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The Mystery of Being 2: Faith and Reality
The Mystery of Being contains the most systematic exposition of the philosophical thought of Gabriel Marcel, a convert to Catholicism and the most distinguished twentieth-century exponent of Christian existentialism. Its two volumes are the Gifford lectures which Marcel delivered in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1949 and 1950. Marcel's work fundamentally challenges most of the major positions of the atheistic existentialists (Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus), especially their belief in an absurd, meaningless, godless universe. These volumes deal with almost all of the major themes of Marcel's the nature of philosophy, our broken world, man's deep ontological need for being, i.e., for permanent eternal values, our incarnate bodily existence, primary and secondary reflection, participation, being in situation, the identity of the human self, intersubjectivity, mystery and problem, faith, hope, and the reality of God, and immortality.
- GenresPhilosophyReligion
198 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1960
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About the author
Gabriel Marcel
181 books124 followersGabriel 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.
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May 29, 2021
It is not enough to say that it is a metaphysic of being; it is a metaphysic of we are as opposed to a metaphysic of I think.
When I recognize, when I salute the existence of anything, I recognize at the same time that before a day has gone it will no longer exist, in the sense that I shall no longer myself exist bodily. We can see this most clearly when we consider things which are bound up with human life: the house in which such and such a person was born no longer exists, it was pulled down at such and such a date, nothing remains in its place but elements that have been scattered to infinity, nothing but a handful of dust.
Here we reach the crucial part of this involved enquiry: from the moment when my affirmation becomes love, it resigns in favour of that which is affirmed, of the thing which is asserted in its substantial value. This is precisely what love is; it cannot be divorced from this resignation. In other words, love is the active refusal to treat itself as subjective, and it is in this refusal that it cannot be separated from faith; in fact it is faith. And the function of secondary reflection will consist essentially in demonstrating that the refusal is transcendent in relation to the criticism to which primary reflection would claim to subject us.
One thing is certain: we must beware of a certain confusion which is embodied in current speech. The verb to believe is commonly used in an extremely vague and fluctuating way. It can simply mean, ‘I presume’ or ‘it seems to me’. In that context to believe appears as something much weaker and more uncertain than to be convinced. But in our domain, if we are to reach a greater precision of thought, we shall have to concentrate our attention not on the fact of believing that but on that of believing in.
But humility has nothing at all in common with this concern to rule out error; in the case of humility it is not error that is to be feared, but rather a claim which is incompatible with our condition of finite beings, the claim which would consist in believing that we are, or have the power to make ourselves, dependent only upon ourselves. The question arises only so soon as I take cognizance of my quality as a subject and of its hidden implications.
• Some years before the war I remember hearing one of a small party of guests, a young man evidently of marxist tendencies, say that we do not yet know what are the true values, and that we must wait for science to progress further and enlighten us. The fact is, however, that such a notion testifies to a lack of reflection that is really distressing. How can one imagine for a moment that the future development of science will be able to throw any light on true values? All we can anticipate is a continuation of more and more extensive research, from which we shall learn what is judged to be good or bad in different types of society. We can easily imagine also that a sort of social physics might explain approximately the connection, for example, between various moral beliefs and the birth or suicide rate. But it is quite obvious that such conclusions can tell us nothing about values. It is beyond the power of science to tell us whether it is right or wrong to increase the population; it will only be able to remind us that unless certain economic conditions are fulfilled, over-population can become a grave social danger. As for what are called popular polls, they are necessarily without any real significance. It would be ridiculous to suppose that the majority can ever get a clear view of these matters; the contrary is much more true. We may admit that Ibsen's phrase, ‘the majority is always wrong’ goes too far, but we must realize all the same that in this connection the category of number has no significance at all.
Prayer, as we see it practised by the most fervent souls, can in no instance be understood as containing in itself its own granting. On the contrary, it may be thought of as depending on the mysterious will of an incomprehensible power whose plans we cannot fathom. The man who is praying thinks of himself as quite uncertain, however hopeful he may be, of the answer which will be made to his prayer.
The fact is that in a general way it is almost impossible for us to think of union except in relation to what is akin to us, in which case we integrate ourselves into a whole whose elements are homogeneous. In the case of prayer such a union cannot be thought of. Here the mystery lies in that I have to merge in something which infinitely transcends me, and at first it seems impossible to conceive such a thing. It might perhaps be suggested that the union we claim might be interpreted as a surrender—but a surrender to what? To a will whose ends and whose very nature go infinitely beyond anything we can conceive. But would not that amount to a blind unconditional surrender? ‘Whatever you may will, your will shall be mine.’
When coherence is a goal which I set before myself, there is a risk that it will come between me and myself, and in that case it keeps a certain mechanical character. We should never forget that my position is such that I cannot rightly know who I am and who I shall be: in the same way the artist cannot know exactly what his work will be, before he creates it. It may well take the artist himself by surprise, we might say. The same thing happens on occasion with the free act, by which I mean the act which I come to think of, after the event, as having helped to make me what I am.
Would not a fairly accurate definition of generosity be a light whose joy is in giving light, in being light? There can be no substitute here for the word ‘light’.
There are times when my own faith seems to me like a stranger: there is a gap between the believing or praying me and the reflecting me. This cannot be a mere accident. The possibility of this gap between me and myself seems to be implied in what I am, and it is a thing which I must face.
All we can say is that at its furthest extension metaphysical thought perceives the possibility of conversion, but perceives it as being dependent on conditions which it is beyond the power of freedom to bring about by itself. We should certainly add, as a rider to what we said above, that conversion is the act by which man is called to become a witness.
If we look at the question carefully we shall see, also, that we have here a real vicious circle. The less men are thought of as beings in the sense which we have already tried to define, the stronger will be the temptation to use them as machines which are capable of a given output; this output being the only justification for their existence, they will end by having no other reality.
Now, we must assert as forcibly as possible that human love itself is nothing, it lies to itself, if it is not charged with infinite possibilities. That phrase, however, entails an extremely precise significance: its very exact meaning is that if human love is centred on itself, if it sinks into a mutually shared narcissism, it turns into idolatry and pronounces its own death sentence.
The first answer, I think, must be this; to hope is not essentially to hope that… whereas to desire is always to desire something. I once wrote that hope is the stuff of which our soul is woven. But would it not be possible for hope to be another name for the exigence of transcendence, or for it to be that exigence itself, in as much as it is the driving force behind man the wayfarer? Could it be claimed that to conceive of hope in this way is to confuse it with life itself? A word of warning, however: the idea of life itself is ambiguous.
Each one of us is in a position to recognize that his own essence is a gift—that it is not a datum; that he himself is a gift, and that he has no existence at all through himself.
Hence again it follows that salvation can also be better conceived by us as a road rather than a state; and this links up again with some profound views of the Greek Fathers, in particular St. Gregory of Nyssa.
We must maintain that in so far as we are not things, in so far as we refuse to allow ourselves to be reduced to the condition of things, we belong to an entirely different world-dimension, and it is this dimension which can and must be called supra-temporal. ‘One thing I found after the death of my parents’, says one of the principal characters in a recent play of mine2 ‘It was that what we call survival is really undervival; we find that those whom we have never ceased to love with all that is best in us, become a sort of throbbing vault: it is invisible, but yet we can just feel its presence, it almost touches us; as we move forward under it we have to bend ourselves lower and lower; we become more and more drawn out of our own selves until the moment when everything has been swallowed up in love.’
When I recognize, when I salute the existence of anything, I recognize at the same time that before a day has gone it will no longer exist, in the sense that I shall no longer myself exist bodily. We can see this most clearly when we consider things which are bound up with human life: the house in which such and such a person was born no longer exists, it was pulled down at such and such a date, nothing remains in its place but elements that have been scattered to infinity, nothing but a handful of dust.
Here we reach the crucial part of this involved enquiry: from the moment when my affirmation becomes love, it resigns in favour of that which is affirmed, of the thing which is asserted in its substantial value. This is precisely what love is; it cannot be divorced from this resignation. In other words, love is the active refusal to treat itself as subjective, and it is in this refusal that it cannot be separated from faith; in fact it is faith. And the function of secondary reflection will consist essentially in demonstrating that the refusal is transcendent in relation to the criticism to which primary reflection would claim to subject us.
One thing is certain: we must beware of a certain confusion which is embodied in current speech. The verb to believe is commonly used in an extremely vague and fluctuating way. It can simply mean, ‘I presume’ or ‘it seems to me’. In that context to believe appears as something much weaker and more uncertain than to be convinced. But in our domain, if we are to reach a greater precision of thought, we shall have to concentrate our attention not on the fact of believing that but on that of believing in.
But humility has nothing at all in common with this concern to rule out error; in the case of humility it is not error that is to be feared, but rather a claim which is incompatible with our condition of finite beings, the claim which would consist in believing that we are, or have the power to make ourselves, dependent only upon ourselves. The question arises only so soon as I take cognizance of my quality as a subject and of its hidden implications.
• Some years before the war I remember hearing one of a small party of guests, a young man evidently of marxist tendencies, say that we do not yet know what are the true values, and that we must wait for science to progress further and enlighten us. The fact is, however, that such a notion testifies to a lack of reflection that is really distressing. How can one imagine for a moment that the future development of science will be able to throw any light on true values? All we can anticipate is a continuation of more and more extensive research, from which we shall learn what is judged to be good or bad in different types of society. We can easily imagine also that a sort of social physics might explain approximately the connection, for example, between various moral beliefs and the birth or suicide rate. But it is quite obvious that such conclusions can tell us nothing about values. It is beyond the power of science to tell us whether it is right or wrong to increase the population; it will only be able to remind us that unless certain economic conditions are fulfilled, over-population can become a grave social danger. As for what are called popular polls, they are necessarily without any real significance. It would be ridiculous to suppose that the majority can ever get a clear view of these matters; the contrary is much more true. We may admit that Ibsen's phrase, ‘the majority is always wrong’ goes too far, but we must realize all the same that in this connection the category of number has no significance at all.
Prayer, as we see it practised by the most fervent souls, can in no instance be understood as containing in itself its own granting. On the contrary, it may be thought of as depending on the mysterious will of an incomprehensible power whose plans we cannot fathom. The man who is praying thinks of himself as quite uncertain, however hopeful he may be, of the answer which will be made to his prayer.
The fact is that in a general way it is almost impossible for us to think of union except in relation to what is akin to us, in which case we integrate ourselves into a whole whose elements are homogeneous. In the case of prayer such a union cannot be thought of. Here the mystery lies in that I have to merge in something which infinitely transcends me, and at first it seems impossible to conceive such a thing. It might perhaps be suggested that the union we claim might be interpreted as a surrender—but a surrender to what? To a will whose ends and whose very nature go infinitely beyond anything we can conceive. But would not that amount to a blind unconditional surrender? ‘Whatever you may will, your will shall be mine.’
When coherence is a goal which I set before myself, there is a risk that it will come between me and myself, and in that case it keeps a certain mechanical character. We should never forget that my position is such that I cannot rightly know who I am and who I shall be: in the same way the artist cannot know exactly what his work will be, before he creates it. It may well take the artist himself by surprise, we might say. The same thing happens on occasion with the free act, by which I mean the act which I come to think of, after the event, as having helped to make me what I am.
Would not a fairly accurate definition of generosity be a light whose joy is in giving light, in being light? There can be no substitute here for the word ‘light’.
There are times when my own faith seems to me like a stranger: there is a gap between the believing or praying me and the reflecting me. This cannot be a mere accident. The possibility of this gap between me and myself seems to be implied in what I am, and it is a thing which I must face.
All we can say is that at its furthest extension metaphysical thought perceives the possibility of conversion, but perceives it as being dependent on conditions which it is beyond the power of freedom to bring about by itself. We should certainly add, as a rider to what we said above, that conversion is the act by which man is called to become a witness.
If we look at the question carefully we shall see, also, that we have here a real vicious circle. The less men are thought of as beings in the sense which we have already tried to define, the stronger will be the temptation to use them as machines which are capable of a given output; this output being the only justification for their existence, they will end by having no other reality.
Now, we must assert as forcibly as possible that human love itself is nothing, it lies to itself, if it is not charged with infinite possibilities. That phrase, however, entails an extremely precise significance: its very exact meaning is that if human love is centred on itself, if it sinks into a mutually shared narcissism, it turns into idolatry and pronounces its own death sentence.
The first answer, I think, must be this; to hope is not essentially to hope that… whereas to desire is always to desire something. I once wrote that hope is the stuff of which our soul is woven. But would it not be possible for hope to be another name for the exigence of transcendence, or for it to be that exigence itself, in as much as it is the driving force behind man the wayfarer? Could it be claimed that to conceive of hope in this way is to confuse it with life itself? A word of warning, however: the idea of life itself is ambiguous.
Each one of us is in a position to recognize that his own essence is a gift—that it is not a datum; that he himself is a gift, and that he has no existence at all through himself.
Hence again it follows that salvation can also be better conceived by us as a road rather than a state; and this links up again with some profound views of the Greek Fathers, in particular St. Gregory of Nyssa.
We must maintain that in so far as we are not things, in so far as we refuse to allow ourselves to be reduced to the condition of things, we belong to an entirely different world-dimension, and it is this dimension which can and must be called supra-temporal. ‘One thing I found after the death of my parents’, says one of the principal characters in a recent play of mine2 ‘It was that what we call survival is really undervival; we find that those whom we have never ceased to love with all that is best in us, become a sort of throbbing vault: it is invisible, but yet we can just feel its presence, it almost touches us; as we move forward under it we have to bend ourselves lower and lower; we become more and more drawn out of our own selves until the moment when everything has been swallowed up in love.’
November 4, 2025
THE SECOND VOLUME OF MARCEL’S MOST IMPORTANT “SUMMATION” WORK
Gabriel Honoré Marcel (1889-1973) was a French philosopher, playwright, music critic and Christian existentialist. This is the second of two series of Gifford Lectures given by Marcel in 1949 and 1950, at the University of Aberdeen. [NOTE: page numbers refer to the 210-page Gateway paperback edition.]
He begins the first lecture by stating, “this time we shall have to ask ourselves questions about the nature of being as such. As soon as we do that, it will be as though we had to move in a new dimension… this new dimension will have to conform with those in which our earlier enquiries were contained. I shall make use of the method which I often found useful last year of continually reviving the metaphors with which I reinforce my arguments. I shall say that everything happens now, rather as in a fugue when a new voice intervenes… in some way [the new voice] changes the whole colour of the complete work. Later, it should be necessary for us… to keep the spatial metaphor present in our minds simultaneously with the musical metaphor.
"Thus we shall gain a more distinct idea of the sort of transformation, of the sort of revival, which this second series of lectures must attempt to introduce.” (Pg. 1-2) He summarizes, “we must recognize from the outset that the enquiry moves in a dimension which cannot be that of solipsist reflection… even in the most critical sense, that is to say of a reflection which is centered on the transcendental Ego, by whatever name we may call it. In more concrete language: I concern myself with being only in so far as I have a more or less distinct consciousness of the underlying unity which ties me to other beings of whose reality I already have a preliminary notion.” (Pg. 19)
He observes, “from the moment when my affirmation becomes love, it resigns in favour of that which is affirmed, of the thing which is asserted in its substantial value. This is precisely what love it; it cannot be divorced from this resignation. In other words, love is the active refusal to treat itself as subjective, and it is in this refusal that it cannot be separated from faith; in fact it is faith.” (Pg. 69)
He adds, “secondary reflection, while not yet being itself faith, succeeds at least in preparing or fostering what I am ready to call the spiritual setting of faith… if belief lays itself open to the attack of critical reflection, it is because of the aspect which it turns toward it… the determining factor here is the idea which I tend to form of it for myself… from the moment when I am… outside faith; that is from the moment when we cease to live it… The line of secondary reflection …. [has] for its proper function … asking whether the idea of faith with which primary reflection was concerned may not be a corrupt or deformed experience of something or an entirely different order.” (Pg. 74-75)
He argues, “my freedom is not and cannot be something that I observe as I observe an outward fact; rather it must be something that I decide and that I decide, moreover, without any appeal. It is beyond the power of anyone to reject the decision by which I assert my freedom, and this assertion is ultimately bound up with the consciousness that I have of myself.” (Pg. 126)
He states, “now that we are dealing with ‘being in the world,’ we find that what we are concerned with is precisely the non-identifiable, as such; and this for the quite obvious reason that no identifications at all can be made except on the inside of or within the boundaries of being in the world. In the perspective of faith, however, which is at the same time that of freedom, it is this non-identifiable which is experienced or apprehended as the absolute Thou.” (Pg. 141)
He testifies, “The Christian idea of an indwelling of Christ in the man who is completely faithful to Him, an idea which corresponds exactly in the religious order to the position which I am trying to define on the philosophical plane, involves a categorical rejection of this purely imaginary way of picturing it. Just as I spoke in my first series of lectures of creative fidelity, so now we are concerned with creative testifying. But we must repeat once more that creation is never a production; it implies an active receptivity, and in this connection any idealist interpretation must be resolutely rejected.” (Pg. 156)
He asserts, “evil and death can in a certain sense be regarded as synonymous. It is true that one can imagine an unhistorical world in which after the creature had actualized all its possibilities… natural euthanasia would be the rule and death would no longer be an object of terror… that world would lack any spiritual depth; it would be a fairy story world… our own world harbours seemingly inexhaustible possibilities of waste and destruction; if we met a man who seemed to us to have reached the fulfillment of his being… such a being would not only not receive therefrom any immunity from the principles of death … he might well, on the contrary, seem to be even more threatened, even more vulnerable, than average beings, as though his very perfection brought on him the active hostility of some adverse power.” (Pg. 161-162)
He points out, “one might have imagined… what many people did in the nineteenth century---that as soon as the majority of men in a given society ceased to believe in an afterlife, life in this world would be more and more lovingly taken care of and would become the object of an increased regard. What has happened is … the very opposite in fact. Life in this world has become more and more widely looked upon as a sort of worthless phenomenon, devoid of any intrinsic justification, and as thereby subject to countless interferences which in a different metaphysical context would have been considered sacrilegious.” (Pg. 165-166)
He concludes, “Each one of us is in a position to recognize that his own essence is a GIFT---that it is not a DATUM; that he himself is a gift, and that he has no existence at all through himself. On the other hand, however, it is on the basis of that gift that freedom can grow or expand---that freedom which coincides with the trial in the course of which each man will have to make his own decision. This trial implies a decisive option.” (Pg. 194)
He adds, “If a man has experienced the presence of God, not only has he no need of proofs, he may even go so far as to consider the idea of a demonstration as a slur on what is for him a sacred evidence… it is this sort of testimony which is the central and irreducible datum. When, on the other hand, the presence of God is no longer… recognized, then there is nothing which is not questionable…” (Pg. 197-198)
Marcel’s work is important for anyone studying Existentialism, or contemporary Catholic philosophy.
Gabriel Honoré Marcel (1889-1973) was a French philosopher, playwright, music critic and Christian existentialist. This is the second of two series of Gifford Lectures given by Marcel in 1949 and 1950, at the University of Aberdeen. [NOTE: page numbers refer to the 210-page Gateway paperback edition.]
He begins the first lecture by stating, “this time we shall have to ask ourselves questions about the nature of being as such. As soon as we do that, it will be as though we had to move in a new dimension… this new dimension will have to conform with those in which our earlier enquiries were contained. I shall make use of the method which I often found useful last year of continually reviving the metaphors with which I reinforce my arguments. I shall say that everything happens now, rather as in a fugue when a new voice intervenes… in some way [the new voice] changes the whole colour of the complete work. Later, it should be necessary for us… to keep the spatial metaphor present in our minds simultaneously with the musical metaphor.
"Thus we shall gain a more distinct idea of the sort of transformation, of the sort of revival, which this second series of lectures must attempt to introduce.” (Pg. 1-2) He summarizes, “we must recognize from the outset that the enquiry moves in a dimension which cannot be that of solipsist reflection… even in the most critical sense, that is to say of a reflection which is centered on the transcendental Ego, by whatever name we may call it. In more concrete language: I concern myself with being only in so far as I have a more or less distinct consciousness of the underlying unity which ties me to other beings of whose reality I already have a preliminary notion.” (Pg. 19)
He observes, “from the moment when my affirmation becomes love, it resigns in favour of that which is affirmed, of the thing which is asserted in its substantial value. This is precisely what love it; it cannot be divorced from this resignation. In other words, love is the active refusal to treat itself as subjective, and it is in this refusal that it cannot be separated from faith; in fact it is faith.” (Pg. 69)
He adds, “secondary reflection, while not yet being itself faith, succeeds at least in preparing or fostering what I am ready to call the spiritual setting of faith… if belief lays itself open to the attack of critical reflection, it is because of the aspect which it turns toward it… the determining factor here is the idea which I tend to form of it for myself… from the moment when I am… outside faith; that is from the moment when we cease to live it… The line of secondary reflection …. [has] for its proper function … asking whether the idea of faith with which primary reflection was concerned may not be a corrupt or deformed experience of something or an entirely different order.” (Pg. 74-75)
He argues, “my freedom is not and cannot be something that I observe as I observe an outward fact; rather it must be something that I decide and that I decide, moreover, without any appeal. It is beyond the power of anyone to reject the decision by which I assert my freedom, and this assertion is ultimately bound up with the consciousness that I have of myself.” (Pg. 126)
He states, “now that we are dealing with ‘being in the world,’ we find that what we are concerned with is precisely the non-identifiable, as such; and this for the quite obvious reason that no identifications at all can be made except on the inside of or within the boundaries of being in the world. In the perspective of faith, however, which is at the same time that of freedom, it is this non-identifiable which is experienced or apprehended as the absolute Thou.” (Pg. 141)
He testifies, “The Christian idea of an indwelling of Christ in the man who is completely faithful to Him, an idea which corresponds exactly in the religious order to the position which I am trying to define on the philosophical plane, involves a categorical rejection of this purely imaginary way of picturing it. Just as I spoke in my first series of lectures of creative fidelity, so now we are concerned with creative testifying. But we must repeat once more that creation is never a production; it implies an active receptivity, and in this connection any idealist interpretation must be resolutely rejected.” (Pg. 156)
He asserts, “evil and death can in a certain sense be regarded as synonymous. It is true that one can imagine an unhistorical world in which after the creature had actualized all its possibilities… natural euthanasia would be the rule and death would no longer be an object of terror… that world would lack any spiritual depth; it would be a fairy story world… our own world harbours seemingly inexhaustible possibilities of waste and destruction; if we met a man who seemed to us to have reached the fulfillment of his being… such a being would not only not receive therefrom any immunity from the principles of death … he might well, on the contrary, seem to be even more threatened, even more vulnerable, than average beings, as though his very perfection brought on him the active hostility of some adverse power.” (Pg. 161-162)
He points out, “one might have imagined… what many people did in the nineteenth century---that as soon as the majority of men in a given society ceased to believe in an afterlife, life in this world would be more and more lovingly taken care of and would become the object of an increased regard. What has happened is … the very opposite in fact. Life in this world has become more and more widely looked upon as a sort of worthless phenomenon, devoid of any intrinsic justification, and as thereby subject to countless interferences which in a different metaphysical context would have been considered sacrilegious.” (Pg. 165-166)
He concludes, “Each one of us is in a position to recognize that his own essence is a GIFT---that it is not a DATUM; that he himself is a gift, and that he has no existence at all through himself. On the other hand, however, it is on the basis of that gift that freedom can grow or expand---that freedom which coincides with the trial in the course of which each man will have to make his own decision. This trial implies a decisive option.” (Pg. 194)
He adds, “If a man has experienced the presence of God, not only has he no need of proofs, he may even go so far as to consider the idea of a demonstration as a slur on what is for him a sacred evidence… it is this sort of testimony which is the central and irreducible datum. When, on the other hand, the presence of God is no longer… recognized, then there is nothing which is not questionable…” (Pg. 197-198)
Marcel’s work is important for anyone studying Existentialism, or contemporary Catholic philosophy.
May 1, 2016
I read this over a long period of time. The book is based on the Gifford Lecture series that he gave in 1949 and 50. It brings out a lot of themes key to his work as well as speaks to many themes that will become dominant in French thinking from then on (I think of the "gift" for many French thinkers).
His style is very "French," one which I wish I could really grasp, but cannot (along with other French philosophers of the mid-late 20th century). Still, even if one must struggle to pull very non-systematic nuggets out of a very non-systematic thinker, they are still nuggets of gold.
His style is very "French," one which I wish I could really grasp, but cannot (along with other French philosophers of the mid-late 20th century). Still, even if one must struggle to pull very non-systematic nuggets out of a very non-systematic thinker, they are still nuggets of gold.
January 9, 2025
BYUI: Philosophy of Religion
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