From Gabriel Marcel, The Ontological Need for Being: It should be noted that this world is, on the one hand, riddled with problems and, on the other, determined to allow no room for mystery. I shall come back to this distinction between problem and mystery which I believe to be fundamental. For the moment I shall only point out that to eliminate or to try to eliminate mystery is (in this functionalist world) to bring into play in the face of events which break in on the course of existence--such as birth, love and death--that psychological and pseudo-scientific category of the purely natural which deserves a study to itself. In reality, this is nothing more than the remains of a degraded rationalism from whose standpoint cause explains effect and accounts for it exhaustively. There exists in such a world, nevertheless, an infinity of problems, since the causes are not known to us in detail and thus leave room for unlimited research. And in addition to these theoretical puzzles there are innumerable technical problems, bound up with the difficulty of knowing how the various functions, once they have been inventoried and labeled, can be made to work together without doing one another harm. These theoretical and technical questions are independent, for the theoretical problems arise out of the different techniques while the technical problems can not be solved without a measure of pre-established theoretical knowledge. In such a world the ontological need, the need of being, is exhausted in exact proportion to the breaking up of personality on the one hand and, on the other, to the triumph of the category of the purely natural and the consequent atrophy of the faculty of wonder. But to come at last to the ontological need itself: can we not approach it directly and attempt to define it? In reality this can only be done to a limited extent. For reasons which I shall develop later, I suspect that the characteristic of this need is that it can never be wholly clear to itself. To try to describe it without distorting it we shall have to say something like this: Being is--or should be--necessary. It is impossible that everything should be reduced to a play of successive appearances which are inconsistent with each other (inconsistent is essential), or, in the words of Shakespeare, to a tale told by an idiot. I aspire to participate in this being, in this reality--and perhaps this aspiration is already a degree of participation, however rudimentary... As for defining the word being, let us admit that it is extremely difficult. I would merely suggest this method of approach: being is what withstands--or would withstand--an exhaustive analysis bearing on the data of experience and aiming to reduce them step by step to elements increasingly devoid of intrinsic or significant values. . . A philosophy which refuses to endorse the ontological need is, nevertheless, possible; indeed, generally speaking, contemporary thought tends towards this abstention. But at this point a distinction must be made between two different attitudes which are sometimes confused: one which consists in a systematic reserve (it is that of agnosticism in all its forms), and the other, bolder and more coherent, which regards the ontological need as the expression of an outworn body of dogma liquidated once and for all by the Idealist critique. . . Being and Knowledge These preliminary reflections on the ontological need are sufficient to bring out its indeterminate character and to reveal a fundamental paradox. To formulate this need is to raise a host of questions: is there such a thing as being? What is it? etc. Yet immediately an abyss opens under my feet: I who ask these questions about being, how can I be sure that I exist? Yet surely I, who formulate this problem, should be able to remain outside it--before or beyond it? Clearly this is not so. The more I consider it the more I find that this problem tends inevitably to invade the proscenium from which it is excluded in theory; it is only by means of a fiction that Idealism in its traditional form seeks to maintain on the margin of being the consciousness which asserts it or denies it. So I am inevitably forced to ask: Who am I--I who question being? How am I qualified to begin this investigation? If I do not exist, how can I succeed in it? And if I do exist, how can I be sure of this fact? Contrary to the opinion which suggests itself at this point, I believe that on this plane the cogito cannot help us at all. Whatever Descartes may have thought of it himself, the only certainty with which it provides us concerns only the epistemological subject as organ of objective cognition. As I have written elsewhere, the cogito merely guards the threshold of objective validity, and that is strictly all; this is proved by the indeterminate character of the I. The I am is, to my mind, a global statement which it is impossible to break down into its component parts. There remains a possible objection; it might be said: Either the being designated in the question What am I? concerns the subject of cognition, and in this case we are on the plane of the cogito; or else that which you call the ontological need is merely the extreme point (or perhaps only the fallacious transposition) of a need which is, in reality, vital and with which the metaphysician is not concerned. But is it a mistake arbitrarily to divide the question, Who am I? from the ontological problem taken as a whole? The truth is that neither of the two can be dealt with separately, but that when they are taken together, they cancel one another out as problems. It should be added that the Cartesian position is inseparable from a form of dualism which I, for my part, would unhesitatingly reject. To raise the ontological problem is to raise the question of being as a whole and of oneself seen as a totality. But should we not ask ourselves if we must not reject this dissociation between the intellectual and the vital, with its resultant over- or underestimation of the one or the other? Doubtless it is legitimate to establish certain distinctions within the unity of the being who thinks and who endeavors to think himself; but it is only beyond such distinctions that the ontological problem can arise and it must relate to that being seen in his all-comprehensive unity. To sum up our reflections at this point, we find that we are dealing with an urge towards an affirmation--yet an affirmation which it seems impossible to make, since it is not until it has been made that I can regard myself as qualified to make it. It should be noted that this difficulty never arises at a time when I am actually faced with a problem to be solved. In such a case I work on the data, but everything leads me to believe that I need not take into account the I who is at work--it is a factor which is presupposed and nothing more. Here, on the contrary, what I would call the ontological status of the investigator assumes a decisive importance. Yet so long as I am concerned with thought itself I seem to follow an endless regression. But by the very fact of recognizing it as endless I transcend it in a certain way: I see that this process takes place within an affirmation of being--an affirmation which I am rather than an affirmation which I utter: by uttering it I break it, I divide it, I am on the point of betraying it. It might be said, by way of an approximation, that 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. But this is only at the extreme limit of thought, a limit which I cannot reach without falling into contradiction. I am therefore led to assume or to recognize a form of participation which has the reality of a subject; this participation cannot be, by definition, an object of thought; it cannot serve as a solution--it appears beyond the realm of problems; it is meta-problematical. Conversely, it will be seen that, 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, on the one hand, and being as asserted by that subject, on the other, 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--a sense perhaps analogous to that which Paul Claudel tried to define in his Art Poetique. From this standpoint, contrary to what epistemology seeks vainly to establish, there exists well and truly a mystery of cognition; knowledge is contingent on a participation in being for which no epistemology can account because it continually presupposes it. --Gabriel Marcel, The Ontological Need for Being
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 03:37:10 +0000
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