Gabriel Marcel
Gabriel Marcel
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Full Name and Common Aliases
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Gabriel Honoré Marcel was a French philosopher, playwright, and critic. He is often referred to as G. M. by scholars and writers.
Birth and Death Dates
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Gabriel Marcel was born on December 7, 1889, in Paris, France. He passed away on October 8, 1973, also in Paris.
Nationality and Profession(s)
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Marcel was a French citizen and held professions as a philosopher, playwright, and critic.
Early Life and Background
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Gabriel Marcel was born into a devout Catholic family. His early life was marked by tragedy when his mother passed away at a young age. This event had a profound impact on Marcel's worldview and spiritual development. He went on to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he was heavily influenced by the works of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Major Accomplishments
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Marcel made significant contributions to existentialist philosophy. His work focused on the nature of existence, human freedom, and the search for meaning in life. He is known for coining the term "existentialism," although he later distanced himself from the label due to its association with nihilism.
Notable Works or Actions
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Some of Marcel's notable works include:
Being and Having (1950), a philosophical treatise on the relationship between existence and being.
The Mystery of Being (1951), a collection of essays exploring existentialist themes.
* The Existential Background of Human Dignity (1963), a critical analysis of human dignity in the context of existentialism.
Impact and Legacy
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Gabriel Marcel's philosophical ideas have had a lasting impact on modern thought. His emphasis on subjective experience, freedom, and the search for meaning has influenced thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. Marcel's work also extends to the realm of theater, with his plays exploring themes of human existence and morality.
Why They Are Widely Quoted or Remembered
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Gabriel Marcel is widely quoted and remembered due to his profound insights into the human condition. His philosophical ideas continue to resonate with readers seeking answers to life's fundamental questions.
Quotes by Gabriel Marcel
The detachment of the saint springs, as one might say, from the very core of reality; it completely excludes curiosity about the universe. This detachment is the highest form of participation. The detachment of the spectator is just the opposite, it is desertion, not only in thought but in act.
I cannot help recording that this illumination of my thought is for me only the extension of the Other, the only Light. I have never known such happiness. I have been playing Brahms for a long time, piano sonatas that were new to me. They will always remind me of this unforgettable time. How can I keep this feeling of being entered, of being absolutely safe – and also of being enfolded?
The obscurity of the external world is a function of my own obscurity to myself; the world has no intrinsic obscurity. Should we say that it comes to the same thing in the end? We must ask up to what point this interior opacity is a result; is it not very largely the consequence of an act? and is not this act simply sin?
March 7th It is a serious error, if I am not mistaken, to treat time as a mode of apprehension. For one is then forced to consider it also as the order according to which the subject apprehends himself, and he can only do this by breaking away from himself, as it were, and mentally severing the fundamental engagement which makes him what he is.
We must, therefore, break away once and for all from the metaphors which depict consciousness as a luminous circle round which there is nothing, to its own eyes, but darkness. On the contrary, the shadow is at the centre.
I know by my own experience how, from a stranger met by chance, there may come an irresistible appeal which overturns the habitual perspectives just as a gust of wind might tumble down the panels of a stage set – what had seemed near becomes infinitely remote and what had seemed distant seems to be close.
It is impossible to exaggerate how much better the formula es denkt in mir is than cogito ergo sum, which lets us in for pure subjectivism.
My freedom is not and cannot be something that I observe as I observe an outward fact; rather it must be something that I decide, moreover, without appeal. It is beyond the power of anyone to reject the decision by which I assert my freedom and this assertion is ultimately bound up with the consciousness that I have of myself.
Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me.
You know you have loved someone when you have glimpsed in them that which is too beautiful to die.