"On the Ontological Mystery," Marcel (1933)

Idea of the loss of the ontological sense, the sense of being: need of  being, being is or should be necessary -- it is impossible that everything is meaningless, a successive play of inconsistent appearances, a tale told by an idiot

• Man as assemblage of functions (vital, social, psychological?)
• Unquiet, unease
• World is empty, rings hollow
• Full of problems, but no place for mystery
• Events which break in on the ordinary course of existence, such as birth, love and death, are completely explainable--cause exhaustively accounts for effect
• Atrophy of the faculty of wonder

Distinction between the full and the empty

Distinction between problem and mystery: mystery = problem that encroaches on its own data

• Problem = objectively valid, the rational, the abstract and universalizable

Being = what would withstand exhaustive reductive analysis aiming to devoid the data of our experience of intrinsic value (e.g. Freud)

Question "who am I" is caught up with the ontological problem: urge towards an affirmation of being, an affirmation which I do not first utter but which I am

"My inquiry into being presupposes an affirmation in regard to which I am, in a sense, passive, and of which I am the stage rather than the subject. [cf. Hediegger]"

If the meta-problematical can be asserted at all, it must be conceived as transcending the opposition between the subject who asserts the existence of being and being as asserted by that subject, and as underlying it in a given sense. To postulate the meta-problematical is to postulate the primacy of being over knowledge (not of being as asserted, but of being as asserting itself); it is to recognize that knowledge is, as it were, environed by being, that it is interior to it in a certain sense. . . Knowledge is contingent on a participation in being for which no epistemology can account because it continually presupposes it.

Perhaps the domain of the meta-problematical coincides with the demain of love: obliteration of the division between that which is in me and that which is only before me

I who inquire into the meaning of this event, I cannot place myself outside it: I am engaged, I depend upon it, it envelops and comprehends me

It is only by way of liberation and detachment from experience that we can possibly rise to the level of the meta-problematical (mystery) = recollection

• Recollection transcends the dualism of being and action, reconciles the two
• This grasp upon myself is also an abandonment of myself
• Not to make myself an object for myself: the 'I' ceases to belong to itself

We are dealing with an assurance which underlies the entire development of thought

"I am convinced that it is in drama and through drama that metaphysical thought grasps and defines itself in concreto" (against Idealism, against losing the person)

Despair = "there is nothing in the realm of reality to which I can give credit--no security, no guarantee"

Hope implies credit: "there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and calculations, a mysterious principle which is in collusion with me, which cannot but will what I will, if what I will deserves to be willed and is, in fact, willed by the whole of my being"

Assertion that reality is on my side: transcends the level of all possible empirical disproof

Realm of the problematical = realm of the scientist, the one who draws up the minutes of reality as exactly as possible--this is the realm of technique, which serves desire and fear

• Despair = recognition of the ultimate inefficacy of techniques (envisioning reality as a complex of problems) together with the refusal to change over to a new ground, one which fundamentally escapes our grasp

Man is at the mercy of his technics: he is increasingly incapable of controlling his control (= recollection)

Question is, do we consider it desirable and just that we should have such control?

Optimism of technical progress goes hand in hand with pessimism of despair

The only genuine hope is hope in what does not depend on ourselves, hope as humility, not pride

• Pride = drawing one's strength solely from oneself

Hope is not quietism, a kind of inert waiting: rather it is "the prolongation into the unknown of an activity which is central, which is rooted in being"--"the will when it is made to bear on what does not depend on itself"

The stiffening, the contraction, the falling back on the self which are inseparable from pride . . . must not be confused with the humble withdrawal which befits recollection and whereby I renew my contact with the ontological basis of my being.

• This is the presupposition of creativity

Creative fidelity

• Fidelity = the opposite of inert conformism; it is active recognition of something permanent, not a law but a presence
• Not fidelity to a principle, which is a mere abstract affirmation
• Fidelity is the active perpetuation of presence, the renewal of its benefits--of its virtue which consists in a mysterious incitement to create

Presence = a certain kind of hold which being has upon us--it is more than the object, it exceeds the object on every side

• A reality, a certain kind of influx
• It depends upon us to be permeable to this influx, but not to call it forth: maintaining ourselves actively in a permeable state
• Not only before, but in me: interior accretion

Being = presence; a being is granted to me as a presence = as a being

Death as the test of presence

To be with: neither relationship of inherence or immanence nor a relationship of exteriority -- coesse, intimacy

Disponibilite: total spiritual availability, pure charity, to be present, to make room for, to welcome, to give, to be with with the whole of oneself

Presence vs. object: "presence involves a reciprocity which is excluded from any relation of subject to object or of subject to subject-object" [cf. I-thou vs. I-it]

Increasingly precise and automatic division between what concerns me and what does not, between things for which I am responsible and things for which I am not: concentric zones of decreasing interest and participation

The study of sanctity as the true introduction to ontology

The being who is opaque vs. the being who is transparent

"In contrast to the captive soul, the disponible soul is consecrated and inwardly dedicated; it is protected against suicide and despair, which are interrelated and alike, because it knows that it is not its own, and that the most legitimate use it can make of its freedom is precisely to recognize that it does not belong to itself; this recognition is the starting point of its activity and creativeness."

No revelation is, after all, conceivable unless it is addressed to a being who is involved--committed--in the sense which I have tried to define--that is to say, to a being who participates in a reality which is non-problematical and which provides him with his foundation as subject. Supernatural life must, when all is said and done, find a hold in the natural--which is not to say that it is the flowering of the natural. On the contrary it seems to me that any study of created Nature, which is fundamental for the Christian, leads to the conclusion that there is in the depth of Nature, as of reason which is governed by it, a fundamental principle of inadequacy to itself which is, as it were, a restless anticipation of another order.