Not only do we have a right to assert that others exist, but I should be inclined to contend that existence can be attributed only to others, and in virtue of their otherness, and that I cannot think of myself as existing except in so far as I conceive of myself as not being the others: and so as other than them. I would go so far as to say that it is of the essence of the Other that he exists. I cannot think of him as Other without thinking of him as existing. Doubt only arises when his otherness is, so to say, expunged from my mind.” (Pg. 104)

He explains, “My deepest and most unshakeable conviction---and if it is heretical, so much the worse for orthodoxy---is, that whatever all the thinkers and doctors have said, it is not God’s will at all to be loved by us AGAINST the Creation, but rather glorified THROUGH the Creation and with the Creation as our starting-point. That is why I find so many devotional books intolerable. The God who is set up against the Creation and who is somehow jealous of his own works is, to my mind, nothing but an idol.” (Pg. 135)

He contends, “Absolute Being is as a whole rebellious to descriptions which will never fit anything but what has less Being. They will only fit an object before which we place ourselves, reducing ourselves, to some extent, to its measure, and reducing it to ours. God can only be given to me as Absolute Presence in worship; any idea I form of Him is only an abstract expression or intellectualization of the Presence. I must never fail to remember this, when I try to handle such thoughts; otherwise the thoughts will suffer distortion in my sacrilegious hands.” (Pg. 169-170)

He argues, “I do not think that Descartes’ cogito can be of any help to us here. The cogito… is at the mere threshold of validity; the subject of the cogito is the epistemological subject. Cartesianism implies a severance… between intellect and life; its result is a depreciation of the one, and an exaltation of the other, both arbitrary… It would certainly not be proper to deny the legitimacy of making distinctions of order within the unity of a living subject, who THINKS and strives to think of himself. But the ontological problem can only arise beyond such distinctions, and for the living being grasped in his full unity and vitality.” (Pg. 170-171)

He points out, “[Science and astronomy] seems aimed at taking down the simple-minded and ridiculous pride of mankind, which thought itself the supreme expression and perhaps ultimate purpose of the cosmos. But please notice at once that this philosophy only SEEMS to be satirizing human pride… It is in fact exalting it. There is a shift of position, and what an extraordinary one it is! It is true that Man regarded as an object of science is … a mere object among an infinite crowd of other objects. But Man still possesses one thing that claims to transcend the material world to which he is reduced---Science.” (Pg. 179)

He suggests, “To say ‘my being is not identical with my life’ is to say two different things. First, that since I AM not my life, my life must have been given to me; in a sense unfathomable to man, I am previous to it; I AM comes before I LIVE. Second, my being is something which is in jeopardy from the moment my life begins, and must be saved; my being is a stake, and therein perhaps lies the whole meaning of life. And from this second point of view, I am not BEFORE but BEYOND my life. This is the only possible way to explain the ordeal of human life…” (Pg. 196)

He says, “For I believe that no man, however enlightened and holy he is, can ever really arrive until the others, ALL the others, have started out to follow him. That is a great truth, and applies to philosophy as well as to religion, though philosophers on the whole have rejected it…” (Pg. 199-200)

He observes, “The great mistake of idealism perhaps lies in its initial assumption that the act of thinking is transparent to itself, whereas it is nothing of the kind. Knowledge is in fact unable to give an account of itself. When it tries to think itself, it is led irresistibly either to be content with metaphorical and material expressions which caricature it, or to treat itself as an absolute and self-sufficient datum, enjoying a priority to its object so startling that it becomes impossible to understand how it can be entirely capable, as far as one can see, of creating that object in all its unimaginable richness.” (Pg. 215)

While perhaps not one of Marcel’s “major works,” this book contains many interesting insights, and will be of keen interest to anyone studying Marcel.

[Ibrahim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gabriel Marcel would rather not be called an existential and he would rather be seen as a Christian Socratic. He finds the presence of God in our personal acts. While Thomas Aquinas had a scholastic approach to philosophy, Marcel embodies a way of philosophizing closer to the Patristic tradition. No formal argumentation but concrete description. Christianity cannot be confused with philosophy but it is relevant for philosophy. The book won’t read like a typically conventional philosophical treatise, but actually it sounds more like a metaphysical diary that aims to show us what it means to be a Socratic mind as we engage in self-questioning and dialogue.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish I could share the reading of this book with my guru, Fernando Pacheco.

[Filippo · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Some minds may think they are completely free of the kind of ideology which started with August Comte, and yet they will say, as though it were self-evident, that man advances from an infantile to an adult state of knowledge, and that the characteristic mark of the higher stage, which the "intellectual leaders" of today have reached, is simply the elimination of anthropomorphism. This presupposes the most curious temporal realism, and perhaps especially the most summary and simplicist picture of mental growth. Not only do they make a virtue of disregarding the positive and irreplaceable value of that original candour in the soul, not only do they make an idol of experience, by regarding it as the only way to spiritual dedication, but they also say in so many words that our minds are telling the time differently, since some are "more advanced", that is - whether or not this is admitted - nearer to a "terminus". And yet, by an amazing contradiction, they are forbidden to actualise that terminus even in thought. So that progress no longer consists in drawing nearer to one's end, but is described by a purely intrinsic quality of its own; although they will not consider its darker sides, such as old age and creaking joints, because they no doubt think that they are moving in a sphere where thought is depersonalised, so that these inevitable accidents of the flesh will be automatically banished."

[David Tye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marcel was a Catholic existentialist, and is sadly neglected nowadays.

[Gia Ân · Rating 5 out of 5]

yes, very good