"The Existentialists": Part 1 - Gabriel Marcel - The Neo-Socratic

1 - Introduction

There is a point of view that all existentialists share besides their different paradigmatic approaches that are through our choices that we become who we are.
Our existential angst is the mother of the manifested anxiety and man/woman is condemned to live in an eternal choice to solve it, on the stairway to freedom.
Existentialists are big contributors to the cause of anti-conformism and individual autonomy to choose the way to act.

Before starting with Gabriel Marcel, I would like to mention the contribution of two Spanish philosophers as early contributors to the existentialist cause, Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) and José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955).
The Basque Miguel de Unamuno is mainly a poet but in his philosophical book Tragic Sense of Life, he feels a weirdo reality, where he wants to find the Truth, the meaning of Existence and himself.
His philosophical view most anchored in Kierkegaard is also very personal but based in metaphysics, knowledge theory and the existential quest for life.

"Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons" - Miguel de Unamuno

The philosopher Ortega y Gasset sees Unamuno as a quasi-philosopher with deep thoughts about reality, and he contributed with a remarkable book, The Revolt of the Masses, fighting rationalism and modernity with its empty subjectivist idealism.
He is critical about the masses in society, increasingly invested with power to act by the genesis and rise of the Mass-Man that he sees in all the range of social classes, characterized by the bourgeois civilization and way of thinking.

“To be different is to be indecent.” - Ortega y Gasset

There is no confluence of thought between all the existentialists, and they all had quarrels and disagreements between them, but they all agreed in one point that Man is born entitled to the quest for personal freedom.

"Philosophy and Art as revolutions of consciousness are always dangerous to any centralized abusive power." - charlie777pt

2 - Gabriel Marcel, the Post-Socratic

"I am my body." - Gabriel Marcel

Gabriel Marcel was pointed as on the first existentialists, but he always preferred to be named a post-Socratic philosopher, and he was a big critic of Sartre and other atheist existentialists, mainly by their opposing religious beliefs.
The first influences of Gabriel Marcel are the German idealist Schelling, and Josiah Royce and the English Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but his great jump in thought came from Henri Bergson, that put him in the right path to his concrete existential philosophy, and the search for the Self.
He saw philosophy as the investigation about the Self, using what he called "ontological demand", as the main questions that are the basis of his thoughts.

His first paradigm brings the concepts of the interaction between the Problem- the control of Man over things-, that involve and imprison the Mystery- The unavailable Self -, that Man can't recognize, identify or have its mental representation.
The Self is totally subjective, and can be felt with some intuitive glimpses in Existence, and "that can't be dissolved by the dialectics of experience".

The binomial connection of Mystery/Problem between Thought and Action, he develops a second paradigm in the book Être et Avoir (To Be and To Have), as the opposing pair where the Self is immersed in the objectification of possessions because Existence is inseparable from the Body.
Gabriel Marcel wants to find the way for the Self in the binomial relation of the external Body with Reality, refusing the Cartesian separation between the subject and the object of knowledge, where the being is a mystery.

"I can not say anything about myself that is authentically myself." - Gabriel Marcel

The Ontological Demand of Man is ephemeral and it is not a conscious will, but a kind of natural desire, that has been silenced by modern society life, instilled with the search for materiality (To Have) instead of the search for the mystery of the Self.
He wants to replace the anxiety and dissatisfaction of Sartre by a feeling of hope, fidelity, and love, going in a different direction with the transcendence of religion and God making the Self irrelevant.

"It is absolutely necessary that I lose consciousness of the individual reality of being that I may be led to suppress." - Gabriel Marcel

To me this a total contradiction with his theory that leaves no answers but transcendence, as an unsolvable answer to the questions he poses making reality a prison of an outside entity, without any definable form, that makes the Self non-existant.

3- Technology is killing the Self

"But a science is exact to the extent that its method measures up to and is adequate to its object." - Gabriel Marcel

Marcel was afraid that modernity was swallowing the Self because people are getting too attached to science and technology in the construction of social decision making, where people is impersonalized and reduced to mere Things.
He had ethical considerations about the relation between Power and Technique, that is always controlling its outcomes, but he also saw Technology as a fountain of human satisfaction and realization because, it can enrich and educate the human character.
The risk he previewed is already real today, that man has become a prisoner of Science and Technology, without an escape to his natural spiritual dignity to serve Mankind, with people leaving in a to distort reality that obliterates the space of the Self.

This reality can't mirror the real Selves of people and makes Mankind renounce to the old Socratic quote of "Know Your Self" as the first philosophical paradigm of self-liberation.
He believed Technocracy was becoming a black hole that couldn't be stopped to attract Man to inhumanity, where life has no intrinsic value in face of the productivity criteria of cold technology.
Like Marcel, I believe we must dedicate ourselves to mistery of the Self, and avoid the weight of material possessions, but I can't accept that the last solution is the transcendence of the mystery of God and faith, making our being totally obsolete in Existence.
His relation between Technique and Anxiety is explained in the gap of the continuous search for possessions and the fear of losing it, and the fulfillment of the unsustainable lightness of the Being.

We have to reverse the social tendency to value possessions (To Have) as if they were great human qualities (To Be) so that humanity does not finish in a dead end.

"I can not be really at peace with myself if I'm not at peace with my brothers." - Gabriel Marcel