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Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973). Only child of a highly cultivated agnostic Catholic father (French Minister). His mother died when he was four, he was brought up by maternal aunt. He had a carefree and happy childhood. Hated “abstract and inhuman school system.” He experienced clash between free personal life and object oriented school years. Loved theatre (he published 15 of his 20 dramas. Loved music- Called it his true vocation.) He was against systematizing expression in philosophy. Marcel’s phenomenology of man is not Cartesian “I think” nor the existentialist “I exist” but the incarnate interpersonal “we are.” His Philosophical anthropology begins as social anthropology: “existence is co-existence.”
2. Engagement and Availability as Interpersonal Existentials
If one bases oneself solely on direct experience in order to learn all one can. He would be able to draw the conclusion that the act which establishes the ego or rather by which the ego establishes itself is always identically the same. Let us consider the example of a child bringing flower for his mother he has just gathered form the meadow. “Look,” he cries, “I picked these.” The child points himself out for gratitude and admiration. The child draws attention to himself, he offers himself to the other in order to receive a special tribute. The ego considered as centre of magnetism cannot be reduced to certain parts which can be specified such as “my body, my hands, my brain;” it’s a global presence. But some may object saying, “self –satisfaction, self-confidence, self love: takes for granted a self that is already established. But actually, this pre-existent ego can only be postulated and if we try to describe it, we can only do so negatively by way of exclusion. On the other hand it is very instructive to give a careful account of the act which establishes what I call myself, the act, for instance by which I attract attention of others. In every case I produce myself i.e., I put myself forward.
3. Presence
Presence denotes something rather different and more comprehensive than the fact of just being there; one should not actually say that an object is present. Presence is also linked up with the urges to make ourselves recognized by other persons. It is necessary to see ego not as isolated reality rather as something integral to the person. It is impossible to establish any precise frontiers of the ego. For instance, the term self-love is manifestedly incomplete. Actually it is rooted in anguish than in love. The fact is I can affirm nothing about myself which would be really myself. Hence, the craving to be confirmed from outside is always there; even the most self-centred among us look to others and only to others for his final investiture. To affirm this fact we could consider the example of the poseur... (The poseur basically treats others just as a means for my self-glorification.)
4. Ego
The conditions under which I become conscious of myself as a person are essentially “social.” There is every reason to think that in this competitive world to which a person is subject to, ego must be given utmost importance. But if we want to fight effectively against individualism in its most harmful form we must find some way of breaking free from the atmosphere of examinations and competitions in which our young people are struggling. “I must win not you,” “I must get above you.” This system does in fact encourage each one to compare himself with his neighbour, to give himself a mark or number by which he can be measured against him. But actually such a system which promotes self-love is the most de personalizing process possible. For the thing in us which has real value cannot be judged by comparison, because it has no common measure with anything else. There is no more fatal error than that which conceives of the ego as the secret abode of originality.
5. The Moral Egocentricity
The best part of my personality does not belong to me. I am in no sense the owner, only the trustee. (Except in the realm of metaphysics.) Actually there is nothing in me which cannot or should not be regarded as a gift. It is pure fiction to imagine a pre-existent self on whom these gifts were bestowed in virtue of certain rights, or as a recompense for some former merit. Therefore this means I need to puncture the ideal illusion that I am the centre of my universe while others are just obstructions to be removed. This illusion is called “moral egocentricity.” Actually the claim of egoists, in the final analysis is merely another expression of purely biological and animal claim.
6. The Person
Today, the meaning of the term “person” too is coloured by the above mentioned misconception (moral egocentricity). Nowadays, people consider themselves as an atom caught up in a whirlwind, a mere statistical unit. Thus he is an anonymous unit of that anonymous entity “one.” But he almost inevitably has the illusion that his reactions are authentic, so that he submits, while all the time he imagines he is taking action. On the contrary it is in the nature of a person to face any given situation directly, to make an effective decision upon it. There is no question of conceiving of the person as of something distinct from that other thing the ego; as if they were in separate compartments. Such an idea is completely fictitious. The person cannot be regarded as an element or attribute of the ego either. Therefore, we may say, it is something which takes its birth in what appears to me to be mine, or to be me myself, but this compelling force only becomes conscious of itself when it becomes a reality.
7. Responsibility
I claim to be person in so far as I assume responsibility for what I do and what I say. I am conjointly responsible both to myself and to everyone else and this conjunction is precisely characteristic of an engagement of the person and it is the mark proper to the person. Here we could consider the example of an unsigned letter... I tend to establish myself as a person in so far as I assume responsibility for my acts and so behave as a real being. Thus we might also say that, I establish myself as a person in so far as I really believe in the existence of others and allow this belief to influence my conduct.
8. Personality
One cannot strictly say that personality is good in itself, or that it is an element of goodness: the truth is much more; it controls the existence of a world where there is good and evil. The ego if it remains shut up within itself it is beyond the reach of evil as well as of good. It literally has not yet awakened to reality. One of the essential characteristic of a person is availability. It refers to an ability to give oneself to anything which offers, and to bind oneself by the gift. Personality is vocation. It’s a call or response to the call. The call comes both from me and outside me at one and same time. The knowledge of the individual being cannot be separated from the action of love or charity by which the being is accepted in all which makes of him a unique creature or the image of God. If I consider the other as mechanism exterior to my own ego, and remove each part and study, I’ll only have the exterior knowledge which is denial of his real being. Such knowledge is in reality sacrilegious and destructive. If I passively accept a group of regulations which seem to be imposed upon me by the circle to which I belong by birth, by the party to which I have allowed myself to be attached without genuine thought from my part, then I am nothing more than an instrument a mere cog in the wheel as if supreme gift of free action had been refused me. This means that person has failed to recognize himself or has alienated that which alone could comfort the dignity proper to his nature.
A person cannot say “I am” of himself. The personality is only realized in the act by which it tends to become incarnate (in a book, an action or in a complete life), but at the same time it is of its very essence never to fix itself or crystallize itself finally in this particular incarnation, because it participates in the inexhaustible fullness of the Being from which it emanates. There lies the deep reason for which it is impossible to think of personality or the personal order without at the same time thinking of that which reaches beyond them both, a Supra-Personal Reality, presiding over all their initiative, which is both their beginning and their end.
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