Gabriel Marcel is a philosopher, playwright and musician French (Paris, December 7th 1889 - Paris, October 8th 1973) representative of the Christian Existentialisme.

Its life

Listener of Bergson and aggregate of philosophy (1912), Gabriel Marcel however does not launch out in a career of teacher, which it gives up since 1923. In 1926, it created at Plon, the collection of international literature Crossfires , then carries out face of the activities of writer, lecturer, dramatic author, literary and musical critic (with the NRF). After war, it acquires an international notoriety and finishes its career covered of honors: doctor honoris causa several universities, Grand Prix of literature of the French Academy in 1949, member of the Academy of Science morals and political in 1952, it receives the National Grand Prix of the Letters in 1958 and the price Érasme in 1969.

He wanted as made it Jean-Paul Sartre be devoted entirely to its vocation of philosopher. He will pass his life to look further into his intuitions first which he will take again unceasingly. The existential experiments of Marcel, like the death of his/her mother when it was four years old or the loss of his partner in 1947, are inseparable from a philosophical work based on the meditation of the human experiment in forms as personal as its from day to day held metaphysical Journal . In 1929, its conversion with the Catholicism mark a turning in its work and makes of Marcel the French Master of the Christian Existentialisme.

The thought marcellienne

For Marcel, the existence is the single experiment of any conscience. The man discovers it like committed in a world and as limited at the same time by this world. This conscience poses problems: one cannot reduce it to a given word or a concept. This difficulty of thinking the existence shows well that it is not reduced to the speculation: the difficulty of thinking others in particular testifies some. From there, Marcel draws his famous distinction between problem and mystery: “The problem is something which bars the road. It is entire in front of me. On the contrary, the mystery is something where I am committed, whose gasoline is, consequently, not to be not entire in front of me” ( Être and To have ). The existence will be thus about the mysterious incompetent of precise knowledge and conceptualisable as the method even of Marcel testifies some: a not-system.

Marcel criticizes the Cartesian cogito and one can say that this criticism is the starting point of its thought of the “Co-presence” or of the “intersubjectivity” marcellienne. For him, Descartes locks up it to me in its own shell: “I think” is a yoke of which we could not demolish ourselves. It primarily poses a major handicap for a possible relation with others. If we follow Descartes we will do nothing but represent others or monologuer on him. From there, we would treat the other like “him”. It is as “you” who should be considered it, i.e. like bathing in a concrete existence.

Gabriel Marcel thus supports the thesis that it is by others that it is necessary to pass first of all to return to oneself: only means to seize the other in its originality. It is to be brought closer in this search to the mystery to others to Emmanuel Lévinas and Martin Buber, philosophers and thinkers Jewish, but also, nearer to the Christianity of Karl Jaspers, a relationship (in this last case) of which it was claimed. It also met Lévinas in its life besides, in particular during a dialog with him with the Universit3e libre de Bruxelles in 1964.

In 1975 an association " was created; Presence of Gabriel Marcel " who under the presidency of honor of Paul Ricœur gathers all those which wish to make radiate its thought.

At the time of the 10th birthday of the creation of this association an important gathering conference was held of many personalities: Joel Bouëssée, Simonne Plourde, Rene Davignon, Yves Ledure, Pierre Hake, the cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger. The whole of the acts of this conference increased of other new texts with fact the object of an special issue of the review Quoted

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