Before his death in 1973, Gabriel Marcel sat down for a conversation with his former student, the great twentieth century French phenomenologist, Paul Ricoeur. During their discussion, Ricoeur told Marcel that he was responsible for inaugurating and revealing the deep interrelationship between philosophy and existence. Ricoeur adds that Marcel helped to lay the foundation of twentieth century French existential-phenomenology by showing that “sensations testify to our participation in existence, the participation of my own self in the world of existing things.”1placeholder Indeed, one of Marcel’s chief contributions to twentieth century French Thought was thinking by way of embodiment. Rejecting idealist postulations, Marcel recentered the multi-faceted notion of corporeal existence in response to some of life’s most profound questions. One important text which accomplishes this is Gabriel Marcel’s Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary originally published in 1949.
Marcel’s Being and Having is not a typical work of academic philosophy. Indeed, like Kierkegaard’s style, the majority of the text might be better identified as a highly individualized self-reflection. Half of it is composed of diary entries, while the other half consists of conference papers. In some places Marcel disagrees with himself, and in other places he leaves behind scattered remnants of thoughts. Due to its form, it can be difficult to read and at times appear highly convoluted. Nonetheless, one intellectual constant remains evident: the question of what I am and how I relate to Being.
Being and Having offers what I understand to be a pivotal ascent into the realm of complex existential-ontological questions.2placeholder Although the text does not operate specifically as a work of existentialism, ontology, or phenomenology, it nonetheless offers critical insights into all three as well as their meaning of and significance for lived experience. The prevailing intricacies of the text might be best illuminated by engaging with Marcel’s notion of corporeal existence. Therefore, in this essay, I will provide a discussion of embodiment by employing three layers of interpretation in Being and Having. The first layer will address Marcel’s notion of the self as body. The second layer will continue the notion of embodiment by probing into Marcel’s implicit ontological argument. The third layer of my interpretation will put Being and embodiment together in order to reveal what Marcel conceives as the sacredness of the human person in the act of love.
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Like Martin Heidegger, Marcel is interested in the question of how existence factors into Being. In “On the Ontological Mystery,” Marcel writes: “Being is—or should be—necessary. It is impossible that everything should be reduced to a play of successive appearances which are inconstant with each other.”3placeholder Marcel, like thinkers who come after Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, diagnoses the world as dangerously lacking, on the verge of being emptied of meaning. He describes the present moment as one of “ontological need.”4placeholder In this way, Marcel makes his intellectual project manifest: a recovery of and participation in Being.5placeholder He does this by bringing the ontological question into conversation with existentialism in a way that realizes and affirms Being as both present and personal in the world.6placeholder Marcel himself says that this is the philosophical exigency and essential character of Being and Having.7placeholder By exploring the nature of the embodied person in different manners, Marcel hopes to recover the constitution and dignity of the human person in lived experience.
The fact that the world is “already there” is a fundamental attitude of existential phenomenology.8placeholder By setting aside reflection and coming to terms with pre-reflective experience, phenomenology tries to open up the world and reveal new kinds of meaning. The organizing principle of this framework is the individual, more specifically, the body. Marcel, in Being and Having, affirms this notion of incarnate awareness, a capacity without which individuals could not lay claim to their existence and by extension their meaning in the world.9placeholder This reality, as Marcel suggests, “color[s] all existential judgments.”10placeholder For Marcel, the critical pivot of existential questions is not the only the body but the fact that it is my body.11placeholder The idea of the body is the first apparent layer of Being and Having.
The primordial problem of the self as body is that it is both I and not I, both myself and for myself.12placeholder As Marcels writes, it is “a situation which is mirrored but cannot be understood.”13placeholder The fact that I can instrumentalize my body and reduce it to a function to accomplish certain tasks poses as a philosophical conundrum. Either my body is me, or is not me. Descartes’ dualism, for instance, would relegate the body to a sphere of doubt as opposed to the mind which is superior. Marcel, in contrast to Descartes, argues that in referring to my body I cannot treat myself as something distinct from my carnality. When I do something, it is all of me that performs a particular task, not some of me. I cannot objectify my body as an actor of its own accord (e.g., “I and my body”).14placeholder The fundamental makeup of myself, therefore, cannot be treated in terms of a totally objectified existence (e.g., I used my body to do this, or I and my body did that). The body, though it performs my intentions, is never reduced to an ulterior entity. In this way, Marcel observes that Descartes’s cogito misses the point. By eschewing the body as secondary and demoting the self to a dualism, we impede our chances at acquiring a vital knowledge of lived experience.15placeholder We are blind to the world if our first intention is one in which we ignore the basic hermeneutic for interpreting it, namely, our body.
As Husserl suggests in Ideas II, the body is the means by which we perceive the external world.16placeholder In the same way, Marcel affirms that the body is mine insofar as it is distinct from the world and remains tied to me and my projects as an individual living in it. Indeed, the first contact we as individuals have with the world is through our body. Marcel borrows from the French intellectual Paul Claudel saying that the first human act is one of co-naissance, “co-birth.”17placeholder Rather than thinking about the world, our primary existential orientation consists in feeling the world—being born into and with it. Marcel calls this form of embodiment thinking “inside existence.”18placeholder What it means to be a human being is enfolded by experience and depends on its presence.19placeholder The body is the medium by which the ontological knowledge of what we are is fully engaged. This leads to the question of Being, the next layer of interpreting Being and Having.
Marcel believes that the relationship between embodiment and Being is the fundamental way by which the dignity of the human person is realized. This is discussed at length in Being and Having, and it begins with the recognition of an inward tension. For instance, Marcel writes that it is not always intelligible when something is not I, is I, or is for I.20placeholder Furthermore, this ambiguity is never completely mitigated. Throughout Being and Having, Marcel implicitly makes an ontological argument to try and resolve this problem. As he writes: “The fact that I cannot possibly deny the principle of identity, except in verbis, at once prevents me from denying Being.”21placeholder The question of the human being is necessarily bound up with the question of Being. Marcel writes that “we are involved in Being, and it is not in our power to leave it: more simply, we are, and our whole inquiry is just how to place ourselves in relation to plenary Reality.”22placeholder Their cohesiveness is perhaps the key to unlocking Marcel’s resolution of inward, existential tension. Just as the world is the first given of our existence, so too is Being. Its reality is the precondition for orienting ourselves as human beings in the world.
Being, for Marcel, is accessed through a kind of divine framework in which thought adheres to its ultimate source. He agrees with the Thomist formula that thought transcends the individual and brings about a new plane of metaphysical meaning, i.e., God.23placeholder However, Marcel identifies a fundamental problem which is that we as individuals are incapable of thinking of God in the same way that we can think about a place or an event which has spatial-temporal dimensions.O n the one hand, Marcel is loyal to ontology;24placeholder but, on the other hand, he has trouble proving its efficacy.25placeholder To overcome this problem requires a rearrangement within the ontological framework.
Being does not operate in the same way that individuals conduct their daily lives.26placeholder This distinction, for Marcel, implies two different modes of thought: an existential and an ontological. The existential tries to penetrate the depths of existence which is determinate and workable (e.g., what exists), while the ontological seeks to ascend into the realm of that which is indeterminate and infinite (e.g., what is). In trying to bring the two together, Marcel writes that they correspond to each other in “the activity of thought taken as construction or as recognition.”27placeholder In this way, existence is not treated as independent from the ways in which Being comes to fruition and reveals itself, rather existence is already integrated into it.28placeholder For Marcel, existence is the means by which we as individuals reconstruct the world which already possesses ontological meaning. The issue at hand is in determining how existence actually accomplishes this.
“I do really assert that thought is made for being as the eye is made for light.”29placeholder The eye, as an organ of the body, is fulfilled both in its application as well as its participation in that which provides for its use, namely, the light. So, too, does thinking reach its goal both in the utilization of itself in the human world as well as its pure participation in the realm of higher thought. Thinking, in this way, becomes both instrumental and essential. Marcel, here, is implying a reconstructive capacity which enables human beings at achieving an ontological vision of the world. The problem with ontology, however, is that it loses the strength of its argument in this second sphere of thought.30placeholder Either ontology can satisfy a response to this, or it cannot. As he puts it, either Being is real and we have access to it, or we do not.31placeholder
The idea that Being is not real comes as a critical response to twentieth century Thomism which, as Marcel himself observes, lacks the rigor to bring about a new formula by which Being can be recovered in an increasingly problematic world. The issue that Marcel identifies is not that Being is not real; it is real, but not for the reasons that prior Catholic intellectuals have been arguing. The inability of the Thomist argument rests in its “lethargy of devitalized doctrine.”32placeholder What ontological Thomism lacks is the character of lived experience grounded in an existence of human persons who undergo ordeals of their own.33placeholder The fact of the matter is that the human condition is uniquely human.34placeholder Thus, Thomism and by extension ontology need to be redressed in fresh terms. This is precisely the role of Marcel’s embodied existentialism. Though the feeling of “having arrived” at a renewed meaning seems unattainable, Marcel contends that the possibility remains within reach.35placeholder This is the philosophical moment where his existentialism meets his ontology.
Marcel writes that the connection between Being and the created world is found in “corporeity,” i.e., the body. There is a process of assimilation which occurs.36placeholder For Marcel, to affirm human existence means to have it in connection to my body, however indirect or direct it maintains contact with it.37placeholder Corporeity participates in the created world; it has a pure, organic relationship to it. The body itself demonstrates how we as individuals can situate and relate to actual meaning in the world by virtue of being part of it. In the mosaic of life, corporeity is the Archimedean point of interpretation. It assigns place and status to that which is outside of me, i.e., my body. The relationship between my corporeal self and what is beyond me is both intimate and foundational. Reality, for Marcel, is grounded in this incarnate personality. Only in and through my body does reality as lived experience become constructed, only by way of incarnate existence does meaning become readily available. Marcel suggests that this mode of existential-ontological interpretation persists in how we exist in particular manners.38placeholder These manners are most revealed in the difference between having and being.39placeholder This is the third and final layer of interpreting Being and Having.
“Everything comes down to the distinction between what we have and we are.”40placeholder This ambiguity defines what it means to be a human person alive in the world; it is the human condition in action. Having is a basic unavoidable reality of lived experience which we as individuals participate in every day. The notion of having implies things that are external to the self but still relate to it. They are actualities represented in states of experience or objects. For instance, I might say that I have a headache or that I have a bed. In either case, both correlate to me but neither substantiate who I am. Being, on the contrary, is more complex; indeed, it can only be first approached by way of having. To say that I do not have a bed, for instance, does not reduce my integrity as an individual. In the same way, to announce that I do not have a headache does not increase my integrity. Being is a deeper level of interiority of the human person; it attests to the mystery of the individual as the individual. To be does not rely on a thought. I do not need to be thought of to be a self. Indeed, to do so would imply an objectification which does in fact reduce my integrity, and which neglects my dignity as a human being.41placeholder To be, therefore, is to affirm the sacredness within myself that is not preconditioned by thoughts or objects. Being precedes and affirms these things; simply put, it says ‘yes’ to life.42placeholder Only in demonstrating a fidelity to the sacredness of life and not possessions does being begin for the individual. Whereas too much having “can swallow us up,” being thrives by its own dignified potency.43placeholder The equilibrium between the two arises as a result of two practical dispositions.
Marcel suggests that there are two basic characteristics of the human person in its relationship to being and having: the one who is disposable and the one who is non-disposable. Disposability means to be present, to be there for another person. It is fully actualized in the act of charity by which one individual gives absolute presence to another. This state of presence, however, is not like that of objects. Being there objectively, that is, taking up space and time in proximity to another, does not guarantee presence. Rather, presence “is a reality; it is a kind of influx; it depends on us to be permeable to this influx, but not, to tell the truth, to call it forth.”44placeholder Disposability properly construed is the active investment in another with the other; it is a gift which supersedes material things. For instance, when I try to comfort a friend in need the true meaning of my presence is not embedded in any kind of gift I might bring. “The most attentive and the most conscientious listener may give me the impression of not being present; he gives me nothing, he cannot make room for me in himself, whatever material favors which he has prepared to grant me.”45placeholder Rather, my presence is encapsulated in my openness to the other, as one who is listening and attentive with complete disposability.46placeholder The meaning of such a presence, indeed, is deeply intimate. Appearing present in bodily form and bearing material gifts alone are not enough, in fact, both of these things could still result in what Marcel calls indisponibilité (“unavailability”).47placeholder Thus, having a presence is different than being present.
Non-disposability, in contrast to disposability, means to not be present for another. It contradicts influx and is embodied in absence.48placeholder The lack of adherence to another is directly proportional to an increase in self-preoccupation. Simply put, the more I am invested in myself the less I am invested in others. My manner of non-disposability is a form of selfishness, something which cuts me off from the world. Furthermore, according to Marcel, the fundamental problem of non-disposability is that “as my life becomes more and more an established thing, a certain division tends to be made between what concerns me and what does not concern me.”49placeholder The extent to which I follow one path or the other will result in my manner of presence or absence, disposability or non-disposability.
Human existence consists of the frequent interchangeability of being versus having. The more I have, the more of the external world is sublimated into my being.50placeholder The self and the body are incorporated with one another where feeling and dignity intersect. The body is a “thickening” which participates in both the material and spiritual expression of the self, a burgeoning as a result of both having and being.51placeholder For Marcel, knowing how to navigate the interrelationship between these two spheres of existence is equal to unearthing and fostering the unity between body and soul. To put it differently, the inherent unity of body and soul is demonstrated by the ways in which the self either capitulates completely to having or asserts its being. Just as having too many possessions can cloud judgment, so too does it make our inner life opaque.
By dwelling only in the realm of having, we become fettered to ourselves and are unable to participate in a joyous life. For Marcel, this human captivity is precisely the sin of material functionalism which to him has plagued the modern world.52placeholder It turns the individual inside out and reduces him to a schedule of sense datum of which no meaning beyond the surface is possible.53placeholder In this way, the self is diminished rather than glorified. Opacity holds our being captive.54placeholder In contrast, fluidity allows it to flourish; this is most revealed in the act of love.
For Marcel, love is the way by which individuals come into contact with what is beyond them and assert the freedom of their being. Through love the self participates in an immediate transcendence which at times can appear hidden in lived experience. Love is a moment of grace. When Marcel purports that presence is the capacity to be emphatically disposable to another person, he is implying the innate goodness of the act itself. Love operates in the same way; it makes transparent the entire self to another. In so doing, this transparency legitimates the self and raises it into a participation with the Divine mystery. Love does not have reason; its scope is beyond the problematic of things.55placeholder Though the act of love cannot be fully comprehended it nevertheless surrounds and comprehends the individual. It is a development from within and manifested by me as me.56placeholder Though it might elude me, I remain dependent on it as something above and within me.57placeholder Indeed, Marcel defines love this way:
“Love, insofar as desire or opposed to desire, love treated as the subordination of the self to a superior reality, a reality at my deepest level more truly me than myself—love as the breaking down of the tension between the self and the other, appears to me to be what one might call the ontological datum. I think, and will say so by the way, that the science of ontology will not get out of the scholastic rut until it takes full cognizance of the fact that love comes first.”58placeholder
What has hitherto been misunderstood is that willing the good for the other as the other is not a routine virtue. Rather, it is a spontaneous act rooted in a soul which is open and not closed. Scholasticism, like atheism, has relegated love into parameters which are not conducive to the revelation of its mystery. If the created world lacks love, it is because we as modern subjects no longer seek its mystery and readily participate in it. In short, love itself bridges the gaps between being and having in lived experience.
Works Cited
Husserl, Edmund. Studies in the phenomenology of constitution: second book, Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1989.
Kruks, Sonia. “Marcel and Merleau-Ponty: Incarnation, Situation and the Problem of History.” Human Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1987): 225-245.
Marcel, Gabriel. Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary. Translated by Peter Smith. Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976.
⎯. The Philosophy of Existence. Translated by Manya Harai. New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1969.
⎯. Tragic Wisdom, Including Conversations Between Paul Ricoeur and Gabriel Marcel. Translated and edited by Stephen Jolin and Peter McCormick. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958.
Gabriel Marcel, Tragic Wisdom, Including Conversations Between Paul Ricoeur and Gabriel Marcel, trans. and ed. Stephen Jolin and Peter McCormick (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 222.
Marcel himself does not prefer the existentialist label as a matter of separation from the competing French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (See Tragic Wisdom, pp. 237-238). The form of Marcel’s thought, if it is to be associated with an existentialist tag, is Christian existentialism. See Gabriel Marcel, “Testimony and Existentialism,” from The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harai (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1969), pp. 67-68.
Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” from The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harai (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1969), 4.
Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” from The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harai (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1969), 4.
Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” from The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harai (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1969), 5.
Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” from The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harai (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1969), 6.
Gabriel Marcel. Tragic Wisdom, Including Conversations Between Paul Ricoeur and Gabriel Marcel. Translated and edited by Stephen Jolin and Peter McCormick. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, 235.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), vii.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 10.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 10.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 11.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 12.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 12.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 14.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 27.
For Husserl, the body is treated as an organ of the will which manifest my body in relation to material things which are not my body, i.e., not me. See Edmund Husserl, Studies in the phenomenology of constitution: second book, Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1989).
Gabriel Marcel. Tragic Wisdom, Including Conversations Between Paul Ricoeur and Gabriel Marcel. Translated and edited by Stephen Jolin and Peter McCormick. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, 222.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 27.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 115.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 12.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 28.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 35.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 30.
Marcel’s philosophical position is grounded in a faith commitment to God (Being and Having, 54).
“I am not sure if one can think of God in the same sense that we can think of the incarnate Christ” (Being and Having, 31).
Even to say that Being “exits” is not fully coherent.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 32.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 38.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 38.
The second sphere is often associated with the soul. This is perhaps why Marcel calls the soul the pivot of metaphysical questions (Being and Having, 11).
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 28.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 198.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 198.
This is a major Catholic intellectual theme that peaks at the Second Vatican Council and its written counterpart “Gaudium et spes.”
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 199.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 83.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 10.
Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” from The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harai (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1969), 28.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 82.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 155.
Marcel asks: To what extent am I a thing? Can I be had; am I an object? Ultimately, to think in these terms—to be had—is unethical and relegates the human person to the sphere of use-value or functionalism. Marcel, in order to overcome and ease this problem, sets it up as a mystery. As he says, “What is the mysterious relationship between self and ourself?” (Being and Having, 156).
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 95.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 152.
Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” from The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harai (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1969), 24.
Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” from The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harai (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1969), 26.
In “Existence and Human Freedom” Marcel references Sartre’s similar treatment of gooeyness in Nausea. Mucous, for Sartre, is a negative reality that displays the lack of form and definition in the world; it is a repellent stickiness that apprehends the individual in the world and makes him “a prey of existence” with little way out. Marcel, in contrast, still sees hope in the spiritual realm which supersedes contingency (“Existence and Human Freedom,” from The Philosophy of Existence, pp. 34-39).
Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” from The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harai (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1969), 26.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 71.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 70.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 165.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 167.
Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” from The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harai (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1969), 2.
Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” from The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harai (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1969), 5.
Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” from The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harai (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1969), 28.
Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” from The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harai (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1969), 11.
Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” from The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harai (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1969), 11.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 167.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Peter Smith (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 167.