Gabriel marcel reflection. Marcel, Gabriel 2019-01-07

The Mystery of Being 1: Reflection and Mystery by Gabriel Marcel

Thus, the question is posed as follows. He belongs to the line of thinkers, which includes Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Buber in philosophy, and Karl Barth and Paul Tillich in theology, who draw attention to the non-theoretical dimension of religious belief, and moral experience. Authentic prayer is not a self-centered request for attention but is a way of uniting ourselves with God. It is true that certain disorderly elements-sickness, accidents of every sort-will break in on the smooth working of the system. Edited by Paul Arthur Schlipp and Lewis Edwin Hahn.

Gabriel Marcel

But there is really no contradiction in this, for the attitude in question can reveal itself only as a certain way that consciousness reacts to what must be called its fundamental situation. I can spend twenty years of my life serving a corporation but when I no longer help the company make profits, I am rendered unworthy of employment by the powers that be and am sent on my merry way to the unemployment line. Science may be concerned with problems which we can stand apart from and be objective about, but philosophy may be concerned with mysteries which we cannot stand apart from or be objective about. Marcel excels here in his concrete analyses of the attitude of hope, the family community in its temporal and supratemporal aspects, and the forgotten virtue of personal fidelity. Marcel talks to our condition, emphasizing our urgent need of hope, thus discovering beyond the lack of stability the values on which we may depend.

Mystery of Being Vol. I: Reflection and Mystery

Martin's Press, 1977 , 163. Marcel explains that faith is associated with humility and prayer. But a mystery is something in which I am myself involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and initial validity. London: The Harvill Press, 1950. Disponibilité does not insist on its rights or make any claim on the other whatsoever. Technology takes over and becomes the center of attention as furnishing all that seems to be needed for human comfort and well-being.

Marcel, Gabriel

This is also manifest in Science which tends to compartmentalize everything, analyze and break everything into understandable parts. Availability is a risk one takes, since it is only through availability that the potential for fullness emerges as possible. He responded by embracing Catholicism. All these factors which make a difference, if not the difference, when the human person is involved are what is at the center of his philosophical reflection. There would be no sense in saying that a situation can by itself produce a demand.

Mystery of Being Vol. I: Reflection and Mystery

How could we live without the telephone or electricity? After converting to Catholicism in 1929, he became a noted opponent of atheistic existentialism, and primarily that of. O'Connor New York: The Free Press, 1964 , p. Marcel was a very prolific writer, whose work ranges over philosophy, drama, criticism, and musical compositions. Marait London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952. People then regard and admire their own technological creations, ascribing glory to themselves instead of the Creator. Finally, Marcel saw that the dual approaches of abstraction and possession lay at the root of social problems.

Homo Viator

Any serious disruption in the functioning of the economy would be devastating. This paradigm guided his arguments and his language. What can the inner reality of such a person be like? Creative Fidelity For Marcel, to exist only as body is to exist problematically. Judgments of value may be true or false, but we may not be able to describe a sensation or feeling as true or false. To feel is a mode of participation, a creative act which draws the subject closer to an experience of the self as a being-among-beings, although higher degrees of participation are achieved by one whose acts demonstrate a commitment to that experience. In addition, the philosopher seeks solutions to the problem of evil that can be presented to everyone in a logically objective manner, so almost by definition these solutions cannot fully address the existential question. It could easily be shown that these questions are related to others pertaining to the self that I am and to whom appearances are given.

Homo Viator

Of course I can converse with another person about the first movement of Beethoven's Fourteenth Quartet, for example, and we might accomplish considerably more than just making some observations about the tonality or the way the different instruments break in here or there-structural matters which could also be observed by a non-musical deaf person simply by reading the score. Am I within this world or outside it? Just as Socrates in Fifth Century Athens played the gadfly to his fellow Athenians, stinging them into an awareness of their ignorance and into an alertness to their sacredness, so Marcel has been raising difficulties these many years for the easy conscience of an age which is secure in the possession of its material progress and smug in the splendor of its intellectual learning. On the brink of a complete breakdown, he rejected idealism irrevocably, throwing off its mental straight jacket and plunging deeply into that current of personal and passionate research known as lived or concrete experience. A felt quality or a quality of feeling may be unanalyzable, because the quality of a person's feelings may be inseparable from the things which that person feels. Marcel died in Paris on 9 October 1973.

The Mystery of Being: Reflection and Mystery

I had one philosophy professor, a man of great learning, whose teaching was distinguished by remarkable clarity. As indisponibilité is illustrated with the example of pride, disponibilité is best illustrated in the relations of love, hope and fidelity. Marcel is concerned with forgetting or rejecting human nature. Pride is not an exaggerated opinion of oneself arising from self-love, which Marcel insists is really only vanity; rather, pride consists in believing that one is self-sufficient Marcel 1995, p. In an example such as that which I have just cited, reflection does really play the part of the ferryman.