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The Mystery of Being 1: Reflection and Mystery
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.
237 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1950
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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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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 5, 2025
A necessary read in this age of AI.
March 23, 2024
Deep and aged very well.
Want to read
December 4, 2009Recommended by James Schall in Another Sort of Learning, Chapter 15, as one of Twelve Collections of Lectures and Reflections.
November 4, 2025
THE FIRST 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 first of two series of Gifford Lectures given by Marcel in 1949 and 1950, at the University of Aberdeen.
He states in the Introduction, “my tasks… could not be that of expounding some system which might be described as Marcelism… but rather to recapitulate the body of my work under a fresh light… above all to indicate its general direction.” (Pg. 4) He continues, “When I look at or listen to a masterpiece, I have an experience which can strictly be called a revelation. That experience will just not allow itself to be analysed away as a mere state of simply strongly felt satisfaction. One of the secondary purposes, indeed, of these lectures will be to look into the question of how we ought to understand such revelations.” (Pg. 12) He adds, “it may be that the role of the free critical thinker in our time is to swim against the current and attack the premises themselves… we must state, simply and flatly, that there do exist ranges of human experience where a too literal, an over-simplified way of conceiving the criterion of universality just cannot be accepted.” (Pg. 13)
He explains, “We shall be starting off… from the double observation that nothing is more necessary than that one should reflect; but that on the other hand reflection is not a task like other tasks; in reality is it not a task at all, since it is reflection that enables us to set about any task whatsoever, in an orderly fashion… It may be, nevertheless, that this process of reflective self-clarification cannot be pushed to the last extreme; it may be, as we shall see, that reflection, interrogating itself about its own essential nature, will be led to acknowledge that it inevitably bases itself on something that is not itself… it may be that an intuition, given in advance, of supra-reflective unity is at the root of the criticism reflection is able to exert upon itself.” (Pg. 47)
He observes, “we can say that where primary reflection tends to dissolve the unity of experience which is first put before it, the function of secondary reflection is essentially recuperative; it reconquers that unity. But how is such a reconquest possible? … what we have to deal with here is an actual way of access to a realm that is assuredly as near to us as can be, but that nevertheless, by a fatality… has been, through the influence of modern thought, set at a greater and greater distance from us; so that the realm has become more and more of a problematic realm, and we are forced to call its very existence into question. I am talking about the self, about that reality of the self, with which we have already come in contact so often, but always to be struck by its disquieting ambiguity.” (Pg. 102-103)
He suggests, “I AM my body in so far as I succeed in recognizing that this body of mine CANNOT, in the last analysis, be brought down to the level of being this object, AN object, a something or other. It is at this point that we have to bring in the idea of the body not as an object but as a subject.” (Pg. 124) He notes, “contemplation, in so far as it cannot be simply equated with the spectator’s attitude and in a deep sense is even at the opposite pole from that attitude, and even as one of participation’s most intimate modes.” (Pg. 152)
He states, “in the last analysis I do not know what I live by nor why I live; and that moreover, as a character says in one of my plays, perhaps I can only go on living on condition that I do not ask myself why I do. My life infinitely transcends my possible conscious grasp of my life at any given moment; fundamentally and essentially it refuses to tally with itself… the practical conditions in which my life unfolds itself force me… to attempt to make my accounts tally; but my sort of moral bookkeeping is of its very nature concerned with factors that evade any attempt to confine their essence or even to demonstrate their existence… The task of the profoundest philosophical speculation is perhaps that of discovering the conditions … under which the real balance-sheet may occasionally emerge in a partial and temporary fashion from underneath the cooked figures that mask it.” (Pg. 206-207)
He says, “I cannot speak of my life without asking myself what point it has, or even whether it points in any direction at all; and even if I decide that it is in fact a pointless business, that it points nowhere, still the very fact that I have raised the question presupposes the assumption that life, in some cases at least, might have a point.” (Pg. 212)
He adds, “We ought vigorously to reject any attempt to represent my life, or any human life at all for that matter, as a sequence of cinematic images… it is impossible that my life should reduce itself to a mere flow of images, and impossible therefore that its structure should be merely that of a succession… we have to acknowledge that our inner experience, as we live that experience, would be an impossibility for a being who was merely a succession of images.” (Pg. 232-233)
He concludes, “one thing that we may feel that we have established in this first volume is that this process of getting an insight into something whose reality, by definition, lies completely outside our own. We have been forced to insist more and more emphatically on the presence of one’s self TO itself, or on the presence to it of the other that is not really separable from it. And we have, in fact, real grounds for stating that we discern an organic connection between presence and mystery. For, in the first place, every presence IS mysterious and, in the second place, it is very doubtful whether the word ‘mystery’ can really be properly used in the case where a presence is not, at the very least itself somehow felt.” (Pg. 266)
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 first of two series of Gifford Lectures given by Marcel in 1949 and 1950, at the University of Aberdeen.
He states in the Introduction, “my tasks… could not be that of expounding some system which might be described as Marcelism… but rather to recapitulate the body of my work under a fresh light… above all to indicate its general direction.” (Pg. 4) He continues, “When I look at or listen to a masterpiece, I have an experience which can strictly be called a revelation. That experience will just not allow itself to be analysed away as a mere state of simply strongly felt satisfaction. One of the secondary purposes, indeed, of these lectures will be to look into the question of how we ought to understand such revelations.” (Pg. 12) He adds, “it may be that the role of the free critical thinker in our time is to swim against the current and attack the premises themselves… we must state, simply and flatly, that there do exist ranges of human experience where a too literal, an over-simplified way of conceiving the criterion of universality just cannot be accepted.” (Pg. 13)
He explains, “We shall be starting off… from the double observation that nothing is more necessary than that one should reflect; but that on the other hand reflection is not a task like other tasks; in reality is it not a task at all, since it is reflection that enables us to set about any task whatsoever, in an orderly fashion… It may be, nevertheless, that this process of reflective self-clarification cannot be pushed to the last extreme; it may be, as we shall see, that reflection, interrogating itself about its own essential nature, will be led to acknowledge that it inevitably bases itself on something that is not itself… it may be that an intuition, given in advance, of supra-reflective unity is at the root of the criticism reflection is able to exert upon itself.” (Pg. 47)
He observes, “we can say that where primary reflection tends to dissolve the unity of experience which is first put before it, the function of secondary reflection is essentially recuperative; it reconquers that unity. But how is such a reconquest possible? … what we have to deal with here is an actual way of access to a realm that is assuredly as near to us as can be, but that nevertheless, by a fatality… has been, through the influence of modern thought, set at a greater and greater distance from us; so that the realm has become more and more of a problematic realm, and we are forced to call its very existence into question. I am talking about the self, about that reality of the self, with which we have already come in contact so often, but always to be struck by its disquieting ambiguity.” (Pg. 102-103)
He suggests, “I AM my body in so far as I succeed in recognizing that this body of mine CANNOT, in the last analysis, be brought down to the level of being this object, AN object, a something or other. It is at this point that we have to bring in the idea of the body not as an object but as a subject.” (Pg. 124) He notes, “contemplation, in so far as it cannot be simply equated with the spectator’s attitude and in a deep sense is even at the opposite pole from that attitude, and even as one of participation’s most intimate modes.” (Pg. 152)
He states, “in the last analysis I do not know what I live by nor why I live; and that moreover, as a character says in one of my plays, perhaps I can only go on living on condition that I do not ask myself why I do. My life infinitely transcends my possible conscious grasp of my life at any given moment; fundamentally and essentially it refuses to tally with itself… the practical conditions in which my life unfolds itself force me… to attempt to make my accounts tally; but my sort of moral bookkeeping is of its very nature concerned with factors that evade any attempt to confine their essence or even to demonstrate their existence… The task of the profoundest philosophical speculation is perhaps that of discovering the conditions … under which the real balance-sheet may occasionally emerge in a partial and temporary fashion from underneath the cooked figures that mask it.” (Pg. 206-207)
He says, “I cannot speak of my life without asking myself what point it has, or even whether it points in any direction at all; and even if I decide that it is in fact a pointless business, that it points nowhere, still the very fact that I have raised the question presupposes the assumption that life, in some cases at least, might have a point.” (Pg. 212)
He adds, “We ought vigorously to reject any attempt to represent my life, or any human life at all for that matter, as a sequence of cinematic images… it is impossible that my life should reduce itself to a mere flow of images, and impossible therefore that its structure should be merely that of a succession… we have to acknowledge that our inner experience, as we live that experience, would be an impossibility for a being who was merely a succession of images.” (Pg. 232-233)
He concludes, “one thing that we may feel that we have established in this first volume is that this process of getting an insight into something whose reality, by definition, lies completely outside our own. We have been forced to insist more and more emphatically on the presence of one’s self TO itself, or on the presence to it of the other that is not really separable from it. And we have, in fact, real grounds for stating that we discern an organic connection between presence and mystery. For, in the first place, every presence IS mysterious and, in the second place, it is very doubtful whether the word ‘mystery’ can really be properly used in the case where a presence is not, at the very least itself somehow felt.” (Pg. 266)
Marcel’s work is important for anyone studying Existentialism, or contemporary Catholic philosophy.
August 13, 2025
okay no se como explicar este libro. TBH no lo lei completo. Lo leimos en un curso que tome en verano, junto con otros libros de Gabriel Marcel, poemas de J.L Borges y Chesterton para complementar.
En si el libro se me hizo MUY difícil de leer, ya que es una filosofia muy avanzada para mi (no estudio filosofía ni nada), pero ya cuando ibamos hablando de los conceptos en clase lo pude ir entendiendo un poco mas, y me gusta mucho lo que trata de decir en este libro. Critica al "superhombre" de Nietzche, y como en la modernidad el hombre trata de poner sus propios valores como su camino de actuar en el mundo, envez de Dios.
En si el libro se me hizo MUY difícil de leer, ya que es una filosofia muy avanzada para mi (no estudio filosofía ni nada), pero ya cuando ibamos hablando de los conceptos en clase lo pude ir entendiendo un poco mas, y me gusta mucho lo que trata de decir en este libro. Critica al "superhombre" de Nietzche, y como en la modernidad el hombre trata de poner sus propios valores como su camino de actuar en el mundo, envez de Dios.
May 15, 2025
“Every society pronounces sentence of doom or acquittal on itself according to the throne of state which it reserves, both within itself and high above itself, for that Truth which is not a thing, but a spirit.”
July 21, 2019
A profound exploration of the question “What am I?”
May 12, 2013
A mysterious journey,carfully elucidated,around the central questions concerning existence,such as who am I? how do I know for certain I exisit?
You may not still have the answer after reading this first volume but at least you will feel less silly about it.
You may not still have the answer after reading this first volume but at least you will feel less silly about it.
April 14, 2013
Marcel presents some great accounts of the mysterious nature of our being and our increasing lack of ability to grasp ourselves. However, the continual conflation of ineffability with Christianity becomes tiresome quickly. I'm holding off on reading volume 2 in order to recharge my impartiality.
April 11, 2023
El dardo. Obra de teatro en 3 actos.
La señal de la cruz, desde mi punto de vista es la mejor de las piezas dramáticas. Plantea el problema de la Francia del antisemitismo francés desde una vertiente diferente.
La señal de la cruz, desde mi punto de vista es la mejor de las piezas dramáticas. Plantea el problema de la Francia del antisemitismo francés desde una vertiente diferente.
January 9, 2025
BYUI: Philosophy of Religion
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July 22, 2015Persons bear a fundamentally mysterious presence.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews