Aspects of Alterity: Levinas, Marcel, and the Contemporary Debate

3. Gabriel Marcel

3 Gabriel Marcel All that can be said is that everything in our life happens as though we entered upon it with a load of obligations contracted from a previous existence. Proust, La Prisonnière Don’t you feel sometimes that we are living . . . if you can call it living . . . in a broken world? Yes, broken like a broken watch. The mainspring has stopped working. Just look at it; nothing has changed. Everything is in its place. But put the watch to your ear, and you don’t hear any ticking. You know what I’m talking about, the world, what we call the world, the world of human creatures . . . it seems to me as if it must have had a heart at one time, but today you would say the heart has stopped beating. Gabriel Marcel, The Broken World Just as the previous chapter sketched an outline of Levinas’s thought, this chapter will summarize some of the significant elements in Marcel’s diverse and unsystematic work. The format will follow that of the previous chapter: a general summary, followed by a description of intersubjectivity and alterity, and a final focus on love and justice. Again, while intending to provide a fair representation of Marcel’s work, the role played by these first two exegetical chapters —that of anticipating an engagement between Levinas and Marcel on the question of otherness—requires a more selective summary. 52 Furthermore, while building toward a dialogue, this summary must resist the temptation to speak of Marcel’s thought in terms of Levinas ’s thought or to prematurely juxtapose absolute and relative otherness . Each of these thinkers deserves to be taken on his own terms and to have the merits of his philosophy evaluated before undertaking any analysis of the shortcomings of either one. Thus, this chapter will do for Marcel what the previous chapter did for Levinas, that is, provide a general overview of the philosophy in question, but with a special attention to those features that have a bearing on love, justice, or otherness. Gabriel Marcel was not a ‘‘professional’’ philosopher and his philosophical legacy includes lectures, journal entries, and dramatic works in addition to more orthodox philosophical expression in essays .1 Of these various genres, Marcel was perhaps most pleased with his dramatic works, in which he felt he was able to express things for which the more rigid structures of philosophical language were inadequate. In fact, reading between the lines of Marcel’s autobiographical remarks, one can discern some puzzlement and no small amount of frustration at the success of his philosophical works and the relative obscurity of his dramatic works.2 Although he maintains a distinction between his drama and his philosophy, at times Marcel seems to acknowledge that it is in the dramatic works that his thoughts are found in their pure and unalloyed state.3 Le Monde cassé, Un homme de Dieu, L’Iconoclaste, and Le chemin de crête are, in part, dramatic expressions of philosophical (and theological) positions, and of insights better conveyed by experience or example than by theory and concept. Marcel frequently cites his drama in his philosophical work in order to anchor his philosophy with examples. In fact, examples of all kinds are central to Marcel’s way of philosophizing. He claims that ‘‘thinking that does not deal seriously with examples always runs the risk of losing itself, of letting itself be deluded by a kind of antecedent linguistic structure.’’4 Marcel’s thought does not build up a system. Rather, it digs down; it mines experience in order to come to a fuller understanding of it. Instead of moving predictably from one point to another, he frequently returns to reevaluate the same phenomena again from a different perspective before moving on. Through the repetitive treatment of the same subjects from new perspectives, new insight is gained. Like Karl Jaspers, he seems to think that ‘‘philosophy’’ should properly be used to designate the act of philosophizing rather than the body of philosophical doctrines. However, the lack of sysGabriel Marcel 53 tematicity, the journal entry format, and the wandering meditations of Marcel’s thought pose some interesting problems for his interpreters . Where should one look for a concise and coherent explanation of Marcel’s philosophy? Does such a source exist, or must one wade through the entirety of his extensive oeuvre in order to grasp the underlying themes and positions...