Radical empiricism,intersubectivity and the importance of praxis in the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel

Making a case for Marcel in the 21st century

Marcel scholars are pleased to witness a resurgence of interest in the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel. The past decade has seen the reissue of several works long out of print, the production of excellent critical literature and the dedication of a special issue of a respected journal to his work. ² This positive trend also reflects a darker side. The fact remains that a critical mass of interest in Marcel is beginning to wane; the number of younger scholars standing in the wings may not be sufficient to fill the void.

The current condition of Marcel scholarship must be viewed in context. Sources of his popularity were multiple; his participation in French philosophical debates concerning the possibility of La philosophie de l’espirit throughout the 1930s; his association with European existentialism and phenomenology; and long tenure as playwright, drama critic and editor. ³ Spiritualism and existentialism no longer command much attention on the contemporary philosophical stage. Sadly, but understandably, increasing levels of abstraction in philosophical discourse have contributed to conditions that have helped deflect attention away from the importance of Marcel’s work.

Marcel scholars have responded adeptly. Brian Treanor’s Aspects of Alterity: Levinas, Marcel and the Contemporary Debate presents Marcel and Levinas as ‘two thinkers [who] are not only excellent representatives of two different ways of thinking otherness, but they each exert influence on the way in which the question of otherness is construed today’. ⁴ Jill Graper Hernandez, in Marcel’s Ethics of Hope: Evil, God and Virtue, views Marcel as a ‘bridge’ between existential and analytic ethics, and relevant to contemporary concerns with global welfare and a feminist ethics of care: ‘[W]hereas analytic ethics struggles to establish the efficacy of moral behavior in the relational tie between subjects, the key feature of Marcel’s ethics is that another person’s perspective functions as the basis of moral decision making.’ ⁵ Brendon Sweetman, in The Vision of Marcel: Epistemology, Human Person, the Transcendent, argues that Marcel’s epistemology offers an important solution to one of the most pressing problems of post-Cartesian philosophy – skepticism. Sweetman states correctly that Marcel is ‘a realist in the sense that he holds the view that the human mind can come to know reality just as it is in itself’. ⁶ Marcel’s ‘existential realism’ offers a compelling alternative that ‘allows him to place the situation of the human subject at the center of epistemology … but without falling into the problem of relativizing all knowledge claims to the contextual situation of the subject’. ⁷

Another way of positioning Marcel in the contemporary philosophical debate is to acknowledge his relationship to classical American philosophy – specifically William James, William Ernest Hocking and Josiah Royce. The lines of connection between Marcel and these figures are rich but, to date, largely ignored. The first philosophical position Marcel claimed was idealism. His first-hand understanding of idealism provided a unique vantage point from which to evaluate Royce’s thought. Marcel’s La métaphysique de Royce – perhaps the least-known of his writings – remains a ‘gold-standard’ in Royce studies. ⁸ Marcel eventually moved from idealism to a position of ‘metaphysical realism’, a shift resulting from reading Hocking’s The Meaning of God in Human Experience – a masterful study of intersubjectivity. At the commencement of his William James Lectures at Harvard University in 1961, Marcel acknowledged his personal debt to American philosophy and James in particular: ‘What I appreciate in William James is precisely that he appears to have felt in the highest degree the need … to struggle relentlessly against the peril to which all thought is exposed: that of becoming rancid, like butter, or overripe, like fruit.’ ⁹ James represented the need for philosophy to remain true to experience, reinforcing Marcel’s belief that ‘the true philosopher’s inner need is to grasp reality in its concreteness’. ¹⁰

Marcel’s philosophy and its relation to classical American philosophy are relevant to Marcel scholars, those interested in American pragmatism, and, in principle, those open to novel ways of contributing to philosophical discourse. Part I examines Marcel’s philosophy in light of James’ theory of radical empiricism. Part II considers Marcel’s emphasis upon the primacy of intersubjective experience from the perspective of Hocking’s philosophy. Part III explores Marcel’s conception of praxis and its importance from the context of his Royce writings. The Catholic nature of Marcel’s philosophy is aptly suited for the pluralistic tendencies of classical American philosophy, while James, Hocking and Royce offer Marcel a philosophically robust conception of experience – a rare blend of concreteness ‘here and now’, and universality sub specie aeternitatis. Classical American philosophy helped liberate Marcel from abstract forms of speculation. Understanding Marcel through the lens of classical American philosophy can accomplish for philosophy what it did for Marcel: serve as ‘a call, which … has had the eminent value of inciting me to accomplish certain work which, left to myself, I might not have had the strength or heart to undertake’. ¹¹

Return to experience: Radical empirical dimensions of Marcel’s thought

Marcel’s radical empiricism is the result of his dissatisfaction with idealism. Marcel was an idealist for about a decade – roughly 1905 to 1915. His idealistic writings exhibit stark contrast to his later works. His later writings are clear, detailed descriptions of concrete situations. The idealistic writings, conversely, consist of abstract analyses of epistemological problems often with uneven clarity. Marcel recognized the disparity between his idealistic and post-idealistic writing:

Today I would be incapable of reading what was later to become the first part of the Journal métaphysique, and if I forced myself to do so, it would not be without experiencing at almost every page a feeling of irritation that I would not be able to master successfully … But what strikes me is how this research that is so abstract and so awkward depended in the end on the safe and comfortable conditions in which I first found myself. ¹²

Marcel’s rejection of idealism stems from his growing suspicion regarding the transparency of the cogito. The cogito is an unsuitable point of departure: ‘[A] philosophy that begins with the cogito runs the risk of never getting back to being.’ ¹³ Descartes believed that through a rigorous attention to the ideational content of the cogito, the cogitata, a rigorous connection to the objective world is possible – an assumption many believe problematic. Reality, for Marcel, reveals itself precisely at the moment it surpasses all forms of representation – any condition of pure thought risks becoming ‘lost in a sort of dream of itself’. ¹⁴ The presence of insolubilia in experience foreshadows a dimension of the objectively real. Existence cannot be completely ‘summed up’ or synthesized within any conceptual system. A philosophy of immanence is incapable of accounting for the ontological source out of which it arises: ‘[N]either Absolute Knowledge nor Absolute Experience [can] be regarded as a self-sufficient whole … The mistake seem[s] to me to consist in hypostatizing what is after all only a requirement of thought and in believing it possible to isolate and consider the product of this act as a reality in itself.’ ¹⁵

Les conditions dialectiques de la philosophie de l’intuition provides an excellent example of Marcel’s idealist phase. A philosophy of immanence is ‘powerless to convert the idea of being into being’. ¹⁶ Marcel turns to a kind of experiential activity not reducible to a purely noetic act. Thought does not create being; each epistemic episode is the reflection of an infra-experiential act within being. The circumference of the self exceeds the region of ego cogito. Marcel broadens the horizon of experiential givenness. Being is not exhausted by consciousness, but ‘[thought is] identical to being, at least when it is participating in it’. ¹⁷ Les conditions dialectiques de la philosophie de l’intuition ends in rejection of a complete noetic synthesis in exchange for experiential movement within a ‘zone of adhesion’ [zone de l’adhérence] including ‘the one who is’ [Celui qui est]. ¹⁸ Jean Wahl, a contemporary of Marcel well acquainted with his thought, stated the relation between the abstract and the concrete this way:

The concrete for the philosopher is never given. It is pursued. It is not in the absence of thought that the concrete can reveal itself to us … A dialectic is necessary precisely because there is a realism here. The real is the limit of the dialectic; it is its origin, its end, its explanation and its destruction. ¹⁹

Marcel jettisoned his faith in idealistic construction in order to obtain ‘a hold on the real’. ²⁰

Marcel’s encounter with idealism confirmed the inability of cogito to provide a complete logos of being. Being is not a demonstrandum; being is an ‘indissoluble unity of existence and of the existent’. ²¹ If thought is a form of ‘intra-existential’ movement between the absolute and the immediate, then a return to experience is paramount:

An identification of experience and reality is possible only when the term experience is given the full range of its significance, only when it is defined as the total life of the self … The ‘return’ … will not really be an effort to simply find something already there … but rather to elaborate something new. It will really be an effort to reshape experience, to give it a new mold, a new direction. ²²

Radical empiricism is the thesis that experience is relational, consisting of multiple degrees of intimacy and externality between relata. Experience, as James is fond of saying, is ‘double-barreled’:

The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that. In this naïf immediacy it is of course valid, it is there, we act upon it; and the doubling of it in retrospection into a state of mind and a reality intended thereby, is just one of the acts. ²³

Within the field of pure experience, relations exist between web-like configurations. Human beings occupy an important relational position. Much like a series of concentric circles, when any one of these relations is impacted, a ripple-like, directional affect results: ‘[S]uch a universe is continuous. Its members interdigitate with their next neighbors in manifold directions, and there are no clean cuts between them anywhere … Instead of a straight line, it now follows a zigzag … [N]ot only do the terms themselves and their associates and environments change, but we change and their meaning for us changes …’ ²⁴ James maintains that through acts of ‘interstitial alteration’, the shape of reality can be adjusted: ‘[the] real effectual causation … of reality is just what we feel it to be, just that kind of conjunction which our own activity series reveal.’ ²⁵ The potential for readjustment is due both to the malleable character of experience and to the ubiquity of relations – ‘the through-and-through union of adjacent minima of experience, of the confluence of every passing moment of concrete felt experience with its immediately next neighbors … a coalescence of next with next’. ²⁶

In the Varieties of Religious Experience, James referred to experiences that transcend material explanation by the phrase ‘the reality of the unseen’ – the very experience Marcel referred to as l’invérifiable. ²⁷ From the age of five, Marcel experienced l’invérifiable. The death of his mother marks the beginning of Marcel’s memory:

It would surely be better to speak of a certain affective tonality of my first years, those years preceding the death of my mother, after two days of illness, on the 15th of November, 1893; I was going on four … Strange as it may seem, I recall absolutely nothing of those two desolate days … Yet I retain a rather definite memory … I still seem to hear the murmurs of Granny and other members of the family who had come to extend their condolences. ²⁸

In the wake of his mother’s death, Marcel immediately began to trust in the evidences of things unseen, stimulating his lifelong commitment to serving as – un veilleur and un éveilleur – both ‘watchman’ and ‘awakener’, to forms of transliminal experience. He recalls a walk with his aunt:

I must have been about seven or eight, during which my aunt, having told me that no one could know if the dead were completely annihilated or lived on in some way, I exclaimed: ‘When I’m older I’m going to try to find out!’ And I think it would be a mistake to take those childish words lightly: in some ways they determined the course I was to take. ²⁹

Marcel’s return to experience is an attempt to recover from a sense of fragmentation, restoring an experience of continuity – ‘remaking, thread by thread, the spiritual fabric heedlessly torn’. ³⁰ The presence of l’invérifiable continued to haunt Marcel at the lycée: ‘My lycée years left, on the whole, the most disagreeable memories; and I can say in retrospect that I think they contributed to the retardation of my intellectual development and, in the last analysis, seriously affected my health.’ ³¹ Marcel’s experience at the lycée precipitated lifelong suspicion as to the ontological priority of the abstract and measurable; and he was convinced that his ‘aversion to the lycée must have been at the root of his growing horror of the spirit of abstraction’. ³² Philosophy provided release from the sterility of the lycée: ‘[W]hat had seemed to be a given, das Selbstverständlich, was in reality becoming the place for impassioned questioning.’ ³³ In 1906 Marcel attended Bergson’s lectures at the Sorbonne, stressing the rich spiritual interior of the self, the inability of static concepts to depict dynamic reality, and the existence of an ‘open’, transcendent universe. Marcel co-witnessed the interior jubilation in the presence of the spark of genius Bergson exhibited – ‘a driving light cutting through the gray and indistinct background’ of existing forms of intellectual abstraction. ³⁴ Marcel never lost sight of l’invérifiable.

Hocking and the primacy of intersubjective experience

Gabriel Marcel and William Ernest Hocking are connected through Royce. Royce, Hocking’s teacher, viewed intersubjectivity as possible only on the condition of the existence of a ‘third’ – the Absolute or the set of universal symbols through which the Absolute is disclosed: ‘We have no direct empirical knowledge of ourselves, nor of other minds, and hence, in substance, of our entire social environment …’ ³⁵ Hocking recounts a meeting with his esteemed professor on this issue:

[D]uring my last graduate year at Harvard, 1903–1904, I ventured to differ from one of Royce’s central doctrines, namely, that we have no direct knowledge of either our own minds or of other minds … In this particular essay, I reported an experience in which, as I read it, I was directly aware of another mind and my own as co-knowers of a bit of the physical world, a ‘Thou’ and ‘I’ as co-knowers of an ‘It.’ So far as feeling was involved, that feeling was cognitive … [and] we must extend the conception of empirical knowledge, and so admit an element of realism within the ideal totality. [W]hen Royce handed my essay back, he pointed out the dissenting passage with the comment, ‘This is your insight: you must adhere to that!’ ³⁶

Hocking understood the primacy of intersubjective experience from his Midwestern upbringing. We have direct access to others: ‘Our communication with our neighbors is as direct and immediate as it needs to be.’ ³⁷ No appeal to the Absolute is required to complete the intersubjective circuit. Marcel seized upon this important insight of Hocking. Frustrated with idealism, he believed Hocking’s ‘provocative accent on intersubjectivty … challenged Proust’s monadism’. ³⁸ In Meaning of God in Human Experience, Marcel states, ‘I am sure had a lasting influence on me. But it cannot be doubted that Hocking’s book was an advance on Royce’s thought, an advance in the direction of that metaphysical realism toward which I resolutely tended.’ ³⁹

Marcel’s Festschrift contribution to Hocking, Solipsism Surmounted, is the consummate expression of their long, fruitful association. ⁴⁰ Marcel credits Hocking with providing the key that unlocked the prison of immanence: ‘My reading of The Meaning of God was to show me once and for all that it is actually in experience, grasped at its center, that we find the means for transcending that experience, and not at all, as I had believed for too long, in going outside it and appealing to a set of a priori principles.’ ⁴¹ One of Hocking’s favorite examples consists of the phrase ‘Here we are.’ The phrase bespeaks an expanse in which I exist, we exist, as well as a third: the field in which the here lies and that binds us into we. Within this ‘meeting ground’ – what Marcel referred to as a ‘zone de l’adhérence’ – we breathe native air under a common sky: In all of these situations the encounter does not take place within each of the respective participants, or in a neutral unity encompassing them, but between them in a most exact sense, in a dimension accessible to them alone.’ ⁴² This dimension must be approached dynamically in order to prevent mésalliance into an objective category. Marcel is famous for his examples of deepening levels of connection disclosed through person-to-person encounter, demonstrating how concrete acts of experiential interaction occur de profundis as an unfolding of unity: ‘We become simply us.’ ⁴³ For Hocking, this sense of connection was powerful: ‘I can imagine no contact more real and more thrilling than this.’ ⁴⁴ Intersubjectivity, for Hocking, is either everywhere or nowhere. ⁴⁵

Marcel’s work for the Red Cross during the First World War confirmed the importance of intersubjective experience. Physically unfit to perform military duty, Marcel joined the Red Cross. He served as liaison, helping families obtain information concerning the status of those missing in action. Marcel’s Red Cross work is philosophically important: ‘August 2, 1914 truly marks the transition from one world to another.’ ⁴⁶ Meeting with soldiers and with families whose life he first encountered on file-cards provided un sentiment of the mystery of persons and person-to-person encounter. Marcel referred to this experience as ‘like the first apprenticeship of intersubjectivity as I was to define it much later on’. ⁴⁷

Marcel began to explore his interest in la métapsychique during this period by engaging in telepathy. Telepathic experience discloses networks of relationships inaccessible through materialist conceptions. As Marcel says:

[T]o reflect on a relationship of the kind that the word with suggests is to recognize how poor and inadequate our logic is. Apart from juxta- positions pure and simple it is in fact incapable of expressing relationships of increasing intimacy … I might add that the English noun togetherness … has no possible equivalent in French. It is as if the French language refused to make a substantive of – that is, to conceptualize – a certain quality of being which is concerned with the ‘entre-nous,’ the ‘between you and me.’ ⁴⁸

Marcel participated in a particular seance in which he utilized a planchette. ⁴⁹ Mrs. Adolphe Reinach was trying to obtain news as to the disposition of her husband, a reserve officer in the 46th Infantry Regiment. During a session when Mrs. Reinach was absent, ‘the planchette seemed to be imbued with what I can only call ardent and affectionate energy, the entity addressed the absent woman by the name Clio’. ⁵⁰ Later Marcel learned that Adolphe had given his wife the nickname of ‘Clio’. This discovery made a profound impact: ‘This little incident has always seemed to me very important; since any idea of a fortuitous coincidence was excluded, it seemed as though we there had proof of a communication inexplicable within the bounds of normal experience.’ ⁵¹

Marcel was alert to levels of experience [niveaux de l’ expérience] converging through simultaneous experience of the concrete and the universal – a convergence [convergence] of beings [celui des êtres] and being [celui de l’être]. ⁵² Transliminal experience is not rigidly bi-furcated; the experience remains within the ‘span’ [l’indice temporel] of one and the same self. The trans-dimensional reach extending between the two dimensions is vital because human being reveals its transcendent character as a swinging gate opening to transcendence. ⁵³

Telepathic experience confirmed Marcel’s view of the self as transparent, permeable by a broad spectrum of experiential media. Telepathic experience, exceeding the five senses, occurs at band-widths outside the grid of epistemological justification. Visual perception is not the only medium. Marcel’s commitment to the phenomenology and its sensitivity to experience, allowed for a deep appreciation of the interstitial depth of the lifeworld. Marcel appeals to a broad range of experiences; many resistant to strict empirical confirmation. In the preface to Pietro Prini’s La Méthodologie de l’Invérifiable, Marcel insisted that l’invérifiable provides the ‘source’ and ‘origin’ of his metaphysical development. ⁵⁴ In many cases, our capacity for non-objective modes of experience is drowned out by the vast amount of sensory data incurred through day-to-day living. Concepts like ‘simple location’, ‘epistemological gap’ and ‘subject–object duality’ are severely challenged by the notion of telepathic experience. Marcel learned from Bergson to ‘put aside artificial reconstructions of thinking [and] consider thinking itself; you will find directions rather than states, and you will see that thinking is essentially a continual and continuous change of inward direction, incessantly trying to translate itself by changes of outward direction’. ⁵⁵ Telepathic experience is able to traverse space similar to the way in which mnemonic experience is able to traverse time.

Hocking’s view of self-consciousness is derived from his theory of intersubjectivity. Self-conscious is not a private episode, à la Leibniz, ‘with an impenetrably private world panorama unrolling’. ⁵⁶ Consciousness is a reflexive activity – one becomes conscious through an encounter with something. For Hocking, cogito ergo sum, the notion of a private consciousness requiring nothing but itself in order to exist, must be supplanted by cogito aliquid, ergo sum et aliquid est – I think something, therefore I exist and something else also exists! ⁵⁷ Reality exceeds the limits of ego cogitata: ‘The real is the source of myself … [T]he finite knower knows realistically; the being of the object is prior to his own.’ ⁵⁸

Hocking and Marcel affirm the role of the other as essential for the formation of the self, not solely for purposes of self-consciousness alone, but as an essential stage of becoming a person. The distinction is vital. If being related to the other is simply a matter of increasing the scope of my egoistic development, then social consciousness cannot lead to the establishment of a genuine human community, but rather to its opposite in the form of atomic individualism. It is necessary to move beyond the stage in which social consciousness merely reinforces the ego, to an awareness of essential relatedness to the other as member of a common community of concern. The achievement of self-consciousness is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for personhood: ‘Though we pass ultimately beyond egoism, we still must pass through it.’ ⁵⁹

Marcel explores the ontogenic and phylogenic development of self-consciousness and its implications in The Ego and its Relation to Others. ⁶⁰ Like Hocking, Marcel stressed ‘[t]he pre-existent ego can only be postulated, and if we try to describe it, we can only do so negatively, by way of exclusion’. ⁶¹ A small boy presents his mother with a bunch of flowers gathered from the meadow: ‘Look, I picked these.’ ⁶² The child is present, offering himself so as to receive tribute. The ego becomes aware of itself as present not simply because it involves a reference to someone else:

Here, however, we must note something of capital importance. From the very fact that I treat the other person as merely a means of resonance or an amplifier, I tend to consider him as a sort of apparatus which I can, or think I can, manipulate, or of which I can dispose at will. I form my own idea of him and, strangely enough, this idea can become a substitute for the real person, a shadow to which I shall come to refer my acts and words. ⁶³

The key to overcoming moral egocentricity is to recover the sense of autochthonous connection with the other: ‘[T]o go to the root of the thou’. ⁶⁴ Human beings possess a defining characteristic Marcel refers to as disponibilité – a condition of being accessible through intersubjective encounter – what Hocking referred to as ‘a vein of nonsolitude of the “solitary” ego’. ⁶⁵ For Marcel, fidelity to experience ‘is never fidelity to one’s-self, but is referred to what I have called the hold the other being has over us’. ⁶⁶ Living during a time of increasing evidence concerning the inherent dangers of egoism, Marcel supported Hocking’s advocacy for a ‘passage beyond modernity’, in order to surpass the grip of egoism in its advanced forms as subjectivity and solipsism. Hocking, from his apprenticeship with Husserl, and Marcel, from his engagement with idealism, remained steadfast to their conviction concerning the inability of noetic intuition to exhaust reality. ⁶⁷ Any attempt to comprehensively grasp being necessarily reveals noematic surplus, an Überschuss, whether in the form of Marcel’s celui qui est or Hocking’s ‘non-impulsive background’ – the aboriginal fact of consciousness. ⁶⁸ Modernity’s attempts to obtain a complete noetic intuition, through transcendental subjectivity, objective idealism, or logicism, are significant examples of the failure of consciousness to move beyond the stage of egoism. Transcendental solutions stand on gilded splinters, insofar as they attempt, as Wittgenstein remarked, to ‘throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it’, ⁶⁹ failing to realize the noematic grounding necessary for noetic scaffolding to take hold. The crisis of modernity, according to Hocking, is because ‘with this abandonment of man’s native rapport with the whole, the nerve of worth in his own living ceases to function’. ⁷⁰ The threat of danger to the intersubjective fabric of experience led Hocking and Marcel to commit to turning to an emphasis upon praxis in an effort to enact causality at a level exceeding the material – operating sur le plan spirituel. This was a tactic previously taken by Royce – their original source of connection.

Ontological importance of praxis: Lessons from Royce’s philosophy of loyalty and theory of semiotics

Royce’s philosophy – and this is its great value – marks a kind of transition between absolute idealism and existentialist thought. ⁷¹

When asked to account for any long-term influence Royce had upon the development of his thought, Marcel responded that he found Royce’s theory of loyalty and semiotics the most important. ⁷² Loyalty and semiotics provide the tools by which Royce navigated some of the most difficult conundrums stemming from idealism – a journey from which Marcel had just returned.

Royce must refute the Bradleyan position that the unity of one and many cannot be solved without contradiction. Royce points to a ‘self-representative system’ – a formula expressing a general purpose requiring an infinite series of terms for its complete expression – as the model for an actual infinite. The Absolute must be actual, exhibiting the complete fulfillment of its presented content. Any attempt to hypostatize the Absolute as it ‘would be’ freezes the Absolute in the mode of possibility. The Absolute cannot exist solely in the subjunctive mode – it must be indicative through and through. The example Royce offers as a model of a self-representative system is a map of England representing its terrain in every detail. If we wish to trace an exact map of England ⁷³ with a point-by-point correspondence between the map and the terrain, the map must contain a representation of its own contour and content. If there were a limit to this series of self-representations, the map would be imperfect and, ex hypothesi, incomplete. An infinite series of maps within maps is necessarily implied in the intended purpose. If we suppose this map to exist in principle, we assert that it actually contains an infinite series of maps. A self-representative system is ‘fully recoverable’ to the extent that it can be telescopically represented by any part of itself. Such a system is infinite; existing both as system and series. Dr. Deepak Chopra refers to Dioxyribo Nucleic Acid (DNA) as a self-replicating system, ‘a brick factory made out of bricks’. ⁷⁴ From a Roycean standpoint, temporal experience presents endless series of dispersion, but dispersion is subordinate to the unity through which the Absolute defines itself totum simul. Human beings are subseries of Absolute existence – temporally dispersed and eternally unified.

Marcel doubts whether Royce’s speculative solution to the problem of reconciling ‘realistic pluralism’ with ‘idealistic monism’ is satisfactory. Unable to free himself from the architectonic of Absolute idealism, Royce embraced a stock-in-trade inventory of conceptual tools much too rigid for the purpose of establishing finite freedom in the midst of Absolute existence: ‘[T]his compromise is the expression of a thought which is still a bit hesitant, which hasn’t been able to free itself completely from the categories of analytic understanding, and which is bent upon translating, in inappropriate language, the concrete unity of freedoms in the midst of absolute freedom.’ ⁷⁵ Royce must alter the direction of his thought. For those who are familiar with the course of Royce’s development, this move involves a shift from an all-inclusive, synchronic conception of the Absolute to a diachronic conception. It is at this juncture that the Roycean doctrine of loyalty takes center stage. Royce is attempting to merge metaphysics and ethics in such a way as to arrive at the fundamental meaning of praxis. Divine will is expressed through the finite individual but, as Royce is quick to point out, ‘This, your own way of expressing God’s will is not derived. It is yourself. And it is yours because God worketh in you.’ ⁷⁶ By expressing God’s will, I express no will except my own. In the words of Meister Eckhart, ‘Were I not, God himself could not be.’

The self simultaneously exhibits two dimensions. We participate in the unity of the Absolute but our participation is ensured only through a series of living acts. There is work to be done. Through loyal participation, we exercise our unique capacity for free, temporal development. Unconstrained by the categorical divisions of discursive thought, loyalty provides for a more concrete connection between finite and infinite being. Royce’s appeal to loyalty enlivens his thought by creating synergy between diverse orders of experience – an ‘act partak[ing] more of faith than of abstract thought’. ⁷⁷ When I act on behalf of a cause, I come into being as the person I am through serving this cause. The act by which I respond as loyal is one of the acts by which God is. ⁷⁸ Instead of arguing for something resembling a ‘block universe’, Royce came to realize that metaphysical speculation required the acknowledgement of both a cognitive and a conative relation between ourselves and the Absolute – a relation that Royce originally interpreted solely in a conceptual manner. Through the act of being loyal, human beings are united and understood – but not absorbed – by That which transcends them. Royce was aware of this developing tendency in his thought. While on a voyage to Australia – recuperating from a nervous breakdown caused by overwork – he wrote to William James:

In fine, I have largely straightened out the big metaphysical tangle about continuity, freedom, and world formula … and I am ready to amuse you with a metaphysical speculation of a very simple, but as now seems to me, of a very expansive nature, which does more to make the dry bones of my ‘Universal Thought’ live than any prophesying I have therefore had the fortune to do. ⁷⁹

Royce’s emphasis upon the active pursuit of spiritual unity assumed greater importance in The Problem of Christianity. Insisting that The Problem of Christianity is ‘in essential harmony’ with The World and the Individual, Royce clearly recognized that ‘There is much in [the latter] which I did not expect to say when I began the task’. ⁸⁰ Royce appropriated Peirce’s triadic logic and theory of signs in order to emphasize the importance of interpretation in the semiotic development of the self. He took this tack in order to lay stress upon the ongoing, teleologically guided process undergone as we realize greater degrees of comprehensive unity. ⁸¹ The creative appropriation of Peirce’s logical semiotics helped Royce negotiate a way out of the labyrinth of Absolute idealism. By naturalizing the Absolute through a logic of interpretation, human beings can now be viewed as developing signs of the Absolute. Human beings have a special role to play as enduring, time-spanning entities unified by a center of intention and capable of self-realization within the context of what we perceive and conceive. The emphasis on Spirit as an objective structure, unfolding seriatim ‘through an infinite number of developments which all lead to the goal of total self-interpretation’, ⁸² has replaced the block conception of a static Absolute. Having descended from heaven, the Absolute is now semiotically realized within a dynamically evolving temporal context. Royce believed that a spiritually unified body of members represents a distinct type of being which is neither a mere collection of monads, nor a barren abstract universal. This form of communal fellowship through active association, in the Greek sense of κoινωνία, is neither individual nor universal; it is a distinctive level of being. Acting as a loyal member of a divinely inspired, loyal semiotic community of association, ‘far from integrating in a single rational system … [offers] a less systematic, but more faithful and profound, interpretation of our spiritual life’. ⁸³ This is a living logos: ‘Let us bury the natural body of tradition. We want its glorified body and its immortal soul … We need a new heaven and a new earth.’ ⁸⁴

Marcel recognized the genius behind Royce’s effort. Marcel’s concerns, however, are not unlike those of William James, and others, who argued that a complete and total Absolute results in an identitätsphilosophie of the worst kind – a ‘block’ universe in which ‘the world and the all-thinker thus compenetrate and soak each other up without residuum’. ⁸⁵ Can Royce maintain the concrete unity of freedoms in the midst of absolute freedom? A stock-in-trade inventory of idealist principles leads to dualism in the form of the one and the many. According to Marcel, we must ‘find a fulcrum in the actual [and] start from the real. [T]his act partakes more of faith than of abstract thought. The relation … between God and myself is a relation of individual to individual.’ ⁸⁶ Although Marcel remained uneasy with the idealistic leitmotiv of Royce’s thought, he praised Royce’s appeal to loyalty, claiming that the shift in emphasis in Royce’s thought is ‘due to a reflection upon his own system … resulting [in] the discovery that there are certain ideal connections between distinct orders of speculation’. ⁸⁷

The importance of Royce’s practical turn for Marcel should not be minimized. Marcel’s close reading of the Roycean corpus caused him to realize that ‘[h]owever much we might admire Royce’s attempt to conceptualize his ethico-religious insight in philosophical concepts, his ethico-religious insight cannot remain a live one unless we separate it from his absolutist conception of God’. ⁸⁸ Royce’s acknowledgement of the practical dimensions of experience solidified Marcel’s commitment to praxis as ontologically efficacious activity. Marcel’s emphasis upon praxis is not radically new to French philosophy. Maurice Blondel’s L’Action (1893) and Joseph de Finance’s Essai sur l’agir humain (1962) both emphasize the importance of praxis in a speculative context. The Czechoslovakian philosopher, Karel Kosík, captures the ontological importance of praxis in the following:

[P]raxis is the exposure of the mystery of man as an onto-formative being, a being that forms (the socio-economic) reality and therefore also grasps and interprets it (i.e. reality both human and extra-human, reality in its totality). [P]raxis is the determination of human being as the process of forming reality … What is human and non-human is not pre-ordained, it is determined in history through a process of practical determination. ⁸⁹

Marcel’s turn to praxis is in keeping with his prior emphases upon intersubjective experience and telepathy. Towards the end of Royce’s Metaphysics he writes: ‘We do not see, from the point of view of Royce’s monism of interpretation, why certain phenomena of one order might not allow us to decipher other phenomenon of a different order … The strangeness of traditional processes of divination should therefore surprise us no more than the strangeness of conditions under which two finite beings are revealed to each other.’ ⁹⁰ Marcel’s appreciation of the importance of praxis later informed his understanding of the ontological dimensions of hope. To hope is to ‘rejoin an immemorial experience … in a dimension which is that of perpetual novelty’. ⁹¹ In the realm of hope, time is relaxed or stretched – ‘a range which goes from inert waiting to active waiting’. ⁹² A contrast with desire is helpful in this context. Whereas desire is an egoistic act executed in the mode of having [avoir], hope, on the other hand, is executed in the realm of mystère, reflecting the presence of possibility. When one truly engages in hope, one is immersed in a dimension of intersubjective existence in which the self interiorizes itself within the totality: ‘I hope in thee for us.’ ⁹³ Unlike the condition of desire, hope transcends the material realm; mechanistic causality is left behind as life moves forward in its vector character – ‘in the making’ [faciens] as opposed to already-made [factum]. Hope possesses ‘the power of making things fluid’. ⁹⁴

Conclusion: The religious dimension of Marcel’s thought

Perhaps the most important task on the plane of speculation is to deepen once again the notion of life itself in the light of the highest and most genuine religious thought. ⁹⁵

It is well known that Gabriel Marcel converted to Roman Catholicism at age 41. The Roman Catholic Church was synonymous with the universal; the multiple sects of Protestantism undermined the sense of unity Marcel was seeking: ‘It then seemed to me that I could not give my adherence save to the Church that presented itself as corresponding to the richest and most global vision.’ ⁹⁶ Marcel employs the Greek term κoινωνία to refer to the intersubjective experience of being united in Christ. The experience of κoινωνία is not a rarefied act in which ‘unless we bow our heads and furrow our brow, or settle into a pious coma, we cannot be in God’s presence’: ⁹⁷ κoινωνία is an experience of ἐκκλησία – a condition of being intersubjectively called-together through faith in the source of unity. Marcel believed that the fundamental truths of Christianity are coeval with the integral structure of the human being: ‘[T]he more one penetrates into human nature, the more one finds oneself situated on the axes of the great truths of Christianity.’ ⁹⁸ While irresistibly drawn into the domain of Christian beliefs, Marcel never abandoned a commitment to reaching a level of understanding sufficiently universal to be appreciated by non-Catholics and non-Christians, so long as there is a commitment to what is essential. Marcel referred to this universal dimension as ‘peri-Christian’. Marcel’s most important legacy may be his sustained commitment to unity of Christian philosophizing. Christian philosophizing requires an appeal to a multitude of sources; any authentic expression of Christian faith requires the transcendence of limited meaning spheres. No single philosophical system exhausts the deposit of faith. A priori dictates concerning methodological orientation risk ‘set[ting] oneself outside of the very conditions of philosophical activity’. ⁹⁹ Limiting conceptions leave an experiential residue; something resembling what Royce called ‘a still small voice [that] is not heard in them’. ¹⁰⁰ Marcel would often speak of co-appartenance à or ‘spiritual convergence’ – a deep sense of co-belonging between himself and his interlocutors – a condition with which contemporary philosophy is not completely comfortable. If the task of Christian philosophizing is to seek truth wherever it may be found – bearing witness to whatever, wherever and whenever authentic intellectual experience is present – then Marcel’s work stands as a profound example of Christian philosophizing. Marcel believed that others are a source of an ‘endless treasure’ of new ideas. Christian philosophizing, as exhibited by Marcel, bespeaks a reflexive unity derived from the truth that is sought as well as the kaleidoscopic, kergymatic and kairotic gifts revealed through the act of seeking. Christian philosophizing seeks a truth that can never be untrue to itself; its aim is to be that of which it speaks.