An Existential Approach To God - A Study of Gabriel Marcel

AN EXISTENTIAL APPROACH TO GOD:
A STUDY OF GABRIEL MARCEL

AN EXISTENTIAL APPROACH
TO GOD:
A STUDY OF GABRIEL MARCEL
by
CLYDE PAX
MARTINUS NljHOFF / THE HAGUE I 1972

© I972 by Martinus Nijhott, The Hague, Netherlands
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st Edition 1984
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN-I3: 978-90-247- I 503-9 e-ISBN-I3: 978-94-010-2416-7

DOl: 10.1007/978-94-010-2416-7
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
CHAPTER 1. The Nature of Philosophical Reflection 1
CHAPTER 2. Myself and the Other 21
CHAPTER 3. Fidelity and Truth 44
CHAPTER 4. Approach to God 53
CHAPTER 5. Appraisal of the Traditional Proofs 73
CHAPTER 6. Testimony Versus Demonstration 84
CHAPTER 7. The Communication of Hope 105
INDEX II7
PREFACE
Man's concern about God is both a question and a quest. We seek to

know with certainty that God is real; we seek also to draw near to God,
to know that He is really for us. My aim in this work is to re-think this
two-fold concern and to do so with Gabriel Marcel. Throughout the
work I have combined the presentation of Marcel's views with a
critical examination of his thought, and in the spirit in which Marcel
meets his own predecessors and contemporaries I have held myself free
to accept, to amend or to reject what he has written. Thus the focus
of the work is only incidentally on the writings of Marcel; the direct
focus, as for Marcel, is on man's seeking to know and to draw near to
God.
The effort to re-think that dimension of our experience which we
designate religious cannot begin apart from a critical consideration of
what we mean by knowledge and certainty. What will count as an
answer to the question of whether God is real and whether He is really
for us? If, as the believer maintains, God is the answer to man - an
answer wholly unlike every other answer - then the method of searching
for this answer must be different from other methods of searching.
Furthermore, even for the believer, God remains the hidden God,
Deus absconditus, and at best we see through a glass darkly. A careful
examination of the methods by which we have been trying to see can
help us to remove some of the distracting and misleading reflections
which may have impaired our vision. It is in this connection that
Marcel's distinction between primary and secondary reflection, as
well as his distinction between problem and mystery, must be con-
sidered important.
It is not only God, however, who is hidden; we are hidden from our-
selves and from one another. Who are we and what are our ultimate
aspirations? These questions are as troublesome as the questions about
VIII PREFACE
God and are inseparable from our quest for God. To raise questions
about the reality and meaning of God makes sense only if we are "on
the way," that is, only if our deepest aspirations lead us to become
aware in experience and in reflection that we are radically incomplete.
In order to gain this kind of self-knowledge, however, we must re-
examine in a more concrete way some of our ordinary experiences.
What is implied, for example, in our experience of perception, or in our
experience of having a body which is in some way our own body and
yet a body which belongs to the world and to others as well as to our-
selves? We need also to examine anew the conditions which make it
possible for us to be with others, not only in the present but also with
the possibility of a past and a future.
The need to find and maintain our self-identity is evident to each
of us. The implications of this need and the knowledge of the conditions
necessary for self-fulfillment are clear to none of us. It is this question
of self-identity, in all of its fullness and obscurity, which provides the
unifying theme of this study. The method chosen to pursue this theme
is a critical evaluation of the efforts of Gabriel Marcel to understand
and to bring about the conditions which will make possible a viable
bond among men.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the publishers of the English

editions of various writings of Gabriel Marcel for permission to use
quotations from these works: to Harper & Row for the use of material
from Homo Viator; to The Philosophical Library, Inc., for material
from The Philosophy ot Existence; to Herder and Herder, New York,
for quotations from Problematic Man; to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.,
for material from Creative Fidelity; to the Harvill Press, Ltd., for
numerous quotations from The Mystery ot Being; to the University of
Notre Dame Press for use of quotations from Philosophical Fragments
I909-I9I4; to the publishers of Philosophy Today for material from
the essay "Contemporary Atheism and the Religious Mind"; to Edi-
tions Gallimard for use of quotations from the Metaphysical] ournal;
to the Dacre Press, A. & C. Black Ltd., London, and Harper & Row,
N.Y., for use of material from Being and Having.
I wish to thank also: the Northwestern University Press for permis-
sion to use two brief quotations from Merleau-Ponty's work Sense and
Non-Sense, translated by Herbert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen
Dreyfus, 1964; the John Knox Press for permission to quote from
Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, by Karl Barth; the publishers of
The Month for use of quotations from the article "Existentialism after
Twelve Years: An Evaluation," by John Cruickshank which appeared
in The Dublin Review; and finally Harper & Row for the permission
to quote from Approaches to God, by Jacques Maritain.
I likewise wish to express my sincere appreciation to the many indi-
viduals whose companionship in study over the years has fostered my
understanding and encouraged my efforts. In particular I am grateful
to the College of Holy Cross for a fellowship which gave me opportunity
for prolonged study and reflection, to Dr. Frederick Crosson of the
University of Notre Dame who guided my early study of Marcel, to
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
my colleagues Professors Albert DiIanni, Frederick Herx and Richard

Downs who read and commented upon the entire manuscript, to my
wife for her many constructive criticisms of both content and style.
My thanks are also due to Mrs. Judith Brideau for her careful work of
preparing the manuscript for the publisher. Lastly I wish to thank my
parents who, by conscious word and example, first made me aware of
the values of mind and spirit.
CHAPTER I
THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION
Ours is a restless age. In every sector of intellectual and social life we

are letting go of established modes of thought and action and are
seeking new ways to discover our own reality and that of our world.
During half a century of writing Gabriel Marcel has shared the need to
ask who we are. With others he has pioneered new methods of inquiry
and uncovered new insights in our constant and often agonized efforts
to know ourselves and to give sense to our lives.
Change, however, is disruptive as well as constructive and the in-
novations of Marcel's philosophy are no exception. The novelty of his
style of philosophizing has frequently evoked surprise and irritation
among his readers because his style is an integral part of his philoso-
phizing and reflects the non-systematic character of his thought. The
reader who is looking for a "system" of thought with clear lines of
demarcation and connection can be certain of disappointment. And
those readers not troubled by a lack of system may find the easy
conversational style of Marcel misleading, for the lack of system does
not mean a lack of order. There are an order and direction, as well as an
underlying rigor, which permeate all of Marcel's work and which, with
the approval of Marcel, have been clarified and outlined in an excellent
study by Troisfontaines. 1
Paradoxically, the lack of system and the order within Marcel's
writings arise from the same source. Throughout his life Marcel has
been guided and goaded by the question "who am I?" How to under-
stand my own life, my own existence and my own world, these are the
concerns which underline all of Marcel's work, both as a philosopher
and as a playwright. The pursuit of these questions has led him into
many other areas of concern, but it is these questions which furnish
1 Troisfontaines, Roger, De L'Existence A L'if.tre, 2 vols., Nauwelaerts, Louvain, I953.
For Marcel's appraisal see "Lettre Preface", vol. I.
2 THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION
his point of departure and the constant frame of reference for his
thought.
An initial understanding of this order without system, which unifies
Marcel's reflective self-questioning, can most easily be gained by a
brief consideration of the development of his Metaphysical Journal. 2
When he began to keep the diary which now forms the Journal, the
author viewed the notes simply as a series of annotations which were
later to be worked into a comprehensive system similar in scope to
the Hegelian synthesis in which he had been trained. As he continued
to reflect and to write he became aware that our experience of reality
exceeded in significant ways the limits of any systematic explanation,
and that therefore the attempt to construct a system of total meaning
of reality would be a betrayal of our experience. His continued medita-
tions on subjectivity, although inspired by Kant and the systematic
philosophies after Kant, turned toward a consideration of the indi-
vidual subject, existing and experiencing as this individual person.
The inability of idealistic philosophy to account satisfactorily for the
concrete individual self confirmed Marcel's growing belief that not all
reality could be studied and comprehended in the objective way
demanded by a system which purported to be all-comprehensive. In
Hegel, the individual seemed totally subordinated to and even absorbed
into the absolute. In Fichte, the arguments to establish the reality of
finite egos appeared inconclusive. 3 In our experience, ~n the other
hand, we are faced with ourselves as individuals; our most fundamental
and on-going experience of reality is with a reality in relation to which
we are not objects but persons. In similar manner, our experience
reveals other persons who can be understood as objective realities only
by leaving out what is most valuable in our associations with them.
We ourselves, and the world in which we find ourselves, can be under-
stood adequately only by an approach which respects the richness of
the immediate experience. Because of this inability to deal adequately
with the individual, idealism, in effect, barred itself from considering
the questions which really concern men.
As Marcel was recording the meditations which form the first part
of the Journal, he undertook a detailed study of the philosophies of
Bradley and Royce. His articles on the metaphysics of Royce reveal
2 Journal MttaPhysique, GaIlimard, Paris, 1927. English translation, Metaphysical Journal

by Bernard Wall, Regnery, Chicago, 1952.
3 "An Essay in Autobiography", Marcel, G., in The Philosophy of Existence, translated by
Manya Harari, Books for Libraries Press, Freeport, New York, 1969, p. 78.
THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION 3
the same tension as does the Journal. 4 On the one hand, he seeks to
grasp the whole of reality as the whole; on the other hand he becomes
increasingly sceptical of, and finally rejects altogether, the very
possibility of an all-inclusive system of philosophy. His criticisms of
the Roycean metaphysics bear on the monistic tendency of Royce's
system to reduce all meaning to the comprehensive and omniscient
experience which is the Absolute: " ... the problem goes beyond even
Royce's philosophy and bears on the legitimacy of any philosophy
which accepts to some extent Hegel's idea of synthesis". 5
What disturbs Marcel in any philosophy accepting the Hegelian idea
of synthesis is that such a philosophy tends to view the finite, indivi-
dually existing self as ultimately contained within the absolute. This,
in effect, is to think of the self as content or object of the absolute
knower. The self, however, is precisely what cannot be made content
or object, whether for an absolute or a finite knower. To be known by
the absolute is not to be contained as object of his thought; if it means
anything, it must mean to be established in my own radical selfhood.
Isn't the self or the pure "mine", as Bradley proved with incomparable force,
always merely what my consciousness refuses or is unable to treat as an object
or content, and hence is only what remains as in some way adhering to an
unexplicit context? This inability to make explicit the totality of its context
under pain of self-destruction as a consciousness is the price we pay for indivi-
duality. 6
Not only was Marcel's early training in philosophy in the idealistic
school, but a predilection for idealism had its roots early in Marcel's
childhood. It arose, in part, from an aversion to whatever might be
called the empirical. The empirical was equated, or at least related, to
the dirty, the common and, therefore, the trivial. Systematic idealism
offered itself on a philosophic level as a way to escape from the trivia
of everyday existence - a level of existence which, at one time, pre-
sented to him no intelligibility whatever unless it were mediatized into
an infinite.
Present with this aversion for the empirical, however, was an aware-
ness of the undeniable significance of the individual person. This aware-
ness was developed and nurtured by the lavish attention given to Marcel
by his guardians and most especially by his father's practice of and
skill in reading plays to his son. It was from this tutor that Marcel
learned to appreciate drama as a privileged form of expression, privi-
4 Cf. Royce's Metaphysics, Marcel, G., translated by Virginia and Gordon Ringer, Regnery,
Chicago, 1956.
5 Ibid., p. 153.
6 Ibid., pp. 149-50.
leged both because it was joined inseparably to the individual person

and because it somehow allowed a person to expand his own person
into the characters on the stage.
A fundamental lack of satisfaction with the merely empirical, at
least as it was present in much of modern thought and social life, and
yet the undeniable significance of the uniquely individual and empiri-
cal person provide the foundations for a deep and life-long inquiry by
Marcel. On the one hand stands the individual who cannot be considered
simply as a unit in a system but is himself alone. On the other hand is
the need for some wholeness, some totality, embracing even the indi-
vidual and enabling him to understand his own questioning of reality
in a universal sense.
In his book Creative Fidelity, Marcel comments that two interests
have exercised him in all of his work.
Whenever I try to consider that development as a whole, I have to observe that
it has been dominated by two interests which may at first seem contradictory;
the first of these is more directly expressed in metaphysical terms, but still lies
in the background at least, of almost all of my plays without exception. The
latter is what I shall call the exigence of being; the first is the obsession with
beings taken in their individuality but also affected by the mysterious relations
which link them together. Clearly the paramount problem was to find some
means whereby these two different inquiries could meet, although they at first
seem oriented in opposite directions .... 7
Experience presents us not only with the individual, and not only with
the totality, but with the individual myself, able and perhaps forced
to ask about the ultimate significance of "my life". In the passage just
quoted Marcel goes on to tell us that he always had a kind of "a priori
act of faith" that the way we are best able to know the individual was
by a movement towards understanding the whole of being as such. The
task posed to him was to develop a method of philosophizing which
would render the nature of this "a priori act of faith in reality" intelli-
gible without neglecting the importance of the individual; in short, a
philosophizing which would enable him to understand his own ex-
istence.
Numerous experiences in his early life revealed to Marcel the inade-
quacy of the philosophical methods with which he was acquainted. By
overemphasizing the discreteness of the individual existent, empiricism
failed to do justice to his belief in the need to question being as a whole.
Idealism, and materialism as well, went so quickly to the universal as
7 Creative Fidelity, Marcel, G., translated by Robert Rosthal, Noonday Press, New York,
I964, pp. I47-8.
to miss the importance of the individual. None of these views really
seriously tried, in Marcel's opinion, to retain both an ultimate signifi-
cance of the individual and an equally ultimate significance of the
universal. What was needed was a way of philosophizing which could
render intelligible, for example, the differing ethical commitments of
men of good will, a need which Marcel felt very keenly and very person-
ally from observing the relationship between his father and step-
mother who were of quite different temperament and conviction. How
can we render understandable the simultaneous presence among men
of despair and optimism, or give some sense and meaning to our ex-
perience of seeing beauty and loveableness in a person whom our
friends find boring or distasteful? What kind of philosophical context
could accomodate the religious thinker and the non-believer when both
are taken seriously? Above all, how could the experience of an all-
encompassing involvement with being as a value be reconciled with
the experience of our own freedom? None of these questions, which
in their concrete manifestations are so all-pervasive in our lives, lends
itself to an objective answer, and yet we find ourselves involved in
these dilemmas in such a way that our personal peace and well-being
are at stake and call forth a desire for understanding.
But if our approach to reality must, to some extent, be non-objective,
the style of writing philosophy should reflect this approach. Conse-
quently, the notes of the diary originally intended to be worked into
a total system assumed a quite new dimension. As a result, Marcel
abandoned all thought of recasting them into an ordered exposition.
Such a systematic ordering would, in fact, have misrepresented the
insights which came to him in a non-objective and non-systematic
fashion.
This change of Marcel's attitude led to the continued use of diary-
style. Even his most systematic work, the Gifford Lectures which were
later printed as The Mystery of Being, are filled with digressions and
repeated attempts to start anew on the topic under discussion. Lest
this pronounced aversion to systematic presentation be an obstacle
to the reader, it must be seen in its true nature, that is, as the author's
more or less conscious attempt to respect the essential openness of
philosophical reflection. For Marcel philosophical reflection arises from
the questions which face him and which make life unsatisfactory if
there is no attempt to resolve the questions.
The first chapter of The Mystery of Being contains an explicit dis-
cussion of the character of philosophical research. 8 There the author

points out that the searching of the philosopher differs from the search
for an object that is lost, since the philosopher has no clear knowledge
before the search of what he is searching for. There is in this sense no
goal of the search. Philosophic research is further distinguished from
the work of the scientist and the inventor, and even the social scientist,
in that once their work is completed, the result is there to be seen,
handled, purchased by whoever wishes. I can go to the pharmacist and
buy the result of the chemist's work without having at all become
engaged in his research. The product is there for anybody, and the
research, likewise, could have been carried on by anyone. Both the
researcher and his product fall into anonymity .
... in an investigation of the type on which we are now engaged, a philosophical
investigation, there can be no place at all for results of this sort. Let us expand
that: between a philosophical investigation and its final outcome, there exists a
link which cannot be broken without the summing up itself immediately losing
all reality.9
What is the reason for this link? The point of origin of philosophical
reflection is the concrete situation in which I find myself and the
discordant character of this situation. For the man who finds his situation
fully satisfying philosophy is neither helpful nor possible. In contrast to
the kind of result disowned above, there is a result possible in philosophy.
It is precisely the progressive resolving of the disharmony of the
situation in which I am located. It is for this reason that the result is
not something separable from my question but is the very bringing to
light and the very articulation of a setting and a context in which my
situation can be humanly lived. What this setting is cannot be known
ahead of time, and it has no reality at all part from its relation to the
discordant situation. Hence, philosophy can never be completed and
stored in books and libraries but, as Heidegger comments, each
succeeding generation must do its own philosophizing anew. A complete
system of truth would indeed do away with the necessity of philoso-
phizing but would likewise do away with the significance of the
individual person living here and now.
Because philosophical conclusions cannot be understood apart from
their original point of departure in questioning, a study of Marcel's
approach to God must necessarily begin with a study of his approach
8 The Mystery 0/ Being, Marcel, G., 2 vols., translated by G. S. Fraser, Regnery, Chicago,
1960, vol. I, ch. I.
9 Ibid., vol. I, p. 6.
to philosophical method and with the questions which gave rise to his
reflection. The criticism which would write off a philosopher like
Marcel on the grounds that "he is a religious thinker" is superficial in
the extreme. Marcel does not set out to be a religious thinker. His
interest in religion is forced upon him because he can find no way apart
from religion to explain his human experiences. If a criticism of Marcel's
philosophical positions is to have any relevance to an ongoing philo-
sophical discussion, it must begin with the tedious task of trying to
shed light on the very questions with which Marcel himself began his
research. Indeed, one of the strengths of Marcel's philosophy of religion
lies in the sympathy he has with the non-believer whose position he
shared in one way or another for a good portion of his life.
With this understanding of the nature of philosophy wherein the
whole meaning of the result is tied to the concrete and specific situation
giving rise to the reflection, there arises a difficulty, namely the difficulty
of trying to communicate the result of reflection. If the situation is the
situation of the concrete individual, what reason is there to think that
the philosophy which grows out of this situation has value for anyone
other than the one who is actually philosophizing? In the last analysis,
this objection can only be allowed to stand; the fruit of reflection is
no fruit until and unless I can make the reflection leading up to it my
own. There is danger here, however, of a too simplistic understanding
of what is my own. Perhaps there is a form of universality which
eludes the dichotomy between what is my own and what is for others.
The possibility of such a universality, which does not rely upon ab-
straction, will be investigated more fully in our subsequent discussion
on the meaning of person. In the beginning it may suffice simply to
spend some time with Marcel's questions and with his attempt to
develop a method to resolve them. It may, after all, turn out that the
questions which exercise him are also, to a large extent, our own.
However faithfully Marcel's style reflects his philosophical con-
victions, it does make more difficult the task of specifying and under-
standing his positions. In his writings one seldom finds a discussion of
any given topic either isolated from other topics or complete in itself.
Furthermore, the exposition frequently proceeds by way of a mere
revelation of insight rather than by any conscious argument; the end
sought, one feels, is not so much to convince the reader as to issue an
invitation to come and seek with the author; and if the thinking seems
to be directed repeatedly toward realities already perceived in some
way, the seeking is nonetheless neither fruitless nor unnecessary. After
all, if the philosophical result cannot be separated from the search, the
end must already be given in an indistinct way in the search. Question-
ing about anything, as Heidegger observes, already presupposes some
knowledge before the question can be placed. Marcel's call for a
repetitious seeking of a deeper and fuller meaning to experience echoes
the demand not only of Heidegger and of Kierkegaard, whom he came
to know after the main lines of his own thought were well-drawn, but
of the whole tradition of realistic philosophy and indeed of the structure
of our everyday experience.
Marcel has likened his style to that of a musical composition in which
a single theme is carried forward throughout but which is made meaning-
ful and vital by the harmonious union of various instruments taking
up the theme at various intervals and with their various tonal qualities.
The theme, to be sure, is given already at the beginning of the composi-
tion but is given in quite another and fuller way at the conclusion of
the piece. The added fullness achieved by the activity of composition
amounts to a re-definition of the original theme, and only such a full-
ness can reveal the full significance of the theme as originally given.
Similarly, philosophical reflection can make explicit the implications
and give new depths to our experience of sensation, of ourh aving a
body or of our own existence, new depths which can reveal to us how
little indeed we formerly understood these experiences. Truly there
is nothing new in philosophy, but equally true is it that each act of
philosophical reflection leads to a newness of understanding of what
was previously known.
The comparison of his style to that of a musical composition is
especially relevant since, along with philosophy, music and drama have
been central and life-long concerns of Marcel. Although developed
independently and for their own value, the music and drama of Marcel
have influenced his work in philosophy. The attempt to trace these
influences, especially that of drama, was one of the recurring themes
of the William James Lectures delivered by Marcel at Harvard
University in the fall of Ig6r. 10
Perhaps the most important influence of his dramatic work on
Marcel's philosophy has been to emphasize the grounding of philosophy
in concrete and everyday experience. The creative art of the dramatist
or the novelist finds its expression in a situation in which the persons
of the play are immediately involved. "The role of the drama, at a
10 Published as The Existential Background 01 Human Dignity, Marcel, G., Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, 1963.
certain level, seems to be to place us at a point of vantage at which
truth is made concrete to us, far above any level of abstract defini-
tions." 11
But if drama gives us a privileged point of view, the relation between
drama and a "concrete philosophy" must extend far beyond the style
of writing philosophy. The relationship must be intimately involved
in the questions of what reality is and what is the method of procedure
proper to a philosophical investigation of reality. The answer to the
former question largely determines the latter because no method can
be adopted unless a philosopher has at least implicitly considered in
what way or ways reality is open to human probing.
Our author, however, does not begin with a fixed notion of the way
in which reality is opened to us, and a fortiori does not begin with a
well-defined method. Far from it. The philosopher is rather one who is
always searching - one who never ceases to be astonished by the
presence of reality. The search is not only for an understanding of
reality but for "my door" to reality. Or, stated differently, the search is
for an understanding of reality which does not exclude my personal
participation in the real. The numerous attempts by Marcel to specify
the method and meaning of philosophy spring, in part, from the dis-
covery of new insights into the ways we can be open to the world in
which we are living.
In the first entry of his Metaphysical Journal, dated January the
first, 1914, Marcel declares his purpose in writing is to investigate the
ontological relationships between the different planes of reflection
according to which things become intelligible to us. 12 At that stage of
his work, still not totally freed from his idealistic training in philosophy,
Marcel saw immediate experience as a level on which "nothing can be
explained or even understood". At that time he saw the empirical as
meaningful only from the higher levels of reflection, and when so
considered the data of immediate experience appear no longer as
immediate, but, as in Hegel's system, "infinitely mediatisable". His
later study brought Marcel to reject this position. Rather than being
made more meaningful when mediatized in the absolute, the data of
immediate experience then became only more and more abstract and
farther removed from their true significance. Immediate experience is
meaningful, he later insists, only when it is accepted as immediate,
that is, when it is recognized as a non-mediatizable immediate.
11 The Myste1'y 0/ Being, I, 71.
12 Metaphysical Journal, p. I.
IO THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION
This statement however does not accurately state Marcel's position.

A careful study of his work reveals a duality: immediate experience is
accepted in its immediacy, but in another way it is mediatized. Unless
there were some mediation of the data of experience, Marcel could not
be writing about the religious grounding of our experience; there would,
in fact, be no task whatever for reflection. Perhaps it would be better to
say that reflection is an interplay between "two unknowns", that is,
two absolutes - one of which is absolute as a need for a total integration
of all experiences and the other as absolute in the sense of being data
which are originally given and simply to be accepted as they present
themselves.
It is not enough, however, to note the presence of mediation which
is a requirement for all reflective know ledge. The question of a metho-
dology for philosophy is the question of how we are to understand this
mediation which allows to the data of experience a kind of absolute
status. One form of mediation, which Marcel feels is typical of idealistic
philosophy, is an objectifying mediation. In his opinion such mediation
reduces the self to a content of the absolute knower. It is this radical
insufficiency of any objective treatment of the individual existing self,
which experience reveals to us as going beyond objective categories,
which underlies Marcel's rebellion against excessive systematization,
both in philosophy and in social institutions.
Undoubtedly we can, to a certain extent, quite legitimately consider
ourselves and others as objects, and in that way, learn certain valuable
facts about ourselves. However, the immediately given and incontes-
table awareness of ourselves is not the awareness of an object simply.
For that reason a merely objective knowledge of ourselves is always
incomplete and false to the extent that it obscures or obliterates our
immediate self-awareness. In the realm of the particular sciences, which
is the realm of the objective knowledge ofthings, abstraction is properly
made from the knowing subject. Marcel's attack upon the "spirit of
abstraction" is not an attack upon the empirical sciences even though
he has sometimes been falsely accused of making such an attack. Nor
does his position deny the objective nature of things. He has always
clearly recognized the impossibility of pursuing either science or
philosophy without affirming the essential natures of beings. He ex-
plicitly rejects the extreme form of existentialism which would affirm
existence without regard to essences. l3 Marcel's position is, rather, a
refusal to accept the approach of the empirical sciences as affording
18 Existential Background of Human Dignity, p. 96. Cf. Troisfontaines, op. cit., vol. I, p. 146.
THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION II
an adequate method for understanding reality. Science can study

objects in their insularity, but a philosophical understanding of reality
cannot ignore the unique and inseparable relation tying the individual
to his situation.
A clear indication of the limitations of the objective approach is
seen in our inability to give an objective answer to such a question as
"is he truly worthy of my trust?" or in our inability to enumerate a
list of predicates that would answer the question "who am I?" The
inadequacy of the list is not that it is always incomplete, but that it
captures only what might be called externals and does not really take
me into account. Science is open to everyone precisely because it is for
no one uniquely, and accounts for no one as subject.
The equating of the objective with the scientific realm is not, by
implication, an equating of philosophy with the subjective realm in the
sense of making it merely a matter of individual opinion or sentiment.
The subjective in this sense is the correlative to the objective, and like
the objective is clearly a limited category of explanation. To the extent
that philosophy seeks to attain a reflective appreciation of our concrete
and immediate experience it must adopt a method which resolutely
rejects the dualism of subject-object so helpful in our knowledge of
things. What is needed is a method which is adequate to explain the
"central reference point of metaphysics", namely the fact that I am
aware of myself neither simply as an object nor as a consciousness
transparent to itself. In experience I am neither my body nor am I
separable from my body. A concrete metaphysics must serve to illumi-
nate this ambiguous presence of myself to myself which is at the origin
of all our experience.
Marcel's attempt to analyze a level of experience beyond the scope
of an epistemology of subject and object is not a re-instatement of
subjective idealism. The reality of the other than thought is implied
for him in the very meaning of thought.
But here I join forces with Thomism or at least with what I understand to be
Thomism. Thought, far from being a relation with itself, is on the contrary es-
sentially a self-transcendence. So the possibility of the realist definition of truth
is implied in the very nature of thought. Thought turns toward the Other ....
It is abundantly clear to me that access to objectivity, in the sense in which itis
a stumbling-block to a certain type of mind, must either be posited from the
beginning or remain for ever unattainable. 14
14 Being and Having, Marcel, G., translated by K. Farrer, Dacre Press, Westminster, 1949,
P·30.
The central aim of Marcel's search for a method might be expressed as

follows: given the validity of the distinction between subject and object
and the validity of knowledge arising on the basis of that distinction,
how are we to understand those experiences which seem to exist
beyond the limits where this distinction is meaningful? It is his con-
tention that our radication in being, and our most human response
to beings, lie beyond these limits. The person, in all of his experien-
cings, can be treated as object only if his individuality and character
as person are left out of consideration.
It is this rejection of objectivity as the paradigm of knowledge
that gives rise to the charge of irrationalism sometimes leveled against
the existentialists. If the charge is meant to convey the acceptance of
the absurd or the whimsical, it has no application to Marcel's intended
method. If the charge implies an acceptance of a method which differs
from that which abstracts from the subject's involvement in ex-
perience, it truly applies to Marcel's method. His answer to the charge
would be to point to such experiences as perception, hope, trust and
commitment - experiences which cannot be "rationalized" by abstract
thought but which retain their meaning and nature only if the subject
remains engaged in the experience. How such experiences are to be
talked about and an understanding of them communicated is the
burden of Marcel's writing.
This effort to survey new ground brings with it certain language
difficulties which result in ambiguities liable to mislead the unwary
reader. For example, Marcel sometimes uses the verb to think in a
pejorative sense (pejorative from his philosophical viewpoint) to indi-
cate an objective consideration of a reality that cannot be legitimately
studied in an objective way: "my body thought is no longer my body"
or, "to think of myself thinking is to convert the me into something
which is nothing". At other times, he uses the verb simply to mean a
reflective awareness, and in this use it has no pejorative overtones. In
a more important way than might be indicated by these rather obvious
examples, Marcel is asking his readers to reconsider what they have
commonly understood by such terms as body, person, thought, God,
and where necessary to amplify and to change their understanding so
that these terms reveal more fully the experiences of our daily lives
from which our language springs and which it should serve.
Since philosophy, or more precisely metaphysics, is a quest for an
understanding of being which cannot be approached in terms of
subject and object thrown over against that subject, the point of
THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION I3
departure of metaphysics cannot be an indubitable content of thought.
To make either the Cartesian cogito or its content the point of de-
parture, is to conceive of philosophy as a logically constructed system
of truths about objects and about subjects considered objectively. The
cogito may well be the limiting notion of what is valid for conceptual
thought, but it is hardly the measure or foundation of our knowledge
of what is real. The only indubitable which can serve as a point of
departure for the study of being is one which does not withdraw from
the concrete situation where alone we are radicated in being. This
metaphysical indubitable is the lived experience of myself existing in
the world. What is initially given in experience is neither the world nor
a conceptualized self whether this is conceived in psychological or
philosophical terms, but the self as already involved in and living in
the world.
This experience wherein we find our roots in being is not an ontologi-
cal but a phenomenological absolute, that is, not an absolute in the
order of being, but in the order of our experience of being. The ex-
istence of this primary experience is not proven but affirmed. While
the metaphysician can and must reflect upon the primary experience,
he does so in order to understand its structure and significance, not
to establish its reality.
Perhaps more explicitly than many philosophers, Marcel recognizes
the radical impossibility of establishing or proving the point of de-
parture. Toward the end of the first part of the Journal he says simply
that no inquiry is possible concerning what is primary in metaphysics.
The force of this position is implicitly recognized equally by the realist
who begins his philosophy with the assumption that a world exists
beyond his thought, and by the idealist who finds it irrefutable that
what we truly know is the content of our ideas. Marcel's meditations
on the point of departure make explicit the optional character of this
point of departure - optional not in the sense that one is free to begin
anywhere, but in the sense that the primary encounter with reality
can be expressed only by an option, by an affirmation, rather than by
an argument. Whether the primary option is a good one or a bad one
must be judged by the metaphysics which grows from it.
According to Marcel the development no less than the origin of the
metaphysical quest must beware of considering being as if it were an
object. The method of proceeding is one of reflective analysis rather
than one of logical demonstration and the focus of the analysis is on
what is experienced rather than on the state of the subject. Borrowing
a term introduced by Kant and Hegel, Marcel describes his philo-

sophical analyses as "phenomenological". "By 'phenomenological
analysis' I mean the analysis of an implicit content of thought, as
opposed to a psychological analysis of 'state'." 15 It is obvious from the
application of the method that the phrase "content of thought" refers
not to objects cognized by abstract thought, but designates the matter
or content of the experience in which the subject is involved and
continues to be involved.
Although there are similarities between the phenomenological
methods of Husserl and Marcel, the differences are much greater than
the similarities. Whereas Husserl, at least in the earlier part of his work
conceived of philosophy as a rigorous science leading by way of a
"transcendental epoch6," to a presuppositionless science and by way
of the "eidetic reduction" to a knowledge of essences, Marcel insists
upon the necessity of grounding the study of being on a non-objectifi-
able experience that can only be presupposed. He would prefer, it
would seem, to call his analysis the way to an irreducible, rather than
a reduction to the presuppositionless. This primary irreducible is
similar to the notion of Lebenswelt in the later Husserl in that it is an
immediate and self-justifying unity of the subject and the other than
subject.
In the second part of the Journal, under the influence of Bergson,
Marcel uses the phrase "blinded intuition" to describe the metaphysical
grasp of reality: intuition to indicate its immediacy, blinded because
it is not the grasping of some thing. However, even when he uses the
phrase Marcel seems to be aware of its ambiguity and settles rather on
the term reflection.
In the Gifford Lectures the kind of reflection upon which philosophy
depends, and which makes possible a deeper study of being, is ex-
plained in detail. There the author distinguishes two kinds of reflection.
When I step back from my ongoing involvement in the world and
consider who I am there is an awareness in reflection that I am myself
and not another, an awareness that various objects are before me: this
table, the pen I am writing with, etc. This awareness which arises as
soon as I begin to look at myself and my world Marcel calls primary
reflection. It is the reflection of common sense and of the particular
sciences and allows us to set off one object from another, to relate
various objects, and in general to proceed along the lines of discursive
thought. Going beyond this level of reflection, it is necessary to ask
15 Ibid., p. 151. Cf. Creative Fidelity, pp. 38 ff.
what is my relation to the world and to other persons which makes it
possible for me to see myself as other than this object and as distinct
from the person in whose presence I am standing. This further order
of reflection, by asking about the meaning of the dichotomy between
subject and object, reveals an order of experience in which subject and
object exist in a unity which is ontologically prior to the distinction
between them. Consequently this secondary reflection is unifying; it
forces us to a new level of awareness of our integrity with the world and
enables us, as it were, to recuperate from the division caused by prima-
ry reflection. By bringing to light the conditions under which primary
reflection was possible, it leads us to the realization that the objects
arrived at by primary reflection are objects only because of a more
ultimate experience wherein the subject-object dichotomy has no
application. Secondary reflection shows us the limit and the necessary
corrective of primary reflection by revealing a fundamental and
immediate self-transcendence as a condition of all experience. Thus it
reveals also an ultimate foundation for the objectivity of the sciences
themselves. Unlike Berdyaev who saw objectification as a fall and a
fault, Marcel sees it as a legitimate and a necessary, though intermediary,
kind of reflection, and a closer reading of his work soon dispels a first
impression that he is opposed to the pursuit of science. His criticism
is not of science, nor of the scientific method, but of the unwarranted
extensions of this method to the concrete study of person, freedom,
existence and being.
His criticism has its relevance for scientific philosophy as well. It
becomes clear, for example, that on purely methodological grounds,
Marcel must have difficulty accepting the notion of a demonstration of
the existence of a personal God. Proof and verifiability refer to validity
and hence to the objective relation of subject to what is other than
subject. If such terms as proof and verification have meaning at all
in our relationship to a personal God, it must be a meaning quite
different from that which they have in the objective sciences. To ask
for a verification of the statement of one's faith, for example, is to
refuse to treat the statement as one of faith and to reduce it to what
faith has left behind. The specific and unique significance of religious
affirmations is just this, that their content points in an ultimate way
beyond the subjective without resting in what can be opposed to the
subject as object. If we may again refer to Berdyaev, the possibility
of this self-transcendence of the subject, without objectification, is
the basis of all mysticism and of all prayer. Speaking in a similar tone,
I6 THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION
Marcel notes that the impossibility of universal verifiability becomes

clear if we consider how absurd it would be to attempt to measure or,
even worse, to predict the efficaciousness of prayer. To do so would
be to totally misapprehend the notion of prayer and to reduce it to the
notion of efficient and mechanical causality.
Only in our lived experience as persons are we in immediate contact
with existence. Philosophical reflection has the task of rendering ex-
plicit this presence to existence which cannot, in fact, be separated
from the individual existent. The term presence is well chosen to
indicate the unified and immediately meaningful nature of the personal
encounter with reality. It is the philosophy which continually stresses
the need for verification that "ends by ignoring presence - that inward
realization of presence through love which infinitely transcends all
possible verification because it exists in an immediacy beyond all con-
ceivable mediation" .16 If this personalistic approach to reality appears
inexact and haphazard in comparison to the objective methods of
science, it is because it does not negate the unique individuality of the
one who approaches reality.
Marcel's struggle to elucidate the character of the philosophical
quest reaches its climax in the distinction between "problem" and
"mystery". Although the terms problem and mystery are used already
in the Journal, it is not until the latter part of Being and Having, and
more especially in the essay in "The Ontological Mystery" published
in I933, that they are placed in "technical" opposition to each other,
and the fruitfulness of the distinction is made evident. 17
A problem is some question that confronts a person, that stands in
the way, and that can be mastered by the proper solution. The question
of the area of a geometrical figure, or the need for an additional clerk
in a store, or the need for a precise correction in the flight of a manned
rocket are problematical questions. In each of these instances (to the
extent that they are purely problematical), the subject is not personally
involved; he stands outside the need for the solution and the solution
itself. However when I ask some other questions, such as, "Is life
worth living; is existence really meaningful?" or "How am I related
to my body?", !find that I, as subject, am necessarily involved. There
is no neutral ground from which I might decide whether existence is or
is not meaningful. On the contrary, some meaning to existence is
expressed and demanded by the very formulation of the question.
16 The Philosophy 0/ Existence, p. 6.
17 "The Ontological Mystery" in The Philosophy 0/ Existence, pp. 1-31.
Similarly, I can ask about my relation to my body, or to my freedom
or my knowledge, only from within an already acknowledged involve-
ment with my body or my freedom. Such questions call for an analysis
which differs from problem-solving and are examples of what Marcel
means by mystery.
Without going any further than necessary at this point into the
ontological or content element of mystery and problem, we can
profitably take note of certain methodological elements of the distinc-
tion. A problem is that which can be placed before the subject and
considered from all sides and to which at least theoretically an answer
can be given. The problematical is the objectifiable and the verifiable.
The mysterious, on the other hand, is that which cannot be separated
from the subject and still retain its true form. "A mystery is a problem
which encroaches upon its own data, invading them, as it were, and
thereby transcending itself as a simple problem." 18
This understanding of mystery clearly sets off Marcel's use of the
term from several other possible uses. As he is using the term, mystery
does not necessarily, although it may, refer to the mysteries of a
religion. Nor does it refer to the unknown or to what cannot be identi-
fied. Rather, it refers to those experiences which cannot be understood
unless they are considered in their integrity, that is, without isolating
the content of the experience from the experiencing subject. Thus it
is clear also that the mysterious does not refer to the subjective, but
has its locus on the level of experience prior to the distinction between
the subjective and the objective.
One might agree that it is surely permissible for the philosopher to
inquire what lies beyond the limits of objective cognition, but might
ask what guarantee can be found that there is any experience beyond
these limits. Marcel's answer is unequivocal. There must be experience
beyond these limits, because otherwise objective knowledge itself
would be impossible. But is not this answer a simple petitio principii?
Marcel is not unaware of the difficulty in his response, but he is also
aware that the difficulty arises because the objection is formulated at
a point already within the problematical order, that is, at a point
which does not critically question the meaning and bases of objectivity
itself.
The only way to answer the objection, and the sufficient way, is to
bring the objector in contact with the mysterious, that is, to point out
situations and questions which call for some resolution which is both
18 Ibid., p. 8.
necessary and beyond the scope of objectivity. It is for this reason

that examples are so constantly used in the writings of Marcel. Ex-
amples are not merely illustrative; insofar as they are lived examples,
they are the only access to the mysterious and consequently references
to these examples are a necessary and integral part of the act of philoso-
phizing.
Trying again to focus our attention on the method, rather than on
the content, we can ask ourselves: "Am I a free being?" To this
question, the only answer that forestalls all denial is that I know I am
free because I am personally and vitally aware that I could choose to
act differently than I do act. But to make this decision I cannot stand
back and view myself from outside of the question. The affirmation of
freedom is involved in the very act of making the response, and indeed
in the very possibility of formulating the question. This is why Marcel
is led to re-define mystery as a problem that encroaches not only upon
its answer, but upon the basis of its formulation as a question. 19 We
cannot approach the mysterious unless we can return by reflection
from the level of objective thought, where problems and answers are
formulated, to the hyper-phenomenological level from which the pro-
blematical springs. This return of thought upon itself is secondary re-
flection or recollection, and is the necessary condition for philosophizing .
... my method of advance does invariably consist, as the reader will have
noticed already, in working way up from life to thought and then down from
thought to life again, so that I may try to throw more light upon life. 20
The mysterious, far from being equivalent to the unknowable, is the

"intelligible background" upon which all objective truth relies. Philoso-
phy is the attempt to recognize this intelligible background and to
respond to its demands.
If we look back now on Marcel's early attempts to understand the
meaning of philosophy, we can see how these earlier attempts are
clarified by the distinction between mystery and problem. Philosophy
is an unending search because it is the seeking of the mysterious which,
in principle, is an on-going encounter with the world and cannot be
grasped in its entirety. Philosophical knowledge has the non-mediati-
zable character of intuition because its data is the experience which
is immediatety given. It is an intuition which is blinded, however,
because it cannot encircle being and encompass it in an essential
definition.
19 Being and Having, p. lz6.
20 The Mystery 01 Being, vol. I, p. 51.
THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION I9
We are here at the most difficult point of our whole discussion. Rather than to
speak of intuition in this context, we should say that we are dealing with an
assurance which underlies the entire development of thought, even of discursive
thought; it can therefore be approached only by a second reflection - a reflection
whereby I ask myself how and from what starting point I was able to proceed in
my initial reflection, which itself postulated the ontological, but without knowing
it. This second reflection is recollection in the measure in which recollection can
be self-conscious. 21
Philosophy must proceed by phenomenological or descriptive analysis,

rather than by demonstration, because it is concerned with our initial
and primary experience of existence and being in the lived encounter
with reality; only the problematical allows us to withdraw sufficiently
from reality to have matter for demonstration. "There is no criterio-
logy except in the order of the objective and problematical".
What then is left for such a philosophy? It must be wary of giving
answer to the difficulties it uncovers for fear of reducing these diffi-
culties to the status of problems. It cannot verify what it insists is
most true. It cannot even express except in a round-about and repe-
titious way all that it declares to be most meaningful. On the other hand,
to keep silent is to ignore, or to speak more properly, to betray reality
as it presents itself to us.
The task of the philosopher on the negative side must be to refuse
constantly to deny his insight. That which calls for this denial is not
only the nihilistic and the absurd, but also the objective, the abstract,
and in our society this means to some extent, the scientific and techno-
logical. On the positive side, the task is to strive, repeatedly, to lead
oneself and others to a full response to reality as we are concretely
immersed in it. This can be done by pointing out and analyzing those
openings where being forces back the abstract. This is why the philoso-
phers of existence return over and over to such realities as suicide and
death which can only be unique acts, to hope and friendship which
cannot be understood except as acts uniquely belonging to and in-
volving the subject.
If Marcel is truly uncovering an area of philosophical interest by his
distinction between mystery and problem, it becomes simply irrelevant
to accuse him of being unsystematic and non-objective. The admission
of non-objectivity on his part, however, is not an admission of sub-
jectivity, but an insistence that the metaphysics of being should
reflect the manner in which we are actually present to and within
being. It is the adoption of a method that brings not the definitive
21 The Philosophy 0/ Existence, p. 14.
grasp of an object but which gives insight into the communion of all
beings and which always invites further examination. Thus, both the
philosopher and the philosophical audience are distinguished more by
the manner and level on which they approach reality, than by the
questions they study.
Perhaps we can best close this discussion with a few lines from the
essay "On the Ontological Mystery".
But, like Carl Jaspers in his Philosophy of Existence, I can only proceed in this
kind of country by calling out to other travellers. If, as it occasionally happened,
certain minds respond - not the generality, but this being and that other - then
there is a way. But, as I believe Plato perceived with incomparable clarity, it
is a way which is undiscoverable except through love, to which alone it is
visible, and this brings us to what is perhaps the deepest characteristic of that
realm of the meta-problematical of which I have tried to explore certain regions. 22
28 Ibid., p. 29.
CHAPTER II
MYSELF AND THE OTHER
Understanding always involves a subject as the one who is under-

standing. To the extent that it concerns itself with questions of ex-
istence and reality, philosophical understanding involves subjectivity
as a necessary dimension of the "content" of the understanding. In
order to ask about the meaning of existence and being, the philosopher
must place himself in a position to have access to such questions. The
burden of this chapter will be to show that a concrete description and
analysis of our experiencing self in its relations to the world and to other
persons opens a unique and fruitful way to such questions. The effort,
therefore, will be to uncover the meaning of the self, taking care not to
disengage the self from the act of experiencing.
Our present interest, then~ is no longer directly with the form of
philosophical reflection but with a particular "content" of philosophi-
cal reflection, namely the self understood philosophically. Indirectly
our concern is still with the method of philosophizing as it unfolds and
clarifies itself in our attempt to undertake a philosophical investi-
gation. As we proceed in this attempt to gain understanding of the
experiencing subject it is important to remember that we are now in
the order of what Marcel calls the mysterious and, therefore, the ap-
propriate procedure will not be one of demonstration but one of de-
scription and reflection focused upon typical experiences of ourselves
as subjects. The analysis will not lead to conclusions which are de-
monstrably verifiable, perhaps not even to conclusions which are
generally or publicly acceptable. If successful, it will reveal those
structures of our experiencing selves without which we would be forced
to deny, or at least to leave unanalyzed, those experiences in which we
find ourselves uniquely as ourselves. These experiences include, among
others, the act of perception, the awareness of ourselves as persons,
acts of love, of hope, of personal acceptance and rejection, of belief, etc.
22 MYSELF AND THE OTHER
Such a discussion of subjectivity is necessary if we are to have any

hope of understanding the import of Marcel's investigations of the
religious dimensions of experience. This is so for two reasons. First, it is
the individual person who has a need to approach God or who fails to
experience any such need. Secondly, the religious dimensions of ex-
perience became evident to Marcel himself as a result of his investi-
gations of the foundations and the limits of the human person in his
contact with others rather than through an investigation of the cosmos.
Before we can see and evaluate his understanding of the foundations
and implications of our encounters, we must analyze the encounter
itself.
In the spirit which is typical of all his work, Marcel suggests that we
begin working toward an understanding of the self by turning our
attention to commonplace occurrences and to the language which we
use to designate and describe these occurrences. By reflecting on our
day-to-day experiences and the ordinary language we use to refer to
them, we can proceed with least fear of pre-judging the nature of the
self. Some critics have seen in this, and similar suggestions, a link
between the existentialist and the ordinary language analyst. However,
in view of his concern for the ontological ground behind the language,
Marcel's procedure is perhaps more akin to the "phenomenological"
analyses of nature, motion and place in Aristotle's Physics. 1
In spite of our naive belief that we know ourselves and have, indeed,
known for a long time who we are, the task of becoming reflectively
aware of ourselves is far from easy. For example, when we say "I am
hungry", or "I am sitting at my desk", or "I love people", what is the
meaning of "I"? If our reflection and description is to become concrete,
the ego referred to in such statements is not the self, but I myself in this
particular situation. Thus, almost immediately the question changes
under our probing, and the question which opens us to the presence of
reality is not what is the meaning of selfhood, but "Who am J?"
This question "Who am I?" is first of all quite different from the
question what is man, even though I am man. The question of the
meaning of man has been asked by philosophers and poets from time
immemorial and various answers have been given to it. Scholastic philo-
sophy answered that man is a rational animal. This answer, and others
similar to it, do tell us something of man and something of myself.
Nonetheless, the question and the answer refer to a particular kind of
entity and the value of the answer is limited to what they reveal about
1 Aristotle, Physics, Bk. 1.
MYSELF AND THE OTHER 23
the structure of this kind of entity. Man is taken as one object among
others, albeit a very particular kind of object called subject. As we
shall see in the study which follows, such ontic knowledge about man
not only fails to get at who I am, but also fails to raise the question
of the meaning of being and instead asks about the meaning of this
particular kind of being called man.
The self with which we are concerned is likewise "in no way reduced"
to the rational ego - to the "I think" which, in Kant, is an accompani-
ment of all reflection. 2 For such an ego, as for the Cartesian cogito, the
world is a problem exterior to the self. Quite consistent with his
understanding of the cogito as an indubitably given ego, Descartes
feels the need to establish the reality of the extramental world, and
Kant, also consistent with his understanding of the self, teaches that
we cannot know the thing in itself but only as it has appeared to a
consciousness existing independently and in some sense prior to the
phenomena of experience.
The issue which Marcel is concerned with lies on a different level, but
one which does bring him into conflict with the Kantian and Cartesian
understanding of man. The import, one might say the weight, of the
question who am I, and its distinction from the question what is man
or what is consciousness, is that the former question brings into con-
sideration not only the "I", but the fact of existing. This intention to
have the question fasten on to the fact of existing is made clear by the
further formulation of the question when Marcel asks "Who am I who
can ask who I am?" 3 Here it is clear that the question is one not
only about myself, but also about the most encompassing context in
which I find myself.
The justification for questioning myself in this fashion arises from
the experience of finding myself always already in the world. For
Marcel as for the whole movement of contemporary phenomenology,
consciousness always presents itself as consciousness of something. The
primary experience from which all questioning arises, and consequently
in which all meaning finds its locus, is the experience of finding myself
already existing in and reacting to the world. It is the analysis of this
experience, which is not simply the experience of an entity called the
self, nor of an entity called the world, which provides the point of
departure for metaphysics. The self which answers the question who
2 Metaphysical Journal, p. 247. In a later observation written in 1925 and appended as a
footnote to this passage Marcel speaks of the discovery of an individual a priori as a "funda-
mental discovery."
3 The Mystery of Being, I. p. 103.
am I is always the individual self, but always as involved in what is

other than its own individuality.
In order to avoid misunderstanding let us distinguish our question
also from the question of the empirical psychologist. To the extent
that the empirical ego is taken as an entity, psychological studies have,
like other objective sciences, taken the self as an object, even fre-
quently as an object of statistical research. However valid such an
approach is within limited frameworks it does not raise the question
of existence. The attempt to make the empirical ego serve as a philo-
sophical reference point can only result in Hume's admittedly fruitless
search for an identifiable principle by which to unite all of his percep-
tions. As Hume discovered, such a principle can only be postulated,
not experienced or pointed to. What is experienced is myself as being
alive, as seeing the tree in the distance, as being different from the
next person. It is this non-empirical, in the sense of non-objective,
awareness of myself that we must try to describe and investigate. It is
the opinion of Marcel that this investigation leads not to the proof of a
consciousness which exists prior to the experience of the world and to
which various experiences come, but to myself as ontologically con-
stituted by the presence of the other than myself.
For this reason it would be a complete misunderstanding of Marcel
to see his work as an anthropelogy or a philosophy of man. His interest
in man is central, to be sure, but it is central because being is present
to man. It is the presence of being, in which I find myself, which is the
primary mystery, and which sets the context for an understanding of
myself even though my only approach to being is from myself as parti-
cipating in being. The fact that this participation in being is taken to
be of the first importance determines in a most radical way the whole
of Marcel's philosophical interest in man. More specifically, it makes
myself a mystery to myself because I can never, even in reflection,
grasp myself in totality. My radication in being does not belong to me
but is given prior to the possibility of my comprehending myself and
thus places a fundamental opacity at the heart of all self-knowledge.
This fundamental opacity of the self to itself is what, in the last analysis,
separates Marcel from idealistic philosophy. The injunction to "know
thyself" is impossible unless one looks beyond himself to the conditions
which make self-knowledge possible. "What concerns us here is only
to know under what conditions I become conscious of myself as a
person". 4
When we attempt to unveil these conditions under which I become
conscious of myself as existing, we are doing nothing less than at-
tempting to unveil existence itself as the first condition of my own
self-awareness. Thus, we are at the very point of departure of meta-
physics. At this point, we cannot hope for demonstration because we
cannot back off from either existence or consciousness in order to find
some principle of mediation. What is perhaps possible is a careful
description and analysis not of the self, but of some central acts of
experience.
In search of an initial opening into metaphysics Marcel undertakes
a detailed study of the experience of perception and the experience of
myself as having a body. Although the literary mode of exposition
forces us to take up each of these topics separately, the analysis will
reveal that the experiences of perception and of being embodied are
intimately and inseparably one and that both lead ultimately to the
necessity of asking about the meaning of existence itself.
Different theories about sensation or perception have held sway in
the history of philosophy. Our common sense, bolstered by an empirical
philosophy and a dominance of scientific thought, finds it almost
impossible to avoid thinking of sensation as a transfer of some sort
of a message from an object to ourselves as subjects. Although we do
not normally advert to what sensation entails, we feel instinctively at
home with an image of a sending station and a receiving set, much like
a broadcasting station with individual receiving sets which, as it were,
activate the broadcast by being turned on. At the opposite extreme
from this view there is another view of sensation, variously modified
in the different strands of idealistic philosophy, which sees the object
of sensation as created by the subject.
Neither of these views adequately accounts for sensation as an act
of the perceiving subject. The explanation of idealism systematically
ignores the testimony of the senses and thereby cannot account for our
experience of being confronted by an object that presents itself as other
than myself. This leads ultimately to the affirmation of an internal
identity of the object with the subject, even though the subject may
be seen as presenting its own other to itself in a dynamic dialectic of
self-bifurcation. The denial of the otherness of the subject flows from
4 Homo Viator, translated by Emma Craufurd, Harper Torchbooks, N.Y., 1962, p. 18; cf.
Metaphysical Journal, p. 256.
the very starting point of any stysem which makes the act of knowing
transparent and sufficient to itself. If the act of knowing, or, indeed,
the very reality of the self-conscious being, does not rely upon what
is other than itself both for its own possibility and for the form of the
particular act of knowing, any attempt to reach the other is doomed
to failure. "If we begin, like Descartes, by assuming that my essence
is self-consciousness, there is no longer a way out".5 Early in his
philosophical studies, Marcel saw the impossibility of upholding either
the Cartesian cogito or the transcendental ego of Kant and the idealists
coming after Kant. The logical conclusion of this approach to the
question is the refusal to take seriously the givenness of the world.
Equally unsatisfactory and for the same reason is the notion of the
pour-soi of Marcel's younger contemporary in Being and Nothingness.
Both in this work and in "The Transcendendence of the Ego", Sartre
sees consciousness as a plenum, intelligible in and to itself and to which
the opacity of the en-soi can be only a threat. In this understanding,
any effective bridging of the gap between the knowing subject and the
object is at the expense of consciousness and of freedom. It is to Sartre's
credit that he has himself, in his later writing, perceived the inade-
quacy of his earlier work. In an interview published in the New Left
Review Sartre rejects the idea of freedom formulated in Being and
Nothingness, saying that the notions of subjectivity and objectivity
appear to him now as useless notions. 6 He goes on to say that he
could use the word "objectivity" to indicate that everything is ob-
jective and that the subject interiorizes his relations to others and then
again re-exteriorizes them. One wonders, however, whether there is not
still too sharp a distinction between the external and the internal and
whether the willingness to use the term objectivity to refer to every-
thing is not once more a reduction to a kind of monism which denies the
experienced otherness between myself and the world in which I live
but with which I am not identified.
The approach of empiricism, on the other hand, does take note of
the presence of the object of sensation, but fails to give any account
of the act of perceiving as an act of the experiencing subject. The
crucial question is not whether some transmission takes place such
that I can say "Yes, it is the rose that smells sweet", but whether it is
any such transmission that explains the act of perception. The answer
must be negative for several reasons. One could even respond, and not
5 Being and Having, p. 104.
• "Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre", New Left Review No. 58 (Nov.-Dec., 1969), p. 45.
as superficially as it might seem, that if such transmission were the
essential element of perception, the act of perceiving would have to be
attributed to the fence next to the rose as well as to the person drawing
near. A nonsensical suggestion surely (since it can easily be countered
by the observation that the fence has no receiving mechanism), but
it may lead our reflections in a fruitful direction, that is, away from
the notion of transmission to a re-consideration of the perceiving
subject. The notion of the transfer between subject and object leaves
unexplained the act itself.
Moreover, and on a more serious level of discussion, to think of
sensation as a transfer of a message is to separate my perceiving body
either from the object or from myself. When the physical object is seen
as a datum to be translated to perceptual language my body is made
into the instrument by which I perceive, but then the body is no longer
mine but could be any body suitably attuned to myself. But then, who
am I thus differentiated from my body? Two other difficulties arise:
how is the translation of the object into perceptual data to be under-
stood and explained; and are we not again caught in the necessity of
trying to establish the reality of the extra-mental world which, on this
hypothesis, is not given immediately but only through the mediation
of the message, a message, moreover, with which I myself am not in
contact but which I receive by the instrument called my body?
Matters are not helped if the object or the message is taken purely as a
stimulus for my sensory organs. In fact, this interpretation seems to
add the difficulty either of assuming some "unconscious sensation" - a
reception of the message in code which then has to be de-coded or
translated into perceptual data - or of assuming (with the pan-
psychists) that the sensed object is itself conscious and the data of the
message therefore not in need of translation. In either case, the body
remains instrumental and the gap between my body and myself un-
explained.
A doctrine in some ways kindred to the above but with vastly
different ontological implications, is that of Thomas Aquinas who
teaches that an identical form informs both the thing known and the
knower; the knower in actuality is the thing known and only their
mode of existence differs. The common datum is made available to the
knower by an act of abstraction by which act the knower becomes the
thing known. 7 This position does have the great merit of retaining an
intimate relationship between the object and the knower. It does,
7 Thomas Aquinas, Su mma Theologica, Pars Prima, Quaestio 84.
however, consider both the object and the subject as entities in them-
selves. It begins with an acceptance of man as something in himself and
then proceeds to try to explain the fact of perception. Thus, in relation
to his act of existence, man's act of knowing becomes a secondary act.
Marcel's procedure is the reverse of this. Rather than try to explain
perception by a theory of communication or by a form common to
knower and known or by some other theory, he suggests that it is in the
act of perceiving that I first am able to recognize myself, and hence
from this act, formulate questions about myself or about the world. No
explanation, in the sense of a justification, for the act of perception is
possible. Perception is a primordial and founding dimension of our
existence; it can only be recognized and the implications of its structure
for a philosophy of man or an ontology be sought out. This acceptance
of perception as primary has led Marcel to a non-Cartesian under-
standing of the I exist which he calls the point of departure of meta-
physics. The I exist is a global awareness of myself existing in a
universe just because the act of perceiving - and here we can see the
act of perceiving in its full significance as the fundamental act of
consciousness - is not the reception from something outside the self
but the irreducible and non-mediatized contact and presence of the
self to the universe. Because sensation is not a transmission or communi-
cation but an immediate participation which is constitutive of both
the self and the world, perception and existence are phenomenologi-
cally inseparable .
... unless thought is to abdicate when confronted with sensation, that is really
to say when confronted with itself, it is obliged to look in the direction I have
suggested for the way out that critical philosophy has failed to find. If sensation
is to appear in some way intelligible, the mind must establish itself at the outset
in a universe which is not a world of ideas. If it is possible to prove, as I think
it is, that sensation is not susceptible of being conceived as a message, as a
communication between different stations, it must involve the immediate
participation of what we normally call the subject in a surrounding world from
which no veritable frontier separates it. It can be shown, moreover, that this
initial postUlate enables us to account for the existence of a body that appears
to the subject to be his body.S
What is immediately given in experience is neither the I nor the world,
but the participation of myself and the world in existence. Thus, there
is no more need or possibility of establishing the existence of the extra-
mental world than there is of establishing my own existence. Heidegger
8 "Existence and Objectivity" (printed as a supplement to the Metaphysical Journal) pp.

33I-2. A similar analysis, but one that seemed at the time of its writing still "rather obscure",
is given in the Journal, p. 256, entry dated Oct. I920.
is correct when he notes that the scandal of modern philosophy is not

that we have been unable to prove the existence of the world but that
we should ever have thought that such a proof was called for.
But what are we to understand by the word existence? On this
question as on many other topics, there is a very interesting develop-
ment of Marcel's thought. Although his language becomes somewhat
technical, a brief indication of this development will lead us to the
other central experience mentioned in the concluding line of the
quotation above, namely, my having a body which is uniquely my own.
In a manuscript written in the winter of I9IO-I9II and thus pre-
dating the Journal by several years, Marcel made a distinction between
reality and existence. There he defines existence as "the limit-function
exercised with regard to finite thought by the datum relative to this
thought".9 Existence is thus made correlative to thought, and the
various modes or levels of existence are dependent upon the activity
of the thinking subject. In the early part of the Journal (p. 22) Marcel
re-affirms the "fundamental distinction between what is existing (i.e.
in relation to immediate consciousness) and what is real (Le. only defined
for thought)." When he was jotting down these reflections in I9I4 his
study of Kant had fully convinced Marcel that existence could not be
understood as a predicate, that is, as some characteristic which could
be attributed to this object and denied to that. Nor could existence be
considered as some content common to all existing objects, because
this again would make it a predicate, although universal, and would
give rise to the problem of how existence could be attributed to this
common content itself, as well as to the problem of why and how this
content came to be applied to one existent and not to another. In
truth, such a common content can be given only to thought and not
to sensation, and yet it is the sensed object which is recognized as
existent. At this point of his career, he felt he could view "as established
that we can only speak of existence with regard to objects given in an
immediate relation to a consciousness (which is at least posited as
possible). As we can conceive a multiplicity of ways in which one and
the same object (the same content) might be given to consciousness in
an immediate relation, we must conceive an infinite series of planes of
existence relating to the possible modes of apprehension" .10
Immediate consciousness, here distinguished from imaginative and
9 Philosophical Fragments I909-I9I4, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame,

Indiana, 1965, p. 59.
10 Metaphysical Joul'nal, p. I7.
reflective thought, is the consciousness of my spatial bodily existence

and therefore only objects which are found in space and time can be in
relation to immediate consciousness and only such can be said to exist.
This condition holds even for consciousness itself thought of as ex-
isting:
... we have to ask ourselves in what sense a consciousness can be thought of as
existing. It is clear that it can only be so thought in the measure in which it is
given in an immediate relationship either to itself or to another. And as soon as
we state the problem in this way we are on the road to a solution. For it is clear
that the datum common to my consciousness and to other possible consciousnesses
is my body. I cannot think of myself as existing save in so far as I am a datum
for other consciousnesses, that is to say that insofar as I am a datum in space. 11
The relationship of my body to my consciousness is, however, in itself

troublesome because there appears to be a double relationship involved,
a relationship insofar as my body is given to my consciousness as an
object in space and another relationship in which my body is given
to me in internal perception. These two modes of existence are irre-
ducibly different.
One is by definition objective, that is to say it applies to any consciousness
endowed with conditions of perception analogous to ours; the other is by
definition purely individual, i.e. bound up with my consciousness. 12
Different though they be, these two modes of existence are in one
respect the same. In both cases the existent is what is given in im-
mediate relation to consciousness by reason of the body given to me as
spatial. Moreover, distinct though they be, these two modes are given
as complementary to each other in such a way that when I reflect upon
myself, I must think of myself and posit my reality as transcending
and involving both of these modes. Inasmuch as I reflect (that is,
inasmuch as I am self-conscious subject) it is impossible to view my
body as purely spatial or to view immediate consciousness in itself as
anything more than one dialectical moment posited by the subject as
the foundation for its own act of judgment. This positing of immediate
consciousness as existing Marcel calls "experience-limit".
Henceforward I will call this positing as existent (in which existence is not
defined as a predicate) experience-limit; and say that experience-limit can only
be thought by an act of reflection brought to bear on the dualism of the judg-
ment of existence and of that on which this judgment is made. This experience-
limit, inasmuch as the reflecting subject claims to disentangle its objective
content, is reduced to a contact between a body bound up with a perceiving
11 Ibid., p. 18.
18 Ibid., p. 19.
consciousness, and an external datum. Reflective thought thus posits the judg-
ment of existence as being the transposition of the experience-limit into the
intellectual order (where there are objects and judgments bearing on those
objects); and this goes for any judgment of existence whatsoever. From this
standpoint we can see how only that which is capable of entering into relations
of contact, i.e. spatial relations with my body, can be said to exist. That may
serve as a definition. 13
We are led to dis-associate existence from that which exists and

consequently to form questions and judgments about existence only
when reflective thought is brought to bear upon the experience-limit.
For immediate consciousness there is no question about the existence
of the object because the latter is given in direct (physical) contact, as
when I rest my arm on the desk. For spatial objects not in direct
contact "there occurs a construction of a state of consciousness that
would correspond to the contact". Since existence is signified to mean
a relation to immediate consciousness, it is only the separation of the
existent from existence in reflective thought which allows problems
about existence to arise. Consequently, judgments regarding existence
do not imply an object of existence independent of the reflecting
subject, but merely characterize the mode of subjectivity found in
reflection.
To say that nothing exists save what is in space is merely to say that the ex-
perience-limit can only be translated into thought on condition that it is con-
verted into an affirmation regarding spatial data.
From this point of view we can see how the problem of the existence of the
external world strictly speaking has no meaning at all, for the external world is
implicitly posited as something which exists (or does not exist) amongst other
things. 14
In light of this meaning of existent object, it is not difficult to see
why Maritain has referred to the position of Marcel as leaning toward
idealism. Near the close of the entry from which the above quotation is
taken, Marcel himself says: "It would obviously be absurd to view all
this in terms of a realism of a spatial character ... the whole theory is
in accord with Kantian idealism".
It is likewise understandable that at this stage of his career Marcel
should hesitate to speak of an existing subject. What exists is what
is in immediate contact with consciousness, and it is only by either
bending back upon itself in reflection or by being in the presence of
another consciousness that the subject can be said to exist. Within the
view here presented this is to objectify the subject and only upon this
13 Ibid., p. 25.
14 Ibid.
objectification is the subject existent. In spite of his understanding

that existence is not a predicate, it becomes, in the last analysis, just
that, namely, the character a datum has of being in immediate relation
to consciousness, and this translated by thought means the object's
character of being spatial. 15
In a footnote introducing the English translation of the essay
"Existence and Objectivity", Marcel notes that in this article he is
attempting to "disentangle several of the fundamental themes of the
Metaphysical Journal". This disentanglement leads, I believe, to a
somewhat different understanding of existence and with the new under-
standing of existence, a much more promising understanding of
subjectivity and of person.
If we begin our investigation, not from some notion or definition, but
from experience, the briefest examination reveals that I find myself
as consciousness always already occupied with a content, and this con-
tent, as well as my occupation with it, is spontaneously received as
existing. So long as the actual character of the experience, that is, its
character of being an act, is respected, there is no possibility of doubting
existence. It is only when I myself or the content is taken out of the
context of the act that I can conceive of the content as existent or not,
and ask for a judgment about its existence. This is to say that only if
I take existence as a predicate is there any gap between the existent
and its existence. Without the arbitrary act of thought which isolates
me from the experience there can be no doubt of existence and no
denial of existence. In truth, any verbal denial of existence is only
verbal because the denial itself is possible only within the affirmation of
existence. In the question of existence, consciousness can only proceed
by decree, and because of the impossibility of denying or even of
doubting existence, this means consciousness can only radically accept
existence. This is the root of the "ontological humility" which is the
necessary virtue of the metaphysician. Existence is never a demon-
strandum; "It is either primary or it is not".
In the experience in which I become conscious of myself as subject
nothing is "given" to me in the sense of being added to me by reason
of my existing. On the contrary, I am aware of myself only in relation
to, only by participating in, what is other than me. Without the presence
of the other I would cease to be conscious subject. Hence, it is only
by positing the other that the conscious ego can first find itself as
16 Troisfontaines quotes numerous references to show that prior to 1922 Marcel held for
an equivalence between the existent and the objective. Op cit., I, 153.
existent; " ... this assurance [of existence] appears to us as though
constitutive of what we habitually call the subject. It is not added to it
or provided for it; without this assurance the subject ceases to be
anything, it disappears or at least is reduced to a logical shadow of
itself". 16
Here existence is no longer a predicate that applies to that which
is in relation to consciousness. It is rather the very structure that
allows the subject (and the object) to be constituted as such. It can
no longer be equated with the objective but must be seen also and
fundamentally as the manifestation of the subject to itself and to other
consciousnesses. "I exist" really means "I am manifest". The force of
the prefix "ex" is to show that one who exists is one who is not self-
centered, one who must stand outside himself in order to be able to be
in himself. Marcel stresses this even to the point of saying that we can
never be assured of the existence of any particular reality. Assurance
of existence is undeniable, but it is an assurance of a global character.
It is not even possible to say "I exist", unless the meaning is a denial
of any exclusive particularity of myself. To say "I exist" can be valid
only if it means I am to the world, that the universe also exists, where
again the universe is taken as a denial of all particularity. The cogito
ergo sum is in reality cogito ergo sursum.
The relation between perception and existence now becomes clear.
By virtue of the fact that perception is not a reception of a message
but an immediate openness to the world, my existence is always etre-
au-monde. I exist only by participation in the world which is other
than myself. Perception, the fundamental act by which the existent
object is recognized is also the act by which I am constituted as ex-
isting. Thus again, but for quite a different reason, it becomes meaning-
less to ask whether the world of objects exists. Objects exist in the
sense that the self and the objective universe are mutually constitutive
of one another. The self-presentation of the object in its otherness, not
only perceptually but in countless other ways, is thus carefully guarded
and respected as a necessary condition of consciousness. Conversely,
the act of perceiving in its otherness from the object is a necessary
condition for the existence of the object. The two are distinct and yet
"there are no veritable frontiers separating the two".
Is this thinkable, this mutual participation which is constitutive of
subject and object and which allows each to retain its own identity?
If by thinkable we understand conceptualizable, it is not. Marcel
16 "Existence and Objectivity", p. 323.
himself uses the word feeling to designate the kind of awareness which
is possible here. By the use of this term he wishes to express the in-
adequacy of all attempts to conceptualize the experience, which he
perceives would be condemned to failure because the experience is one
prior to and constitutive of the level where the concepts of subject
and object have their meaning. The term feeling, although perhaps
somewhat unfortunate in its everyday connotations, also warns us
against taking the fruit of our reflections simply as a theory to explain
perception. In one sense the results can be seen as a theory in that they
are an intellectual attempt to identify the conditions under which
perception of objects is possible. It is not meant to be a theory, however,
in the sense of an explanatory construct but as a description of the
minimum conditions for intelligibility. If we recall Marcel's methodo-
logy, there is an additional value in the use of the word feeling in that
it connotes an immediate knowledge rather than a knowledge dis-
cursively arrived at. We have here an instance of what was called
earlier secondary reflection, that is a reflection which is recuperative,
a re-discovery in reflection of the primary experience of a plurality-in-
unity. It is from this global experience that the awareness of myself as
subject and the awareness of objects arise by the distinguishing act
which Marcel labels primary reflection. To accept the results of primary
reflection, that is, the independent existence of either myself or the
object, as the whole truth of the matter is to de-nature our experience
and to construct a truncated understanding of myself and of the world.
Only if the ontological interdependence between myself and the world
is acknowledged, can either be said to exist. Once this fact of partici-
pation in a :qmtual constitution of myself and the world has been
grasped, the teachings of solipsism and of idealism no longer have any
force. Nor do the teachings of objective realism.
Among the "objects" which are present as other than myself, my
body understood as mine holds a pre-eminent place. Its place is pre-
eminent because as an object it is most closely united with me, but
more especially because it has a relation to me that cannot be objecti-
fied. It is this non-objectifiable rapport between me and my body that
makes me a "being-to-the-world".
When I consider my body as one body among others I necessarily
disregard the fact that it is my body. But only if I avoid this temptation
to objectify my awareness of my own body am I able to see the concrete
significance of such experiences as pain, perception, comfort, etc. These
experiences are my own and are de-natured or changed when they are
not mine but made into abstract experiences of pain, seeing or feeling.
As with perception, the presence of my own body as mine can only be
"felt", that is to say, can only be a presence which is immediate and
non-mediatizable. To allow any mediation between me and my body
on the ontological level is to make my body into an instrument, and
this ultimately means to make the ego of which it is the instrument
likewise physical or to involve oneself in an infinite regress of instru-
ment and instrumentalist. I do not see by means of my eyes or touch
by means of my fingers; rather being myself embodied with eyes and
hands I am able to see and touch. I am neither my body purely and
simply, nor am I myself apart from my body.
This relation to my body by an internal awareness is the ground
for the awareness of my body as a spatial object, and by reason of this
awareness other objects are also available to me. Without my hands
there are no objects of touch. Without my eyes, no visual objects.
Thus it is only by reason of the continuity between my body as im-
mediately present to me and to other bodies (although in a multitude
of ways and degrees of proximity) that the latter can be said to exist.
The esse est percipi of Berkeley is right, but only "on condition that by
perception we understand not representation but a prolongation of the
act by which I apprehend my body as mine". 17 At the basis of all
objective perception is a communion with my body which is non-
objective and non-verifiable in any public sense. The act by which the
ego posits itself in existence is always the same and always identical
with the positing of the world in existence: it is always the recognition
in perception, and in the immediate presence of my body as mine, of
that which is other than me.
lt is clear by now that when Marcel refers to my being a subject-in-a-
body as the central reference point of metaphysical reflection he is
turning his attention to a much more comprehensive question than
what has traditionally been considered as the problem of the relation
of body and soul. To be embodied, to be incarnate, means to be such
a consciousness as can exist only immediately to-the-world. And since
existence is the fundamental open structure of the self, for a being
such as man "to exist" means to be incarnate. IS Consequently, to
construe Marcel's metaphysics as simply a philosophy of man is to
17 Metaphysical Journal, p. 274.
18 The objection that such a position makes it impossible for Marcel to speak of man as
continuing through death deserves serious consideration; however, much of the force of the
objection rests upon a purely biological understanding of body which Marcel has not espoused.
For a fuller consideration of death see Chapter Four.
misapprehend the very orientation of his efforts. The scope of these

efforts extends to existence itself and as the following chapters will
attempt to show, to the foundations of existence in an Absolute Thou.
If we look at the lifetime work of Marcel, it is the presence of "thou
my Ultimate Recourse" which gives direction to all of his reflections,
even though he himself had to take the path from refusal to invocation,
and even though he finds himself never at the conclusion but always
a pilgrim on the way.
Our concern thus far has been to understand the act of awareness
in which a consciousness and the world are present to each other. It
is now necessary to push the reflection further and to consider the
presence of the subject as person. This is not, of course, to imply that
there is an ego or self to which personality is added. It is rather to ask
under what conditions the ego, or better I myself, recognize myself as
person rather than as simple perceiver. Our daily actions find us and
others in a whole spectrum of involvements. In many of these we are
not really persons but subjects as, for example, when I become a
ticket-taker in a theatre, or a number and a name on a dossier, or
generally when I think of myself, or am thought of by others in terms
of the functions I can perform. In contrast to our purely functional
relations to others we, in some actions, speak of ourselves as being
personally involved: in a conversation with a friend, or in entering into
marriage or into the choice of our life style or vocation. How can we
describe the experiences wherein we recognize ourselves fully as
persons? Again, we can best proceed by way of concrete examples.
In the first essay of Homo Viator, the author presents several typical
examples of the way in which we are brought to this awareness.
Take, for instance, the child who brings his mother flowers he has just been
gathering in the meadow. "Look", he cries, "1 picked these." Mark the triumph
in his voice and above all the gesture, simple and rapid enough, perhaps, which
accompanies his announcement. The child points himself out for admiration
and gratitude: "It was I, I who am with you here, who picked these lovely
flowers, don't go thinking it was Nanny or my sister; it was I and no one else."
This exclusion is of the greatest importance: it seems that the child wants to
attract attention almost materially. 19
Two points need to be noted in this and in the portrayal of an adult

in a similar situation in the following pages of the essay. The first is
the child's presentation of himself (and the flowers) to his mother. The
other is the note of exclusiveness. The child depends on the presence
of the mother in order to perform the act which makes him into a
19 Homo Viator, p. 13.
personal giver. If there is no one to receive the flowers they remain not
a gift but an object. At the same time, unless there is the exclusive
relationship to this child the gift remains anonymous, something that
could have been purchased at the florist shop. A little later in the same
essay the author writes:
Supposing that I wish or feel bound to put a certain person on his guard against
someone else. I decide to write him a letter to this effect. If I do not sign my
letter I am still as it were moving in a realm of play .... I reserve to myself the
possibility of denying my action .... From the moment that I sign my letter, on
the contrary, I have taken on the responsibility for it, that is to say I have
shouldered the consequences in advance. I have created the irrevocable not
only for the other person but for myself. 20
It is just this willingness to face the situation, to evaluate, and to be
responsible that is the proper mark of the person. But to whom is this
willingness to accept responsibility directed? "We must reply that I
am conjointly responsible both to myself and to everyone else, and
that this conjunction is precisely characteristic of an engagement of
the person .... " 21
Just as existence understood as the openness of the subject unto the
universe makes it impossible to speak about an exclusive existence of
a particular entity, so too the openness to others which ontologically
identifies personhood makes it impossible to speak of freedom as an
exclusive possession of an individual, myself. The structure of the
experiences wherein we are personally involved reveals a mutual con-
stitution which is analogous to the structure of existence. And just as
the subject exists only by accepting the other as at once constitutive
of and differentiated from itself so the person creates himself in being
only by "receiving" other persons who are recognized as distinct from
himself.
Our ingrained habits of thinking of ourselves and of others in an
objective way, as if to be person is to be "something given", diverts
our attention from our lived experience. As we are personally living,
our person is created and creates itself in the acts of encounter with
other persons. Thus the question "Who am I" can, in reality, only be
answered by my history, my history not as told, but as lived: to tell
the story of my life is to reduce my person to a him or an it.
To recognize one's own nature at any level whatsoever is possible only for a
being who is effectively acting and to the degree to which he is effectively
acting ... 22
20 Ibid., p. 2I.
21 Ibid.
22 The Mystery 0/ Being, I, I77.
To be myself is to be at once historical inasmuch as I exist only in my

encounters with others and to be transhistorical in the sense that I
cannot be identified with any or all of my past acts. To allow myself
to be frozen in one period of my life, to become fastened onto one under-
standing, one dogma, is to step out of encounter and to cease to act
personally. Thus to seek my identity from the past is to forget how to
recognize myself and others and to execute, in a profound sense, an act
of infidelity. This theme is dramatically expressed in Marcel's short
play entitled A Man of God. After a lengthy and fruitless struggle to
examine his past life and to discover his inadequacies which may have
brought about a very difficult family situation Claude is finally brought
to realize that whatever his past, the present need of those about him
is sufficient reason to continue his religious ministry. At the same time,
in seeing that fidelity is adherence not to the past but to persons, he
realizes that being present to another is not a passive reception but
an active giving. The reception of another is, in fact, the gift of myself;
it is a making myself open to other persons. It is an invitation to the
other to enter into "my room" coupled with the recognition that it is
only in this mutual presence that we are persons at all.
The implications of Marcel's position strike even deeper, to the very
foundations of ontology. It is only in the community of persons
present to each other (present here in a different and stronger sense
than that in which a subject is present to the universe) that being is
at all. All being is personal.
Person - engagement - community - reality: there we have a sort of chain of
notions which, to be exact, do not readily follow from each other by deduction
(actually there is nothing more fallacious than a belief in the value of deduction)
but of which the union can be grasped by an act of the mind. 23
But one might ask are not such things as trees and dogs real beings?
Yes, surely they are real beings, but only to the degree that they are
in relation to persons. If it is further objected that such a notion makes
the being of all objects purely relational, Marcel, it seems, can only
agree. For him, not only objects but personal existence as well is
constituted in being only by an intersubjective bond. To refuse to
recognize the participative character of being is so to isolate beings
that our experience of persons and of nature becomes totally unintelli-
gible. The unifying force of philosophical reflection must be allowed
to modify the divisive report rendered by primary reflection. It would

not be too strong to say of Marcel that his whole philosophic task is an
effort to re-instate a viable bond among men.
The emphasis that Marcel here places on participation and com-
munity as necessary for personal self-recognition is in no way a denial
of the unique individuality of each person nor a lessening of the dignity
of the individual, although it is a rejection of the notion of person as
a being in himself or for himself. Rather than a rejection of personal
individuality, what is given is a redefinition of personal individuality
in terms of a structural relationship of one person to another, under-
stood in such a way that this relationship defines, better to say
establishes, the uniqueness of myself and of thou. My dignity as a
person is grounded in and contingent upon the possibility and the need
of being responsible to others. If Sartre is correct in his position that I
am unable to affirm my own freedom without also and at the same
time affirming the freedom of all men, there must be an ontological lack
of independence in the center and depth of my own freedom. Mutual
constitution as outlined by Marcel is not mutual reciprocity. Reciproci-
ty pre-supposes a prior independence of the agents. Such a position
does not clarify the ontological basis of my relation to another freedom
but can only affirm that in choosing my own freedom I must choose as
well the freedom of all other men. It is the task of the philosoper, and
the urgent need of our society in domestic and international relations,
to develop an effective and affective vision of the bases upon which
mutual respect can be grounded. Marcel's description ofinter-personal
relations as one of mutual constitution seeks to provide this vision. The
experiential evidence for his position is, on the one hand, our inability
to recognize ourselves as truly persons except in the act of encountering
another and, on the other hand, our inability to recognize another
freedom as inviolate unless the encounter is understood as immediate
and as constitutive of our own freedom.
Here again, the central significance of incarnation is clear. Initially
at least, I become present to other persons by reason of my being an
incarnate person, not only because only by incarnation am I a con-
scious subject, but also because my presence to the other person and
his presence to me is a bodily presence. Hence, my participation in
the realm of personal being, as well as in existence, is ultimately by
reason of my lived unity with my body.
Marcel arrived at this position only after repeated efforts to clarify
his relation to the consciousness of others. In the early pages of The
Journal 24 he seems to have been satisfied with the idea that our
knowledge of others arises from a comparison of others to ourselves
by way of an argument of analogy, a position obviously reminiscent
of Descartes. Commenting on this position in a footnote written in
I925 Marcel reflects that he could then accept the position only with
the most explicit reservations. His later insistence upon the immediate
character of personal presence would seem to indicate an entirely
different approach. The argument by analogy rests upon the acceptance
of others and of myself as independent entities; the meaning of persona-
lity developed, on the other hand, in Homo Viator and in the book
Creative Fidelity is expressly non-objective, and all acts of personal
presence are necessarily acts of inter-subjectivity and are non-verifiable
in essence in a public way.
The uniqueness of inter-personal relationships can be seen by con-
trasting the perception that we have of another person with the
perception that we have of an object (including our objective knowledge
of other persons). The perception of an object involves a triadic re-
lationship in which the object in its character as objectified is always
that which is independent of me and about which I can communicate
either to another person or to myself. We are not speaking here of the
lived experience of being in the world, but of that level of experience
where the object has been distinguished from the subject. In this ex-
perience, the dialogue forms a triangle; it is a dialogue between two
subjects concerning a third party, even though at times the second
subject is myself as distinguished from myself-in-the-world. However,
to the extent that I as person am present to another person the dialogue
forms a dyadic unity. When I am truly acting in a personal way there
is no possibility of a dialogue with myself because when I am acting
as a person I am engaging myself totally and cannot disengage the
myself from the I. The dialogue in the personal encounter is rather
between I and thou. The importance of this difference is revealed in
the fact that I and thou can become a we, for example in marriage or
friendship, whereas the object must remain "that which does not
take me into account".
As is evident from everyday life, our encounters with other persons
are not of equal significance. There is, in fact, a broad spectrum of
presences ranging from the mere chance meetings to the close intimacy
of friendships. Common to all of these degrees of presence, however,
is the fact that I am present in a personal way only if I choose to be
24 Metaphysical Journal, p. 15.
present. Even when another person is physically and objectively near

me I can refuse to open myself to him and can treat him as a him or an
it. When I do so, I negate to some extent both his and my own personal-
ity. Contrariwise, to the extent that I make myself available to others
I thereby create or bring into being that community which is reality.
Thus it is at the junction of freedom and existence that the realm of
personal being takes its origin.
Since this realm is entered and indeed constituted only by free
choice it is totally enveloped by the mystery of freedom and totally
outside of the realm of the objective and the demonstrable. To give a
proof of one's presence to another person is simply out of the question,
as it is out of the question to prove that I am a free being. The world
of being, that is the world of persons, is a world where cause, necessity
and determinism give way to free participation. This lack of determin-
ism in the personal world is expressed eloquently by the silence which
generally follows the question "Why do you love him?" And even
when an answer is given, it is at once recognized as inadequate. The
tragedy of this freedom is that just as I can choose to be present, choose
to love and to respect, so I can also refuse to open myself to others. I
can choose to hold persons in the degraded state of objects. When and
to the extent that this occurs, oppression has replaced freedom.
The availability by which I enter into presence and thus partake of
being must not be confused with a kind of social consciousness or,
worse still, with a superficial inclination toward activity. The level on
which we are speaking is one of understanding the ontological con-
stitution of myself as a person and might best be described as a
"spiritual availability". It is the failure (and it would seem in large
part the inability) of contemporary society to distinguish between the
participation which springs from encounter in which the person is
responsible and totally involved and an excess of activity which at
best dissipates the person, that makes the same society blind to the
values of contemplation and reflection. In contrast, the apparent
aloofness sometimes found in the saint is participation par excellence;
he has given himself to other persons and therefore cannot allow him-
self to be overly concerned with objects, even though these objects
are the major concern of the society in which he lives. Mindful of the
irreducible difference between objects and persons, Marcel can quite
consistently remark that the study of sanctity would make a good
introduction to the study of being. 25
25 The affinity between the pursuit of sanctity and the study of metaphysics has played a
In spite of the tragic possibility of failure inherent in the very

meaning of freedom, the free character of personal encounter creates a
kind of absolute bond between persons. It is only I who can refuse to
remain faithful to you. Once the inter-subjective bond has been estab-
lished, that is, once I have chosen to respect other persons, change of
time, of circumstances, and even the betrayal by the other person can
destroy the bond only if I choose to be unfaithful. This is why being can
be called the "place of fidelity". By contrast, non-being might be
called the "place of infidelity". The refusal to respond to the oppor-
tunities which are available is always a betrayal of reality. As Kant
saw with profound vision, the real world is a community of freedoms
which has no guarantee for its continued existence. Only to an ob-
jective point of view which has not examined its own basis are person
and community given as facts. To philosophical reflection, as well as
to our lived experience, person is not the point of departure but is the
goal to be achieved, maintained and constantly nurtured.
The central concern of this chapter has been to expose the funda-
mentally open character of ourselves as personal subjects. If the
analysis has been successful, it has revealed the existing self as immedi-
ately present to the other-than-self in such a way that to exist means
precisely to be manifest to and in the world. This entails an under-
standing of sensation as an immediate being-to-the-world rather than
the reception of a message from outside the sensing being; it further
entails the understanding of incarnation as a kind of conscious presence
rather than the possession of a body by a conscious being.
Corresponding to this immediate encounter of consciousness and
the other-than-subject on the level of existence, there is on the level
of persons an immediate presence of the I to thou. The presence of two
persons is mutually constitutive of the persons and might be under-
stood as a unity-in-plurality rather than as a relation among entities.
Consequently, objective evidence so valuable in the study of things
must give way when persons are concerned to a free and uniquely
individual acceptance of and response to the other person and the
community.
Once the free character of our response to the other person is seen in
its function of creating the community of being, it becomes increasingly
clear why Marcel holds with Plato that the way of being is discoverable
only by the way of love. Love discovers being not only by revealing
decisive role in the development of Marcel's thought. Cf. "An Essay in Autobiography" in
The PhilosoPhy ot Existence.
being, but in a much more fundamental way by creating the community
which is reality. It is in the order of love even more than in the order
of being that we are real and find one another; the principle of human
existence, as origin and goal, is mutual love.
CHAPTER III
FIDELITY AND TRUTH
The previous chapters investigated what it means to pursue philo-

sophical research and provided a brief view of Marcel's understanding
of subjectivity and person. The subject of the present chapter will be
an inquiry into some aspects of the meaning of truth in its relation to
these earlier discussions. For a study of man's approach to God such
an investigation is called for by the fact that the believer holds himself
to be within the bounds of truth in his belief. The truth of his belief is,
in his own experience, powerful in that it frequently calls the believer
to a life of total commitment.
The framework for the investigation remains the "relationship
between philosophical research and life" and the goal is a further
clarification of "my life". Reflection upon certain views of Marcel,
especially as they are set forth in the fourth chapter of The Mystery of
Being and in several other lectures, will provide impetus and direction
for the search. The earlier discussions should have prepared the reader
to anticipate not only a development of Marcel's thought but also a
certain novelty in thought and expression as he attempts to find a
position midway between idealism and objective realism. By leaving
both of these positions Marcel has cut himself off from the possibility
of understanding truth either as a self-consistency in the internal life
of consciousness, in which truth could appear as a harmonious co-
herence of all possible experience, or as a representation within con-
sciousness of all that is real and knowable.
Following his usual manner of proceeding, Marcel attempts to
describe and reflectively analyze certain types of experience which
common language has linked with the word truth. His selection of
experiences to be studied is by no means random, but is made with
a view toward uncovering meanings of truth which have a significant
FIDELITY AND TRUTH 45
relationship to the question "Who am I?" and which have received
too little attention from philosophers in the past.
The most difficult task underlying such a quest for truth is to
uncover the properframework or vantage point from which to ask what
truth means. But rather than ask this question directly it is more
helpful to turn first to concrete experience. To make a beginning we
might direct our attention to the experience of "being guided by a love
of the truth" or to the more extreme but yet possible experience of
being called upon to "sacrifice oneself for the sake of truth". In trying
to analyze the conditions under which such experiences can be made
meaningful to reflection, one must ask when does truth become some-
thing for the sake of which an act is done.
When we are faced with this question, the insufficiency of the
traditional definition of truth as an adequation between intellect and
object becomes apparent. No one sacrifices himself or should be called
upon to sacrifice himself for the sake of a conformity between his
knowledge and what is real. The experiences which are caught by the
phrases above draw our vision not to ourselves, but require us ex-
plicitly to look beyond ourselves for the truth. They indicate the pre-
sence of a demand upon us, and require the recognition of a value which
can bestow a meaning on our lives and for which value, in the extreme
case, we might be called upon to give up our lives, and in less extreme
cases to give up our previous opinions on a given subject.
The analysis of particular experiences which reveal truth as a value
making a demand upon us does not, of course, mean that the definition
of truth as adequation is a meaningless formula; these analyses do
indicate clearly, however, that another approach to the question of
truth is needed if philosophical inquiry is to shed light upon the
various ways in which truth enters into or fails to enter into our lives.
Truth as adequation between intellect and thing known has its relevance
in an understanding of knowledge as a knowledge of objects; it is in
this domain, in which subject and object are already clearly dis-
tinguished from one another, that we can meaningfully speak of an
adequation between the two. Such an understanding rightly places the
primary meaning of truth in the act of judgment because it is in the
act of judgment that we achieve the necessary distancing from the
lived experience of the world which makes possible an objective state-
ment of adequation.
For Marcel, the most troublesome aspect of the definition of truth
as adequation is the implication, uncritically accepted, that the facts
FIDELITY AND TRUTH
are "out there", objectively available, for the would-be researcher.!

As we saw in the last chapter, his understanding of perception as anon-
mediatized involvement of the perceiver with what is other than
himself excludes the possibility of any neutral facts. Both the perceiver
and his world can be rendered intelligible only by the affirmation of an
open or uncompleted structure of both the perceived and the perceiver.
In the earlier study of perception our main concern was to become
aware of the openness of myself unto the world. However, if perception
is an intentional act in which the perceived object is necessary for the
actual perception, it is also true that the perceived fact is a fact only
in the presence of the perceiver. Thus the fact as such, as well as the
perceiver, must be thought of in terms of a basic and grounding
"availability" to what is other than itself. This means that the truth
of the facts carries with it a reference to the knower apart from which
there is no truth; " ... the fact only acquires its value as a fact because
it is referred to that living centre .... " 2
Although it is a structure of all of the facts of experience, this
necessary reference becomes more evident in the kind of experience
which provides the connoisseur with his realm of truth, a realm which
even the non-connoisseur does not hesitate to recognize. In his know-
ledge that one vintage or one work of art is good and another bad the
connoisseur is within the bounds of truth, that is, in the presence of
facts which are simply not present for the non-connoisseur. The latter
can stay within the bounds of truth only by recognizing that there is a
domain of truth beyond him; this amounts to saying that in order to
remain true he must recognize that the "true facts" are for him non-
factual and this because of his own unavailability; the truth of the
facts becomes available only with the creative testimony of the connois-
seur.3 The realm of inter-personal relations provides numerous ex-
amples of similar experience. The person blessed with a deep friendship
which is central to his life can neither deny the true worth of his friend
nor ask someone else to step in his place and observe the true value of
the friendship. Even so-called objective facts, as Michael Polyani has
so well pointed out, take their standing as facts in terms of the demand
of the self for consistency.4 Only to an uncritical objectivism is the
1 "It is against this idea of the fact as external to me that we must direct our polemic."
The Mystery of Being, I, 79.
a Ibid., p. 81.
B Ibid., p. 76.
4 Polyani, Michael, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, Harper and
Row, N. Y., 1958, Ch. I.
fact purely external, waiting to be perceived. Experientially, what is
totally outside my experience is non-factual and can rightly be called
fanciful or even non-existent. What Marcel's meditations on "being
guided by the truth" and "sacrificing oneself for the truth" add to our
understanding of the uncompleted structure of facts is the realization
that this necessary relationship to the living center of subjectivity is
one of value. Apart from some co-efficient of value, either positive or
negative, and apart from the activity of valuing by the person, there
are no experiences and no facts to be experienced.
To conclude from this analysis of the dependence of the fact upon
the knower that truth is simply relative to the observer would be quite
false in Marcel's view. Quite apart from theoretical considerations our
practical conduct of calling in the expert, especially in matters of a
serious nature, reveals clearly that we do not live as if truth were
simply relative to the perceiver. In such diverse areas as medicine,
bridge design, individual counselling and countless others we actively
rely upon the trustworthiness of facts which are available only to the
expert.
The dependence of the facts upon the knowing subject for their
worth is only one side of the picture. In order to bring the other side
into focus Marcel calls attention to another way in which truth comes
upon us. While there are no facts apart from the living center of the
self, we have all experienced the need to face the facts; we have ex-
perienced in ourselves and in others the unwillingness to face the truth
in difficult situations. This unwillingness to face the truth expresses
itself in a struggle within ourselves. Moreover, we know at the outset
of the struggle that there can be no resolution, with the resultant sense
of joy and liberation, except to courageously face the truth; "the weight
of the facts is against us". This experience of a struggle with the truth,
in which the pursuit of truth presents itself as an obligation making a
demand against me, shows clearly that the discovery and acceptance
of truth can be no merely spontaneous act of the self. "There is thus
an extremely subtle reciprocal interlinking between facts and self that
comes into existence every time we recognize a mortifying truth." 5
To speak exactly, the struggle is not against the truth but against that
dimension of ourselves which would gladly find a way to shut out the
light; the struggle against the truth, in the midst of which we still
desire the truth, reveals again the lack of simple identity of the self
which arises as soon as we ask who we are. Truth approaches us as a
5 The Mystery 0/ Being, I, 84.
FIDELITY AND TRUTH
demand, as from without, obliging us to live within truth if we are

to retain our internal worth. Insistence here upon clearly identifiable
boundaries between what is external and what is internal to the self,
makes the analysis of truth impossible. The experiences of loving the
truth and of being obliged to follow the truth lose all their meaning
when truth is thought of as a complete system of facts external to the
self as well as when the radically incomplete structure of the self is not
taken seriously. "It is in connection with this [uncompleted] structure
that the problem of truth can and must be raised .... " 6
If we can draw here upon the matter of the last chapter, it is the
lack of self-centeredness of the self, that is, its existential character
which expresses itself in the need for a mutual constitution by the
world and by others, which enables truth to be something at stake. It
is likewise the mutual constitution of self and world (and more signi-
ficantly of I and thou) which makes it impossible to speak of facts as
simply out there. Facts and other persons are values for the self and
without the active valuing of the self - a valuing which takes the form
of respect when other persons are concerned - there are no facts to be
experienced and no persons to be met in a truly human way. Because
the constitution in question is a mutual constitution, what is said of the
truth of facts must also be said of the self. Both truth and the value
of the self are at stake jointly, as the experience of being obliged to
seek the truth makes clear. If I refuse the truth I become an object of
contempt in my own eyes.
Here Marcel finds himself in "fundamental agreement" with Heideg-
ger's understanding of truth as a relation of appresentation.
To appresent is "to allow the thing to surge up before us in the guise of this or
that object, but in such a fashion that the judgment lets itself be led by the
thing and expresses it just as it has presented itself. It is a necessary condition
of all appresentation that the appresentating being should be placed in the
middle of a light that will allow something to appear to that being .... This
.something , must span or traverse a domain open to our encounter". 7
Although the two philosophers differ greatly in their ultimate under-

standing of what it means to be person they are one in affirming that
truth appears in an openness which stands between consciousness and
what is present to consciousness, and that consequently truth cannot
be understood in terms of the sheer givenness of facts or the pure
spontaneity of consciousness. If truth resides in this openness wherein
6 Ibid., p. 82.
7 Ibid., p. 87; Marcel is quoting from Heidegger's essay Vom Wesen der Wahrheit.
beings appear, "to stay within the bounds of truth" means to find
ways to step into and remain in this openness.
My most fundamental presence in this openness which manifests
beings is by way of my body as mine and, therefore, in the last analysis,
my presence to truth is in no way a matter of freedom. This radical
foundation of truth for me in terms inseparable from my body, that is
inseparable from a manifestation which goes beyond all possibility of
choice, has profound implications. The most immediate of these impli-
cations, as we have already seen experientially, is that truth and the
adherence to truth present themselves as demands upon me in such a
way that I must respect them or lose all human dignity. The unchosen
necessity of my being manifest to reality and of reality being manifest
to me is, on the level of conscious reflection, identical with or at least
inseparable from the need to love truth, to nurture and pursue it. A
second implication is that for man truth can never be a complete
system to be grasped just because man can never be either identified
with nor separated from his manifestation to reality.
Perhaps it is this unavoidable incompleteness of truth for man
which accounts in large part for our hesitancy simply to identify truth
with what is - and on another level simply to identify the good with
what is.
Surely there can be no question in this matter of affirming a contra-
diction between what is real and what is true and of still having our
words retain any sense. Is not the researcher in his work merely seek-
ing to discover what is the case? Even now, as we search for the
meaning of the truth are we not simply asking how the matter stands
regarding truth? Scholastic philosophy saw deeply into the unity of
truth and being and made truth one of the transcendentals, co-extensive
with ens; it was, in fact, ens in its relation to intellect. Bradley,
following Hegel, seems also to have thought of truth as reality realizing
itself in one aspect. And yet the affirmation of an identity between
being and truth does not preclude the questions of how and why being
is related to intellect or what it means for reality to realize itself in one
aspect. Nor does the affirmation of a simple identity ease the problem
of explaining our experience of falling out of the truth, at times even by
a deliberate act.
The resolution of this difficulty adopted by some philosophers of
locating truth and falsity only in the act of judgment and of allowing
sensations to be just what they are, neither true nor false, is clearly
not available to Marcel in view of his analysis of sensation. Much of
50 FIDELITY AND TRUTH
Merleau-Ponty's work as well has been to show that our primary

involvement with truth takes place on the level of sensation in such a
way that this truth informs even the truth of judgment. For scholastic
philosophy, too, the prior act of apprehension makes possible the act of
judgment. In trying to relate the truth of perception with that of
judgment, Marcel suggests the metaphor of light. The essence or fact
might be thought of as a light which illuminates the knower on con-
dition "that the self disposes itself in relation to the radiant fact so as
to receive the light that streams from it."8 This is, of course, to suggest
a kind of pre-reflective intercourse between the essence and the knower
and to draw a closer tie between apprehension and judgment, but the
metaphor merely reaffirms, as Marcel is well aware, that truth is never
a possession which we take hold of in any completeness. For the parti-
cular task of this study, namely man's relation to God, the incomplete
involvement with truth in its fullness, an involvement which defines
man, makes unavoidable the extreme difficulty we have in speaking
with any certainty and clarity about God. If, as Heidegger observes,
man is always standing in truth but not totally, that is standing in
truth and in untruth, the believer must in the truth of his belief be
always in unbelief as well as in belief.
The threat against our need to stay within the bounds of truth can
come either from within our spirit or from without. An experience
which has taxed Marcel's efforts to understand truth and to which he
has returned in several of his writings is the experience of the researcher,
perhaps the scientist, who is being forcibly urged to follow a particular
ideology and who, knowing he has caught hold of a particular truth,
refuses to recant. 9 In the certainty of his discovery, to recant would
be to betray the truth. What is most striking about such a situation
is that it is not the scientist's own interests but fidelity to the truth
which forbids him to deny his insight. What or whom would he be
betraying were he to relent and recant? Does truth itself have the
ability and authority to command fidelity?
Taking up an idea elaborated by Josiah Royce, Marcel suggests that
the conduct of the person who clings to the truth in such adverse
circumstances might be made intelligible, at least in part, if it is
understood as an act of fidelity to the human community. There is, as
it were, an ideal city that is built up by the researcher's refusal to
deny his discovered truth and which would be harmed, perhaps
8 Ibid., p. 83.
9 Ibid., pp. 88-92.
FIDELITY AND TRUTH 5I
grievously, by his sacrifice of the truth. Such a metaphor can help us
to see the intimate link not only between truth and fidelity but between
truth and justice as well. With the present advanced application of
technology to warfare it is a hopeful sign in man's attempt to live in
truth to find an increasing number of researchers ask openly whether
their research can retain its long-cherished neutrality, ask openly
whether in order to remain within the bounds of truth they are not
obliged to look beyond the demands of their technical research and
ask seriously whether the social and political actions made possible by
their research do not condition that research itself. Failure to take this
broader perspective might well result in a breaking of the link between
truth and justice to the consequent destruction of truth itself. The
situation is the same whenever another person is treated without due
respect, and can be seen in the breakdown of any genuine discussion.
As long as the discussants refrain from merely trying to win an argu-
ment or from simply trying to discover where the other party agrees
with their opinions, the discussants are guided along a parallel or joint
path by the desire to reach the truth. But as soon as a note of self-
aggrandizement enters the discussion to that extent the search for
truth is left behind. 10
This image of the ideal city does not, however, reach far enough.
Marcel speaks of it as a half-way house and finds it necessary to ask
how this ideal city is possible and what its foundations are. Is not this
ideal community of men itself called into existence by the truth and
for the sake of the truth! In posing these questions Marcel is taking the
issue of truth beyond the realm of particular truths. The issue which
is raised by these questions can be phrased in different ways. How
account for the experience that, in spite of our frequent struggles
against the light, we still cherish truth and prefer it to falsehood and
ignorance? The "fundamental question" of Heidegger: "How does it
stand with Being so that beings can appear?" is the same question. 11
Marcel, looking beyond the resolution of particular problems, asks how
thought gets its tasks suggested to it. 12 The depth of these questions,
which ultimately cannot be side-stepped unless the whole search for
truth is to be abandoned, shows how inadequate a procedure it is "to
isolate a judgment and to ask what truth is in relation to that judg-
10Ibid., pp. 9I-92.

11Cf. Heidegger, Martin, An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Ralph Mannheim,
Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1961, Ch. I.
52 FIDELITY AND TRUTH
ment." 13 How untrue to truth is such a procedure! The possibility of

forming a judgment of any kind (including most especially judgments
in matters of ultimate concern) takes place already far within the light
of truth. To try to understand the truth of a judgment without taking
into account the abiding determination of what Merleau-Ponty has
called "the primacy of perception" 14 is to make judgment into an
artificial and truncated concept which can be designated true or false
only by the most blatant abstraction. The ultimate question, however,
reaches beyond the primacy of perception and forces us to inquire into
the conditions which make possible the truth of perception itself. The
immediate pragmatic value of such an inquiry is non-existent. Its value
arises only for the person or the people who are seriously asking who
they are. To such a person it becomes evident, as it was for Plato, that
no single truth and no human intercourse can be valuable, unless it
"takes place against what I would call a kind of intelligible back-
ground .... " 15 The necessity of adhering to this background and of
actively asserting its presence as a value if the question of truth is to
be seriously raised reveals the ultimate propriety of linking the notions
of truth and fidelity. Only for the person who has accepted the gratuitous
presence of the light can there be an ultimate meaning to life - or any
ultimate distinction between falsehood and truth.
19 Ibid.
14 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Primacy of Perception edited by James M. Edie, Northwestern
Univ. Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1964, Ch. II.
CHAPTERIV
APPROACH TO GOD
As early as 1914 Marcel maintained that the affirmation of the reality

of God must be the culmination of a complex act of faith, rather than
the conclusion of a demonstration. In this chapter we will examine the
nature of this act of faith, the ground which "justifies" this act and
the implications which are joined to the affirmation or the refusal to
affirm the reality of God.
It is clear from the earlier discussions on the nature of philosophical
research that this analysis must proceed, not by objective proof, but
by an examination of the bases of our experience. As in the analysis of
person and truth, the procedure here will be one of self-interrogation
concerning the conditions under which our experiences are possible
and meaningful. The radically free and necessarily individual character
of this act of affirmation makes questionable any objective verification
of the legitimacy of the act of affirmation or of the reality of the
transcendent being toward whom the act is directed. This is not, it
must be emphasized, an admission that the act and its terminus are
subjective, but an insistence that in philosophical reflection we can
proceed only on a level which is prior to the level where objective
verification is possible. Whether this insistence is warranted or not
must be judged by what follows.
What precisely are we asking when we ask about man's approach to
God? The metaphysical question of man's approach to God must not
be confused with the ethical question of how man ought to conduct
himself in the light of his knowledge of the reality of God. The two
questions are certainly related; but while ethics asks what will or should
be done, metaphysics tries to understand what is. The metaphysical
question is likewise related to the problem of salvation, but is not
identified with it. It is the understanding of being, however partial,
which gives significance to and dictates the necessity of salvation, but
54 APPROACH TO GOD
the attempt to reach this understanding of being is not directed to the

self as salvation is primarily self-directed. Initially, at least, the
metaphysician does not make the distinction between self and the
other than self. On one level of consideration we might say that the
problem of being is identified with the problem of salvation, while the
mystery of being is concerned only with what is.
The metaphysical question about the reality of God must be dis-
tinguished also from the religious affirmation of God insofar as the
latter entails the acceptance of a specific religious creed. Philosophy
finds its place in its willingness to ask radical questions, and in this
is indifferent to the bounds of any specific creed. In today's intellectual
climate this perhaps no longer needs to be emphasized. There is far more
likelihood that the philosopher, even the philosopher of religion, will
go to the opposite extreme and think of himself as in no way dependent
upon the question of belief. To insist upon such an absolute autonomy
for philosophy, however, is in reality to blind oneself to the data which
are the content for reflection. The philosopher who is concerned with
the question of religion must take careful notice of the fact of man's
belief as manifested by those who do believe, whether this belief is
expressed in the profession of a specific religious creed or in a less
particularized form. The philosopher's chief task in the area of religion
is just this; to understand the meaning of the "I believe" of the be-
liever.! Here as always philosophy has no independent life but comes
into being as our attempt to step more fully into a life already in
progress.
In his dependence upon pre-philosophical experience, the philosopher
of religion differs not at all from the philosopher of science or the
philosopher concerned with understanding aesthetic experience. Ob-
vious as this is, its implications are by no means readily accepted even,
one might say especially, by those who claim to be most openminded.
"To take notice of man's belief" means to take notice not merely of the
objective contents of a creed, but more importantly of the structure of
the act of believing and the existential stance of the religious man. To
do this - and let it be said bluntly - means to have become involved
in some way with the act as an action, that is, either to have entered
oneself into believing or to have entered into the life of one who is
believing. What a blatant inconsistency exists in the philosopher who
prides himself on his reliance upon the data of science, and who at the
same time expostUlates on the absurdity of a religious life in which he
1 Creative Fidelity, p. r68.
APPROACH TO GOD 55
in no way shares. Only to the extent that he keeps in contact with life
has a philosopher any warrant to speak. Similarly, only because he is
in the presence of death and carries within himself the possibility of
suicide and despair can the living philosopher speak of these matters
and seek a way to transcend the impulse toward death and despair.
A very sensitive awareness of this concrete dependence of philosophy
upon life, coupled with the philosopher's conviction that lived ex-
perience must be articulated in reflection in order to become aware
of its full reality, provides the incentive for Marcel's consideration of
man's approach to God. The approach is, in fact, a continuation of
his attempt to answer the question who am I.
The attempt to understand this question by an analysis of ex-
perience has revealed that I am essentially and immediately in-the-
world by reason of the open structure of existence and, further, that I
discover myself as person only by reason of the presence of another
person. This personal constitution, while analogous to the structure of
existing in the world, is distinguished from it in that the act of
personal involvement is always a free act. Thus, the act of being real
as person is inseparably united with my freedom, which freedom,
however, is itself experienced only as a response or a refusal to respond
to another.
Still unexamined, however, is a whole range of questions related
to the original question. By what reason am I able to be faithful to
another person? Who am I that I can interrogate myself as to who I
am? And why, in the last analysis, is fidelity to be preferred to infi-
delity? Hopefully the probing of these further formulations of the
original question will indicate a way to a reflective understanding of
our human community in which sincere believers and non-believers
share, and perhaps also a way to an effective passage from non-belief
to belief.
Marcel's approach remains always the same: a selection of particular
experiences wherein we are personally involved, followed by a close
descriptive analysis. One experience that he suggests is our human
experience of making promises. What exactly do we mean when we
make a promise? What am I doing, for example, when I promise in the
marriage vows to love and to cherish another person unto death? Or
what does it mean when I promise to make a return visit to a friend
who is lonely and may be dying in a hospital?
At the time when promises are made, we frequently cannot see the
full range of the conditions under which the promises will have to be
APPROACH TO GOD
kept. My feelings of pity for my dying friend can give way to a less
emotional if no less real desire to comfort him. The trials and ad-
versities involved in raising a family may make impossible the same
feelings of warmth which were present on the day when the marriage
vows were made. Obviously if these promises are to be meaningful- and
experience presents them as meaningful - their binding force cannot
depend upon the particular set of circumstances surrounding us at the
time when the promises are made. By reason of an element of uncondi-
tionality in the pledge, promise-making implies a trans-temporal
identity or presence of the self to an as yet unknown future self and
future world. Indeed a promise made with conditions attached loses
the character of promise to the degree that the conditions are at-
tached. I promise I will go with you to the theatre if you call before
six o'clock. You do not call, and I am free of any obligation. In some
sense I am no longer bound by the marriage vows when fulfillment of
the condition of death has taken away the vow. If the whole body of a
promise is made conditional, the promise ceases to be a promise: "I shall
do such and such unless .... " Hence it is this element of uncondition-
ality which must be closely examined.
In attempting to discover the origin and direction of this element of
unconditionality, Marcel notes that a promise entails both a com-
mitment and fidelity to that commitment. 2 To whom is a commitment
made? To a person surely, because fidelity implies not only immutabi-
lity but also the notion of personal presence. But to what person? To
myself, to my sick friend?
The commitment can hardly be to myself. Were this the case, a
promise would be no more than an attempt at self-mastery, a wager
made perhaps in the presence of witnesses, but totally closed upon
myself. Fidelity to promises would become very much akin to ex-
hibitionism and would be totally lacking in the notion of giving which
is of the essence of the act of promising. If the obligation of fulfilling
the promise is only to myself and imposed by myself, it is nothing more
than the decision to satisfy my own desires and the obligation can be
removed by my merely changing my mind.
Can the commitment be, then, to the other human person? Surely
in some way both the commitment and the faithfulness to it are directed
to the other person. I may even say to my sick friend, "I promise you
that I will return to see you next week". And if I decide not to return,
I am quite well aware that I have been unfaithful to my friend.
2 Being and Having, p. 42.
APPROACH TO GOD 57
Reflection upon this sense of obligation to keep one's promises reveals
a very fundamental element of the promise as such. Not only is all
commitment and fidelity directed toward a person, it is always a
response to a person. 3 It is the acknowledgement that the other person
has a claim against me; from the moment in which I make a promise
I accept the fact that I do not belong entirely to myself. 4 Unexpectedly
perhaps, but quite consistently, the attempt to understand the meaning
of promises has led us back to the notion of an inter-subjective presence
in which the persons involved are mutually necessary to one another.
I can pledge myself only to the extent that I do not retain complete
autonomy.
The analysis of my promise cannot stop here, however, for it is quite
possible that I am fully aware that my friend does not wish to burden
me by holding me responsible. He may even have sunk into a coma
and would presumably be wholly unaware of whether or not I kept my
promise. Or, it can be that I made the promise without even telling my
friend of it. In any of these circumstances, it is still possible to make
a promise and to know that it is good (if not fully obligatory) to be
faithful in carrying out what I had promised. Make the case even more
stringent. I have made a serious pledge to a person who later has
repudiated my friendship or simply disregarded me as a person. Even
then, although it is in fact often disregarded, the pledge can remain as
the embodiment of an obligation and bond. This is evident not only in
the continued love of a mother for a wayward child, but also in the care
with which a national constitution, for example, guarantees the rights
of the convicted criminal. To whom then, ultimately, is the fidelity
and the commitment directed? Marcel's answer is clear. Writing at a
time when he had not as yet embraced any specific religious creed he
says:
... fidelity, unless it is to be fruitless or, worse, reduced to mere persistency,
must spring from something that is "absolutely given" to me. (I feel this is
especially true in my relation to the people I love best). From the very beginning
there must be a sense of stewardship: Something has been entrusted to us, so
that we are not only responsible towards ourselves, but towards an active and
superior principle - and how it goes against my inclinations to use such a
disgustingly abstract word 15
His continued study in the next twenty years gave Marcel no reason
to alter his understanding. "But one might say that conditional pledges
3 Ibid., p. 46.
4 Ibid., p. 48.
5 Ibid., pp. I4-I5, entry dated February 28, I929.
58 APPROACH TO GOD
are only possible in a world from which God is absent. Unconditionality

is the true sign of God's presence .... "6 It is only to the unconditionally
present that we can make the absolutely unconditional pledge.
Fidelity to a particular being is always both absolute and non-absolute:
absolute because the individual person is always a sharer in presence,
non-absolute because the individual being is constituted in and there-
fore conditionally present in being.7 The fullest expression of this
fidelity is the making oneself completely available to a "higher cause"
by the voluntary sacrifice of one's life, whether this is done suddenly or
is spread over many years. Such a sacrifice cannot be a giving unless it
is a fidelity to someone who transcends the temporal and spatial order
of particular beings, and who is given to me as an unconditional guaran-
tor of my pledge. This last statement is not meant to deny or to
belittle the fact that the sacrifice is made to and for someone in particu-
lar, say one's family or one's country. Rather, what we need to appreci-
ate here is that the sacrifice would not be a gift, except within a frame-
work in which the fact of giving is itself given as significant. Just as the
truth of particular jUdgments is a truth on and against an intelligible
background, so particular acts of giving are ultimately gift only
because we already find ourselves and our work against a background
that has said yea to giving itself.
A brief consideration of the necessity of bearing witness reveals a
similar need to affirm the reality of a presence beyond my own. Why
am I obliged to testify, for example, in a court of law? Say I am not
at all involved in the outcome of the issue at trial. I am merely a
witness or the only witness to a crime committed against some
stranger. Why must I testify? Why, except that I hold a certain
particle of light that would otherwise remain hidden? I must give of
myself or be guilty of betrayal of truth. The possibility of betraying
truth reveals that testimony is always given before a transcendence.
To testify to myself has no meaning whatever because the testimony
is not present until I manifest the truth which is present to me and in
this manifestation acknowledge its right to affect the situation at hand.
And when my testimony will cost me my life, or jeopardize the safety
of those whom I love more than my own life, it can only be given
before the transcendent truth understood as absolute worth. 8
Marital fidelity likewise rests upon a presence which transcends the
6 Marcel, G., "Theism and Personal Relationships", Cross Currents ,Vol. I, I (Fall 1950),
P·40 •
7 Creative Fidelity, pp. 166-7.
8 The Philosophy oj Existence, pp. 68 ff.
APPROACH TO GOD 59
presence of the human partners. The love between man and woman,
like all love, rests on the unconditional. Only when marriage is con-
ceived simply as a contract between a man and a woman, does it
become a triadic relation between the persons and the events they will
encounter. Conceived as a dialogue constituting a new reality - us -
marriage demands the unconditional. So conceived it is undertaken
and lived with the implicit understanding that no matter what diffi-
culties arise, they shall not negate our love. Even death need not, in
fact, act as a real condition on marriage. As marriage is actually being
lived by many couples death does not bring an end to the marriage but
functions as a supreme test of love. It is in the ability of a marriage
to transcend this ultimate obstacle that the unconditionality of its
love becomes manifest. To an empirical and legal view, the marriage
has ended at death. But to let such a verdict stand as final simply does
not do justice to the experience of many who have undergone this test.
The discussion so far might well give rise to two serious objections.
On the one hand it might be said that people actually do pledge them-
selves unconditionally on the most transitory grounds and, therefore,
one cannot argue from the unconditional element of the pledge to the
affirmation of an unconditional guarantor of the pledge. On the other
hand it will be said that my ability to affirm the reality of a trans-
cendent personal being does not make necessary the existence of such
a being.
If the objections are brought forth to show that the analyses have
not proven the existence of God, Marcel, it would seem, would be
inclined to agree. But he would be quick also to point out that the
objections posed as objections to a proof show a failure to rise to a level
of reflection necessary to understand this "fidelity to a superior
principle". If the promise or the free act generally is viewed in an
objective way, it will always appear contingent and fragile. There is no
objectively necessary connection between the free act and the terminus
toward which it is directed. The connection is one established by the
act of freedom itself and one that can be broken by freedom. The issue
which is in need of clarification in order to understand the free act is
not that it can fail- this is explained by the very meaning of the free
act itself - but that it can succeed in establishing a firm and lasting bond
with its "object". Thus to argue from the fact of failure in the free act
to a denial of the reality of the bond between the act and its result has
force only if I have already limited my view of necessary bond to the
objective order. A further point needs to be emphasized. When the
60 APPROACH TO GOD
believer is affirming the reality of God, he is not going from his pledge
or his faith to an external guarantor of the pledge. He is rather ap-
pealing to an ultimate strength which from within enables him to make
the pledge which he knows he could not make from himself alone. It
is in this sense that fidelity to God might be called simply faith; it lies
neither inside nor outside the realm where proof is meaningful but
finds its locus in the lived experience of trying to be faithful, and from
within this experience reveals the possibility of fidelity and serves as
its ultimate guarantor. 9 Just as my personal presence freely extended
to or withdrawn from another person can only be affirmed or denied,
so also my presence to a personal God by faith can only be affirmed or
denied, that is, I can either call upon him or refuse to do so. Faith,
like friendship, is real only if the boundaries between I and thou are
to some degree annihilated; hence the affirmation of the believer
cannot be grasped simply as an objective fact of primary reflection. It
is only on the condition that we rise above the attempt to prove and
to verify in a purely objective manner that the reality of the trans-
cendent God can be experienced by us, and therefore neither faith nor
fidelity can be understood to mean simply an intellectual assent. The
position of Marcel is not, however, that of Kant. For Kant the practical
use of reason, by which the existence of God is asserted, brings no
extension of our knowledge to the supra-sensible. For Marcel, on the
other hand, the affirmation of the reality of God is an extension of our
knowledge, by way of secondary reflection, to our ultimate recourse
and source of meaning.
While he thus finds it impossible to prove in an efficacious way "that
there is an unconditional reality to which all real pledges ultimately
refer", Marcel does illuminate a way to understand and to be faithful
to promises, in spite of all adversity, in the call upon an Absolute Thou
to whom the pledge is made:
... but what stands fast is the possibility of a faith deep enough to embrace an
invocation to the absolute Thou: if I give way, if my heart sinks, if my strength
fails me, do come and help me, do renew the fading life of my love! One must
add at once that there can't be on this level anything like an unfailing technique.
This invocation or prayer can by no means be considered as a kind of device, a
magical device intended to mend an imperfect state of things. 10
A consideration of the implications which follow from a refusal to

affirm the reality of God can make more intelligible the necessity of
9 Creative Fidelity, p. 167.
10 "Theism and Personal Relationships", p. 41.
APPROACH TO GOD 6I
this affirmation. The result of the denial of the transcendent personal
presence is that the ego becomes the creator of values. The "death of
God" gives rise to the cult of the superman, and history attests to the
social and political consequences of this false exaltation of the "liber-
ated" man. From the moment in which man poses himself as absolute,
as free from all reference to a higher order, he destroys himself through
the idolatry of the class or the race.!1
Faith considered as fidelity to God cannot be defined any more than
can the intersubjective nexus between human persons, because in
neither case are we dealing with an object with boundaries sufficiently
identifiable to allow definition. Like my presence to another thou,
faith in the absolute thou is not a given, but a creative way of being.
Unlike a simple "will to believe", however, faith entails the full
exercise and fulfillment of both intellect and will as these facets of our
freedom have been traditionally distinguished. Also unlike a "will to
believe", faith, as Marcel understands the act, is not merely a sub-
jective or psychological state of the ego. Far from being primarily
centered on the ego, the act of faith is a lived experience that the center
of my life is not in me or even of the same order of being as my person.
This last statement will be made more clear by a consideration of
another approach to God, a consideration of what Marcel over a period
of forty years has variously referred to as "the need for transcendence",
"ontological exigence" and "metaphysical unrest".
A certain lack of satisfaction with his relation to reality has always
been one of the marks of the philosopher. In the Journal, Marcel goes
farther and says that a person can be a metaphysician only to the
extent that his position in relation to the real appears to him as
fundamentally unacceptable.!2 This dissatisfaction which opens us to
the possibility of a fuller response to being is not just any dissatisfaction.
The phrase is used to designate a particular experience which must be
carefully distinguished from other forms of dissatisfaction if its unique
force is to be allowed to appear.
It goes almost without saying that the unrest in question arises from
a spiritual need and hence cannot be satisfied by or be directed toward
the acquisition of objects. Nor can it be identified with the related but
"more widespread inner moral need, felt by men of good will, to seek
peace and ensue it ... "13 Like this moral need, it is a need for involve-
11 Marcel, G., Problematic Man, translated by Brian Thompson, Herder and Herder, N. Y.,
1967, pp. 53-4·
12 p.288.
13 The Mystery of Being, I, 21.
62 APPROACH TO GOD
ment, but, unlike the moral need, it is not directed toward the self, but
toward being: " ... the metaphysician is like a sick person who is trying
to find a 'position'. The difficulty obviously consists in identifying the
center in relation to which this 'position' is to be defined".14 The
failure to be in this position, to continue the metaphor, manifests
itself in two ways. One of these can be indicated by the term anxiety
and is characterized by its paralyzing effect. This kind of unrest leads us
nowhere, because it stifles all affirmation; it too is directed inwardly
upon the self.
The unrest with which we are here concerned arises from the general
human condition. It arises from the fact that I as person am different
from all that can be called thing or object in that my human person as
such is incomplete and always dependent upon the other tor its very
constitution as a person. This openness which constitutes me as person
lies in the deepest ontological reaches of myself and if I insist upon
looking inward at myself in order to find my position the difficulty of
making a true discovery amounts to an impossibility. Consequently
the need for fidelity in finding my position is intimately linked with the
need for transcendence; " ... metapysical uneasiness can be interpreted
in terms of the refusal to make an abdication, the object being precisely
that before which I abdicate".1 5 The temptation to view myself as an
object, even as the central object of the universe; is a danger that is
never far away. There is a kind of curiosity which would like to look
in upon the self and see the whole movement of the universe from a
safe hiding place. Rather than such a curiosity, metaphysical unrest
which involves my whole person is a "kind of appetite - the appetite
for being. It aims at the possession of being by means of thought" .16
The metaphor of an appetite does lead us to direct our investigation
outward away from myself. But even this is insufficient. Our concern
is with the transcendence upon which the appetite fastens. Here
Marcel's other term to designate the disquietude he is attempting to
clarify, "the exigence of being", may be of use. By this term Marcel
means more than a simple need for being; he suggests that the German
word Forderung brings out more clearly the note of demand or challenge
which he wishes to indicate.
We are obviously here at the center of our question. We need to
find some way to clarify the meaning of transcendence as Marcel is
14 Journal, p. 290.
15 Ibid., p. 292.
18 Ibid., p. 288.
APPROACH TO GOD
using the term, and most importantly to ask why and in what ways
transcendence can present itself as a demand upon us.
The transcendent with which we are here concerned cannot be
transcendent in the way in which the Kantian thing-in-itself is trans-
cendent, that is, in the sense of being beyond all experience. To speak
of what transcends all experience is for Marcel to speak of nothing. The
transcendent, even in its transcendence, must be in some way within
the pale of experience even though it is not comprehended by objective
thought. 17 It is a transcendence which, if demanded, is demanded by
the lived experience of being the one who I am. Hence it is not some
vague notion of transcendence, but a transcendent someone in the
presence of whom I am person. Even in his early work, but much more
explicitly in his later writings, Marcel is talking about the transcendent
God of the believer. This reference to the God of the believer is not a
mere leap to the position where we may wish to arrive. The case is
rather that in the life of the believer there occurs an acceptance of an
understanding which does not initially cut off the search in which we
are engaged. Whether the acceptance of the believer is justified or not
and whether I myself can reach such a position are questions still to
be answered. The believer is in the position of claiming an experience
of the transcendent person; the searcher is at best in the position to
feel a need, perhaps an urgent need for such transcendence. And just
as the aridity, hollowness and boredom arising from the treatment of
personal relationships as functions can lead us to the recognition of a
need for a non-objective approach to persons, so it can happen that in
the fruitless attempt to deny the reality of God or in the equally
fruitless attempt to conceive of him as some supreme object, we can
be led to an affirmation of the absolute personal presence.
Perhaps we have grounds for thinking that it is by becoming conscious of the
destruction and chaos which all nihilism inevitably engenders that the human
being can awaken, or rather reawaken, to consciousness of Being in its fullness. IS
This position needs to be examined more fully. What is meant here
reaches far beyond the notion that practical or even theoretical con-
siderations force us to affirm an ultimate principle of being and order.
Whatever may be the need to affirm the existence of God, it is always
dependent upon my choosing to affirm and is thus quite different from
the conclusion to an argument. Our relations to one another are here
again instructive. The other person as person (for example as friend
17 The Mystery of Being, I, 57.
APPROACH TO GOD
or spouse) is simply not present in a personally meaningful way except

on the condition that I affirm his presence. If the will toward recog-
nition and acceptance presents itself as a condition for meaningful
discourse on the level of inter-human relations there is perhaps reason
to investigate whether a similar openness founded on a will toward
fullness beyond his own order of existence is not a necessary condition
for man's discourse with or about God. The fact that man is able to
deny any need for a fullness beyond his own order - an ability paral-
leled on the physical level by the ever-present possibility of suicide -
forces the person reflecting seriously on this question to recognize that
the necessary presence of a higher order can be thought of only as an
appeal.
The "necessity" of this appeal appears in different ways and for
different reasons. For the one who is well aware of his limitations but
is seeking after a fullness, the appeal presents itself as a need for
transcendence in order that he may continue to believe in his own
ongoing relevance. The relevance here is of an ontological order and has
nothing to do with whether or not he can continue to carry out the
demands of a practical life, even a practical moral life. Searching for
experiences that can awaken our contemporary consciousness to the
necessity of the appeal to transcendence, Marcel, in a lecture entitled
"The Social in the Era of Technology", directs our attention to the
person who is utterly defenseless in the face of the forces which
surround him. In the presence of human frailty which is at once
inviolable and of itself completely defenseless we have a framework in
which "we can best understand 'transcendence' ".1 9 Our "advanced
societies" give us ample instances of such frailty as well as a growing
awareness on the part of some persons to respect and to care for those
in need. It cannot be doubted that the attempt to succor the defenseless
is very often initiated and carried on by persons who would deny any
place for religion in human life and any influence of religious values on
their actions. This lack does not negate the admirable quality of their
efforts but neither does the standard humanistic justification throw
any light upon the troublesome questions of the source of human
worth and the rightness of a universal bond among men. In the face
of a regime which would deny the universality of the human bond,
humanism itself is an appeal; it is, unfortunately, an appeal which
does not carry the questioning beyond the uncritical acceptance of the
human condition.
19 In Searchings, Newman Press, N. Y., 1967, p. 50.
APPROACH TO GOD 65
The necessity of the appeal to an order of truth beyond all particular
jUdgments is present even in the nihilist or the man of absurdity, who
no less than the believer lives his life on a background of truth. It is
only this background of truth which enables him to affirm that man
leads to nothing or that life is ultimately absurd. The affirmation of a
radical absurdity is, at the same time that it denies meaning, an
affirmation of the meaningfulness of the denial. Moreover, it is an
affirmation which no less than the positive affirmation of the believer
can find no way to justify itself. In either case, the ultimate affirma-
tion, or rather I who frame it, remains dumb before the further question
"why make the affirmation?" The dumb silence with which conscious-
ness must face this question beyond its own ultimate and unavoidable
affirmation, makes it plain why Marcel refers to the need for tran-
scendence as an appeal. The affirmation of the reality of the transcen-
dent God arises, in the last analysis, from the refusal to accept the
claim of meaninglessness which is open to us and which seems even
to be thrust upon us by our condition. Considered as the rejection of
the will to negate, Marcel's understanding of being assumes its full
dimensions:
... being is what withstands - or what would withstand - an exhaustive analysis
bearing on the data of experience and aiming to reduce them step by step to
elements increasingly devoid of intrinsic or significant value. 20
For the believer the reality of the transcendent is the undeniable re-
sponse to the urgent appeal of his own inmost being, the reality of
which can neither be denied nor realized as self-sufficient.
To all of this the non-believer might answer that on the strictly
intellectual level the argument is without force and can even be inter-
preted as a cowardly refusal to face up our to radically absurd reality.
This objection, however, is not really telling against the position out-
lined by Marcel because the experience of the need for transcendence is
a lived experience, and the affirmation of the absolute is a lived
response to this need which only later is articulated in thought and
word. Neither the need nor the appeal arises purely on the level of
primary reflection where argumentation takes place.
What appears as cowardice (for example, the cowardice of Sartre's
"serious man") is, in fact, the furthermost reach of the central pheno-
menological and existential insight into man as an ecstasis. Man is
presence to "', not only in being in-the-world, but in the ultimate
roots of his conscious life. In Marcel we have an existentialism that is
20 The PhilosoPhy of Existence, p. 5.
66 APPROACH TO GOD
courageous enough to go all the way into an existential ontology not

only of the individual man but, more importantly, of the human
condition. It is just because this existentialism is courageous enough
to go all the way, and does not hesitate to acknowledge the ecstasis
which is human facticity itself, that it must rest upon a fundamental
acceptance of reality which is expressed by an ontological humility.
To the self-sufficient and, in the last analysis, radically unexistential
proponents of man's absurdity this humility must appear as a
cowardly backing down from responsibility. Yet if man is truly ex-
istential even in his facticity, it is the refusal to acknowledge the
Transcendent Other which vainly tries in a timid foreclosure of inquiry
to find a place of security within the self or within the human condition.
It is the position of the believer that manifests the courage to refuse to
step back from the abyss opened by our self-questioning.
The refusal to affirm the need for transcendence, and the accompa-
nying claim to self-sufficiency, is most manifest in the militant atheist
but is present, though perhaps for the most part unarticulated, in the
non-believer as such. The discussion here, of course, is not concerned
with the person who is simply indifferent to religious values but with
the non-believer, that is, the man who feels happily or sadly that our
human experience makes impossible, or at least unlikely, the existence
of the God of the believer. The man who is indifferent to religious values
is simply not yet conscious in regard to the matter under discussion.
The position of the true non-believer might be expressed in some such
fashion as this: the total complex of my experiences as man does not
make it possible for me to accept an all-powerful and providential
God; to do so would be to deny what has been given to me by experience,
by science, and so on. But let us note that the experiences of the non-
believer are not fundamentally different from the experiences of the
believer. Both have experienced evil. Both have experienced the feeling
of incompatibility between good and evil. Both have experienced a
lack of order or a certain absurdity in the human condition. What
separates the believer and the non-believer is not a difference in
experience, but a difference in the meaning seen in the experience
common to both.
The interpretation of the non-believer is based upon a judgment of
incompatibility between his experiences and the existence of a powerful
and provident God. The believer, on the other hand, cannot conceive
of any incompatibility between God and experience. To pose the
question of the existence of God in terms of compatibility is, for the
APPROACH TO GOD
believer, to treat God as a structure of being, even though a necessary

and primary structure to whom, if he exists, all else must conform. So
to conceive of God is for the believer to reduce God to something less
than the absolute. For the believer God is precisely he who is beyond
all structure, beyond all discussion of compatibility or incompatibility .
... the more we take notice of the specific character which the affirmation of God
presents - above all the fact that it aims at a transcendental reality - the more
we have to realize that no fact of any kind, no objective structure, can ever be
placed on a level with this reality and exclude it. 21
However paradoxical it may sound, it is the transcendent character

of God which at once makes necessary the faith of the believer and
which justifies this faith. To the believer this is already evident, and
his task, like that of Anselm, is to seek understanding for his faith. For
the one who is searching (and even the believer is in large part an un-
believer in search of belief) it is not faith seeking understanding which
characterizes his effort, but the reverse of this, intellectus quaerens
fidem. For the consciousness which is not caught up in the Cartesian
pretense of seeing itself as transparent to itself, the act of understanding
as it tries to discover its own possibilities as understanding, is led
inevitably to the position where "understanding becomes being under-
stood", that is, being held up by what is radically other than itself and
beyond all need for establishment. 22
Because of his adherence to a transcendence which establishes the
meaning of consciousness itself, the world of the believer is radically
different from the world of the non-believer, however similar or identi-
cal their actions might appear. The "ontological weight" which each
attributes to an action is not the same, and when one argues for or
against religion solely from the objective or historical actions of be-
lievers or non-believers he fails to bring the question to its true locus. 23
At the basis of the denial, as well as of the affirmation of a trans-
objective personal presence, lies a free judgment regarding the nature
of human consciousness. The act of fidelity which is faith in God has
its counterpart in the free refusal to believe on the part of the non-
believer. One of the implications embodied in the free nature of the
21 Marcel, G., "Contemporary Atheism and the Religious Mind", Philosophy Today, IV,
4/4 (Winter 1960), p. 254.
22 See Van der Leeuw, G., Religion in Essence and Manifestation, Harper Torchbooks,
N. Y., 1963, Vol. II, p. 684. German original published 1933.
23 Cf. Problematic Man, pp. 34 ff. See also The Existential Background of Human Dignity,
P.74. In this connection one might wonder, for example, whether Sartre's announcement
that "God is dead" is not to be radically distinguished from the verbally similar statement
of Nietzsche.
68 APPROACH TO GOD
act of belief is that the believer possesses the sole right to say what
shall be called God; anyone wishing to study his God must begin by
asking him what he believes. 24
In a large part of western culture, and eastern as well, the religious
affirmation of God cannot be separated from a certain total involvement
of my person, because the God of the believer is always thou beyond
all comparison with or limitation by any other. Just as to love is to
refuse to compare, so to believe is to refuse to call into question. The
position of the non-believer is expressed by I do not believe that"., but
the believer is living on the level of I believe in "" Unlike both the
atheist and the traditional theologian or philosopher who would
demonstrate the existence of God, the man of faith looks not to an
ultimate and necessary metaphysical that, but to an absolute Thou
who can only be approached by invocation and testimony. In this
sense Kierkegaard rightly saw our approach to God as a leap into the
abyss of faith.
Once we have seen the utter transcendence of the God affirmed by
the believer, it becomes easier to see why his hope is an absolute hope.
When hope is directed to an Absolute Thou, there is no longer any
possibility of its being vain. Hope, thus directed, is not an expectation
of what will be, but a creative testimony to Thou who art Absolute.
The hope of the believer is absolute because it is not directed towards
an hypothesis, but is the lived experience of total dependence upon
Thou who cannot fail me. Such a hope must often appear childish and
groundless to one who does not share it, because it puts itself beyond
criticism simply by repudiating in advance all and every standard of
criticism. This, however, is the meaning of the creative character of
hope; and, when directed to an absolute who is in no sense an hypothe-
sis, hope can remain hope only in its rising above every objective set
of circumstances which would challenge it: "". what characterizes it is
the very movement by which it challenges the evidence upon which men
claim to challenge it itself." 25 In hope, as always in mutual presence of
one person to another, it becomes impossible to draw definite ontologi-
cal boundaries between the persons and thereby also impossible to
separate discovery and creativity. The creativity of hope, however,
by which it refuses to despair in the face of adversity has nothing
whatever to do with the notion of productivity. This creativity of hope
rests rather in its response to an ultimate reality that makes legitimate
24 The Mystery oj Being, II, 4.
APPROACH TO GOD 69.
the refusal to accept experience as something merely given and able
to be judged in a final way according to some limited set of canons.
The truth is much more that hope is engaged in the weaving of experience now
in process, or in other words in an adventure now going forward. This does not
run counter to an authentic empiricism but to a certain dogmatism which, while
claiming to be experience, fundamentally misunderstands nature, just as a cult
of the scientific may stand in the way of living science in its creative develop-
ment. 26
Hope properly understood does not run counter to an authentic

empiricism, because its creativity is also a receptivity. The receptivity
which is a dimension of all human creativity, and likewise of hope,
causes Marcel to "resolutely reject" any idealistic interpretation. The
interweaving of creativity and receptivity in all genuine human ex-
perience also underlies Marcel's insistence that freedom and grace can
be understood only if taken together. Man is free to testify or refuse
to testify, to love or to bear false witness, but it is grace in the sense
of an order of being that is gratuitously opened to man which justifies
faith and hope (in both our fellow men and in God) and which likewise
makes it possible for witness to be false.
The receptive character of hope and of faith as well will be made
more clear if we carry the earlier analysis of person yet a bit further.
To the question who am I, various answer can be given. Even when the
question is answered by myself or my personal friends, the I can become
he or it. At their best, human relationships are always subject to
disintegration because I or thou can freely refuse to allow the presence
of the other.
Perhaps my soul would only be the ego of the psychologists, which is really
only a him, were I not to converse about it with God, were it not involved
and vitally interested in this conversation .... If I am asked why my soul can
only become itself when in relation to God, and when confronted with God, I
cannot at present see any means of formulating an abstract answer which will
satisfy me. But I can at least say this (though it needs elucidating and sifting):
My soul is always a thou for God; for God it is always confounded with the sub-
ject who invokes him. 27
The hesitant note in this entry of the Journal is evident. Although

Marcel's later reflection does not yield an abstract answer to the
question, it does remove for him the note of hesitation.
In order to understand the meaning of a human relationship such as
love or friendship it is necessary to see the relationship as a life. It is
26 Ibid., p. 52.
27 Jou1'nal, p. 200.
70 APPROACH TO GOD
something that has a beginning, can be fostered, nurtured, hurt or

even killed. Our attention at this point must be upon the destiny of
such a relationship.
When I have placed my confidence in another by giving myself in
friendship or love, two possibilities are present; either the friendship
can endure and grow, or it can fail for some reason: boredom, jealousy,
weaknesses of various kinds. These possibilities, of course, represent the
extremes of a continuous range of intermediate possibilities of varying
degrees of fulfillment or failure. Should the love and respect come to
an end, the conditional character of the commitment becomes obvious.
Either you to whom I have appealed have failed me, or I have failed
you. We are not, of course, at present concerned with any moral failure,
but with an attempt to uncover the structure of the relationship. But
what of the love that does not fail? The inherent possibility of failure
in all of my efforts - which is only too evident if I reflect honestly on
myself - puts me under the necessity of either looking beyond the
human order or of denying any lasting meaning to love.
To choose the latter alternative and deny any lasting meaning to
the bond between men on the basis that this bond has often been found
weak is to look at only one form of the experience of human community.
The example of those, whether religiously inclined or not, who have
sacrificed their lives for their fellow men, gives evidence that love is
indeed stronger than death. It is in this context of inter-personal
relationships that death assumes its true role as a trial or test of the
strength of the bond between men. When it is true and has reached its
furthermost possibilities, love is never able to accept death as a de-
struction of the bond with the beloved. "I should be inclined to say that
this non-acceptance, (or rather the complementary requirement that
love be eternal), in itself implies the assurance of a correspondence in
the ultimate order of things, or since this is perhaps still too objective
a manner of speaking, the implication that Thou wilt not disappoint
us." 28
We are now perhaps in a better position to give an answer to the
question who am I, or, more properly, to the question who are we who
can ask who we are. Formulated in this way the question emphasizes
the radical ontological lack of self-sufficiency in the human condition
itself. Not only am I a person only in the presence of another person,
but this mutually constituted presence itself is wholly oriented toward
and dependent upon an absolute thou. It is not only I who must find
28 "Theism and Personal Relationships", p. 4I.
APPROACH TO GOD 71
my center beyond myself, but we as well. The fact that our center lies
beyond us changes the question into an appeal : "You alone really
know me and judge me; to doubt You is not to free myself but to anni-
hilate myself". 29
It is necessary to insist that this appeal is made by faith and is a
seeking of the whole self for its rightful center. It is not the rationalistic
search for an ultimate hypothesis which can function as an answer to
my problem. Even if such an absolute answer were to be found, it
would be only a him and could not be the absolute recourse toward
whom my invocation rises. My appeal is to Thou, and the appeal is
certain of response; " ... if I manage to adopt the inner attitude which
corresponds to the affirmation of the primacy of being, I give grace its
chance, that is, I put myself in position to receive it .... " 30
The freedom which makes it possible to have faith at the same time
makes it possible for me to refuse to believe and to silence the inner
need for being: " ... since the world of testimony is that of freedom,
it is also one in which one can refuse to testify, or else in which one
can be a false witness, etc., that is, a world in which there can be sin."3l
If Marcel's analysis of faith is correct, it is clear that God must "resist
the proud", because the proud man has put himself in a position in
which he is unable to receive. He is not existing in that openness in
which the fullness of truth is present, and for this reason the question
of pride is more fundamentally a metaphysical issue than a moral issue.
The possibility of sin to which Marcel here refers is not unlike what
Heidegger calls "the forgetfulness of Being". The man who forgets
Being is not aware of his forgetfulness because it consists precisely in
being ever more fully concerned with beings. In like manner, the person
who is forgetful of the ground of his own fidelities is unaware of his
infidelity to this ground because he is so absorbed in his finite and
conditional affairs.
To the non-believer, of course, the testimony of the believer appears
to rest upon some evidence which the believer thinks, probably
mistakenly, that he possessses. But this way of thinking of the question
entails a severe misrepresentation of the meaning of the testimony
which is faith because it fails to see, and in fact is unable to see, that
the one to whom the witness is given is not outside of the one witnessing.
This is not to say that there is no fundamental difference between God
30 Problematic Man, p. 44.
31 The Mystery of Being, II, 148; see also the commentary by Troisfontaines, Op. cit., I,
98.
72 APPROACH TO GOD
and man, and thus to slide into pantheism. But to speak of being inside
or outside of the absolute Thou is again to conceive of God as a structure
in some way comparable to myself or to the objective structure of the
world. Such a God in no way renders intelligible the unconditional
dimension of our fidelity. It is just because we are persons subject to
despair, betrayal and failure, and yet capable of an unconditional
fidelity that we must appeal to the recourse who is utterly beyond and
yet totally present. To be lasting, our fidelity must be dialectical -
true at one and the same time to our daily interhuman experiences and
to their fullest reaches in Thou who presently makes them possible. The
failure of the deism of classical empirical philosophy is that it does not
reach the unconditional. The failure of Royce and of idealism generally
is a failure to differentiate adequately between the all-knower and our
human knowing and thus to fail to keep hold of the finite.
What, then, does the transcendence of God mean? It certainly does
not mean, as we have already noted, passing beyond all possibility of
human experience. According to Marcel, we do experience a tran-
scendent God, but only by way of faith and hope.
The meaning of the divine transcendence, it would seem, is indicated
by the fact that the Absolute Thou is radically and totally present. If
our existence is necessarily etre-au-monde, the reality of the trans-
cendent God is to be unable to be etre-au-monde, that is to be on a level
beyond all structure and all dependence. If man's radical openness is
revealed in his searching for a response to the question who am I, God
is He who cannot ask who am I because there is no context beyond
himself in which the question might be posed. This transcendence of
every context renders all speech about God inadequate. When Marcel
writes, "When we speak of God it is not of God that we speak ... "32,
he is not in any sense endorsing the position of the agnostic. He is
rather protesting that our approach to God must not and cannot be to
speak about God. We can only invoke him as our origin, our goal and
our Ultimate Recourse.
as Creative Fidelity, p. 36.

CHAPTER V
APPRAISAL OF THE TRADITIONAL PROOFS
Marcel speaks often of the traditional proofs of the existence of God.

The concrete orientation of his philosophy, however, and his phenome-
nological approach to the study of reality do not prompt him to discuss
in detail the internal structure of the arguments or frequently even to
specify which expressions of the arguments he has in mind. His
primary concern is to understand the relation of the individual believer
to God, that is, to clarify the question who I am or who we are in a life
which affirms the necessary presence and overriding importance of
God; his appraisal of the traditional proofs is made in the light of this
primary concern. Therefore, when he considers the proofs, the question
uppermost in his mind is not whether the proofs are logically valid,
but whether they are the necessary or sufficient condition which makes
meaningful the affirmation of the believer. However, in asking the
question in this fashion, Marcel clearly does not wish to place the
discussion on the subjective or the psychological level; he is as much
concerned with the metaphysical or ontological questions involved in
affirming the existence of God as is one who wishes to demonstrate
that God exists.
However disconcerting Marcel's approach to this issue may be to
one trained in a more systematic philosophy, his willingness to consider
the proofs does open the door for discussion. If there is to be any
attempt to achieve a degree of mutual understanding between Marcel
and a tradition which maintains the efficacy of such proofs, it would
seem reasonable to explore this opening made by Marcel.
In this chapter, therefore, we shall consider Marcel's appraisal of the
traditional proofs, starting, as he does, with a consideration of what
it might mean to prove the existence of God. Before proceeding into
the discussion it may be well to eliminate several possible points of
confusion.
74 APPRAISAL OF THE TRADITIONAL PROOFS
One possible source of confusion is the technical meaning given to

the term "existence" by Marcel and by the phenomenological existen-
tialists as a group. If existence is taken to indicate the open structure
by which a subject has his center outside himself, Marcel would deny
the existence of God and say that God does not exist, but is. Over-
looking for the sake of discussion this technical meaning for the word,
Marcel does speak of the existence of God. In doing so, he is using the
terminology of ordinary language and means simply to ask whether
the reality of God can or cannot be truly and meaningfully affirmed.
To seek a way to affirm the reality of God, whether as a conclusion to
a demonstration or by some other mode of reflective thought, is not,
of course, to seek to explain or define the divine reality. For Marcel,
as for many others, it is utterly impossible to comprehend the essence
of God; the concern is rather to study the mode and perhaps the
necessity of man's affirmation of God's reality.
Confusion has arisen from another source; some critics have suggested
that Marcel does not credit man with the ability to know with certainty
that God exists. Marcel has never affirmed, however, that the ex-
istence of God "cannot be certainly known by the natural light of
human reason through created things". His dissatisfaction with all
demonstrations of the existence of God does not imply that the ex-
istence of God cannot be known with certainty but rather that these
demonstrations are not, in fact, the route by which the believer
reaches the certainty of God's existence. In truth, the whole of his
work is nothing less than a repeated attempt to affirm and elucidate
the necessity and the value of our discovery of the abiding Presence of
God.
"What in the final analysis does it mean to prove something?"!
If we consider the phenomenon of proving in contrast to the strictly
logical notion called proof, to prove means to cause another to recognize
that once he has admitted the truth of a certain position or set of
propositions he must also admit some other proposition which is
distinct from the earlier ones only in appearance. In other words, from
a phenomenological point of view to prove must always mean to prove
to another, even though the other might be myself as not yet having
seen the matter to be proven. Consequently, when proving is considered
as a kind of activity of the mind it always implies the presence of
another and is possible, further, only on the basis of a two-fold re-
lationship between one who is attempting to prove something and the
\ C1'8ativ8 Fidelity, p. 175
APPRAISAL OF THE TRADITIONAL PROOFS 75
one to whom the proof is offered. There must be, first of all, some
minimum proposition or set of propositions upon which both can agree
and which can act as a starting point for the proof. In addition, the
notion of proving to implies that I who offer the proof not only share
the field of vision of you to whom I propose the proof, but that beyond
your field of vision I have a view to which I wish to lead you.
This claim to a larger field of vision need not imply also a claim to a
stronger intelligence or a more mature vision; it is based upon an
ontological unity, or what appears at least to be an ontological unity,
between the earlier proposition or set of propositions and the latter
proposition - for example, that God exists, or that I must affirm the
reality of God. In other words, an analysis of the phenomenon of
proving to does not obliterate the need for logical validity in passing
from one proposition to another. Furthermore, if the proof is presented
as an objective proof, this logical validity is understood to be universal
in that it stands good for all rational beings.
Contrary to this claim to universality, however, stands the historical
record. As often as not, men have not made the passage from their
experience and reflection to the affirmation of God's existence, even
when confronted with proofs that appeared irrefutable to the prover.
In asking himself why there should be this scandal, Marcel draws
attention to several possible reasons why the proofs are not con-
vincing. 2 One might say that the failure springs from a hidden fallacy
in the proof itself which, if it could be exposed once and for all, would
reveal not only the inadequacy of the proof but quite possibly also the
basis of the inadequacy in the ambiguity of language which gave
plausibility to the argument. This position seems hardly tenable,
however, because the history of philosophy presents us with repeated
rejections followed by repeated attempts to rehabilitate the ancient
proofs of natural theology. The historical fact that numerous able
thinkers have rejected and equally able and numerous thinkers have
accepted the proofs, gives one every reason to believe that "at a
certain level of philosophical reflection, it is just as impossible to
declare the classical proofs adequate or completely adequate, as it is
to reject them out of hand, the way we discard already postmarked
stamps."3 Marcel suggests further that we cannot dispose of those
thinkers who in the past have accepted the proofs by saying they were
not so far advanced on the way of reason as we are today. To him it
a Ibid., pp. I77-8.
3 Ibid., p. I78.
seems equally probable that there was some essential force in the
arguments of these thinkers which failed to pass completely into the
formulae by which the arguments are expressed. 4 A further con-
sideration of why the arguments lack efficacy might help to clarify the
meaning of this last statement.
A second, logically possible, explanation of why the proofs are not
convincing is that they have come up against a bad will, that is, a
determined resistance not to perceive the force of the argument. If
the explanation stops at this point, it is fruitless because it cuts off all
discussion and ambiguous because what appears as ill will is discovered
merely as an opposition to the will of the demonstrator to lead the
other to the conclusion of the proof. The unbeliever's will not to follow
through with the proof to the affirmation of the reality of God could
be based on his experience of evil and suffering, an experience which
he sees as incompatible with what he understands by the name God.
Thus it would appear to him as an act of bad faith, an act of betrayal
of experience, if he were to affirm the reality of God. In The Mystery
01 Being (II, 196) Marcel sees Albert Camus as one person who denies
the reality of God because the suffering of innocent children appears
to be genuinely incompatible with the existence of a provident God.
In this connection it does not seem incorrect to interpret the finite-
infinite God of certain American philosophers as an attempt to save
both God and experience.
In another form the unwillingness on the part of the non-believer
to follow the lead of the proof might be, in fact, a refusal to admit that
there is any limitation on his own being. Thus, the Sovereign Good
whose existence the demonstration was to establish, looks like an evil
to the non-believer; it appears as the negation of his own sovereign
being. In this case the refusal to follow the lead of the proof includes
in its meaning the will that God not exist, because if he did exist, I
would not be independent of him. Expressed in the language of classical
natural theology, if God is universal and total cause, how can there be
any efficacy to human freedom?
Here we get to the very center of Marcel's criticism of the whole
attempt to give a rational proof for the existence of God. If the God
of the proof appears as the very denial of the chief good which the non-
believer affirms, the opposition between believer and non-believer
concerns not the means but the end. The proof, however, is presented
as a means to an end which is recognized as good prior to the proof.
4 Ibid.
This disagreement as to the identity of the ultimate good shows that
all proof in this area is in reality inseparable from a more fundamental
acceptance of the sovereign goodness of God (goodness here understood
in the broadest possible sense). It can happen, even for one who under-
stands the term God to connote Sovereign Perfection, that the existence
of this good becomes open to doubt and the affirmation of this ex-
istence put into parentheses until further experience or reflection can
be brought to bear on the issue. When this occurs, the task of the proof
is precisely to remove the parantheses. But if there are no parentheses
to remove, that is if the end toward which the proof is directed is not
truly recognized as something to be desired, the proof necessarily
appears to lack force. If one's own freedom or the freedom of man in
general as it is present to experience is chosen as the sovereign good,
there is neither possibility of proving, nor any point in asking about
the existence of God.
From these considerations, it becomes clear that no logical proof
stands by itself in the phenomenon of proving to someone. The most
significant phase of proving to someone, and no doubt often the most
difficult, is the discovery of a point of departure which is acceptable
to both parties and which directs the effort toward a goal which is
mutually desirable. "Proof is a phase of an inner eristic, and is always
subordinate to an unvarying condition, or more precisely, to a system
of values which cannot be questioned." 5 The fact that the proof is a
moment within an interior dialectic does not mean that it is purely
SUbjective. The validity of the proof has a certain universality, that is,
it is effective universally on the condition that it be proposed within
a tradition which does not separate the proof from the simultaneous
acceptance of a certain set of values. This acceptance of a particular
and unquestioned set of values is not a part of the proof but precedes
it and may well be one essential ingredient which did not pass complete-
ly into the formulae of the traditional arguments.
The recognition that the efficacy of the proofs is an efficacy within
a particular tradition or framework of values forces the recognition
of its counterpart, namely, that the proofs are least effective just when
there would seem to be the greatest need for a way to the divine
reality. When there is no acceptance or even awareness of the end
posited by the proofs, they appear either as a series of word-games or
as presuming the reality of the God to whom they pretend to lead. Thus
far from being a substitute for belief or a way to belief, the proofs in
& Ibid., p. 179.
a very profound sense, that is in their very roots, presuppose belief in

the acceptability of a value system without which the proofs would
lose even their logical validity.6 This is why Marcel feels the proofs can
only be a confirmation of what has been given to us in some other
fashion; they can only serve to reaffirm the conformity between faith
and what one has conceived as the demands of reason.
Marcel does not question this confirmatory value of the proofs, nor
does he doubt that it is possible to give logically valid demonstrations
of God's existence. However, the whole question of demonstrating the
existence of God, whatever its value for the completion of a systematic
philosophy, lies outside of the task he has set for himself. This task
is the reflective examination of the mystery of man's actual approach to
God, that is, the approach of the believer, or the person who is searching
to know whether he must become a believer in order to be true to
himself .
... in the order which matters to us - that of faith - there can be testimony only
of the living God. The God with whom theologians of the traditional type are
most frequently concerned, the God whose existence they claim to demonstrate
to us, cannot for all that be the occasion of any testimony; and to that extent one
might be tempted to say that He cannot concern the believer as such. That God,
who is in fact the God whom Pascal calls the philosophers' God, stands in a
dimension which is not and cannot be that of faith [emphasis added].7
From the foregoing, it is clear that in Marcel's opinion the proofs for
the existence of God can neither help us grasp the significance of the
I believe of the believer nor be effectively used as an apologetic to lead
the non-believer to affirm God's reality. Their level of operation, it
would seem, is the same as that of the atheist who would attempt to
demonstrate the non-existence of God. To pose the religious question
on this level appears quite unsatisfactory to Marcel because it does
not illuminate the actual experience of either the believer or the non-
believer. A much more meaningful way to approach the study of the
religious reality open to man would be to begin with the fact that
intelligent men have turned and committed themselves to living a
life of faith. In this regard, he finds the need to testify felt by men like
Maritain and Claudel far more significant for man's attempt to ask
about the reality of God than the repeated attempts to demonstrate
his existence.
6 Much of the current effort to advance philosophical theology beyond the "Death of God"
relies heavily upon the search for a new set of experienced values which could provide a
beginning other than that used by the classical authors. Cf., for example, the first essay in
Schubert M. Ogden's The Reality of God and other Essays, Harper and Row, New York, 1963.
7 The Mystery of Being, II, 147.
As in all philosophical questioning, the reflective understanding of
the approach to God cannot be separated from the particular condi-
tions in which the need for the approach arises, even though the need
may be universal. The disturbing lack of persuasive power of the
demonstrations lies to a large extent in their failure, and in fact their
inability, to take note of the differences in the particular situations
of those to whom they are offered. These differences of intellectual
vision, emotional timber, breadth of experience and especially value
commitments are, in fact, defining of the individual person and are
therefore an indispensable background deeply affecting any further
vision or commitment. The justification for phenomenological de-
scription, whether it is brought to bear on the need itself, or on the
notion of proving, lies in its ability to regain a hold on the concrete
situation in which the person is involved. To be accurate, therefore,
we should speak not of the phenomenological approach, but of many
phenomenological approaches, taking their points of origin from
various profound human involvements. Whereas a phenomenological
view would show that proving the existence of God can only mean a
communication of myself to another individual, the rational proof
moves on an abstract level and presents itself for the consideration of
man in general, "a pure fiction invented by a particular form of
rationalism". 8
This positing of a homo naturalis as if it were some trans-historical
invariable appears to Marcel as a grave error and one which forces a
philosopher who adopts such a notion to become "isolated in a zone of
a false or at least indifferent abstraction. "9 This statement need not
be taken as a denial that there is a human reality specifically the same
in all men, and explicit statements elsewhere by Marcel as well as the
general thrust of his thought toward community make impossible
such an interpretation. The statement is, however, a recognition that
any fruitful study of the relation of man to God, as well as any attempt
to nurture that relation, must be aware of the uniqueness of the in-
dividual which arises from his acts of fidelity, and which in the course
of a life constitutes a philosophically significant difference not only
between the believer and the non-believer but also between the non-
believer who is ignorant of any transcending religious experience and
a man who has set himself against the acceptance of any religion.
For a fruitful discussion of the reality of God in our time, which one
8 Homo Viator, p. 139. Cf. also The Existential Background of Human Experience, pp. 16-17.
author has called "the atheistic age", there must be a very real and
profound realization that homo naturalis is first of all homo historicus.
Only with this realization is it possible to see that a person's needs and
aspirations arise from within the particular epoch in which he lives and
that any personal fulfillment must be in relation to these needs. Per-
haps even more important for the question at hand, it is possible to
see how man can become dislocated, that is, how man - this man, that
man, many groups of men - can no longer find a situation in which
they can make a meaningful response to the question who am I, even
though the question itself is one that cannot be stifled for long as is
evident by its world-wide resurgence in the youth of today.
Given the truth of this view, it is clear that natural man not only evolves, since
homo naturalis is chiefly homo historicus, but that he can also disintegrate; I
believe that this disintegration in large measure explains not the impossibility -
it would be inappropriate to use this word - but the relative ineffectiveness on
the apologetic level at least, of so-called rational theology .... In the final analysis,
it is because the unity of man has been shattered, because his world is broken -
that we confront this scandal of proofs which are logically irrefutable but which
in fact exhibit a lack of any persuasive power. 10
When people can no longer effectively ask the question of self-identity

in its ultimate reaches or cannot even experience any need or sense in
reaching for an ultimate question, they are living in what Marcel calls
a broken world, le monde casse. And since this break in the human
world is historically united with an over-confidence in the power of
objective knowledge and an excessive respect for all that can be grasped
or acquired, it seems highly unlikely to Marcel that the break can be
healed by a further dependence upon objective knowledge in the form
of a logical demonstration of the existence of a transcendent basis for
man's existence. When, as appears to be the case in some quarters
today, the will not to believe is, in fact, also a will that God should not
be, the proofs become totally ineffective. The foundation of such an
atheism, in spite of undeniably worthwhile social reform brought about
by its adherents, is not totally unlike the will-to-power described by
Nietzsche.
Perhaps the nearest point of contact between Marcel's approach to
God and a more traditional proof lies in his affinity with the so-called
ontological argument. In several of his writings Marcel explicitly
mentions his feeling of kinship with this approach. In what does the
similarity consist? On first thought it might appear that no two posi-
tions could be farther apart. Marcel is ever insisting upon the free
10 Ibid.
APPRAISAL OF THE TRADITIONAL PROOFS 8r
character of our acceptance of God whose reality can always be denied

and whose significance for man's religious life is not revealed in the
proofs. On the other hand, the argument of Anselm culminates in a God
whose existence is said to be so clearly demonstrated that we cannot
even conceive of him not to exist.
In the early part of the Journal (page 33) Marcel notes that although
he cannot accept the ontological argument as it has been proposed, it
does have the great merit of showing "that the existence of God
cannot possibibly be denied on empirical grounds". In this same entry
he notes: "At a deep level I am convinced that the argument is valid
and that it is only in its form that it cannot stand". These statements
are made against the background of Marcel's early understanding of
an existent, namely that which is spatially and temporally present to
consciousness. He proceeds to argue that the deeper level must center
upon the question of whether there can be essences that are not
existences, that is, essences that are not empirical.
It would seem, therefore, that the affinity lies at least in part in the
common realization that the affirmation of God's existence must arise
from an order which is other than the empirical order of objects. That
this other order is the order of the conceptual, as it appears to be for
Anselm, Marcel is not prepared to admit. Although he rejects the
Kantian distinction between phenomenon and numenon and holds for
an immediate awareness of other persons, the order of which Marcel is
thinking is more akin to the Kantian "realm of ends" than to the con-
ceptual order, inasmuch as it is an order which exists and is constituted
only by the free acceptance of another freedom. "Nevertheless, it is
here that traditional philosophy and the dialectic of affirmation as I
conceive it, meet. However, it must be stressed that this reflection,
however close to the ontological argument it may be, is directed on an I
believe which can be explicated only when construed in the form of I
believe in You, Who are my sole recourse." 11
Marcel would seem to be indicating in this last sentence a point of
difference between his approach and the ontological argument. If we
take note, however, of the setting of the ontological argument as it is
presented in the Proslogion of Anselm, a willingness to take the faith
of the believer as a significant and legitimate point of departure for
reflecting upon the reality of God is one of the deepest points of simi-
larity between Marcel and Anselm. It is the fact that he believes that
God is a being than which nothing greater can be conceived which
11 Ibid., p. 18z.
gives rise to the "proof" of Anselm. Karl Barth, in his study of Anselm,
rightly insists that the primary movement here is to understand that
God is as we believe. The proof does not lead to the realization of the
existence of God, but beginning with faith the believer, through his
understanding of the being than which nothing greater can be con-
ceived, is led to see the connection between the reality of God and the
necessity of his being, and thus to arrive at a "proof" as a result of
his "faith seeking understanding". According to Barth's interpretation,
it is not understanding that leads to faith, but it is one of the require-
ments of faith that it seek understanding. "Credo ut inteUigam means:
It is my very faith itself that summons me to knowledge".1 2
As an explication of Marcel's view this formulation would appear to
be one-sided. In a letter written in 1951 he expresses surprise that
his position could be thought of as fideistic, and in noting his proximity
to Augustine uses the double formula: faith seeking understanding and
understanding seeking faith. 13 The similarity between the two positions
lies in their common acceptance of the significance of the faith of the
believer and of the need of this faith to come to reflective awareness
of itself. A difference lies in what is joined to the I believe in the further
formulation. In the actual working out of the argument, though not
in the setting of the argument, Anselm takes God to be the object of
faith and understands this object in terms of the possibility of con-
ception. Thus if the argument is restricted to the formula by which it
is expressed, the intelligible background against which the argument is
set is a notion of truth as that which can be conceived. The intelligible
background for Marcel on the other hand, is the possibility of fidelity
because the believer is most deeply concerned with being with God and
because it is truth as fidelity which gives value to the conceptual
order itself. For this reason he refuses to "resurrect the problem of the
object of faith, a problem which, as both history and reflection concur
in showing, offers no solution whatever" 14, but instead appeals to
"Thou my sole recourse" as the basis of the understanding's own
attempt to become aware of itself. It is in the invocation of Thou that
I become myself, and here we see the deepest reaches of Marcel's
dialectic of affirmation.
We can distinguish between problem and mystery in terms of the above complex
train of reflections; for this reality to which I am open when I invoke it can in
12 Barth, Karl, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, translated by Ian Robertson, John
Knox Press, Richmond, Virginia, 1960, p. 18.
13 Cf. Troisfontaines, Op cit., II, 235.
APPRAISAL OF THE TRADITIONAL PROOFS
no way be identified with an objective datum the nature of which must be

contemplated and cognitively determined. It may be said at once that this
reality gives me to myself insofar as I give myself to it; it is through the media-
tion of the act in which I center myself on it, that I truly become a subject.
I repeat, that I become a subject: the fatal error of a certain species of idealism
really consists in a failure to see that being a subject is not a fact nor a point of
departure, but a conquest and a goal. 15
16 Ibid., pp. 182-3.

CHAPTER VI
TESTIMONY VERSUS DEMONSTRATION
I
After the consideration of Marcel's appraisal of the traditional proofs
for the existence of God one might be tempted to ask whether he has
not effectively re-closed the door which was opened for discussion. If
the God whose existence is demonstrable is so small a concern of his,
what possibility is there for a fruitful dialogue between a traditional
metaphysician and this philosopher of existence. If it is possible at all,
the dialogue cannot arise from the acceptance of the proofs, even
though in various places Marcel speaks of the logical validity of the
proofs. In fact, if one considers the current re-investigation of the
proofs on the part of a number of philosophers, Marcel's acceptance of
their validity often appears by comparison annoyingly uncritical.
In truth, Marcel loses nothing by the acceptance of the validity of
the proofs. The whole point of his criticism is that whatever the proofs
demonstrate, it is not central to man's authentic approach to God.
From his point of view, the authentic approach to God is necessarily
the approach to a personal God, not to a prime mover or to a transcen-
dental cause. "It could be ... that the God whose death Nietzsche
truthfully announced was the god of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tra-
dition, god the prime mover." 1 Statements of similar force can be
found elsewhere in Marcel's writings. "If a man has experienced the
presence of God, not only has he no need of proof, he may even go so far
as to consider the idea of a demonstration as a slur on what is for him
a sacred evidence". 2 " ••• the God whose existence they claim to demon-
strate to us, cannot for all that be the occasion of any testimony". 3

2 The Mystery 0/ Being, II, 197-8.
8 Ibid., p. 147.
In another passage Marcel suggests that the traditional natural

theology be left behind as one might forsake an outmoded theory of
art or an outdated social institution.
On the other hand, the criticism directed toward existentialism in
general and toward Marcel's approach to God in particular seems
equally ill-suited to establish any rapprochement.
In the following pages several of the criticisms of Marcel's approach
to God will be discussed and then Marcel's own position re-considered.
The purpose in this is two-fold: first, to bring into sharper focus
certain dimensions of Marcel's thought which appear to have been
somewhat misunderstood; second, to reveal areas where the approaches
to God suggested by Marcel and by the more traditional way of de-
monstration can be mutually fructifying.
At the extreme, it has been suggested that Marcel does not credit the
human understanding with the power of arriving at a certain knowledge
of God's existence. This criticism, however, can hardly stand in the
face of Marcel's repeated statements of the logical validity of the
proofs. As noted in the last chapter, Marcel nowhere denies man's
ability to reach a certain knowledge of the existence of God. Both his
life and his writings, almost from the beginning of his reflections, are
encompassed by the effort to understand and to respond to this
certainty. The semblance of truth in the criticism arises from the fact
that he is concerned neither with the demonstrations themselves, which
he takes to be abstractions from life, nor with a detailed study of the
foundations and implications of the demonstrations. His position,
however, that the existence of God does not fall within the category
of the verifiable is not a doubting of God's existence. It remains to be
determined whather Marcel's own position would not be strengthened
by a closer scrutiny of the foundations and implications of the proofs.
A less extreme criticism, but one equally devastating in its intent,
sees the position of Marcel as fideistic, as an expression of a subjective
and arbitrary will to believe. His assurance of the existence of God is
viewed as an over-hasty satisfaction of the thirst for God and as an
escape from the absurdity of human life by a clinging to a miraculous
presence in the sea of human misery. These criticisms see in Marcel's
approach nothing more than the private satisfaction of a subjective
feeling: I need God; therefore he exists. 4
The charge of fideism implies, in short, that the affirmation of God
4 See article by John Cruickshank, "Existentialism after Twelve Years", The Dublin Review,
No. 473 (I957), pp. 52-65.
86 TESTIMONY VERSUS DEMONSTRATION
rests upon a faith that is self-authenticating and subjective in scope.

The criticism gains its force from Marcel's position that the God of
faith (and indeed all personal reality) is unverifiable in objective terms
and that the acceptance of God (and of all personal reality) is and can
be only the result of the free act. The free character of the acceptance
of the transcendent God implies that God can also be rejected and that
neither acceptance nor rejection is based exclusively on the conclusion
of a reasoned argument. It is an approach to God which is open to me
only if I refuse to think about man in general and appeal to God in an
act of creative fidelity.
As already mentioned, the idea that his work could be interpreted as
an expression of fideism struck Marcel as surprising. In order to appre-
ciate his surprise, it is necessary to elaborate somewhat more fully his
understanding of the term faith.
To interpret his use of words such as faith and fidelity in a volun-
taristic or subjective sense is to overlook the fact that his whole
philosophical orientation is toward reflection, toward secondary re-
flection which is "more profoundly, more essentially reflection, than is
primary reflection".
Secondary reflection is a reflection upon the fact and the content of
primary reflection. In the matter under discussion, the faith of the
believer is the act of primary reflection and his God the "object" of
primary reflection. Secondary reflection, then, is a seeking for the
conditions under which this act and its content are rendered intelligible.
It is necessary to say the act of faith and its content because the act of
faith, like all conscious acts, is an intentionality and remains real only
if the act and the content are taken together. In the philosophical
activity of secondary reflection the faith of the believer and the
believer's God are not merely accepted. They are taken as the data for
the philosophical work of secondary reflection. The procedure here is
the same as it would be were the topic under discussion the act of
sensation or the act of remembering. Secondary reflection on sensation
does not end with sensation or the sense object, but with an under-
standing of the possibility of sensation and the meaning of the sensed
object. So also, Marcel's approach to God does not end with the faith
of the religious man, nor with his God, but with a philosophical under-
standing of the possibility and meaning of the act of faith of the
believer. As it turns out, this understanding is itself an act of faith or
fidelity, but this philosophical faith is on the level of secondary
reflection, rather than that of primary reflection.
A most crucial consideration in this whole procedure is, therefore, the

legitimacy of taking the faith of the believer as a datum upon which
philosophical reflection can operate. Three possibilities present them-
selves. One can deny the philosophical significance of belief and
abstain from using it as a point of departure. As a second possibility
one can simply take the faith of the believer as a unique and irreducible
mode of experience, and this Marcel often does. The limitation of this
procedure is that the philosopher's work is meaningful only to those
listeners who can, to some degree, share in and accept belief as a
significant act open to further probing by philosophical reflection. The
third possibility is to take other kinds of experience, notably acts of
fidelity to one another, and to use them as data for reflection. This
Marcel also does and the analysis of his reflections on these experiences
forms the body of chapter four of this study. The two approaches, from
the faith of the believer and from our intersubjective acts of respect
and fidelity, may not be separable from one another. In fact, as Marcel
sees them, there are no clearcut boundaries between these kinds of
experiences and hence his discussion does, perhaps, afford the possi-
bility of a rapprochement with the thinker who finds it impossible to
accept religious belief as a meaningful human activity.
What is the affinity between intersubjective acts of fidelity and the
faith of the believer? It lies in the fact that the existential effort to
understand the "I believe" of the believer is not a question about
belief in general or the concept of belief but is really the question "who
am I who am believing and living with others who are either believing
or finding no need or no way to believe". Only to the extent that the
question is asked in this fashion can there be any hope of arriving at
the "content" of the act of faith because for the one who is effectively
in belief this content structures his life and his relations to other
persons. Furthermore, when I ask myself whether I believe in God, I
am faced with the possibility, and perhaps at times the inevitable
possibility, of having to answer that I don't know whether or not I
believe, and consequently with the necessity of recognizing a funda-
mental brotherhood with the non-believer as well as with the believer.
In any event, belief in God is meaningless if it does not entail a belief
in one's fellow for whom also God is ultimate recourse. (A God who is
for me to the positive exclusion of thou is no God). The affinity between
these two realms of fidelity can become apparent also from the analysis
of our acts of fidelity to one another. If this analysis is to be complete
it must be made in the face of death. And when the analysis is carried
this far, unless there is the intellectual openness to entertain at least

the real possibility that love can extend through death, the analysis
comes to a dead end and at the same time leaves the experience as it is
often lived completely unanalyzed.
If, in this context, there is any value in maintaining the classical
distinction between intellect and will, it must be said that fidelity
embodies both. There is no fidelity unless I choose to be faithful, but
fidelity, likewise, requires conscious affirmation of the fact that our
love is enduring. Similarly the faith of the believer is not merely a
choosing to believe, but a conscious affirmation in knowledge of the
reality of the "object" of my fidelity, and even the affirmation of the
reality of God beyond any ability of myself to love and to trust. To
interpret faith in a voluntaristic fashion would be to open the road for
a distinction between faith and truth. This would be a serious mistake
in Marcel's opinion, because the believing witness is himself testifying
not to the mere presence of God, but to a God who is truth. Thus to
think of faith as merely an act of choice is to fail to see what the be-
liever in his act of faith is presenting to the world and to the philosopher
who would reflect upon this faith.
What the believer presents to the world is the mystery of life in
progress rather than a problem to be solved. The word mystery is used
here in the technical sense of a question involving the subjective act
and its "object" in a mutually defining way. On the one hand the act of
bearing witness, the acts of prayer or of worship, retain their specific
meaning only if they are not isolated from the individual believer. On
the other hand invocation involves the one to whom it is directed in a
way in which thinking about him does not. To invoke is different from
and more than to think about, because invocation makes impossible
the distancing which is characteristic of objective thought.
To study the act of belief apart from the individual believer is to
separate the one bearing witness from the person to whom and the
persons for whom he bears witness. However, it is only to the extent
that I am involved in a reality that I can bear witness regarding it and
only to the extent that I am not outside a community that I can bear
testimony to the community. If I am not in touch with the situation,
or if I am an enemy from without, my testimony is worthless. In the
question of religious faith the necessity of involvement is absolutely
crucial because any exteriority of the witness would convert God into
a structure (even though the highest structure), which is then er-
roneously thought of as related to me the believer; the believer is
TESTIMONY VERSUS DEMONSTRATION 89
living his life "in God" whose presence is not limited by or set alongside
of the presence of the finite. In this sense, that there exists no ensemble
of conditions against which the faith of the believer could be verified,
the faith of the believer is truly self-authenticating. It is not a faith
that but a faith in. This, however, does not make faith into a subjective
act of the will or of the intellect in the sense that it is an arbitrary
affirmation by my individual SUbjectivity. Because the believer is not
exterior to the "object" of his faith, the notions of subject or object
are no longer strictly applicable as they are in the realm of finite things:
interior and exterior, before and within, no longer are useful modes of
expression because the God of the believer is Absolute Presence. To
believe is precisely to refuse to throw one's faith in the balance; this
is why Marcel can say faith is radically opposed to criticism as such.
It is not that faith has anything to fear from criticism; the question at
issue is much more significant. Faith is above criticism of its foundations
because to admit even the possibility of criticism on that level is to
deny that the God of faith is transcendent to all particular beings and
totalities of beings as well as to the kinds of analyses which are relevant
to the study of particular beings. In the last analysis, the act of faith
is totally unintelligible apart from Thou in whom I place my faith.
Assuredly the act of faith remains a human act, but its nature as faith,
as unfailing and trustworthy fidelity, arises from the Unique Recourse
in whom I believe. Here again we can see the significance of Marcel's
position that it is impossible to set up clear boundaries between
persons. Augustine saw this clearly when he cried out that Thou Oh
Lord art more me than I am myself. A more recent writer, Gerardus
Van Der Leeuw, in his phenomenological study of religion is drawn
to the same conclusion. All understanding when radically questioned
becomes ultimately a "being understood" as well as an understanding.
This is to say that all knowledge of whatever kind is in part an appeal
to intelligibility and ultimately an appeal to an absolute recourse. 5
Thus, the approach by way of secondary reflection is subjective in
the sense that the approach is meaningful only when the individual
believer is included in the focus of the problem. It is not subjective in
the sense that the validity of the faith or the scope of the approach is
determined by the individual consciousness; the believer is testifying
to a God who is beyond all his acts of faith and fidelity. For this reason
the charge of subjectivism and of fideism entail, in the very framing of
the charge, a failure to respect the character of the act of faith as an
5 Religion in Essence and Manifestation, II, 684.
go TESTIMONY VERSUS DEMONSTRATION
intentionality which derives the fullness of its meaning from thou to

whom the act is directed.
Emphasis upon its character as an act of bearing testimony, that is,
of bearing witness to ... , is important for the adequate appreciation of
Marcel's understanding of faith. The act of bearing witness does not
rest merely on a knowledge of the situation but entails also the decision
to stand by and support the truth of the situation. The cognitive
dimension of the act is expressed in the person's becoming aware that
he is called upon to testify; the free dimension of the act makes it
possible for him to refuse to testify or even to refuse to consider
seriously whether he is called upon to testify. Without the presence of
truth testimony would be false, but even in the presence of truth there
is no act of testimony apart from my willingness to bear witness. It is,
nevertheless, an act in which I can be joined by others in a common
witness to the truth and for this reason it would be equally false to
view the act of witnessing as a subjective act belonging to the witness
alone or to make it universal in an objective sense. The "object" of the
testimony is present to those who are testifying and for those who can
accept it. For the one who can neither testify nor accept the witness,
the "object" is absent.
Considered in an abstract way, as is proper to the realm of primary
reflection, one might argue that truth makes the possibility of testimony
universally available to all men. In the concrete order the universality
is "polyphonic" ; it is the free participation of many unique individuals
in their very uniqueness in the same absolute presence. If it is asked
what is gained by introducing this new kind of universality, the answer
is that it is not introduced to solve a particular question at hand, but
is a kind of universality which is part and parcel of our lives and which
calls for recognition. Ranges of human experience where the universal
cannot be thought of in terms of the general and the abstract which
is publicly verifiable are not difficult to find. One thinks, for example,
of the ability of a group of artists to appreciate a painting which
nonetheless "says nothing" to an outsider. A short time ago we saw
"Rock Festivals" which drew together even hundreds of thousands
of young persons and which were at the same time utterly baffling to
the communities in which they took place. An example perhaps closer
to our topic can be seen in the affection and loyalty which children
may bear to a father whom they know is not respected universally
among his peers. On the negative side, the experience of jealousy and
the notorious triangle of lovers find their possibility in a community
TESTIMONY VERSUS DEMONSTRATION 9I
of experience which is available only to the participants; " ... we must
state, simply and flatly, that there do exist ranges of human experience
where a too literal, an over-simplified way of conceiving the criterion
of universality just cannot be accepted". 6
The recognition of this universality which is not abstract but in-
separably bound to my concrete and free acceptance of the need to bear
witness provides a way for Marcel to sidestep the dilemma which
would demand either the acceptance of an objective proof for the
existence of God or the submission to the charge of subjectivism. It
also makes it possible for him to affirm the absolute presence of a God
who is nevertheless not for my neighbor.
In the first chapter of his book, Approaches to God, Maritain dis-
cusses what he calls "the primordial way of approach". This primordial
approach he sees as valid but not as philosophic. Without mentioning
Marcel's name, Maritain places the approach to God in existentialism
on this pre-philosophic level. In a brief paragraph, the author indicates
the relation of this primordial approach to the philosophic proofs for
the existence of God:
It appears, therefore, that the philosophic proofs of the existence of God, let us
say the five ways of Thomas Aquinas, are a development and an unfolding of
this natural knowledge, raised to the level of scientific discussion and scientific
certitude. And they normally presuppose his natural knowledge, not with
regard to the logical structure of the demonstration, but with regard to the
existential condition of the thinking subject. If the preceding observations are
true, it would be necessary, before proposing the philosophic proofs, to be assured
insofar as possible (by trying, where need be, to aid in such awakening) that the
minds to which one addresses oneself are alive to the primordial intuition of
existence, and conscious of the natural knowledge of God involved in this
intuition. 7
The chapters which follow in his book show clearly that the author
holds this unfolding and development of the natural knowledge of God
by means of logical demonstrations absolutely necessary for a scientific
or philosophical knowledge of the existence of God, and for the further
philosophical discussion of the attributes of God and of man's relation
to God.
Without wishing to imply that Marcel's approach is identical with
the primordial way outlined by Maritain, we can say that Marcel, too,
would see the task of philosophy as rendering explicit "human reason's
eternal way of approaching God". He would, however, feel that this
6The Mystery of Being, I, I3.

7Maritain, Jacques, Approaches to God, translated by Peter O'Reilly, Collier Books, New
York, N. Y., I962, p. 23.
should be done not by demonstration, but by reflection upon the

existential condition of the thinking subject. This existential con-
dition, essentially unique and individual, cannot be retained when the
discussion is transferred to the abstract level demanded by demonstra-
tion. Rather than attempt to raise the approach to a scientific level
and thereby lose both the existential condition of the subject and the
personal character of the God who is approached, the philosopher
should reflect upon the conditions of consciousness and of freedom
which make possible this primordial human affirmation of God's
reality. If, as Marcel contends, the objectification of the primordial
affirmation is an abstracting from the involvement of the individual
freedom, the God who is arrived at by the demonstrations is no longer
the God to whom my freedom reaches forth, and for this reason the
philosophical value of the primordial approach is inseparable from the
freedom from any need for objective mediation. 8
A somewhat different form of criticism is brought forward by Carl
Michalson in the development of the thesis that existentialism repre-
sents a penultimate mysticism. 9 In his view the true insight of the
existentialists is their awareness of the utter hopelessness or absurdity
of the human situation without God. He comments further that this
discovery of the "death of God" causes none of them to rejoice; even
the rather militant atheism of Sartre finds the absurdity of man and
his world nauseating and for him man is not endowed with but con-
demned to freedom.
Within this interpretation of the original insight Michalson feels that
the Christian existentialists such as Marcel, Berdyaev and Kierkegaard
go beyond what is available to them philosophically and rely upon data
furnished by Christianity to arrive at their affirmation of God. He
sees Heidegger's refusal to identify himself clearly with either theism
or atheism as the position which is most faithful to that sense of thirst
which characterizes man as being-in-the-world. A similar view is ex-
pressed by J. Cruickshank: "... one inclines more and more to the
view that the movement does not possess the means of becoming a
Christian philosophy without changing its basic character." 10
In these attempts to relate existentialism to Christianity there is
8 For further discussion see Dumery, Henry, The Problem of God in PhilosoPhy of Religion,
translated by Charles Courtney, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1964,
especially pp. IZ7 ff.
B Michalson, Carl, "Existentialism is a Mysticism", Theology Today, Vol. XII (1955),
PP.355-68.
10 Cruickshank, op. cit., p. 64.
perhaps a too-hasty withdrawal from the central insight of the move-
ment. If one asks what such different thinkers as Heidegger and Jaspers,
Marcel and Sartre, Berdyaev and Kierkegaard have in common and
which allows them to be grouped together as existentialists (however
much some may object to the label) the answer is not precisely that
they have discovered that the God of the demonstrations is dead.
What they have in common is not a view about God at all; it is on this
subject that they differ most widely. What they hold in common and
what acts as a central reference for their thought is the perception of man
as experientially incomplete in himself. This existential mode of self-
presence peculiar to man is variously described as being-to-the-world,
being-unto-death, being-condemned-to-freedom, project, etc. The way
in which this existential openness of man - perceived by all of the
existentialists - is interpreted accounts for the far-reaching differences
in their discussions about the reality of God. 11
In noting this, however, we have in fact indicated two points of
communion among these thinkers: the perception of man's openness
and the acceptance of the challenge to interpret man to himself and
to the world. The acceptance of this challenge to interpret the openness
of man shows that the meaning of human presence is not simply given
but that the meaning and character of man's incompleteness itself
falls under the need for interpretation. Consequently jUdgments con-
cerning the truth or falsity, or the value or disvalue, of a particular
dimension of the movement cannot be made simply in terms of its
having respected the basic insight of man's incompleteness. Rather,
the various forms of existentialism must be judged not only in regard
to their respect for the original perceptual data but also as to whether
the interpretation of this data is in harmony with further phenomeno-
logical data. This broader base for evaluation is called for not only
because the original openness stands in need of interpretation but also
because the aim of existentialism is not the understanding of man but
the understanding of being in light of the discovery of the uniqueness
of human existence. Michalson, indeed, agrees on this point, saying
that existentialism is not an anthropology but a philosophy which
takes an anthropological datum as its central point of reference. 12 The
correctness of this view is borne out by Heidegger's concern for Being
in contrast to beings, by Sartre's acknowledgement that en-soi and
11 Cf. Luijpen, William A., Existential Phenomenology (Duquesne Studies, Philosophical

Series No. 12), Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, 1963 edition, p. 315.
12 Michalson, op. cit., pp. 357-8.
pour-soi belong somehow together in being, and by the common concern

of Jaspers and Marcel with a transcendence that is all-encompassing.
Consequently, the question whether the theistic or the atheistic strain
of existentialism remains more faithful to the basic and common insight
of man's lack of full self-possession cannot be answered without asking
first about the ultimate situation of man. The acknowledgement of
man's character as existential, as being defined by what is other than
himself, makes it impossible to seek for the meaning of man (or of
myself) without at the same time acknowledging the meaningfulness
of being as the ultimate possibility of the human ecstasis. For this
reason the oft-repeated characterization of existentialism as a philoso-
phy of the individual must itself be characterized as superficial.
Judged in terms of the depth of its efforts and the persistence of
its commitment to seeking an understanding of the human condition,
there can be little doubt that the theistic existentialists represent a form
of the movement more faithful to the original acceptance of man's
openness. This is made clear by the contrast between Marcel and the
early Sartre: whereas the former habitually seeks to understand what
conditions can render personal reality perenially meaningful even to
the point of seeking the religious conditions of experience, Sartre
breaks off the search by concluding that man is a "useless passion" and
intersubjectivity is hell. In a too often neglected work Heidegger hints
also at the necessity of developing his own work beyond the ontic and
ontological levels into the ontotheological realm as he struggles to
"backtrack" from metaphysics to the essence of metaphysics. IS
But is there any need that the human situation be rendered meaning-
ful? Is there any guarantee that absurdity is not the last word both for
me and for my relations with others? Objective guarantee or objective
proof that meaning is ultimate there is not. To seek such an objective
guarantee, however, is to fail to understand that objectivity itself
depends upon the presence of consciousness and the prior acceptance
of meaning. There is a phenomenological guarantee, and thus one that
is entirely consistent with the method by which the original existential
openness of man is affirmed. This guarantee is that the human situation,
at least in part, is immediately presented as meaningful. To deny that
the acts of devotion, acts of friendship, as well as acts of perception and
acts of worship or, for that matter, the question itself of the meaning-
18 Heidegger, Martin, "The Ontho-theo-logical Nature of Metaphysics", in Essays in

Metaphysics: Identity and Difference, translated by Kurt Leidecker, Philosophical Library,
New York, I960.
TESTIMONY VERSUS DEMONSTRATION 9S
fulness of men are presented as meaningful is to distort these phenome-
nological data beyond all recognition. Meaningfulness is immediately
presented in these acts; we do not reason to their meaningfulness.
And in fact to attempt to do so would be an implicit recognition of
meaningfulness in the reasoning process. A phenomenological de-
scription of the total human situation would not be true to the data at
hand if it did not recognize the immediate sense of the act of fidelity;
nor would it be a description of the total given if it failed to take note
of the lasting and ultimate character of fidelity as it sometimes presents
itself, for example, in friendship unto death or in worship. The immedi-
ate and lasting sense of human life amid the lack of sense is expressed
clearly by Merleau-Ponty. In an essay in the collection entitled Sense
and Non-Sense he writes: "And so I live not for death but forever, and
likewise, not for myself alone but with other people. A more complete
definition of what is called existentialism than we get from talking of
anxiety and the contradictions of the human condition might be found
in the idea of a universality which men affirm or imply by the mere
fact of their being and at the very moment of their opposition to each
other, in the idea of a reason immanent in unreason, of a freedom
which comes into being in the act of accepting limits and to which the
least perception, the slightest movement of the body, the smallest
action, bear incontestable witness." 14
The whole effort of Marce1's existentialism is directed toward taking
seriously the limits of reason and freedom as constitutive of the human
condition. Thus, it is on purely phenomenological grounds that he can
object to the arbitrarily narrow scope of Sartre's philosophy, just as it
is on purely phenomenological grounds that he can and does pay
tribute to the genius of Sartre. Contrary to the view of Michalson, true
existentialism is not a penultimate mysticism, but remains true to its
aims only to the degree that it incorporates within its scope those data
which allow it to go beyond the penultimate stage, regardless of what
may be said of its status as a mysticism.
While agreeing with Cruickshank that the movement "does not
possess the means of becoming a Christian philosophy without changing
its basic character" (italics added), we need not accept the alternative
that existantialism "appears in the end as a humanistic ethical
attitude." 15 The insights of existentialism, as well as its driving force,
14 Sense and Non-Sense, translated by Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus, Northwestern

University Press, 1964, p. 70.
15 Cruickshank, op. cit. p. 64.
are metaphysical rather than ethical or Christian. Its effort is to under-

stand who we are in the fullest possibilities of our being and then to
respond to these possibilities. The presence and meaning of these
possibilities, moreover, are sought more from the encompassing of
Being, than from within man himself. This is true not only for Marcel,
but for Heidegger and Jaspers as well. For Sartre also, as noted above,
the en-soi and the pour-soi somehow both belong to being. If and when
Sartre is able to work out the implications of their common involvement
in being, the notions of the en-soi and the pour-soi may well lose their
ontological opposition to one another, an opposition which provides
the whole structure for Being and Nothingness.
The recognition of the presence of the "encompassing other" as the
place and possibility of man's existence is what marks these men as
metaphysicians. When Cruickshank lists Marcel's notion of faith and
Pascal's wager as two examples of the attempt to raise existentialism
to the Christian level,16 one can only wonder whether he has not
reduced Marcel's notion of God to that of a hypothetical structure.
This, of course, would be to misunderstand the whole approach of
Marcel. For while he does not at all deny that the affirmation of the
real presence of God arises from our felt need for completion, he most
certainly does deny that God can be approached as a hypothetical
structure. Thou who are my only recourse are outside of all possibility of
comparison. Once it is seen that faith is not a belief in an object ex-
terior to the believing witness, but is rather the invocation of a thou
who is absolutely present, both the wager and scepticism generally are
revealed as attempts to relate an exterior God to finite structures. This
can be done only by denaturing the act of faith.
II
The utter impossibility of relating God to the ensemble of particular
beings is what is meant by the transcendence of God. To Marcel this
utter transcendence implies that God cannot be called cause; for to
call God ultimate cause as natural theologians are accustomed to do
is to establish a relation between God and creatures. Yet it is perhaps
here in the discussion of God as cause that a more traditional natural
theology can be fruitfully joined to the personalistic approach of
Marcel.
The meaning of cause found in Marcel's work is not uncommon in the
16 Ibid.
writings of modern philosophers. In general, the notions of cause and
effect are seen as applicable only in the context of an exterior relation
of dependence of one thing upon another thing. This limited understand-
ing of causality is present both in the early writings and in the more
recent works of Marcel. In an entry in the Journal dated January 27,
1914, he wrote:
We know that if God can and must be thought as power, it is only on condition
that by power we do not understand an existing power susceptible of functioning
as cause amongst other causes. But how are we to conceive the relation of such
transcendent power to the order of things existing? It is clear at the outset that
the possibility of a direct relation between one and the other must be denied
absolutely. An objective doctrine of creationism must be rejected out of hand.
As I see things, the process we adopt so as to demonstrate the legitimacy of our
affirmation of God implies the rejection of creationism. 17
And if it is asked why the possibility of a direct relationship must be

denied, the answer is that "we must think God as transcending every
determination whatsoever." 18 Writing in 1920 on the possibility of an
external test of faith, Marcel says: "If I treat myself as object, if I think
God as an agent external to myself, in a word if I remain in the order
of causality, the test loses its spiritual character and becomes a
competition." 19
Marcel does not wish, of course, to deny our absolute dependence
upon God. Such an interpretation of the above passage would not only
be contrary to explicit statements of Marcel, but would destroy the
whole foundation of his theistic existentialism. On the contrary, what
he wishes to say is that to treat God as a cause is to think of God as
him; this would be to posit ourselves as "relatively independent and
detached" whereas our complete dependence upon God can be seen
only in the recognition of God as thou to whom we appeal. Thirty
years later Marcel has seen no reason to enlarge his notion of causality:
... it will be fatal to try to think of this freedom in terms of causality ... in the
whole history of philosophy there has been no more tragic error than that of
trying to think of free will in its opposition to determinism; in reality it lies in a
completely different plane. 20
In the same spirit, Marcel argues in another part of the Gifford

Lectures (II, 149) that the grace of conversion appears as a cause only
"from a distance," that is, only insofar as its true reality is not per-
17 Journal, p. 35.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 235.
20 The Mystery of Being, II, 127.
ceived. And in a statement which forcefully turns the discussion to the

question before us he writes:
To proceed immediately to what appears to me to be the essential, I think we
should have done with the idea of a God as Cause, of a god concentrating in
himself all causality, or even, in more rigorous terms, with all theological usage
of the notion of causality. 21
Marcel is not alone in proposing this limited view of causality. Berdyaev,

for example, also maintains that necessary causal relations can have
no meaning in an order where freedom is present. 22 A similar view of
cause is in the background of E. L. Allen's argument that the pro-
nouncements of the Athanasian Creed reduce God to a problem of
science. 23
It is necessary to emphasize that this refusal to think of God as
cause is not an attempt to make man his own cause or to confer on him
anything resembling aseity. Marcel's ever-present devotion to the
concrete shows him clearly that such a view of man would be, as
Sartre testifies, pure absurdity.
What is needed is a way to respect at once the absolute transcendence
of God and the radical openness of man. Marcel feels that a philosophy
of cause and effect, and in fact any philosophy based upon the cate-
gories of traditional logic is incapable of this because the relation of
man to God is not a relation of one thing to another which, as Marcel
sees the question, is the context in which natural theology has tradi-
tionally been elaborated.
A more promising road, Marcel feels, in indicated by Kant. In sug-
gesting the lead of Kant (as well as that of Plato), he qualifies the sug-
gestion by indicating that he does not wish to incorporate Kant's
formalism in any of its aspects. This qualification is dictated both
by Marcel's distinction between problem and mystery with the ac-
companying rejection of systematic rationalism, and by his denial of
the validity of the Kantian distinction between appearanceiandlreality.
What then is left of Kant? A great deal to be sure and, apropos of
the present discussion, the very rich insight that human knowing and
all human activity is creative in a way which makes comparison with
the receptive activity of a vessel or a tabula rasa impossible. Conse-
quently, God cannot be thought of simply as a transcendent cause who
22 Berdyaev, Nicolas, The Beginning·-and the End, translated by R. M. French, Harper
Torchbooks, New York, 1957, p. 6 3 . "
23 Allen, E. L., "Existentialism and Christian Theology", Hibbert Journal, Vol. 52 (1953-
54), pp. 44-5.
bestows his grace upon us from without. Consequently, too, Marcel
refuses, on all levels of consciousness, to draw a line of demarcation
between discovery and creativity, and speaks instead of creative
fidelity, of existence as a non-mediatizable openness and of inter-
subjectivity as immediate co-presence.
The lead of Kant might be described as an unveiling of a kind of
hylomorphism of human activity in which man is present only at the
intersection, that is, the engagement of human freedom and grace, grace
understood here in the broad sense of any gratituous opening offered
to the self. The metaphysical foundation of humility is just this
necessity to go beyond the self to the gratuitiously present other in
order to find myself. And inasmuch as my opening upon the other on
the personal level is necessarily a free opening, all shutting of myself to
the light is, in fact, a refusal, and in this sense a metaphysical sin, the
sin of pride. For this reason must we learn from Plato that being opens
itself only to those who seek in love.
N ow, while this hylomorphic structure of human activity is clearly
an advance over the position of the pure empiricist, it is not peculiar
to the philosophy of Kant. It is also present, as Husserl and Brentano
knew, in the long tradition stemming from Aristotle's book on the
soul. In the second book of his De A nima Aristotle spoke of the soul as
being all things and Brentano confesses that this section of Aristotle's
writing served as a beginning for the development of his own much
fuller notion of intentionality. In addition to this understanding of the
soul as in some way being all things there is in Aristotle a much richer
understanding of causality than is generally found in the philosophy of
the modern period, an understanding which could enable Marcel to
preserve his own valuable insights, while drawing upon a long tradition
of natural theology.
Our concern here is not to elaborate the fourfold division of causes
found in the Aristotelian tradition (though at times even this seems to
have been overlooked), but to point out that the notion of causality,
even of efficient causality, need not be restricted to the relation of
dependence of one thing upon another thing. The meaning of cause is
much fuller both in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition and in our
concrete experience. The analysis of the kinds of causes in Aristotle's
Physics indicates that his definition of cause, like that of nature, is
first of all an attempt to delineate the reality which men actually call
cause. It is not without significance that the example of efficient
causality first given in the Physics is that of a man who gives advice.
But the person advising me or encouraging me is not simply an object.

In fact, his advice might be most helpful, that is most efficacious to
influence me, if he and I are united in an intimate personal presence
to one another. It is important to notice too that the advice may be
freely given and freely accepted or rejected, and that this freedom does
not destroy its causal efficacy. Marcel is right in saying that it is a tragic
mistake to think of freedom in opposition to determinism - if we think
of it only in terms of this opposition. However, the corrective need not
be to place freedom and determinism on two different planes; more in
keeping with experience is the recognition of the causal efficacy of an
agent who is not determined to a single way of acting or even to the
necessity of acting and thus the recognition of a certain community
existing between determinism and freedom. This community of
influences is experienced, in fact, every time we come upon the limits
of our freedom.
From this broader view of causality the free acceptance of another
person may be seen as an instance of the activity of a free cause. Such
an interpretation seems called for by Marcel's own position that a
subject is constituted as a person only by the presence of other persons.
When it is recalled that the self is essentially historical and is a goal to
be gained by creative fidelity, it is difficult to see why the notion of
cause cannot be applied to this creative fidelity itself.
We might question also whether the notion of cause implies neces-
sarily an exteriority of the cause in relation to the effect. This limitation
of the understanding of cause is evident, for example, from Marcel's
contention that to think of God as cause is to reduce God to a him and
thus to posit myself as "relatively independent and detached". 24 That
some causes are exterior to their effects needs no discussion, but to
insist that this exteriority is an essential characteristic of cause as such
is to overlook, among other things, the possibility of an end or goal
which is intrinsic to the thing or person directed to the goal.
A clear example of such an oversight is expressed in a statement of
Paul-Louis Landsberg, whom Marcel has called one of the better
contemporary phenomenologists. Arguing for a distinction between
the meaning and end of marriage, Landsberg writes, "What a thing is,
what constitutes its essence, is never an end of this thing." 25 However,
according to the Aristotelian tradition at least, what a thing is, that is,
24 Journal, p. 263.
25 Landsberg, Paul-Louis, "Notes toward a phenomenology of marriage", Cross Currents,
Vol. 6 (1956), p_ 251.
TESTIMONY VERSUS DEMONSTRATION ror
the essence in its full perfection, is in the ontological order identical

with its end. This is at least part of the reason why the final cause can
be called the good. If I walk for the purpose of restoring my health,
my person as restored to health is the concrete realization of this
purpose. If I seek friendship or marriage in order to foster communion
with another person, the end as achieved is precisely a mutual presence
established and perfected by communion. Likewise, when I seek God
as my final cause, it is not a him exterior to myself that I reach; again
in the concrete order the end for me is my own self, I who I am,
participating as fully as possible in the divine presence. Given this
fuller meaning of finality, it is neither necessary nor even possible to
go beyond the teleological order, as Marcel suggests, in order to find
the unique value of each human love, whether it be directed toward
another human thou or toward Thou who are my unique recourse.
The presence of final causality in the philosophical work of Marcel is
evident to Merleau-Ponty who accurately identifies the acceptance of
a natural finality in man as the notion which underlies Marcel's opposi-
tion to Sartre (as well as the Christian's opposition to Marxism). 26
What Merleau-Ponty apparently fails to see is that this natural finality
is not some "immanent force in things [or in man] guiding them toward
an equilibrium which is more probable than chaos". Marcel, no less
clearly than Merleau-Ponty, sees that neither history nor reason
allows us to "know whether man can ever be integrated into co-
existence or whether each country's happiness is compossible with that
of the others." 27 Marcel's discussion of the fundamental situation in
Karl Jaspers, which forms the last chapter in Creative Fidelity, is a
serious acknowledgment of the disturbing, all-pervasive and perhaps
inevitable presence of conflict among men. The finality which is in
fact central to Marcel's work is a finality which is within freedom and
thus never guaranteed but open only to hope and to fidelity. This kind
of finality does not provide a pre-ordained end, much less a set of rules
to follow, but gives man the possibility of meaningful choice. It is a fin-
nality which permeates the work also of Merleau-Ponty as, for ex-
ample, when he speaks of that "unknown other future which we must
reach, or die". It is the finality defined by freedom and hope which
makes it worthwhile to strive for social community, rather than chaos
and which vitalizes the effort to bring reason out of unreason.
Where then lies the opposition between Marcel's approach to God
26 Sense and Non-Sense, p. 75.
27 Ibid., p. I24.
through fidelity and a more traditional approach through causality?

The answer must be that it lies in part in the restriction of our under-
standing of causality to mechanical causality. Perhaps a part of that
essential element which seems lacking in the formulation of the proofs
and which often robs them of their ability to convince is a richly
analogous understanding of causality. If the term of the proof is no
more than a mechanical cause, it is surely of no concern to the believer.
But if the term is Free and Personal Cause, there is no contradiction in
his being also thou. For a person with such an understanding of cause
the proofs become more than a moment in an interior dialectic of a
believer assailed by doubts. They become, in addition, reason's contri-
bution to our unending endeavor to enter more fully into the mystery
of being and thus are a direct concern of the believer in his act of
believing. It is the faith in God who is also truth which drives the be-
liever to seek understanding. In the famous words of Anselm:
I do not endeavor, 0 Lord, to penetrate thy sublimity, for in no wise do I

compare my understanding with that; but I long to understand in some degree
thy truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand
that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, -
that unless I believed, I should not understand. 28
Without pretending to grasp the essence of him who is, the proofs
provide a way for the believer to enter into an area where verification
is possible without falling back into scientism. Marcel himself confesses
that the position of the believer implies at least the possibility of
verification. 29 Indeed, if the reality to which faith attests is in no
way open to verification, man's freedom is as absolute and as isolated
as Sartre suggests. Without the possibility of some sort of verification,
the refusal to accept God is as meaningful as to testify to him. And yet
Marcel does not hesitate to say that Sartre's attempt to prove the
nonexistence of God "is incompatible with the profound [metaphysical]
exigency which is at the heart of the philosophies of existence." 30 Also
incompatible with this profound need, at least as it finds itself in
reflective consciousness, is the restriction of causality to the level of
instrumentality. Marcel is right in contending that we arrive at an
impasse or are lost in a labryinth whenever we attempt to extend the
28 St. Anselm, Proslogion, translated by Sidney Deane, Open Court Publishing Compagny,
LaSalle, Illinois, 1958, pp. 6-7.
29 Journal, p. 238.
30 Problematic Man, p. II5.
meaning of cause to a transcendent beingS! - if we conceive of this

transcendent cause as a transcendent instrument. There is no more
reason, however, to make causality essentially linked to a being having
instrumental powers than there is to restrict reality (or presence) to
the plane of the immediately given existential world. Not cause, but
our initial experience of cause, is linked to instrumental causality; not
reality, but again our initial experience of reality is discovered from
our existential consciousness. To extend our understanding of cause is
not to free it from its primitive experiential root, but to seek the
source and ground which makes the original experience meaningful.
To use the terminology of Marcel, secondary reflection must be allowed
to correct and to deepen the report of primary reflection.
A similar and not unrelated task for the philosophers of existence
is a recapturing of a fuller understanding of substance. In his auto-
biographical essay, Marcel says his philosophical inclinations have
always tended toward being, rather than toward das Ding. A too ready
willingness to equate substance with the category of thing-ness has
made Marcel hesitate to use the notion of substance. Such a notion of
substance would indeed solidify the dynamism so evident in life, but
fortunately is not imposed upon philosophical reflection. In fact a
broader and a more truly phenomenological meaning of substance is
implicit in Marcel's recognition of a common human nature, apart
from which all communication and all science is impossible even though
this nature is first of all historical. Nor does he hesitate in his discussion
of availability to speak of true availability as that in which I give of
my "substance".
In the first part of this chapter we have seen that the attempts to
equate Marcel's approach to a subjective fideism really take their
origin from a distortion of the nature of faith as Marcel understands
this act and as it can be lived in religious experience. Central to Marcel's
whole effort is the recognition in reflection of the utterly transcendent
nature of the God of the believer whose faith can only be a testimony
to thou who are neither within nor without, but beyond all determi-
nation.
In the second part of the chapter, we argued that a more analogical
understanding of causality than that found in Marcel's writings would
be more truly phenomenological and could assist in establishing a fruit-
ful rapport between Marcel's concrete metaphysics and the tradition
of natural theology. In this dialogue, traditional natural theology can
81 Ibid., p. 55.
I04 TESTIMONY VERSUS DEMONSTRATION
gain from the descriptive analyses of Marcel, and in turn the reader
of Marcel might be led to question whether proof need be purely on the
level of essences, or whether it can proceed from the existential con-
dition of the subject to the unique recourse who is also ultimate
cause.
CHAPTER VII
THE COMMUNICATION OF HOPE
The meaning of God in human experience is not limited to the question

of the existence of God or of man's certainty regarding God's existence.
Of much more central concern is the question of man's drawing near
to God by actually structuring his life and his social institutions in such
a way that the presence of the Divine can ennoble human life and
human associations. This becomes clear if we prescind from the name
"God" for the moment and look at the issues involved. What man
seeks is not only to know that there is some ultimate sense to his
existence but to bring himself, by discovery and creativity, into
harmony with this meaning; man wishes to conduct his life in the
world and to structure his society in such a way that life becomes as
richly meaningful and satisfying as possible. In a philosophical discus-
sion the use of the name "God" is a kind of a shorthand expression to
designate at once the ultimacy of the search for meaning and hope, and
the conscious awareness that the search cannot be made less than
ultimate without at the same time destroying all meaning for man.
The need to approach in the sense of drawing nearer to God is
Marcel's main concern as well. The awareness of this need to draw
nearer to God, however, was not the point of departure for his philoso-
phizing; it arose as an existential conclusion to a series of reflections.
The affirmation of the presence of God as ultimate recourse is the
concrete response to the question "Who am I" - a question which has
troubled men of all times in both the presence and absence of formalized
religion. It was the need to find some lasting, ennobling and trust-
worthy bond among men that has led Marcel into the reflective analysis
of religious experience. He did not begin his work with religious ex-
perience but with the questions of perception, of self-identity, of our
having a body and of our needing to be faithful to one another. It is
these questions which proved to be incomprehensible to him without
106 THE COMMUNICATION OF HOPE
recourse to a religious affirmation. Thus the affirmation of the presence

of God is an affirmation growing out of practical and social need, and
the recognition of the religious dimension of life, with its roots in the
needs of human fidelity and freedom, is primarily an experienced re-
cognition rather than a conceptually articulated argument. Further-
more, it is because the understanding of the bond among men is
efficacious only in the conscious and continual attempt to live in
harmony with one another that the question of the existence of God is
inseparable from the need to adhere to and invoke Him in order to
make sense out of ourselves and our fellowmen. Although this drawing
near to God has, in the route followed by Marcel, the character of a
conclusion rather than a point of departure, it says nothing at all about
other possible sources of religious insight and experience. Who is to
deny that another person may encounter the ground of his own
contingent existence in a more direct fashion? But whether man
gropingly struggles toward the need to question his own facticity or
meets the Other surprisingly and gratituously on the way, he finds
himself essentially as homo viator.
As soon as man genuinely wonders about the fact of his own presence in
the world, a fact which his consciousness and his freedom cannot
account for, two possibilities arise: man is either homo viator or homo
absurdus. In the order of lived experience the third possibility, that
of the agnostic who does not know whether he is on the way or absurd,
is reduced to one of the other two because such a person lives either in
the hope of some meaning or in the disregard of such hope. Obviously,
for man to be on the way, it is not required that he have already
found his goal, but merely that he has not actively refused the search.
These two possibilities for man belong to the given situation and are
not of our making even though the resolution of the issue, that is, the
decision as to which possibility is finally made actual, may depend
upon my willingness or my refusal to testify. We find ourselves and
our freedom already always in existence and our freedom can neither
justify its own presence nor be responsible for it. 1 The limits of our free
activity and of our responsibility lie totally within the unavoidable
acceptance of a gratuitously given situation, whether this situation be
one of meaning or one of absurdity. How one interprets this given
1 While Sartre acknowledges that freedom does not choose its own facticity, he fails to
take this facticity as an immediate and defining structure of every exercise of freedom. If
this is done we are, indeed, placed in the paradoxical position of apprehending ourselves as
simultaneously totally responsible for our being and totally unjustifiable. Cf. Being and
Nothingness, p. 83.
THE COMMUNICATION OF HOPE 107
context of human life is what, in the last analysis, sets one philosophy
of life off from another. In the purely conceptual order, differing inter-
pretations are possible and equally self-consistent, as the history of
philosophy shows. In the order in which we live our lives, man is either
on the way to meaning and fulfillment or his existence is radically in-
compatible with the context in which he finds himself. If the latter is the
case, man is indeed absurd and all lasting meaning, if there is any such
meaning, lies beyond man's grasp and enjoyment.
If we are to develop a philosophy not of freedom but of the limited
freedom that is man's, it is necessary constantly to keep this context of
freedom in view. It is necessary to learn to see this gratuitous context of
freedom as it manifests itself in our experience, that is, to learn to see
it not as an abstract notion, but as a concrete and ever present di-
mension of our existence which in its being beyond freedom makes our
free activities possible. This devotion to the lived experience manifests
itself in every phase of Marcel's philosophy. It is present in his in-
sistence that the philosopher must not shut himself apart but must
remain within the living social milieu. It is the root of his determined
refusal to become trapped by the spirit of objectivization. The same
desire to be faithful to experience as it is presented concretely forms
the basis for his distinction between problem and mystery. It is like-
wise the mandate from experienced reality which forces him to
recognize a radical difference between the believer and the non-
believer.
For a full appreciation of the experiential grounding of Marcel's
thought, it is necessary, as he himself has said, to read his dramatic
work as well as his philosophical essays.2 When one reads only the
philosophical essays it is easy to come to the opinion that Marcel saw
clearly the positive side of human existence, but that he tended to
disregard the deep conflicts which are characteristic of the joint
exercise of human freedoms and which in the political arena can
encompass the globe in conflict. There is an element of truth at the
base of this view, and it is that Marcel does indeed deny the ultimate
reality of the conflict between men and insists rather on the reality
of the bond arising from mutual respect. The reality of this bond and
therefore the true reality of humanity is, however, not something given
but something which must be created by fidelity and in the darkness
of hope. There is likewise an element of untruth in this view of Marcel's
2 Cf. "My Dramatic Works as Viewed by the Philosopher", in Searchings, Newman Press,
New York, 1967, especially pp. 108-9.
ro8 THE COMMUNICATION OF HOPE
work, inasmuch as his insistence upon the need to create a vinculum

among men and to live in hope arises not from a blindness to human
conflict but precisely from a very clear awareness of this very conflict.
It is just because human freedom is and remains antinomic that the
conflict between individuals and political ideologies cannot be re-
solved on the level of social and political techniques. A reading of
Marcel's dramatic work quickly dispels the idea that he is unaware
of the depths of conflict in human life.
The setting which Marcel has deliberately chosen for much of his
dramatic work is contemporary middle class society, the society which
he knew best. On the surface, the action of the plays circles around the
mundane and often trivial conflicts which arise within this society, but
on a deeper level which makes possible the dramatic presentation of
these mundane conflicts the action is the painful and complex un-
folding of human needs, desires and freedoms as the various persons
attempt to find themselves and one another. By carefully avoiding all
trace of the exotic and of the tragic hero the playwright keeps the
audience within the realm of their own experiences and opens to their
view the mysterious possibilities and pitfalls of their own relations to
one another. These possibilities are revealed typically in a prolonged
conflict which arises from very ordinary human attitudes and desires,
each of which is allowed to follow its own inner logic, but in the
presence of other attitudes equally understandable and also following
their own dynamic course. Typically, the issues are left unresolved;
the individuals are left isolated from one another. When the curtain
falls there is sometimes the thought or maybe just the hope that the
conflict will be transcended in the future; at other times there is the
fear that the situation and the misunderstandings can only worsen.
This latter is the case, for example, in La Chapelle Ardente in which
a young woman, Mireille, who has lost her fiance in war, becomes
hopelessly entangled in the family of her intended husband. Relent-
lessly and yet by a method which no one can clearly identify, Aline,
the mother of the lost boy, maneuvers Mireille to marry her nephew
Andre, an invalid with a heart condition from whom Mireille has long
ago turned away. Although she cannot admit it to herself, the mother
thus to some degree keeps the one who was to be her daughter-in-law
from starting a new life and thereby also keeps her own son in some
way alive and present. The plot is further complicated by the fact that
the mother holds her husband responsible for the death of the son
because it was in his regiment and, at least in Aline's mind, by following
THE COMMUNICATION OF HOPE IOg
his father's example that the boy was killed. As the play develops Aline
is separated from her military husband and Mireille and Andre slowly
begin to realize that they must somehow find their independence from
Aline and the insoluble problems of the past. This past, however - much
of their own making and much not of their making - is perhaps more
powerful than they. When they finally summon sufficient strength to
bring about a break from Aline, a strength made possible ironically,
only by the assistance of Aline herself, they are paralyzed by the fear
that they have only succeeded in driving Aline to suicide. In the
closing scene this fear rushes them to the telephone and perhaps to a
tighter circle of frustration.
In Un Homme de Dieu Claude is gradually awakened to the fact that
neither he nor others can see him as he really is. Again the play ends
with no resolution but the awareness of the need to continue in life
with at most the hope that eventually we will be able to see and be
seen as we really are.
These endings are typical of Marcel's plays and are built on a clear
recognition of the antinomic character of human exchanges. What
are presented are the logical and plausible unfoldings of human conflict.
Thus in a play of Marcel we are not presented with a picture of a
tragic hero flawed by a weakness in his character, but are opened to
the experience that the human situation as such is tragic. It is not one
character who allows the situation to deteriorate but each in his own
way. The world in which the characters live is flawed. "We're all
feeble, broken .... " 3 Again and again, this character or that will suggest
reasonableness only to find that his partner finds a different course
of action reasonable. Repeatedly a character will try to bridge the gap
of loneliness by trying to extract a promise of faithfulness only to discover
that the other person cannot be captured, that faithfulness cannot be
required or purchased. At the end of the play the audience is not given
a solution, nor even a means to a solution. All that is presented is the
situation of conflict and the suggestion that no solution will be forth-
coming without some radical change in the way in which people
understand themselves and one another. There is no way out in terms
of the simple demands, one might even say the reasonable demands,
with which we confront one another.
3 Ariadne, translated by Rosalind Heywood, in Gabriel Marcel, Three Plays, Hill and Wang
N. Y., 1958, p. 213.
IIO THE COMMUNICATION OF HOPE
The philosopher's probing of the mystery of self and of community is

theoretically open to all men inasmuch as the possibility of questioning
in a radical way is given in the experience of our awareness of self and
world. Practically speaking, however, this way is not open to all men
because not all are in the position to recognize the need for questioning
or the possibility of any satisfactory way of questioning. If there is no
felt need by an individual or a society to question its basic reality, if in
Marcel's terms there is no metaphysical unrest, there is neither need
nor possibility of a metaphysics, nor is there possibility of a mature
religion. The development of philosophy and of religion, like the
development of politics and economics, cannot arise apart from man's
needs. To interpret the religious attempt to find a satisfactory way to
live the human life in its ultimate meaning as a cowardly refusal to
accept responsibility for one's freedom is to forget that no man is in
fact able to be responsible for the facticity of his freedom. It is always
possible to refuse to question our own facticity either by adopting a
convenient ideology or by prolonging a childish acceptance of religion;
the philosophical alternative to these failures of nerve is the accomplish-
ment of a reflective awareness of our historical situation, not excluding
the mystery of our own presence in the world of our fellowmen.
Here arises one of the most difficult areas of all of Marcel's work, an
area which nevertheless has been a lifetime concern for him. How does
one communicate the need for giving testimony or awaken another to
the possibility of hope? This difficulty is one which the more traditional
natural theologian who accepts an objective demonstration of the
existence of God can, at least in theory, escape. If the existence of God
can be objectively demonstrated and the demonstration made public,
any problems regarding the communication of the proof stem either
from a lack of intellectual acumen and training or from a bad faith.
But if, as Marcel maintains, the approach to God rests upon a free and
individually creative act of testimony, what possibility is there for
communicating this approach to others? Some critics, as we have
noted, accuse the Christian existentialists of drawing upon data which
are clearly religious and thus beyond the reach of philosophy. In
beginning students of philosophy especially, there stilI lingers a tenden-
cy to link existentialism and atheism. Such criticism, at least when
applied to Marcel, fails to notice that his analyses of incarnation, of the
notion of person, of perception - all of which clear the ground for his
affirmation of the reality of God - proceed without dependence upon
the acceptance of Christianity and in large measure pre-date Marcel's
THE COMMUNICATION OF HOPE III
own acceptance of any religious creed. The historical record of belief

in God, of man's acceptance even of a revealed religion and of his
willingness to make its preservation a matter more important than life
itself - these are not themselves matters of revelation. When the phi-
losopher seeks to enter into a sympathetic understanding of the I believe
of the believer, he does not by that effort necessarily accept the credo
of the believer. Just as the experimental psychologist can study the
behavior patterns of the believer, so the philosopher can search to
illuminate the ontological grounding which would make the faith of the
believer intelligible. It is in view of this possibility that Marcellegiti-
mat ely maintains that the acceptance of his phenomenological analyses
does not depend upon the acceptance of Christianity, even though he
himself saw fit to embrace the Christian religion.
The difficulty raised by the question of communication of hope
cannot be avoided. Not only is the religious believer prone to insist that
God is near and available to everyone without exception who calls upon
him, but Marcel's own discussion of person as being real only in the
ontological communication which is intersubjectivity would seem to
demand the possibility of the communication of hope. Can man's
presence in the world be such that it requires the communication of
intersubjectivity for each person's recognition of himself and for every
aspect of his conduct, and yet man's ultimate radication in being be
such that it rests upon an act of fidelity and testimony in every way
incommunicable? Let us consider fully the depth of this difficulty.
The clarification of our understanding of what it means to be a person
in intersubjective presence to one another, the analyses of forgotten
but powerful meanings of truth, the clarification of the meaning of
freedom - all of this might clear the way for the birth of hope and
fidelity, but all such philosophical considerations can only have the
function of midwife. The birth of hope itself must wait upon the act
of invocation and the willingness of the individual and of society to
experience a need for hope. We cannot give hope to one another but
can only assist in making it possible for another to creatively achieve
hope.
A consideration of the mystery of presence on the purely human
level reveals a difficulty of communication analogous to the difficulty
of sharing our approach to God; our experience in responding to the
difficulty on this human plane can perhaps throw some light upon the
richer mysteries of sharing our approach to God.
The act of disposability, of making myself available, by which I
lIZ THE COMMUNICATION OF HOPE
open myself to the personal reality of another, is a free act. And even
though the mutual openness of myself and the other person constitutes
the intersubjective realm, I am always quite consciously free not to
open myself to a particular thou and am always unable to demand that
you extend your presence to me. As is presented so clearly in the
dramatic work of Marcel, the very thought that the personal presence
of another can be demanded either as a right or as a recompense for my
having opened myself destroys the meaning of personal presence
because it eliminates the freedom and with it the ability to become
responsible, without which the person is no longer person. The insight
of Sartre, although exceedingly narrow, is very penetrating on this
point. As long as I think of myself as an objective structure closed in
upon myself, albeit a pour-soi, I can have no real relationships to
another except those of conflict, of possessiveness, of fear and hatred.
The incompatibility between personal presence and the objective
demand that this presence be granted is illustrated perhaps most
clearly in the meaninglessness of the bought friendship. It is seen also,
however, in less obvious forms: in the scandal of a public official
allowing himself to be bribed or in the refusal of a convicted man to
"take to heart" his punishment. It is also visible in the refusal of those
who are truly heroic to enter into the hatred of their provocateurs.
Thus the act of personal availability, just because it is dependent upon
and constituted by the intersubjective personal world, is uniquely free
and can be said to be incommunicable in that it can only be extended
but never forced; it can be solicited but never commanded. The
language of communication on the personal level is the act of accep-
tance itself.
It is in this sense of solicitation and invitation that the approach to
God may likewise be communicable. Once we rid ourselves of the
prejudice that only the extremes of pure subjectivity and objectivity
exhaust the spectrum of human presence, there is room for a communi-
cation through mutual quest, mutual interrogation and example. This
mutual quest, however, is hardly possible unless a society has already
an existential (or better, felt) need to pursue the quest. The extreme
difficulty of awakening a society to its own needs has caused Marcel
as well as others to wonder whether man can indeed awaken to self-
consciousness without first going through a radical loss of meaning.
If this is so, the current rejection of much of the established culture by
young people may have far greater effect than the simple correction of
internal and relatively superficial failures of particular political and
THE COMMUNICATION OF HOPE lI3
economic systems. To achieve this radical re-orientation, however, the
quest will have to go much deeper than it has gone so far in the so-
called radical politics.
This mutual quest places obligations on the believer as well as on the
unbeliever. The spirit of inquiry rules out of order any hint of pater-
nalism and requires the believer to recognize within his belief a di-
mension of non-belief and therefore a kinship with the non-believer.
This dimension of non-belief within belief manifests itself not only in
noments of doubt but also in the believer's need to make a constant
effort to be faithful and in his awareness that even in his best moments
he sees only through a glass darkly. The example of a life lived in hope
and in generous and candid acceptance of one's fellows often communi-
cates more than philosophical discussion. Likewise the negative ex-
ample of individuals (or of a society) who find no reason to rise above
the techniques of everyday life has a deteriorating effect upon man's
efforts to see himself as he really is.
Existentialism, and in particular Marcel, has been charged with
providing a philosophy of the individual, or at most a philosophy of
personal encounters, to the neglect of the more pressing social issues of
the day. The writings of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Marxism are
thus seen as a somewhat belated but welcome advance. These writings
are indeed well worth careful study, but they represent only one kind
of social thinking found in the body of existential thought. The central
concerns of Marcel are social on another level. In his metaphysical
discussions of intersubjectivity and of hope he is calling attention to the
need for a radical re-understanding of what it means to be person, in
order that there can be a social structure which will foster personal values
rather than one which treats persons as entities to be manipulated.
The current unsatisfactory state of the entire welfare program in the
United States is a clear instance of what can result from taking a too
limited view of persons. On the other hand, the current development
of an ever more powerful "counter-culture" in this country reveals at
least the need for a deeper penetration in our analyses of the foun-
dations and meaning of society. The emphasis that this counter-
culture is placing upon meditation in its various and sometimes
esoteric forms is an expression of the ancient wisdom that a society is
defined more truthfully by its reflective and meditative self-awareness,
in other words, by its faith, than it is by its visible structures. What is
changing today is that the recognition of the social efficacy of this
dimension of faith is becoming more widespread and is coupled with
II4 THE COMMUNICATION OF HOPE
the ability of the counter-culture to make its voice heard. However one
may judge some of the tangential, and I would say peripheral, issues
raised by this counter-culture, it seems undeniable that there is
developing a milieu whose demands and questionings will not be
satisfied by the levels of understanding which carried us through the
first half of the twentieth century.
By broadening the scope of our understanding of man's presence to
reality beyond the narrow boundaries of sUbjective-objective cognition
to the order of mystery which is at once cognitive-affective, and
intersubjective, Marcel does establish a consistent theoretical founda-
tion for his own lively concern to lead the unbeliever to the way he
has found. The following passage from Homo Viator is directed specifi-
cally toward the possibility of a Christian maieutic but applies all the
more to the possibility of a theistic maieutic .
... to come to the help of the unbeliever spiritually can scarcely mean claiming
literally to bring him something of which he has been deprived. Such a claim
would in fact always be in danger of annulling or making sterile the good which
we set out to do. All that we can propose to ourselves is, in the last analysis, to
awaken within another the consciousness of what he is, or, more precisely, of his
divine filiation; to teach him to see himself as the child of God through the love
which is shown him. From this point of view, I should be rather tempted to say
that, contrary to what Kierkegaard proclaimed, there is probably a Christian
maieutic, of which, however, the essence is naturally very different from what
we know of the Platonic maieutic. It is in treating the other as a child of God that
it seems to me to be within the limits of possibility for me to awaken within him
a consciousness of his divine filiation. But in reality I do not give or bring him
anything. I merely direct the adoration of which God is the unique object on to
the divine life as seen in this creature, who from the beginning has been unaware
of his true nature and is all the more unaware of it the greater his self-complacent
vanity may be. 4
This passage indicates clearly the uniquely individual character of

the human affirmation of God and of the need to rely upon the intrinsic
creative act of each person, rather than upon any argument brought
to the unbeliever by the believer. It hints also perhaps at the role which
philosophy can play in leading the unbeliever to recognize his true
status. "To treat another as a child of God" has its application not only
in the field of practical activity but also in the field of philosophical
discussion and demands that the search for the bases of a viable bond
among men be carried on with mutual respect and with a view toward
easing the metaphysical unrest which is common to all, once we have
awakened to the gratuitous nature of our existence. The recognition
of the gratuitous character of our existence in the order of mystery
THE COMMUNICATION OF HOPE !IS
"enables those who have attained to it to perceive the possibility of a
revelation in a way which is not open to those who have never ventured
beyond the frontiers of the realm of the problematical.. .. " 5 Such
discussion, to be sure, supposes a willingness to search on the part of
all involved. Neither Marcel's reflective searching nor the demonstra-
tions of the natural theologian have any force whatever against the
man who has denied his need for God and stifled his metaphysical
unrest.
When, on the other hand, the presence of God is no longer - I shall not say felt,
but recognized, then there is nothing which is not unquestionable, and when
man models himself on Lucifer, that questioning degenerates into the negative
will which I have already described. Can I hope to show this Lucifer-man his
mistake? The truth seems to be that there is room for only one thing here, and
that is a conversion which no creature can flatter himself he is capable of bringing
about. 6
The explicit acceptance of this limit to his efforts to reveal the way
he has found and to his efforts to build a wisdom upon a response to the
ultimate recourse reveals again Marcel's devotion to the existential
condition of man. It is here also that his reflection is in clearest oppo-
sition to some of the non-theistic existential philosophers. There is no
possibility of constructing a wisdom for the man-unto-death. The man-
unto-death is in fact the man-unto-infidelity. It is only for the man
oriented toward the fulness of life that he can have any appeal or any
value, and only for such a man is there really any escape from the
"sickness unto death" which Kierkegaard described so forcefully. This
refusal to accept death as the ultimate context of human life and human
meaning brings no automatic or guaranteed resolution to life's problems,
nor does it cause one to close his eyes to the fundamentally ambiguous
character of human life. In fact it is not only death, but the presence
of the other person - which Merleau-Ponty refers to as the nearest
approach to death 7 - which constantly and in every action exercises
a limit on our spontaneity and our self possession. Marcel sees as
clearly as the other existential thinkers the antinomic character of
human relations, a character which causes us to flounder: " ... the fact
is that we are everywhere confronted with fissures, cracks, which
somehow penetrate the presumed integrity of being". 8
The deepest insight of Marcel - and here truth is most clearly in-
5 The Philosophy of Existence, p. 31.
8 The Mystery of Being, II, Ig8.
7 Cf. Merieau-Ponty, M., Sense and Non-Sense, pp. 68 ff.
II6 THE COMMUNICATION OF HOPE
separable from fidelity - is that the antinomic itself cannot be re-

cognized except upon the background of a more fundamental affirma-
tion of the harmony betweenm en and their ultimate situation. The
need is to re-awaken ourselves to the necessity of being faithful to this
ontological mooring. This cannot be done by repudiating the world of
science or of technology, but by rising to a level of reflection which can
grasp both the possibility and the limitations of objective knowledge.
It is from such a level of secondary reflection that we can perceive
that man is not a useless passion. Nor is he simply at the mercy of an
alien universe whose blind threats are ever more clearly revealed by
our science and our failures to create a human universe. Rather is he
truly man only to the extent that he is able and willing to hope.
INDEX
Anselm, 67, 81-2, 102 Fidelity, as place of being, 42, as response

Appetite for being, 62 57, called faith, 60, 61, 67
Aquinas, 27, 84, 91 Free cause, 99-102
Aristotle, 22, 99, 100 Freedom, as antinomic, 108, II 5-6, as
Augustine, 82, 89 response, 55
Availability, as category of personhood, Hegel, 2-3, 9, 14, 49
41, 111-2 Heidegger, 6, 8, 28, 48, 50, 51, 71, 92, 93,
Being-in-the-world, 33, 55, 65, 72, 92 94, 96
Berdyaev, 15, 92-3, 98 Hope, as absolute, 68-9, II6
Bergson, 14 Hume,24
Berkeley, 35 Humility, ontological, 32, 66, 71, 99
Bradley, 2, 3, 49 Husserl, 14, 99
Brentano, 99 Hyper-phenomenological, need for, 18
Camus, 76 Idealism, inadequacy of, 2-3, 4-5, 9-10,
Constitution, mutual, 33, 34, 37, 39, 42, 24, 25-6, 69, 72, 83
62, 70, 112 Individuality, redefined, 39, I13
Death, as test of fidelity, 59, 70, 87-88 Invocation, 60, 68, 72, 82, 88, 96, III
Deism, 72 Intelligible background, 18, 52, 82
Departure, point of, 2, 6, 23-5, 77-81, Intuition, blinded, 14, 18
optional character, 13 Irrationalism, rejected, 12
Descartes, 13, 23, 26, 28, 40, 67 Jaspers, 20, 93-4, 96, 101
Dialectic of affirmation, 81-2 Kant, 2, 14, 23, 26, 29, 3I, 42, 60, 63, 81,
Disposability, as mark of person, III 98, 99
Drama, as privileged form of expression, Kierkegaard, 8, 68, 92-3, 114, II5
3-4, 8-9, relation to philosophy, 8-9, Lebenswelt, 14
107 ff Maritain, 31, 78, 91
Empiricism, inadequacy of, 3-4, 5, II, 24, Merleau-Ponty, 50, 52, 95, 101, II3, II5
26 Metaphysical unrest, 61-2, IIO, 114-5
Esse est percipi, 35 Music, relation to philosophy, 8
Examples, necessity of, 18 Mystery, defined, 17-18
Exigence of being, 61-2 distinguished from problem, 16-17, 50,
Existential ontology, 66 54,82
Experience-limit, 30-31 Nietzsche, 67, 80, 84
Faith, as self-authenticating, 86, 89 Ontological weight, 67
social efficacy of, I13 Pantheism, 72
Feeling, as mode of awareness, 34 Pascal, 78, 96
Fichte,2 Perception, as primordial, 28, 33, 52
Fideism, 82, 85-6, 89, 103 Phenomenological absolute, meaning of, 13
lI8 INDEX
Phenomenological analysis, described, 14, Subjective, as correlate to objective, II,

exemplified, 22 f, 36-7 19
Philosophical research, goal of, 6-7, 44 Thomism, II, 84, 99
Plato, 20, 42, 52, 98, 99, II4 Transcendence, appeal to, 64, 65, 71, 72,
Polyani,46 need for, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66
Prayer, 15-16, 60, 88 Troisfontaines, I, 32
Primary option, 13 Truth, as adequation, 45-6, as incom-
Problem, distinguished from mystery, 16- plete, 49-50, as value, 46-48, linked
17, 50, 54, 82 with justice, 51, of the connoisseur, 46
Promise-making, 55 ff Ultimate Recourse, 36, 60, 72, 87, 105
Reciprocity, as category of personhood, Universality, polyphonic, 9D-91
39 Unconditionality, of promises, 56--7, 58,
Reflection, primary, 14-15, 34, 38, 65, 86, 59
secondary, 14-15, 18, 34, 60, 86, 103, Verification, regarding belief, 15, 85-6,
II6 89, 102
Royce, 2-3, 50, 72 Will-to-believe, rejected, 61
Sartre, 26, 39, 65, 67, 92-3, 94, 95, 96, 98, Will-to-power, 80
101, 102, 106, 112, 113 Witness, bearing, 58, 68, 71, 88, 90

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An Existential Approach To God - A Study of Gabriel Marcel

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AN EXISTENTIAL APPROACH TO GOD:

A STUDY OF GABRIEL MARCEL

MARTINUS NljHOFF / THE HAGUE I 1972

ISBN-I3: 978-90-247- I 503-9 e-ISBN-I3: 978-94-010-2416-7

Man's concern about God is both a question and a quest. We seek to

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the publishers of the English

my colleagues Professors Albert DiIanni, Frederick Herx and Richard

THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION

Ours is a restless age. In every sector of intellectual and social life we

2 Journal MttaPhysique, GaIlimard, Paris, 1927. English translation, Metaphysical Journal

leged both because it was joined inseparably to the individual person

cussion of the character of philosophical research. 8 There the author

This statement however does not accurately state Marcel's position.

an adequate method for understanding reality. Science can study

The central aim of Marcel's search for a method might be expressed as

a term introduced by Kant and Hegel, Marcel describes his philo-

Marcel notes that the impossibility of universal verifiability becomes

necessary and beyond the scope of objectivity. It is for this reason

The mysterious, far from being equivalent to the unknowable, is the

Philosophy must proceed by phenomenological or descriptive analysis,

MYSELF AND THE OTHER

Understanding always involves a subject as the one who is under-

Such a discussion of subjectivity is necessary if we are to have any

am I is always the individual self, but always as involved in what is

8 "Existence and Objectivity" (printed as a supplement to the Metaphysical Journal) pp.

is correct when he notes that the scandal of modern philosophy is not

9 Philosophical Fragments I909-I9I4, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame,

reflective thought, is the consciousness of my spatial bodily existence

The relationship of my body to my consciousness is, however, in itself

We are led to dis-associate existence from that which exists and

objectification is the subject existent. In spite of his understanding

misapprehend the very orientation of his efforts. The scope of these

Two points need to be noted in this and in the portrayal of an adult

To be myself is to be at once historical inasmuch as I exist only in my

23 Homo Viator, p. 22.

present. Even when another person is physically and objectively near

In spite of the tragic possibility of failure inherent in the very

FIDELITY AND TRUTH

The previous chapters investigated what it means to pursue philo-

are "out there", objectively available, for the would-be researcher.!

demand, as from without, obliging us to live within truth if we are

Although the two philosophers differ greatly in their ultimate under-

Merleau-Ponty's work as well has been to show that our primary

10Ibid., pp. 9I-92.

ment." 13 How untrue to truth is such a procedure! The possibility of

As early as 1914 Marcel maintained that the affirmation of the reality

the attempt to reach this understanding of being is not directed to the

are only possible in a world from which God is absent. Unconditionality

A consideration of the implications which follow from a refusal to

or spouse) is simply not present in a personally meaningful way except

courageous enough to go all the way into an existential ontology not

believer, to treat God as a structure of being, even though a necessary

However paradoxical it may sound, it is the transcendent character

Hope properly understood does not run counter to an authentic

The hesitant note in this entry of the Journal is evident. Although

something that has a beginning, can be fostered, nurtured, hurt or

as Creative Fidelity, p. 36.

APPRAISAL OF THE TRADITIONAL PROOFS