Gabriel Marcel's Being and Having!
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BEING AND HAVING by GABRIEL MARCEL a translation by KATHARINE FARRER of Eire et Avoir dacre press Westminster First published in Printed by Robert MacLebose and Company Limited The Press University } Glasgow PREFACE is my great privilege to be allowed to write a preface to this book. In a sense it is its own advertisement: yet in some ways Itits form is rather unusual. The greater part consists in extracts disjointed and repetitive, from a metaphysical diary; the jottings of a thinker concerned to speak with himself rather than to an audience. Some readers would be well advised to postpone reading the diary extracts till they have tackled some of the more systematic studies contained in the second halfofthe volume. But no one can fail to profit from M. Marcel's work, provided he takes it seriously, provided, that is, he doesn't go to him as a ^eading.Christian existentialist' whom he must read in order to* be in the mode! M. Marcel deprecates the label, preferring to call himself 'a concrete philosopher' that is a philosopher who is not sacrifice to the prepared to demands of systematic natures sensitivity to the rough edges ofhuman life. I hope that this book will be widely read, and I especially com- mend it to four classes ofpersons: i. For myself I have come across nothing more important than M. Marcel's writings here and elsewhere on the problem of meta- physics. I say problem advisedly: for we are all of us these days in the end puzzled as to what exactly metaphysics is. The strict Thomist has his answer: so has the positivist: so too the Biblical theologian who is much too ready to find in the decay of ontology an argument for the authenticity of 'Biblical per- spectives*. A^A^celjvaiJi^ined in the tradition ofjdealism: and he knew the influence both ofBergsen and ofW. E. Hocking. His conversation with himself certainly betrays their influences: but it is of far wider significance. Professor Ayer and Dr. E. L. Mascall i have their answer .to the question what ontology is: they have their formulae. Marcel probes beneath these answers; Jpr him ontology is much more than a body of doctrine. It is the intellectual ex- pression ofthe human situation; what is expressed in the syllogisms of, for instance, Pere Garrigou-Lagrange, is valid only in so far as it catches and summarises the very being of man and the universe, as that being is lived through and met with "by man in his pilgrimage through life. I find as I read M. Marcel that the frontiers are blurrec ethical reflection, metaphysics, spirituality. And that is the strength of his seemingly inconsequent method. In a way he is too wise to suppose that the arguments ofthepbilosopbiaperennis are enough in their abstract form to convince a man; they only carry conviction in relation to a whole experience of life of which they are the ex- pression. The issues between the Thomist, the positivist, the idealist are not issues simply ofdoctrine but of life; and to see what they are, one must probe, stretching language beyond the frontiers of poetry, somehow to convey the issues as things through which men live. 2. The book should be studied closely by the moralist whether he be philosopher or moral theologian. Where some of the most familiar ethical ideas are concerned, Marcel reminds us of their 'inside* when we so often in our discussion think simply of their 'outside*. What is a promise? We have our answer pat, our formula which permits us to go on with the discussion ofour obligations to keep the promises we have made and so on. We don't wait to probe. I find myself inevitably using that word 'probe* again and again in connection with M. Marcel: for what he does is to probe the un- suspected profundities ofthe familiar. Most professional students of ethics are morally philistine, men who give little time to penetrating the 'inside* of the ideas they are handling. And there Marcel pulls them up short. 3. The book should be widely read by the many Christian 'fellow-travellers' of today, those who follow, as it were, afar off the Christian themselves way without coming yet to the point of an act offaith in Its the Crucified. very incompleteness will respond to their groping anxiety, and it will enrich their vision of life. And this it can because it do eschews dogmatic exposition seeking rather to shew the inside of the truly Christian way of life. Fidelity, these are hope, chirity, mystery fundamental categories of the Christian and of all these Marcel way: has much to say, which is in every way fresh and yet at the same time rootedjnjhe tradition of Catholic Christianity. The reader of such a work as Albert Camus' La Peste, with its with the preoccupation problem of a^^atheistic sanctity, will understand M. Marcel. In a he the way challenges possibility of Camus' vision; and he does so not on dogmatic grounds but by an o holiness and which their analysis goodness shews indirectly from inseparability acknowledgment of the all-embracing mystery of.God. An age which has known evil as ours has and does still know it, is inevitably interested in goodness; and it jsjwith good- ness, as something inevitably issuing out of God becausca-giftfrom him, that Marcel's studies deal. 4. And lastly I commend this book because at a time when minuteness and subtlety of mind are too often the prerogatives of the light-heartedly destructive, he reminds us that a true minuteness and a true are intellectual subtlety rooted in humility and^urity. of and manifest the heart, soil in which they are nourished by whose charm none can ^raciousness escape and a strength of argument which none can break. D. M. MACKINNON King's College Old Aberdeen February, 1949 CONTENTS PART ONE: BEING AND HAVING I. A Metaphysical Diary page 9 II. Outlines of a Phenomenology of Having page 154 PART TWO: FAITH AND REALITY I. Some Remarks on the Irreligion of Today page 179 II. Some Thoughts on Faith page 203 HI. Peter Wust on the Nature of Piety page 217 PART ONE BEING AND HAVING I A METAPHYSICAL DIARY (1928-1933) November wtb 1928 a firm have today made resolve to continue my metaphysical diary, perhaps in the form ofa series ofconsecutive reflections. I idea I caught sight ofan just now which might be important. Returning to my fundamental views on existence, I was wondering whether it is to in that possible say any sense an idea^exists; and this is how I see it. The idea, so far as it is on the represented pattern of] an object (I was thinking the other day of what we mean by the aspects of an idea) shares with the object as such the characteristic/ of non-existence, the object only existing in so far as k shares in the nature of i.e. in so far as it is not my body, thought of as object.] In the same way, must we not say that an idea can and does have existence, but only and exactly in so far as it is irreducible to the pseudo-objective representations which we form of it? The materialist interpretation, however absurd in itself, does at least a imply confused notion of what I am trying to get at here. We might say that an idea exists proportionately to its being more dr less adherent. I should like to find some concrete examples for illus- but this is of course difficult to do. tration, very The starting point of reflections the my other day was the idea ofan event (X's opera- I had tion) which many reasons to be anxious about. One might I have said that revolved the idea, or that it revolved of itself, and showed its different in i.e. I me aspects turn; thought of it by analogy with a three-dimensional object, a die for instance. November 22nd An interesting point. Is responsibility, or rather the need to attri- 9 bute responsibility the need to have something or someone to fix it on at the root ofall 'causal explanation'? I feel that this might take us a long way. It seems to me very near to Nietzchean psychology. N'OTES FOR A PAPER TO THE PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY Undated, written in 1927 or I928 1 When I affirm that something exists, I always mean that I con- sider this something as connected with my body, as able to be put in contact with it, however indirect this contact may be. But note must be taken that the priority I thus ascribe to my body depends on the fact that my body is given to me in a way that is not exclusively objective, i.e. on the fact that it is my body. This character, at once mysterious and intimate, of the bond between me and my^ body (I in all existential purposely avoid the word relation) does fact colour judgments. What it comes 10 is this. We cannot really separate: 1. Existence 2. Consciousness ofselfas existing 3. Consciousness ofselfas bound to a body, as incarnate. From this several important conclusions would seem to follow: (1) In the first place, the existential point of view about reality cannot^ it seems^be othet than that of an incatnatejgersonality. In so far as we can imagine a pure understanding, there is, for such an understanding, no possibility of considering things as existent or non-existent. (2) On the oae hand, the problem ofthe existence ofthe external world is now changed and perhaps even loses its meaning; I cannot in fact without contradiction think of my body as non-existent, since it is in connection with it (in so far as it is my body) that is .defined andjphced^On the other hand, we x This paper was never delivered.