Time in the Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel by Helen Tattam (review)

Born in the late 1880s, Gabriel Marcel belonged to the generation of French intellectuals who at the turn of the twentieth century rebelled against dogmatic rationalism and positivism. Following the examples of Henri Bergson, whose courses he attended at the Collège de France, and of the American philosopher Josiah Royce, Marcel emphasized the concrete, irreducible aspects of personal experience. In his view, human beings are not mere clusters of social and biological functions: each of us enjoys a privileged, insider’s view on the world. When we say (or rather sense) ‘I am’ — an expression that cannot be divided into ‘I’ and ‘am’ as Descartes argued — we trust Being and, rather than inspect it, we participate in it. Trust and participation entail that what is within me is never fully distinct from what is in front of me, these two aspects of our existence being kept together by love. By contrast with his contemporaries Heidegger and Sartre, Marcel does not see humans as loners ‘thrown’ in a hostile world. Closer to Martin Buber, who meditated on the links between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’, and to Emmanuel Levinas, who praised the wisdom of love, Marcel argues that our life is enigmatically, non-objectively shaped by our encounters — fortuitous yet transformative — with other human beings. Receptivity, availability, and fidelity to our fellow humans are therefore, in his view, the most important demands of moral life. Always careful not to go beyond the borders of philosophy, Marcel, like Buber and Levinas, acknowledges nevertheless that a religious horizon inspires his reflections on trust, love, and fidelity. Helen Tattam’s monograph is a welcome reminder that Marcel’s thought remains highly topical. In order to introduce it to contemporary readers, Tattam examines it through the filters of the writings of Heidegger, Ricœur, and Derrida — a prudent decision considering the present background of specialists in French culture; a risky one, however, from a philosophical point of view, given that Marcel, not unlike his younger French contemporaries Brice Parain, Simone Weil, and Emil Cioran, was pursuing a simple, concrete way of thinking, quite different from the abstract grandeur of Heidegger, Ricœur, and Derrida. In Chapters 1 and 2, devoted to Marcel’s views on time, often in comparison with those of Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger, Tattam shows an admirably detailed knowledge of Marcel’s thought, its main arguments, and its evolution. Her comments on Marcel’s concrete approach to philosophy and on his notions of presence, togetherness (co-esse), and commitment are always illuminating. In Chapter 4, she also offers an excellent introduction to Marcel’s theatre and its intimate links to his philosophy. Chapter 3, on ‘Narrative and Time’, which compares Marcel’s and Ricœur’s views on autobiographic storytelling is, unfortunately, less convincing. Although Tattam prefers the latter’s views, it seems right to me that Marcel takes the unreliability of our memory into account, while Ricœur’s ‘narrative identity’ leaves too much space for narcissism and self-deception. This is a minor point, however: as a whole, Tattam’s book provides an excellent introduction to Marcel’s thought.