Marcel on Mystery Author(s): Roger Hazelton Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Jul., 1958), pp.

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THE

JOURNAL OF
JULY 1958

RELIGION
Number3

Volume XXXVIII

MARCEL ON MYSTERY
ROGER HAZELTON*

found and frequent attention to the mystery of philosophy itself. For all that, mystery is an explicit and often recurring theme in Marcel's writings, whether they happen to be concernedwith unemployment,the cinema, psychopathology, the mind-body relation, technology,or the modernfamily. In fact, all his work might not unjustly be considered a series of meditations, or rather improvisations, on the theme of mystery. When it is not a dominant chord, it is at least a running accompanimentto his thought. My purpose here is to disengage, as gently but also as surely as possible, this motif for examination and appraisal, chiefly in order to understandbetter Marcel's own conception of metaphysics. Perhaps it goes without saying that anyone who writes about mystery as Marcel does has taken on a very large and exacting assignment. A metaphys* Roger Hazelton is John Knox Professor of re- ics which is regardedas the articulation ligion at Pomona College. A graduate of Amherst of mystery must somehow render mysCollege and Chicago Theological Seminary, he also holds the A.M. degree from the University of Chi- tery as a "built-in" category which informs and orders its statements about cago and the Ph.D. degree from Yale University. During the years 1951-57 he was Abbot Professor what is real. That which admittedly lies of Christian theology at Andover-Newton Theobeyond the scope of metaphysics must logical School. He is a member of the American Theological Society and the National Council on nevertheless be brought into definite Religion in Higher Education. Professor Hazelton's metaphysical focus. Thus we have every publications include: The Root and Flower of right to ask Marcel whether this may Prayer (1943); The God We Worship (1946); Renot be semantically, rationally, and hunewing the Mind (1949) ; On Proving God (1952); and God's Way with Man (1956). manly impossible. Can such a proce155
MTETAPHYSICAL

thought, wrote Gabriel Marcel in 1933, is "reflection trained on mysBut it is an essential part of a tery. mystery that it should be acknowledged; metaphysical reflection presupposes this acknowledgement, which is outside its own sphere."' Let this serve us as a kind of text, since it throws considerable light upon the total body of Marcel's thought and especially upon his way of dealing with metaphysical questions. Probably no other living thinker has done more than Marcel to reintroduce the motif of mystery into philosophical discussion. Yet he has scrupulously avoided waving the word as a sort of banner or personal trademark, being well aware of the misunderstandings it is bound to encourage in present-daythought. Althoughhe has no wish to become known as the philosopher of mystery, he has given pro-

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dure be attempted without, on the one hand, forfeiting metaphysics or, on the other, dissolving mystery? A full answer obviously waits upon a careful study of the place of mystery in Marcel's thought. But there are some things which may be said at the beginning. Although Marcel does not admit that he is forced into any such dilemma as suggested above, he sees clearly the issues involved and is always ready to discuss them. He believes that the mysterious can be acknowledged without thereby becoming a mere content of thought; that it is life itself which asks the truly metaphysical questions; and that being asserts itself in the experience and reflection of the metaphysical thinker. Hence he has found it necessary to employ words new to metaphysical discussion, which have, in general, a Christian resonance to them, words like "intersubjectivity," "presence," "incarnation," and "participation." This belief also helps to explain why he has chosen to cast his thought so often in the form of diary entries, dramatic dialogue, or even chamber music. In the very realm where others are tempted to schematize and pontificate, Marcel writes tentatively and diffidently, but all the more evocatively. It is as if his own thought required the co-operation of his reader's in order to become complete. "Experience,"he writes, "has to become, as it were, its own beyond.... Does not the deepeningof metaphysical knowledge consist essentially in the steps whereby experience, instead of evolving technics, turns inward toward the realization of itself?"2

already become classic. Of the many references that might be given, I select one from his journal, together with excerpts from the Marseilles address in which it was expanded:
A problem is something met with which bars my passage. It is before me in its entirety. A mystery, on the other hand, is something in which I find myself caught up [engage], and whose essence is therefore not to be before me in its entirety. It is as though in this province the distinction between in me and before me loses its meaning.3 A mystery is a problem which encroaches upon its own data, invading them, as it were, and thereby transcending itself as a sheer problem. . .. In reflecting upon a mystery we tend inevitably to degradeit to the level of a problem.4 The province of the Natural is the same as the province of the Problematic .... The Mysterious and Ontological are identical. .... It follows from my definition of metaphysical thought as reflection trained upon mystery, that progress in this sort of thinking is not really conceivable. It is a proper characteristic of problems, moreover, to be reduced to detail. Mystery, on the other hand, is something which cannot be reduced to detail.5

The distinction is not offered as a bare antithesis but only in order to make clear, in contrast to the problematic approach, the proper interest of metaphysics. Neither is it intended as a dichotomy by means of which the world is divided up into problems and mysteries with appropriate modes of access assigned to each. That would be ruled out by the very primacy of mystery in Marcel's view; while mystery can make sense ultimately of problems, problems cannot make sense out of mystery. But just as Marcel warns against degrading mystery into a problem, so he holds no brief for upgrading MYSTERY AND PROBLEM every problem into a mystery. While Marcel's view of mystery has been his thought is basically antireductionsharpened chiefly in contrast to the no- istic, the very care with which he detion of a problem. His distinction has fines mystery as the meta-problematic

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157

shows that he respects the limits laid down by scientific inquiry and technical control. Marcel has no interest in blurring a distinction upon which his own thought significantly depends. Hence he never confuses mystery with mystification and still less with a conceptualstopgap or remainder.He is convinced that unless we recognize mystery at the beginning we have no right to invoke it later on residually, when thought runs into difficulties which it cannot handle on its own terms. But, of course, Marcel's intention in making this distinction in the first place is that of freeing metaphysics, or reflection upon being, from the problematic format and milieu. When I pose a problem, I assume a standpoint "over against" or "outside"that which I have to think about. An engineer or a surgeon can do this very well and must do it in order to succeed with the job at hand. But the man who is engaged in thinking about being cannot do this, for the reason that being is not in front of him in its wholeness. Does not the thinker himself belong to being, and is he not part of his own question about being? Whoever asks the ontological question is asking at the same time, "Who am I? What am I to being?" Even if he starts out problematicallyin metaphysics, he cannot go far without discovering that the problem on which he concentrates is, as Marcel says, encroaching upon its own data and so transcending itself as a bare problem. Marcel believes that metaphysics must be liberated from the illusions of facticity and objectificationwhich have bedeviled it throughout the modern period. But he is equally eager to break with subjectivistic and idealistic conceptions of the philosopher's task. The dialectic of his earlier thought away

from realism in the direction of idealism and back again toward realism is in many respects inconclusive; but it establishes that Marcel's view of metaphysics has much in common with the phenomenologists,insofar as they occupy themselves with the patient elucidation of concrete experiences. But, unlike the phenomenologists,Marcel sees these concrete meanings as themselves instances of being; he does not "bracket existence" but regards it as the very core of any phenomenologicaldescription. Sometimes he calls metaphysics "hyperphenomenological recollection," meaning that it is based on the recognition of the linkage of concrete experience with being itself. It follows that Marcel's distinction between problem and mystery is not that between object and subject; instead, it makes the latter distinction metaphysicallyirrelevant.However useful it may be for certain mental operations and manipulative purposes, the problematicapproachcannot legitimately be extended to questions of being, least of all to questions about my being. The point is that, in setting up a problem, not only do I objectify that aspect of the total situation with which I am dealing, but I subjectivize myself as well. In either case I am involved in a process of abstraction rather than of concrete appropriation. This is what happens in the Cartesian cogito and the Kantian "transcendentalsubject," both of which attempt to factor out the thinking self reductively and analytically. Therefore, Marcel does not try to correct the objectivist error simply by falling hard into the subjectivist error, as many other "existentialists" have done. As the self cannot be objectified, so the world must not be subjectivized where metaphysical reflection is con-

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cerned. But the problematicperspective is one in which both these things are attempted at once; and when it is applied to such matters as evil, death, love, or hope, it simply disqualifies itself. What Marcel wants to do is to bring into properly philosophical perspective the lived reality of man's beingin-the-world as something utterly distinct from analytical propositions and technical abstractions.As Donald MacKinnon has remarked, he is concerned "to probe the unsuspected profundities of the familiar." So he begins by rejecting the problematic, subject-object framework for his own reflection as a metaphysician. Our world, he feels, is a broken world because it has become a problematic world. It is no longer recognized as a mysterious world. And yet the mystery lingers, even in such a world; it cannot be isolated or reduced; and the metaphysician has the task of recoveringhis sense of and taste for it. A further misconception which Marcel wants removed is the strange but prevalent idea that mystery can be equated with the unknown or the unknowable. When identified with the unknown, mystery simply becomes a name for our current ignorance; it may even be a pretentious and hypocritical coverup. On these terms mystery is purely a residual category. Far from encroaching on its own data, it is kept at arm's and mind's length, constantly receding as the problem-solversget to work on it. Such an identification, of course, has meaning only within the problematic setup which Marcel is seeking to pry loose from its hold upon metaphysics. One cannot really distinguish problematically between problem and mystery; this leaves no room for the recognition that mystery may deepen with knowledge rather than lessen; indeed, this no-

tion of mystery has nothing actually mysterious about it. Nor can we identify mystery with the unknowable.Marcel is not, like Jaspers, an agnostic still trying to operate under basically Kantian auspices. The unknown is rather the limit of the problematic; it cannot be realized without contradicting itself. Mystery, on the other hand, denotes that zone or dimension in which the thinker must take up a radically new stance with respect to being. If mystery is not a gap which knowledgemay someday bridge, neither is it a permanent rebuff to all knowledge. Thus when Marcel speaks of the "mysterious," he does not mean that there is a chasm between knowledgeand the unknowablewhich has to be bridged by the leap of faith; he means instead the approfondissement or deepeningdown of the implications of experience itself. Here two points are of capital importance. One is that Marcel does not place the mystery of being in an inaccessible realm somewherebeyond intelligibility; on the contrary, thought recognizes in mystery its own source and proper setting. The mark of mystery is therefore not stark hiddenness or darkness but disclosure; one of Marcel's frequent similes for it is that of light. Mystery is benign with reference to thought and knowledge, favoring their growth as the sun favors that of a tree or a flower. Yet neither is Marcel engaged in making risky claims to clear or complete knowledge of being. It is not as if the recognition of mystery could become a special method for the solving of this particularly complicated problem. A second point has to do with Marcel's firm allegiance to the whole Platonic-Augustiniantradition in Christian philosophy, according to which being is

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primary to knowledge. "Knowledge is within being, enfolded by it," so that there is an "ontological mystery of knowledge" itself.6 Only on this basis, of course, can he defend his view that there are differentways of finding truth or gaining knowledge without confining either to the object-subject order. He writes: "Knowledge is, as it were, environed by being ... it is interior to it

in a certain sense.... Knowledgeis contingent on a participation in being for which no epistemology can account because it continually presupposes it."7 Of this more later. Marcel offers many illustrations of the validity of this distinction. One is the "mind-body problem" which has been so worked over in modern philosophy. It is quite possible for me to view, and treat, my body as an object just like other objects, but only by deliberately abstracting from the crucial fact that what makes my body different from all other objects is precisely that I am present to myself in it. Here what poses the problem is the mystery of incarnate individuality itself-of how I both am and have my body. Or take the "problem of evil"; the philosopher or theologian may try to size it up from the outside, as a certain malfunctioning in an otherwise pretty tolerable universe; then he asks what "explanation" can be found for such disorders and frustrations as appear. But, as Marcel says, evil that is observed or read off is no longer evil that is suffered. I realize that it is evil only to the extent that it touches me, as I am bound up in it. Or consider death, which is a problem only to an undertaker; but his own death is no problem, it is mystery. And so forth. Thus Marcel's most fundamental metaphysicaldistinction begins to stand

clear. A mystery is not something that lies before me, waiting to be exposed and tackled and got rid of, like a problem. It is something in which I am included and to which I have to make my personal, existential response. By it Marcel wants to convey what might be called the "initiative" of being. The word has the important negative function of protecting the genuinely metaphysical type of reflectionagainst problematic intrusion; but it is emphatically not a device for giving metaphysics any sort of transcendentalprivileges or immunities whatsoever. Somethingis mysterious (a) if it has personal value for me, (b) if there is a positive reason why it cannot be objectified or problematized, and (c) if my being is involved in it. It is Marcel the man, even more than Marcel the metaphysician, who speaks to us in this distinction. After all, it is his way of remarking that not by analytical observation alone, but by reflective participation, does the world yield up its secret and bestow its blessing. His main charge against technology is that it brings about an atrophy of the human faculty of wonder. The same, he feels, can be said of any area of human experience in which the problematic holds unquestionedsway. As one of his charactersin L'Iconoclaste puts it: "Go on now, you wouldn't be satisfied for long in a world from which all mystery had vanished.... Without mystery, life would be-unbreatheable."
PRIMARY AND SECONDARY REFLECTION

In a certain sense Marcel's philosophy is not really very complicated, for all its involutions, ruminations,and excursions. By this I mean that the many distinctions which seem basic to his thought are converging upon a single

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means a switch in direction which is made necessary by the entrance of real mystery into the philosopher'sperspective. This is what Marcel calls the "change from primary to secondary reflection." Whereas primary reflection works problematically, tending to dissolve the mysteriousunity of experience by reducing it to detail, secondary reflection has the aim of reconquering that unity. It is essentially recuperative in function, rather like Tillich's "ecstasy" or Hocking's "whole-idea." Before developingthe distinction further, however, let us turn to Marcel's view of how reflection as such is connected with what is denoted by such words as "life," "action," or "experience." Most current French philosophy has been strikingly influencedby Bergson at this point. Marcel, too, follows Bergson in believing that the intellect "spatializes" and so tends to destroy were, inner reflection . . . a letting go, the concrete givenness which is preand not a willed tensing up of oneself."8 sented to it. But he does not go on with In his GiffordLectures, as in his diaries, Bergson to reduce life to bare sponhe spells this out quite carefully from taneity or dynamism.Instead, for Marseveral angles of approach. Another cel "reflection is still part of life ... it term he uses is "recollection," in the is one of the ways in which life maniAugustinian sense. My task as a philos- fests itself, or, more profoundly . .. one opher is always to think my way back of life's ways of rising from one level to into being, which is the same thing as another."10 we begin by laying it down If to recover or repossess myself as think- that reflection is alien to life or supering being. And it would be a grave mis- imposed upon it, we are in effect thinktake to suppose that only the sophisti- ing of life in terms of mere animal vicated professional philosopher can and tality-in which case reflection itself must do this; the resources for taking becomes altogether unintelligible,a sort such a step are within the grasp of of gratuitous miracle. So Marcel takes every man who knows or seeks to know a different tack; human experience, he who he is. says, cannot fail to transformitself into Still another word for what might be reflection, and the more completely it called the "metaphysical act" is "con- does so, the more richly it is experience. templation," by which Marcel under- As John Wild comments, this abandonstands "a turning inwardsof our aware- ment of the currentexistentialist polemness of the outer world."9Again there ic against theory and contemplation is are Augustinian reverberations. It "a most welcome deviation."

point of truth, which can therefore be affirmedin as many differentways. But, by the same token, it is difficult, if not impossible, to say just what this point is, as if one knew Marcel's mind better than he does himself. So alongside "problem-mystery"we can place "having-being,""object-presence,""observation-participation," "statementtestimony," "collectivity-intersubjectivity," "opinion-faith," "refusal-invocation," and many others. In each of these Marcel is making use of thematic contrasts for the purpose, as he says, of restoring the ontological weight. A good instance of this is Marcel's contrast between "primary" and "secondary"reflection. By it he answers the question of how we recognize or acknowledge mystery. "Only," he writes, "by means of a kind of inner grip that is nothing else than an ingatheredness ... a kind of concentration and, as it

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Now for the two types. Primary reflection is object-centered, even where one's own selfhood or subjecthood becomes its object. It proceeds observationally, analytically, reductively-in short, problematically. This remains true whether its motives are chiefly practical, as when a hostess considers how to satisfy the tastes of her guests, or scientific, as when a botanist is trying to classify a strange plant. In his earlier notebooks Marcel identifies this sort of reflection with "thinking about.
..." I take note of something, isolate it,

then try to put it in its place. All this is necessary and proper when what I have to do with is truly objective in character; but it becomes questionable when applied to the mystery of being. Take sensation, for instance. For primary reflection this gets problematized into transmission-and-reception stimor which only explains ulus-and-response, away what its pretends to explain. Or take the "problem" of how I am related to my body, which often gets set up by primary reflection in such a way that the most crucial datum of all is neglected-namely, the experience by which my body is mine. Is there any way of escape from this reducing of the lived reality of the human world to a kind of caricature of itself? Marcel thinks there is; it consists not in abandoning the working assumptions of primary, problematic reflectionas in pushing through and beyond them. Briefly, reflection must be raised to the second power (cf. Kierkegaard), learning thereby to be at home in a zone where mysterious meanings have to be conveyed by symbolic hint and metaphorical suggestion. Here one does not so much encounter or approach being as enter into it; and one does not so much make assertions about

it as discover it asserting itself, even in the very assertions he makes regarding it. This is by no means the mere substitution of a subject-centered for an object-centered form of thought, although it is also that. When my reflectionturns inward upon itself, a great deal more than a change of front is involved. I do not simply transfer my attention from "outer"to "inner"states and activities, nor do I concernmyself in the old problematic way with the new field of the "contentsof consciousness."Not at all; for when my thought makes this switch in direction, it finds that it is operating in an entirely different manner and milieu; it becomes aware, no matter how dimly and intermittently, of that wholeness which primary reflection had broken up-namely, of the bond by which I myself am tied to being. Instead of thinking about thinking, I simply think. Incidentally, Marcel regards optical metaphors as grossly unsuited to conveying the nature of recollection or contemplation, which means not so much the seeing as the mirroring of being. For one cannot enter thus into himself without discovering that he is not a "subject" after all but is personally and positively related to his own existence. Unfortunately, Marcel often continues using the word "subject" in a way which does not help to make this clear; and several of his interpreters fall into the same confusion. The point is that introspection opens out upon an intuition of being who one is; but this, as James Collins explains, is a "blindfold intuition, a non-self-conscious apprehension of existence in the existent thing."1'Here againthe languageis probably unfortunate; but all of us are victimized by philosophical language at

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this point, and neologisms sometimes do more harm than good. Marcel likes Peter Wust's dictum that every man is required to make an initial act of trust or mistrust in being as the source of his orientation in the world. Accordingly, metaphysics means the working-out of the implications for my existence of this initial confidence in or suspicion of being; its task is to clarify this intuition, not as the assertion of some cosmic all-togetherness but as the more modest hunch that one is not his own, that one cannot think at all without thinking being, and that he is not so much the subject as the seat (siege) of his self-affirmation. But it is time for an illustration. Suppose a total stranger, perhaps some fonctionnairewaiting to fill out my identity card, asks me, "Who are you?" I give him all the particulars; son of . . .
born at..., residing in ..., working for

. . ., etc. He seems to think this is enough, but I know better. His question has stirred in me a very differentsort of need and search. It has brought me face to face, as it were, with myself. No inventory like this can satisfy the man who in Augustine's phrase has become a question to himself. He cannot possibly identify himself wholly with the informationhe has given about himself, for he has only been able to give it by pretending to be someone else who could do this better than he. Moreover, he may feel that what was left unsaid is more to the point than what was said. At this moment he is in the throes of secondary reflection. He knows very well that he cannot be treated fairly as a fixed quantity or as some x to which certain qualities and happeningsadhere. He knows, too, that he must not be caught playing a role which "they" have put him into, like Sartre's waiter

who is overearnestly engaged in acting the part of a waiter in a cafe. And if he should attempt to avoid all this agony and irony of self-knowledge by giving quite another sort of analysis of himself, this time in terms of social pressures or unconscious instincts, he is bound to find himself as far away as before. If I try to be authentic or sincere, how do I know when I have succeeded? Which, after all, is the real and which is the pretendedme? The majority of Marcel's plays have to do with self-discovery in this sense which goes quite beyond self-analysis. "To be known as one is, and then to sleep," says Pastor Lemoyne in Un Homme de Dieu. "Ah, it is as if you had been given back to me from the dead," cries Laurent when his wife moves to restore their relationship in Le Monde casse. Yet Marcel's interest in this kind of transformingself-knowledge is more than dramatic only; it is chiefly ontological. So he studies boredom, charm, hospitality, saying goodbye, with clinical exactitudeas instances of being or not-being; these are metaphysically significant because they disclose secondary reflection at work. And here again we come upon mystery. To ask "Who am I?" is to find the questioner encroaching upon his own question, to acknowledge one's self to be involved in being. In such an act of thought the subject-objectopposition is transcended,not, to be sure, in the form of an answer but in the form of the question itself. For, as thinking interiorizes itself, it can but transcend the immediacy of experience; yet this is no naive realism for which the being that is affirmedis prior to and "outside" its affirmation. Secondary or recuperative reflection cannot be rationalized in either Cartesian or Thomistic fashion.

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That is because it is essentially reflexive in its nature rather than a recording instrument or a sounding board. Marcel admits that there is "a kind of space between me and being" and can even follow the Thomist formula that thought is made for being as the eye is made for light. But this, he believes, is a rather risky way to put the matter, as it forces us to ask whether thought itself is. Better: "I think; therefore, being is, since my thought demands being. .... All thought tranAnd this descends the immediate."12 mand can be met only by secondary reflection, which passes inwardly beyond the problematic setup which at first seemed to have made any sort of metaphysical knowledge impossible. Solely by reflectionraised in this way to a second power can mystery be articulated in positive terms, says Marcel. What he wants to communicateby this conception is emphatically not the Thomistic hierarchy of knowledge as expounded by Maritain, proceeding from consciousness per se to superrational and on to mystical types of awareness. On the contrary and true to his own idealistic formation, he allies himself with Platonic and Augustinian sources. His main thesis, like that of patristic theology on this point, is that recollection or contemplation is an opening of the self toward transcendent being. To think myself is to think being; self-knowledge means self-transcendence; and this in turn is to be grasped by the mystery which alone can satisfy man's deep ontological hunger. Here mystery and meaning are one and the same thing. One cannot fail to catch again and again in Marcel overtones of the "great tradition" of Christian Platonism, the essential thesis of which is that thought

is the interiorizationof being and therefore a way toward being. So-called subjectivity is thus inseparable from transcendence; one can only discover one's self by going inwardly beyond one's self; for the transcendingact enters into the very structure of selfhood.?3But at the same time there is something decidedly contemporary about this; it seems to come straight out of sociological and psychoanalytical literature, or at any rate to be indefinitely applicable to it. What sort of world is it into which the metaphysical thinker enters by way of this reflexive intuition or secondary reflection of being? Clearly enough, it is a mysterious world, but that does not make it a supernaturalworld. It is rather the natural world regained as the global whole to which I belong and which belongs to me. It is the only really intelligible world, cosmos noetos. Very early in his published writings Marcel made the suggestion that mystery implies power and is tied up with the idea of God.'4 He has also hinted from time to time that there is a close relation between mystery and revelation, although this is not developed carefully. At all events, the mark of mystery for Marcel is always that it matters to me; and I can scarcely avoid the suspicion that I matter to it as well.
BY WAY OF A CRITIQUE

Many facets of Marcel's thought regarding mystery have been left unexamined, such as his views on intersubjectivity, presence, fidelity, or participation. However, we have enough of his thought before us to see how he deals with metaphysical issues and what, at bottom, he conceives the metaphysician's task to be. Quite recently he has repeated that his method is and has

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never ceased to be heuristic; he is more interested by far in discovery than in construction, in finding ways of asking the right questions than of giving the right answers to them. But is this anything more than a modest disclaimer? Can it serve as an adequate methodology? And has not Marcel actually spread before us a whole series of answers to metaphysical questions, answers for which he is ready to contend as against divergent or contrary views? This is but another way of asking what was raised at the beginning: Can Marcel carry through the task he has given himself without either abandoning metaphysics or annulling mystery? To be specific, are the contrasts he draws between problem and mystery or between primary and secondary reflection anything more than strategic devices which enable him to bring into play his own aesthetic rather than scholastic and scientific leanings? For myself, I believe that such questions, though relevant, are external and even perhaps unfair. But they must be reckoned with just the same. The first point to be made is that Marcel is profoundly convinced that man's being-inthe-world is best understood if we take works of art with ontological seriousness; that is, as ways of discovering authentic truth concerning life, "not as a natural phenomenon, but of our life grasped in all its mysterious intiOf macy."15 all the arts, music holds for Marcel the supreme place in this regard. Yet metaphysics and the arts are two differententerprises, and Marcel is always conscious of this difference. He understandsit, however, not in terms of the broad and rubbery contrast so frequently invoked between analysis and

appreciation,logic and feeling, etc., but as that between the evocation and the elucidation of being for ourselves. Doubtless he would agree with Langmead Casserley that metaphysics is an analogical art rather than a demonstrative science; yet he regards the use of metaphysical analogy as itself a painstaking and responsible procedure. For example, he is quite as eager as Tillich to reduce spatial symbolism to a minimum where being is concerned; and possibly he goes further, since he rejects the expression "being itself" because it suggests some sort of distance or opposition. Marcel's analogies for being make no pretense of serving more than a witnessing function, but they are meant to be taken in exactly that way. This is why, in the second place, Marcel has been preoccupied with the precise weight and color of the words he uses, more carefully than probably any other contemporary philosopher. There is nothing "prissy and quaint" in this absorbing interest; it arises from the fact that words for Marcel are never mere tools but tokens of that to which he is directing our attention. Some readershave professed themselvesbothered by the large number of "as it were's," "so to speak's," and "it is as if's" in Marcel's writing; but his qualifications seldom impede the flow of his thought and help to keep its fundamentally analogical intentionality in mind. His preference invariably is for spacious, non-technical, much-handled words; he is therefore sometimes called "literary," which is simply labeling by those whose preferenceleans in another direction. There is in Marcel the same feeling for the power of the word that has again and again been noted in the biblical writings (e.g., J. Pedersen, Is-

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rael [1926], p. 167: "He who utters a word to another lays that which he has created in his own soul into that of the other and here then must it act with the whole of the reality it contains"). This does not make him a "word-artist" busily weaving a semantic spell or a ponderous searcher after verbal "depth."What one cannot help noticing in his work is a pervasive sense that words available for metaphysical discourse must be such as to convey their own inadequacy to convey what, nevertheless, they are chosen to convey; or, if that seems too tormented, such as to communicatetheir mystery as ipso facto their meaning. Of course, each reader of Marcel must decide for himself whether this semantic goal is achieved or not, although Marcel is not asking for our votes. A thinker who takes us into his confidence as much as Marcel does, baring his hesitations as well as his assurances and inviting us to see the world from where he stands in it, has in a way disarmed all criticism, which presupposes a certain neutrality and condescension. Yet the matter cannot be left there. The sharpest and most pertinent criticism of Marcel's vocabulary ought to be coming right now from scientific researchersand students of technology. Does Marcel correctly understand the problematicas they themselves conceive it? Are scientists perhaps continuing to use the word "problem"when they are actually verging toward somethingmore like Marcel's "mystery"? One cannot read much in the philosophy of science nowadays without being at least ruffled by such questions. Ought Marcel to revise his distinction with less of the pejorative nuance attached to his word "problem,"particularly in view of re-

cent developments in the physical and social sciences? For example, may there not be more of a common ground than Marcel thus far suspects in the notion of "hypothesis,"which has been greatly altered since Poincare and Brunschvicg, or in that of the "fruitfulness" of a theory which is drastically opposed to the older view of explanation which Marcel has rightly rejected as a sophisticated substitute for exorcism? Moreover, when "transcendence"becomes a major term in psychological or sociological literature, what happens to the conception of mystery that Marcel has been developing so significantly through the years? One would think that it might at least be restated if Marcel's thought is to be made available to workers in the Geisteswissenschaften. There may well be other names for what is mysterious than "mystery"itself, and some of them may be emerging even now in scientific and especially in interdisciplinary discussions. At times, for instance, one has the distinct impression that Georges Gurvitch and Martin Buber are talking very much the same language about interpersonal relationship; and there are many other evidences of similar convergence. Third, we must consider the difficulties stemming from the obvious lack of system in Marcel's thought. Everyone who writes about him notes this fact, and not a few seem to feel that this makes Marcel something less than coherent (John Wild, for example). These critics would rather apply adjectives like "suggestive"or "penetrating,"thus giving Marcel a high B for the course. Such virtues he does possess to an undoubted degree, and yet I believe his philosophy adds up to considerably

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THE JOURNAL RELIGION OF question is only whether, if there is something like totality in being, there must not be something like system in metaphysics or the thought of being. This, one would suppose, it what is provided by "secondaryreflection"in Marcel's philosophy; yet he is never quite happy with the word "intuition"as denoting this possible global grasp of being by one's thought. Is there in Marcel a root-metaphor that can be said to serve his thought as a true analogia entis? Or has he been so anxious to avoid producing a "university philosophy" that he has neglected to make explicit the critical basis and the structural elements of his profound meditations upon being? What he has done, however, may be still more important. He has developed a mannerof speaking metaphysically, a style and idiom characteristically his own, which demonstrates beyond any doubt that human thought and language can become viable and permeableto the promptingsof being. He has shown how real mystery can become meaningful without denying or negating itself and precisely by not telling us in so many words just what this mystery is. The supple, lucid, pliable character of his thought makes possible the acknowledgment in metaphysics of that which lies beyond metaphysics, even though this has not been transposedby him into metaphysicalknowledge.It may well be, therefore, that, by this metaphysics of humility and fidelity, of "openness" and "availability,"Marcel has been setting forth for our time the Christian wisdom of Augustine's motto, Non intratur in veritatem nisi per caritatem, "one enters into truth only by the way of love."

more than that. Is it not only right to remember that Marcel never pretends to offer a complete philosophy? The unsystematic characterof his thought is conscious and deliberate and effortful. It is hardly cricket to complain that a man does not achieve the very thing which he wants not to achieve. And yet Marcel does realize that a certain dessein or pattern of purpose holds his work together, which he now calls (in the "Lettre-Preface" cited earlier) the "love of discovery" expressed in his heuristic method. But there is a deeper question to be addressed to him, difficult as it may be to put it. Is not metaphysics by its very nature a systematic endeavor, whether or not it is a systematic achievement,in the sense that it means to deal with the whole of things? I am aware, of course, that Marcel prefers the term "fullness" to "unity" or "wholeness"; but more than once he refers to the "totality of being"-as he must do qua metaphysician-and it is perhaps significant that "mystery" is for him invariably a singular and not a plural noun, for reasons which again must be metaphysical. If thought is the interiorizationof being, as Marcel believes, then this question becomes even more crucial. We must ask whether being can be thought at all; if it can, it must be thought as being; and, again, one should be able to express this thought. Otherwise what does this metaphysics of participation really mean? Is it not rather a metaphysics of non-participation?But let us not press too far in this direction. Marcel's strictures against the principle of identity and the concept of absolute knowledge are, I think, well taken. My

MARCEL ON MYSTERY NOTES

1. Being and Having (London: Dacre Press, 1949), p. 100. 2. The Philosophy of Existence (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), p. 96. 3. Being and Having, p. 100. 4. The Philosophy of Existence, pp. 8, 9. 5. Being and Having, p. 101. 6. Ibid., p. 115. 7. The Philosophy of Existence, p. 8. 8. Man against Mass Society (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1952), pp. 68-69. 9. The Mystery of Being (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1950), I, 126. 10. Ibid., p. 82.

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11. James Collins, The Existentialists (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1952), p. 136. 12. Being and Having, p. 38. 13. On this point see Emile Brehier, Les Themes actuels de la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), pp. 56-57. 14. Metaphysical Journal (London: Rockcliffe, 1952), pp. 160 ff. 15. See Marcel's "Lettre-Preface" to Father Roger Troisfontaine's two-volume study, of his work, De l'existence a l'etre (Namur: Bibliotheque de la Faculte de Philosophie et Lettres, 1953), I, 10.