As I reported in last week’s column, Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) is my favorite philosopher. Often when I read him or read about his philosophy I think I have an opportunity to enter more deeply into his thought. I have a sense that there is still more for me to learn.
There seems to be a depth to his thought that is inviting me to continue to reflect on it. As I mentioned in last week’s column, the essay on Marcel’s thought in Father Frank Tyrell’s wonderful book, “Man: Believer and Unbeliever” (New York: Alba House, 1974, 415 pp.), has one of the best commentaries on Marcel’s thought that I have read.
In commenting on Marcel’s importance in philosophy, Father Tyrell wrote the following:
“Gabriel Marcel belongs, despite some disclaimers, to the existentialist camp. As a pioneer of the existentialist mode of thought, he has been critical of some, especially of Sartre, yet even his criticism has been creative and has helped clarify his own position as a Christian theist in contrast with theirs.
“Martin Buber and Marcel have exercised an enormous influence on theology, psychology, and literature and almost every area where their personalism has helped to illuminate and nurture the understanding of the unique value of individual human beings within the human community” (p.110).
An important concept in Marcel’s philosophy he expresses with the French word “disponibilite.” The word means “available” but not merely physically available. Marcel means by the word an active attitude. It refers to the habitual attitude and inclination of welcoming the other into one’s own interiority, into the depth of one’s own person.
I don’t think it is easy to be available in the way Marcel suggests. I suspect that it requires an asceticism, a self-discipline. Perhaps there never was a time when being available was easy to achieve, but it seems to me the technological revolution, the multiplication of cellphones and other gadgets has made it more difficult. It seems as though we are constantly being distracted from being present and inviting to persons who are right before us.
Commenting on Marcel’s vision of the human person, Father Tyrell writes the following:
“I am myself because of and to the degree that I share existence, incarnate existence with others. … “Since we are constituted in our personal being by our communion with others, our ontological density, the depth of our participation in being is dependent on our openness to others and their openness to us.
“Such a relationship is not one of objective causality, but rather of summons and response which proceed from the free initiative of personal subjects that are reciprocally creative” (p. 114).
I find this amazing. What I believe it to mean is that I can only develop as a person if other persons are calling me to a deeper relationship and if I respond to that summons with my presence and open summons to them.
Put very simply I think that Marcel’s view is that I cannot be the best person I can be without a call from other persons, and they cannot be their best selves without me. The way that God has created us, we radically need one another. By our loving presence to one another we can help one another to be open to the mystery of Being, which for Marcel means being open to the mystery of
God.
Acts of faith, hope, and love, which are intimately related, can lead a person to be open to the mystery of God. Father Frank Tyrell succinctly comments on a belief of Marcel’s that has fascinated me from the time I first learned of it many years ago.
Marcel claimed that when you love someone you discover that this person will not die. Loving can open us to the mystery of God’s presence. Commenting on this belief, Father Tyrell writes the following:
“Thus to the love is attributed an absolute value and the beloved is thought of as participating in God and thus situated in an order that transcends all judgment. Accordingly love addresses itself to the eternal and in effect says to the beloved:
‘Thou shall not die.’
“The more one loves, the more the lover sees the beloved as authentic Being, that is as participating in a presence that cannot fail. Thus, although the Thou who is the object of love and the I who is the subject may partake of all the deficiencies of finite beings, the love that is the intense form of their communion invariably points beyond to the One Who envelops them with a presence
that is unconditioned and indefectible” (p. 119).
Writing this column and last week’s column about Marcel’s philosophy has reminded me of why he is my favorite philosopher and also how much my own thought has been influenced by Marcel’s.
Father Lauder is a philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica. He presents two 15-minute talks from his lecture series on the Catholic Novel, 10:30 a.m. Monday through Friday on NET-TV.