Why Marcel Matters

In Alexandria, it has been said that the only persons incapable of a sin are those who have already committed it and repented; to be free of an error, let us add, it is well to have professed it.--Jorge Luis Borges, Averroes' Search

Marcel matters, first, because of his unflinching intellectual honesty; the sort of intellectual honesty and transparency that characterizes the very best humanistic scholarship.

Marcel referred to this intellectual honesty as "philosophy," and therefore characterized his philosophy as "neo-Socratic."

Intrinsic to intellectual candor is the "refusal, at any price, to have the free movement of our thinking blocked" (Mystery of Being, p. 15). This means that thinking must be permitted to find its own way through the dark wood of avoidable prejudice. I qualify "prejudice" in this way because, since Kant, we know that there are unavoidable prejudices: a priori forms of thinking that, for better or worse, make thinking possible. These are prejudices of the first order; we are stuck with them. If there is any consolation to be had, it is that these prejudices are universal: they do not reflect racial, ethnic, gender, or socio-economic class distinctions (although some will dispute this claim). If they reflect history at all, it is the evolutionary history of our species: again, a history universally shared by human beings.

It is second order prejudices with which we have to deal: those enumerated above and, as Marcel insisted, others--even prejudices that many presume endemic to philosophy itself:

I would not hesitate to say, for instance, that philosophical idealism, as that doctrine has long been expounded, first in Germany, then in England and France, rests very largely on prejudices of this sort...(MOB, 15-16).

Marcel then adds a personal note that I find very revealing:

I remember very well the periods of anguish through which I passed, more than thirty years ago now [he was writing around 1950], when I was waging, in utter obscurity, this sort of war against myself, in the name of something which I felt sticking in me as sharply as a needle, but upon which I could not yet see any recognizable face (Ibid).

Marcel's determination to "do" philosophy in a way that eludes the grip of the dead hand of the philosophical past is why he matters; it is also probably one reason why he is, today, so neglected.

Today, the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of the language of philosophical idealism is not the monumental struggle it was for someone like Marcel in the middle of the 20th century. Today, we have new sets of demons to try to dispatch. Many of them, however, produce the same (or similar) effect upon the discursive intellect that philosophical idealism did. Marcel called this effect the "spirit of abstraction."

It is with his analysis of the spirit of abstraction that I always begin to read Marcel; and from there, I inevitably become distracted. In the past, it had always seemed to me that he fell victim to this spirit and, therefore, I found him to be of little help as a guide through it. But he was really very much like Wittgenstein in this regard: his understanding of the effects of the snake's venom was not second-hand. He himself had been bitten. What I failed to recognize when I tried reading him (in the 1970's, then the 1980's, then again in the first decade of the present century) was how he had managed to recover.

Here is where one has to pay very close attention to the moves he makes: he counters the "spirit of abstraction" with a kind of radical immanence: focusing his attention upon subjective responses to phenomena taken, always, in the individual case. At the same time, however--and this is where one must hold on tight or risk losing the Marcellian difference--he insists upon a notion of transcendence. With the impatience of youth, I repeatedly reached this point in Marcel's discourse and said, "Look! We have reached my stop ... Farewell!" I would then put the book down and turn to other things. For it is in Marcel's insistence upon transcendence that I saw his thought turn back upon itself and undermine his stated project. I did not stick around to see how he managed to extricate his thought from self-contradiction. This is why philosophy worthy of the name is not for the young.

Radical immanence need not be set in opposition to transcendence like matter and anti-matter. Marcel had achieved (as I had not) the Heraclitean way of thinking that was capable of perceiving a harmony of opposed tensions, as in the bow and the lyre.

For Marcel, the "true" opposite of transcendence, i.e., the opposite that interrupts harmonies, that makes them untenable, is not radical immanence, but reductive immanence. It is the latter which is best represented in Western philosophy by scientific materialism and the like; ironically, scientific materialism is a mode of the "spirit of abstraction" for it objectifies phenomena to the point where all subjectivity is banished from consideration. But "purely" objective phenomena do not exist for human beings; they are, in fact, abstractions.

Radical immanence, on the other hand, contains within itself a transcendental dimension: the sort one finds in the sober Romanticism of a William Wordsworth and, especially, Wordsworth's American heir, Wallace Stevens.