French existentialist philosopher GABRIEL MARCEL (1889-1973) = A video by Lalit Rao.

French existentialist philosopher GABRIEL MARCEL (1889-1973)
© Lalit Rao (Philosophy Network Channel)
French philosopher and playwright Gabriel Marcel authored thirty plays and the same number of philosophical essays. He was a major representative of French existential thought. Gabriel Marcel converted to Catholicism in 1929 and provided Christian solutions to existentialist problems. In his work, “être and avoir” [being and having] written in 1935, he draws a distinction between one’s being and one’s life. Gabriel Marcel was a member of the Academy of Political and Social Science of the Institute of France. His dramatic and philosophical works enabled the reasoned exercise of freedom to enhance the dignity of human life. “The Broken World” is considered to be his dramatic masterpiece. It portrays the devastating sense of emptiness, superficial activities and fractured relationships that plague the modern world. For Gabriel Marcel, the notion of I am is existentially prior to “I live”. It means that approximately being is a necessary condition for living but living is not a necessary condition for being. This is taken by Gabriel Marcel as a reason for believing that my life was given to me. It is an impressive fact to suggest the existence of god. In his essay “On the ontological mystery” which is considered to be the philosophical sequel to “The Broken World”, Gabriel Marcel confronts the questions : “Who am I” ? , “Is being empty or full” ? Through his essay, he explored the regions of body or incarnate being, inter-subjectivity and transcendence. “Being towards death” by the famous German philosopher Heidegger influenced Gabriel Marcel who noted that one’s being is at every moment in jeopardy and the only way to understand the ordeal of living is to have faith in one’s being beyond one’s life. Gabriel Marcel’s thought struck a balance between despair and hope, fidelity and infidelity, self deception and a spirit of truth. He recognized the rules of freedom and fundamental attitudes or pre-philosophical dispositions as they influence a person’s way of being and the interpretation of life’s meaning. There are problems with Gabriel Marcel’s existentialist metaphysics as I am not numerically identical with the life that I lead doesn’t logically follow that I pre-date or post-date that life. In his 1946 work “Existence and Freedom”, Gabriel Marcel criticizes Heidegger and Jaspers and Sartre for all their “dogmatic negativism” [i.e. their pessimism about human prospects]. This was a charge which Jean Paul Sartre attempted to deny in his speech “L’existentialisme est un humanisme”. Lastly, concern for the presence of loved ones who died appears in both Marcel’s dramatic as well as philosophical works notably in “Presence and immortality”. It led him to explore how a human subject can experience the presence of god or the presence of loved ones from beyond death.