Gabriel Marcel and the difference between a problem and a mystery: 8 October

Gabriel Marcel died in Paris on 8 October 1973. He was eighty-three, and he had outlived the movement he was supposed to have founded. When Jean-Paul Sartre stood up in the Salle des Centraux in October 1945 to explain that existentialism was a humanism, he divided the field into two camps, the atheist one he led and a Christian one, and named Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel as its members. Marcel wanted no part of the arrangement. He preferred to call what he did a philosophy of existence, or, when pressed, neo-Socratic. The name stuck to him anyway, and the irony is that the word existentialisme had been used in French for his thought before it was ever attached to Sartre's.

He was an unlikely figure for a school. Born in Paris on 7 December 1889, he lost his mother, Laure Meyer, when he was a small child and was brought up by an agnostic father, Henry Marcel, a senior civil servant, and by his mother's sister. He took the agrégation in philosophy from the Sorbonne in 1910, at twenty, with Henri Bergson as his adviser, and then declined the ordinary academic life. He taught in lycées, wrote drama criticism, read manuscripts for the publisher Plon, played the piano, and wrote at least thirty plays. He said more than once that his ideas were born on the stage before they reached the page, and the plays are not a hobby beside the philosophy but its first draft.

The thing to carry away from the day is a single distinction, drawn in a short essay of 1933 and worked over for forty years, between a problem and a mystery. It is simple to state and hard to hold on to, and the civilisation Marcel was criticising has spent the half-century since his death confirming his diagnosis.

Where the suspicion of abstraction came from#

Marcel's philosophical temper was formed by a job rather than a seminar. During the First World War, unfit for service, he worked for the Red Cross information service in Paris, tracing missing soldiers for the families who came to ask after them. Each enquiry arrived as a name on a card and an index number; each was also a son. The gap between the file and the person became, as the Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, a lifelong suspicion of what he called the spirit of abstraction. The phrase recurs in everything he wrote. Abstraction is a necessary tool of thought; the spirit of abstraction is the habit of mistaking the tool for the thing, of treating the index card as if it were the man.

The Metaphysical Journal of 1927, the diary in which he worked out his first positions from 1914 onwards, and Being and Having (1935), a second diary covering 1928 to 1933, record the method he chose instead. He did not build a system. He proceeded by what he called secondary reflection. Primary reflection breaks experience into objects and relations so that they can be handled; it is the reflection of science, administration and technique, and nothing is wrong with it until it claims to be the whole of thinking. Secondary reflection turns back on that fragmentation and recovers the unity the first kind had to set aside: the fact that I who analyse am also inside what is analysed.

The clearest case is the body. I can describe my body as a thing I have, an instrument I own and use, and medicine must describe it so. But the description misses something, and Marcel's shorthand for what it misses is the sentence 'I am my body'. Incarnation, he argued, is not a relation of possession at all. This is the ground on which the later phenomenology of embodiment, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's above all, was built, and Marcel had surveyed it nearly two decades before the Phenomenology of Perception appeared in 1945.

A problem and a mystery#

The essay that fixed the distinction was Position et approches concrètes du mystère ontologique, published in 1933 alongside his play Le Monde cassé, 'The Broken World'. A problem, Marcel wrote, is something I meet in front of me, which bars my way and which I can, in principle, go round or remove. Once it is solved it is dismissed from consciousness; nobody keeps thinking about a problem after the answer is found. A mystery is a problem which encroaches upon its own data, one in which the questioner is himself part of what is in question, so that the clean separation of subject from object that a problem requires cannot be made. Evil is a mystery in this sense, so is love, so is death, and so, above all, is being itself. Treat them as problems, as things to be fixed by technique and then forgotten, and you have not solved them; you have refused to see them.

It is easy to read this as a plea for reverence, and Marcel's Catholic admirers sometimes did. It is better read as a piece of logic. The point is not that some questions are too sacred for analysis but that some questions change their character when the analyst pretends to stand outside them. A man asking whether his life has meaning cannot bracket the fact that it is his life. The play from which the essay was published makes the point in its title: the broken world is one in which every relation has become a function, and the characters go on functioning in the absence of the one thing that would make functioning worth while.

Marcel drew from this the critique he set out in Les Hommes contre l'humain (1951), known in English as Man Against Mass Society. The functionalised human being is the clerk, the patient, the consumer, defined by the services he performs or receives, and the technocratic state is the organisation of such beings by people who believe that all their difficulties are problems. He was not opposed to technology; he was opposed to the belief that technique is a complete account of what a human being is for. Readers who know Heidegger's essay on technology will recognise the neighbourhood, though the two men arrived at it from opposite directions, Heidegger by way of the history of being and Marcel by way of the Red Cross index.

Availability, fidelity, hope#

If the critical vocabulary is problem and mystery, the constructive vocabulary is three words. Disponibilité, usually translated as availability, is the condition of being open to another person, of having room. The unavailable person is not wicked; he is full, occupied with himself, and there is no space in him for anyone else to be received. Creative fidelity is the keeping of a promise over time, which Marcel understood not as stubborn adherence to a past commitment but as the continual re-creation of the self that made it, since the person who promised is not quite the person who must keep. And hope, which he was careful to distinguish from optimism, is not a prediction that things will turn out well. It has the form 'I hope in thee for us', a relation rather than a forecast, and it is born inside captivity, not outside it. Homo Viator (1945), written during the Occupation, is the book of these three.

The thinking here ran in parallel with Martin Buber's I and Thou (1923), and Marcel always insisted that his own account of the 'thou' had been reached independently. His Friday evening gatherings in the rue de Tournon drew a generation that would carry his questions in other directions: Jean Wahl, Emmanuel Levinas, Sartre himself in the 1930s, and Paul Ricoeur, who was his student and remained his most faithful reader. The Catholic personalism of Karol Wojtyla borrowed the distinction between being and having; and the modern critiques of the 'buffered' or managerial self in Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre have Marcel's spirit of abstraction somewhere in their ancestry.

He became a Catholic in 1929, at thirty-nine, after François Mauriac had asked him in an open letter why, given everything he had written, he was not already one of them. The conversion did not make the philosophy; the philosophy was in place, and its drift was towards a faith he had not yet professed. He gave the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen in 1949 and 1950, published as The Mystery of Being (1951), and the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1961 and 1962, which became The Existential Background of Human Dignity. His play Le Chemin de crête took the Académie française's Prix Paul-Hervieu in 1936. He is not much read now, outside Catholic universities and the odd seminar on hope, and his prose, diaristic and circling, does not make the case for him. The ideas do.

Also on the day#

Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones and the magistrate who helped found the Bow Street Runners, died in Lisbon on 8 October 1754, where he had gone, too late, for his health; the posthumous Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon is the record of a dying man watching his own body become a problem. And Willy Brandt, the German chancellor whose knee on the ground in Warsaw in 1970 remains the century's best-known gesture of political contrition, died on 8 October 1992. Contrition, Marcel would have said, cannot be a problem either; it encroaches on its own data.

What makes Marcel worth a day in a calendar that has largely forgotten him is that his diagnosis has become more exact as it has aged. We live, more than he did, in a world in which the index card has become a profile, and in which the hardest questions about memory, dying, attention and love arrive in the form of products designed to solve them. A culture that converts every mystery into a problem does not thereby get rid of the mystery; it only loses the ability to notice it. An earlier entry in this series, on Otto Weininger, Sputnik and the calendar's lost ten days, is here.