In January of 1934 Heidegger’s active collaboration with the Nazis ended and on April 23 he resigned as rector, ostensibly in protest against the Nazis although it’s unclear exactly what his protest was. This move represented in his mind his break from the Nazis, so his period of active involvement with the Nazis is about a year. In later years he would make few public statements about this whole affair, nor did he leave Germany through the Nazi years. He could have easily found a job elsewhere in Europe or in North America, but in his mind leaving Germany was pretty much unthinkable. He would never get involved in politics again, but nor did he ever exactly denounce the Nazis, even in later years. He essentially spent the rest of his life teaching and writing, mostly at the hut, spending as much time there as he could. When he wasn’t writing, he enjoyed doing physical activities like chopping wood and cross-country skiing. He often wore traditional rural costume, including lederhosen, to signify his commitment to a rural way of life. For him, getting out of the city and going to the hut was like venturing back to ancient Greece, which represented for him a kind of ideal. As he wrote, “My entire work … is borne and guided by the world of these mountains and peasants. At times my work up there is now interrupted for lengthy periods by negotiations, lecture tours, talks, and my teaching work down here. But as soon as I get up there again the whole world of earlier questions again presses in on me during the very first hours of my cabin existence, moreover entirely in the form in which I had left it. I’m quite simply placed into the specific oscillation of work and I am basically unable to control its hidden law” (Safranski, 278).

At the conclusion of the war in 1945, the French military government fired Heidegger and barred him from teaching in Germany on account of his having been rector in 1933. The following year he experienced something of a mental breakdown and was treated by a psychologist for a time. This was apparently brought on either in whole or in part by the teaching ban as well as the loss of his reputation. It looked like his career was over and his reputation was ruined. He was also worried about his two sons who had been fighting in the war and at the time were being held by the Russians. By 1949 the prohibition against him teaching was lifted but negotiations dragged on for a while, so he didn’t return to teaching (still at the University of Freiburg) until the winter of 1951–2, one year before his scheduled retirement.

Also after the war, Heidegger was becoming very well known outside Germany. Jean-Paul Sartre had taken notice of him beginning in the 1930s, when a number of his writings were being translated into French. After the war he and Sartre were reading each other’s work with admiration. Sartre regarded his Being and Nothingness as a further development of some ideas in Being and Time. The two men never became friends, but they exchanged letters a bit and finally met in 1952.

Heidegger died in 1976 at the age of 86. He asked for and received a Catholic funeral and was buried in the Catholic cemetery in Messkirch. Instead of a cross, his tombstone is marked by a star which recalls a line he had written in 1947: “To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world’s sky” (Poetry, Language, Thought, 4). He remained married throughout his life to Elfride, whose reputation was somewhat mixed. Hannah Arendt, for one, despised her.

Now, why did he get involved with the Nazis? What was he thinking? Was he anti-Semitic? Safranski’s answer is no (he devotes a chapter to this question in his excellent biography): “It is significant that neither in his lectures and philosophical writings, nor in his political speeches and pamphlets are there any anti-Semitic or racist remarks” (Safranski, 254). Heidegger made few public statements about this episode even in later years, but he did try to explain his actions to some people he knew. He also had to explain himself after the war to the denazification commission at the University of Freiburg. As mentioned, by the early 1930s he had become a well-known philosopher. Being and Time had appeared in 1927 and made his reputation most obviously in Germany, but he was becoming known in France as well. In Europe in those days it was possible for a philosopher to become known not only in university circles but potentially as a larger cultural figure, as today it is possible for a podcaster, a novelist, an artist, or even a scientist to become somewhat famous in popular culture. Was Heidegger looking to become famous? Not likely, but he was an ambitious and a proud man, and he seems to have harbored an aspiration to become a kind of cultural figure, a philosopher-sage influencing political developments behind the scenes. He certainly never believed he could control Hitler, but he could, he seems to have thought, exert some kind of influence on this new political party. “He intends to be the herald of a historical-political and, simultaneously, philosophical epiphany. There will come a time that is worthy of philosophy, and then will come a philosophy that is in control of its time. And in some way he will be one of the party, as a squire or as a knight. Now he has to be vigilant, lest he miss the moment when politics can and must become philosophical and philosophy political” (Safranski, 224). Heidegger always loved the grand gesture, and if he was going to get involved in politics at all, he was going to do it in a big way. The Nazi party seems to have appealed to him not because of its racism or fascism but because of its opposition to communism and its emphasis on order and also rurality. He never subscribed to the ideology of “blood and soil,” although he always strongly identified with his rural origins and the way of life that it had to offer. As mentioned, he despised the modern city with its utilitarian and technological way of life. America in particular represented for him a way of life that centered around the city and modern technology, and he never visited there. In fact he rarely left south Germany.

One of his friends visited Heidegger at his hut in 1932, and wrote this in his diary: “One sleeps a lot of there; in the evening it is ‘lights out’ at half past eight. Even so it is dark long enough in winter for some time to be left for a chin-wag. Admittedly the talk was not about philosophy, but mainly about National Socialism. The once so liberal follower of Gertrud Baumer has become a National Socialist and her husband is following her. I would have never believed it, but it is not really surprising. He doesn’t understand much about politics, and that is probably why his detestation of all mediocre halfness lets him expect great things at the party that promises to do something decisive and, above all, effectively to oppose communism. Democratic idealism and Bruning’s conscientiousness cannot, he believes, achieve anything anymore, now that things have reached the present pass; that was why a dictatorship that does not shrink from draconian measures must be approved. Only by means of such a dictatorship could the worse communist dictatorship, which destroys all individual personal culture and hence all culture in the Western sense altogether, be avoided. He doesn’t seem to concern himself with political details. If a man lives up here, he has different yardsticks for everything” (Safranski, 226–7). It’s hard to imagine Heidegger being naive about politics, or about anything, but Gadamer also noted this many years later. His own students were shocked when he became a Nazi, as were his friends, including Jaspers. Jaspers described Heidegger’s state of mind at the time as one of intoxication. For the rest of his life he would be asked to explain himself. He always stressed the hardships of the period, the threat of communism, the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles, poverty, unemployment, the squabbling between political parties during the Weimar years, and virtual civil war in the streets. Something decisive needed to be done, it seemed to him. As he wrote in a letter in 1960, “At the beginning of the 1930s the class differences in our nation had become intolerable for any German with a sense of social responsibility, as had also Germany’s economic throttling by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1932 there were 7 million unemployed, who, with their families, saw before them nothing but hardship and poverty. The confusion stemming from these circumstances, which today’s generation can no longer even imagine, also spread to the universities” (Safranski, 228). He certainly regarded his involvement with the Nazis as a monumental blunder, and he never got involved in politics again, but he was also a very proud man, not one given to making public apologies like politicians and others commonly do today. He would have regarded this as undignified. Gabriel Marcel also opined that “to my knowledge, he never made this act of contrition. I cannot keep from thinking that it was his pride that kept him from doing so” (Marcel, Awakenings, 220). He confessed to Jaspers that he felt ashamed, but he wasn’t about to say this publicly. He presumably also confessed this to Arendt, who managed to forgive him after the war and remained friends with him for the rest of her life (she died in 1975). Jaspers and Heidegger drifted apart in later years; they had long had a bit of a strange friendship. In the 1920s they had regarded each other as philosophical allies in the new movement of existential phenomenology, but Jaspers’ wife was Jewish and when Heidegger became rector Jaspers became a bit afraid of him. After the war the two often wrote to each other and visited each other, but they rarely read each other’s work. They would often discuss philosophy but for some reason didn’t read each other much.

Regarding Heidegger’s manner of thinking, his way was to pose a single question—what is the meaning of Being?—and to approach it again and again for decades, from his teenage years until his death. ‘“An understanding of Heidegger’s thought,’ we read in one account of his long career, ‘can awaken only when the reader of his works is prepared to understand everything he or she reads as a step toward what is to be thought—as something toward which Heidegger is on the way. Heidegger’s thought must be understood as a way. It is not a way of many thoughts but one that restricts itself to a single thought…. Heidegger has always understood his thinking as going along a way … into the neighborhood of Being.’ Heidegger ventured onto that path while still a schoolboy and remained true to it” (Krell, 31).

Being and Time, 1927

All of the above is by way of background. Now let’s turn directly to Being and Time, beginning with one issue that confronts us immediately: why the highly eccentric vocabulary and writing style? Did this writer have a hard time expressing himself or have a fondness for obscurity? No, it isn’t that. He’s writing this way because he believes the tradition of western metaphysics and epistemology has exhausted itself. It has reached a dead end, as Nietzsche had said, and it is also asking the wrong questions. Thinking always begins with a question, and if our questions (not just our answers) contain an error, inquiry will go nowhere. Now, our entire philosophical vocabulary—our basic concepts, distinctions, questions, and issues—is a product of this tradition. If we are to make a fresh start in philosophy and we are now phenomenologists then we will need a new phenomenological terminology. In philosophy, terminology is terribly important as we are trying to find the language that allows the phenomena to show themselves. We need to take our cue, then, from the things themselves. What we mustn’t do is take our familiar philosophical concepts or classificatory scheme as a given and then make the phenomena fit the scheme. Indeed, this is what too much of our thinking does: make it fit, compress our experience of the world into a preconceived schematism. Heidegger is trying to avoid this—hence the need for a new terminology.

Being and Time (BT) announces itself very boldly as a new beginning in philosophy. Heidegger is making a turn toward the world of everyday experience and toward the human being in its “average everydayness.” This is going to require a new, specifically phenomenological, vocabulary, not a metaphysical one. If we are to think differently, we will need to speak differently. Language, he maintains, pre-forms thought or it provides thought with a fundamental orientation. It is not the case that Heidegger had a hard time expressing himself or loved obscurity. His writing style and terminology are very carefully crafted. I mention this because many philosophers are immediately turned off by his writing style and declare him an obscurantist. For Heidegger, while philosophy should aim to be clear—phenomenology does aim for clarity—it should also be faithful to our experience and allow us to understand the things themselves as they show themselves to us. Philosophy should be clear, but it should also be profound and nuanced, and it should allow us to think differently. Heidegger is trying to find a deeper and more rigorous way of thinking about human existence, one that does justice to the phenomena as we actually experience them. One of his convictions will be that modern culture no longer “thinks,” or thinks in the highest sense of the word, and one reason it doesn’t think is because it lacks a proper language in which to do it. He wants, then, to offer not only a new set of philosophical hypotheses, which may be true or false, but a new way of thinking, and a new way of thinking calls for a new terminology.

Let’s begin with a few expressions that Heidegger introduces which pertain to the self. The human being can be spoken of as a thingly being: an organism (biology), citizen (politics), etc., but fundamentally we do not experience ourselves as things but as actors. That is, action is the fundamental structure of the human being. Thought itself is a function of action, or cognition stems from our practical dealings with the world. The self, then, must be explored through the activity of practical, everyday life. There is a sense in which we are what we do. The human being isn’t something that just sits there and is what it is; rather, it’s always in process of realizing something, bringing something about, doing something. What characterizes us is more a how than a what—a way of being, of being conscious and of acting. Instead of “the self” he is going to use the term “Dasein,” meaning the human being is the kind of being that is “there,” or “here” in the midst of a lifeworld. The human being always has a particular orientation in a lifeworld, and a way of understanding it. I am not a detached observer of the world but am an engaged actor or agent within it. I experience myself less as an object than a way of being conscious, of being oriented toward what is around me. Let’s speak of the human being as a “being-in-the-world,” where this means that the human being does not confront the world as subject to object but finds itself already present in it. I and the world in which I live are a unified phenomenon, hence the hyphenated expression. I am also a “being-with-others,” that is, the human being always finds itself in joint association with others. As well, my way of existing is always a “being-ahead-of-oneself,” that is, I am always looking from the present moment into the future, not just occasionally but continually, and with concern.

Question: the meaning of being

What does it mean to say that an entity is? This is the fundamental question of ontology, and it’s a question, Heidegger believes, that philosophy doesn’t have an answer to, nor does any other discipline. We don’t know what we are saying when we say that something is. This is a surprising claim. To say that something is seems straightforward, but it’s anything but straightforward. The question itself, what is the meaning of Being, has been forgotten. Ours, he tells us, is an age of the “forgetfulness of Being.” It is now said that Being is an empty concept or it is a concept without a definition. We all use the word, so we have at least a vague sense of it. When I say “The table is,” you know what I mean, or you think you do: it exists, it occupies space, it has a certain physical constitution or nature, maybe it’s a substance. When Descartes said “I think, I am” you know what he means by “am,” to a degree anyway. Yet Being is the “darkest” of all concepts. We don’t know explicitly what it means, and we need to.

What it is not is any kind of thing or object: the external world, a transcendent realm, or any kind of thing. Being is not a thing unto itself, or an object, but is always the be-ing (the appearing to us) of a thing. This will be very important for Heidegger: Being (upper case B) is not a being (an object or thing, lower case), and yet we generally speak of Being as if it were a kind of thing. The word itself is already a noun, so when the question is posed, most often the direction our thinking takes is: given that Being is a thing, what kind of thing is it? Heidegger’s reply: Being is not a thing or a being. He is going to speak of it instead as a verb. He’s interested not in the content of reality—what there is—but in what enables reality—what conditions make it possible that there should be a world for us at all, a world that we can understand. He’s going to draw a very important distinction, then, between Being and things; this distinction has been called “the ontological difference.” Whereas “ontic” knowledge (which includes scientific knowledge) is about things in existence and their characteristics, the “ontological” deals with the Being of things, what enables the thing to be at all, to be experienced by us and to be intelligible.

Heidegger announces that he is undertaking a “fundamental ontology.” Ontology is the philosophical subdiscipline that deals with Being, and it goes right back to the Greeks, including the greatest Greek thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, but also various presocratics. We will find Heidegger constantly returning to the Greeks for this reason; he’s not originating ontology as a new discipline. The very first philosophers in the western tradition were doing ontology, and Heidegger would always go back to them in his thinking far more than he would go back to philosophers of the early modern period, the rationalists, empiricists, or German idealists, important as they were. His main interlocutors are the presocratic Greeks: Heraclitus, Parmenides, etc., but he wants to raise the question of (the meaning of) Being in a new and explicitly phenomenological way.

Now, how do we do this? Even the question is obscure and problematic: how is the question to be formulated precisely? Let’s try: What is Being? This seems simple enough, but doesn’t this already presuppose some understanding of the “is”? Does this mean that we cannot even get started or does it illustrate something fundamental about the nature of human understanding, namely, that it always presupposes a prereflective understanding of its object? When we set out to understand something, we never do it from scratch. Rather, we understand something explicitly or theoretically on the basis of a preliminary and usually vague understanding of the thing. This is the kind of understanding of Being that we all have, a pre-philosophical one. What we need to do is to gain an explicit, philosophical grasp of what it means to be.

Why has the question of Being been forgotten? The Greek word for Being is ousia, and like a lot of the words that Greek philosophers started asking questions about, it’s ambiguous. According to Heidegger, its primary meaning was the infinitive—to be—but it was also sometimes used as a noun, meaning a substance or perhaps a Supreme Being. The notion of ousia as substance gained popularity among philosophers, where a substance was thought to be something constant which underlies changes in a thing’s qualities, location, etc. For the Greeks, change was a mark of imperfection and they observed an enormous amount of change in the world around them. There must be, they believed, something permanent that underlies change. The question became, what is it? For Plato it was the Forms, for Aristotle it was essences, but prior to Plato, Heidegger believes, some of the presocratics preferred to speak of Being as an infinitive (to be) and also a verb (be-ing, like walking and talking), and it’s this original sense of Being that Heidegger wants to get back to. He would often make this move: when he asks, what is the meaning of X, he would always ask, what was the meaning of X for the presocratics? They (some of them) had, he believes, glimpsed something that philosophers following them did not, beginning with Plato and Aristotle and then down through the western tradition to today.

The linguisticality (language-dependency) of understanding

Aristotle gave philosophy its traditional definition of the human being: the rational animal. Heidegger doesn’t reject this, but he adds an important qualification: by reason Aristotle meant logos. The human being is the bearer of the logos, which we have long translated as reason, but Heidegger reminds us that logos had a broader meaning for the Greeks than reason does in our modern sense of the word. Logos also meant language, word, and account. It wasn’t a technical term with a narrow definition. The rational being is the speaking being, the being that orients itself in the world by the use of language, and where language is not any kind of tool or instrument but is more the nature of a worldview or something that is all-encompassing and the medium in which all phenomena come into view.

Like Being, language is not a thing—a system of rules of grammar or syntax, etc.—but is more like an activity—speaking—and a worldview. As he puts it (p. 56), “When fully concrete, discoursing (letting something be seen) has the character of speaking—vocal proclamation in words.” Language has been a dominant preoccupation of philosophers, both continental and analytic, throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and this is historically new. Recall Descartes: what I am and how I know the world has little to do with language, virtually nothing. Language is just so many arbitrary marks and sounds which I attach to my thoughts or ideas. Thinking happens “in here,” in the privacy of consciousness, while language is a tool I use for the purpose of communicating, or expressing to others, what I’m thinking. Language arrives in my consciousness relatively late, and its purpose is to communicate or to express ideas. I am a thinking thing, an individual consciousness, possibly one that possesses a body and possibly not. I am radically unconditioned; I am what I am outside of history, culture, time, social relationships, physical nature, and also language. Consciousness is independent of all these elements.

In the twentieth century all of this would be widely called into question, and not only by Heidegger. Some questions include: what is the relation between language and the world? Does language provide a mirror of the way the world is? Is language a tool for thinking/knowing the world? Also, what is the relation between language and thought? Heidegger will say this: thinking is a kind of event, a happening, of language. Thought doesn’t “use” language; it happens in language. Interpretation invariably occurs within language and “the things themselves” come into view, or become understood, become unconcealed, by speaking about them, by finding words that allow for their disclosure. We understand an object when we find the words that belong to it or that bring it out of its original condition of hiddenness.

Language is the universal medium of understanding, where language is essentially not rules of grammar or syntax nor a tool that can be used and put aside. One of Heidegger’s most famous statements is “Language is the house of Being” (“Letter on Humanism,” 217). More on this later, but in short it is in language, in words, that objects in the world first come into being or come to be understood. Language is less a tool than a worldview, less an object of consciousness than the perspective from which consciousness occurs. Heidegger emphasizes (sometimes dramatically) the passivity of what he calls “thinking”: it’s not just that we think in a language but that language in a sense thinks us. We don’t use language to think, as a tool or an instrument which we can pick up and put down at will, although we often speak of language as if it were a tool. We don’t pick it up and we don’t put it down. We don’t stand at arm’s length from it but are in a sense always inside it.

Temporality

Remember that the title of this book is Being and Time. Its basic hypothesis is that time and Being must be understood together, as forming one unified phenomenon. We cannot understand time apart from Being or Being apart from time. Temporality is “the meaning of the Being of that entity which we call ‘Dasein’” (60). Being is to be understood in terms of time and history, human being as well. We too exist in time and history. Shortly before Heidegger, Wilhelm Dilthey had argued that “historicity” is a fundamental characteristic of all things human, including everything that pertains to culture, social practices, language, etc. Everything human is a matter of historical contingency. Heidegger now advances an ontological claim: we exist not only in the present but from out of the past and into the future: “It [Dasein] is its past, whether explicitly or not.” We experience ourselves as emerging from, and oriented by, a past, and as anticipating, projecting ourselves into, a future. Every action is in a way Janus-faced: one face looks to the future, the other to the past. We tend to forget our own temporality and to see ourselves as existing only in the present. For Heidegger, the meaning of Being is time. Being is nothing ahistorical; it is contingent and changing. It is nothing present at hand but an event, a happening not an object.

So, back to our original question: what is Being? We have taken a very long detour through Dasein and now have a phenomenological understanding, however incomplete, of the human being who is asking the question of Being: Dasein is a being-in-the-world, it is thrown into a lifeworld of relations and practical involvements, it is an issue to itself, a set of possibilities, a being that finds its way through the world through understanding, a linguistic being, a social and historical being, a being-toward-death, a being-with-others. This is not a metaphysical account of our human essence but a phenomenological description of how we experience the world and ourselves.

Now, at long last, what is Being? What does it mean to say that a thing is, and what is the difference between Being and beings/entities? To say that something is must mean that it is understood or intelligible, that its meaning is comprehended in thought (that it is for us) and that it is understood in language, as this particular kind of thing, with this meaning. We cannot separate Being from understanding, nor reality from consciousness. We also cannot separate understanding from language. Being is like language: it is not an object but a context of meaning that surrounds us, and it defines the point of view from which we think. Being is something like a worldview or a context of meaning within which particular beings come to be (or become intelligible). Being, then, is to beings what context is to particular things, a background, one that is understood vaguely and that largely escapes our notice.

The short answer to the question, what is Being, is that it’s a context of meaning (which for the most part is forgotten, in the background of thought, tacit, presupposed, taken for granted). Later, Heidegger would speak of Being more as a way—a way of thinking, or a way that the things themselves show themselves to us—and one way among many possibilities. What makes it possible to interpret any particular thing explicitly is a larger context of understanding, a worldview (Being), so to be means to appear to us, to become intelligible and understood in a particular fashion, to be revealed this way or that. And “Language is the house of Being,” or understanding is linguistic; it is an event of language. There are no wordless intuitions. Language is there, in all knowing and all meaningful human experience, from the start.

There is therefore an essential correlation between Being and Dasein: to be is to be a meaningful object of thought, to be understood—and understood either theoretically or (especially) pragmatically. We primarily understand things in the world pragmatically. To be human is to be constantly engaged in an effort to understand the meaning of things.

This raises a further problem for Heidegger, which he would write about elsewhere: in the modern age, our way of understanding the world is dominated by what he terms “science-technology.” This is a kind of diagnosis he offers of the modern age: we don’t merely know by means of science and increasingly science alone, we are bewitched by it and by its ostensible offspring, technology. He sees even the conflicts in world politics as a clash of concepts that have the same underlying basis. The politics of the last century, as he sees it, is divided into Americanism (“calculation”), communism (“planning”), and Nazism. All three are ideologies that promise security, control, and order, and it is a false promise. At the heart of our existence is insecurity. This is an “age of consummate meaninglessness,” what Nietzsche called nihilism. Science has become the final arbiter of knowledge about both the world and ourselves. Being now appears in only one form: science-technology. We speak, for example, of human beings as “human resources.” What is a resource? It’s a thing that we use and throw out once it has served its purpose. Technology is something we use; it’s an instrument of our purposes, a means to an end, and we now see people this way too and everything else in our world. It’s all so much stuff to be controlled, managed, administered, and used. Heidegger was very worried about this. He was worried about the ethical implications of this, but his main worry is deeper than ethics. It concerns our ability to think differently about anything at all. The possibility of thinking differently, or to think period, is diminishing. Today when we are asked to think, what do we do? We look for rules, a method, a technique (the scientific method, logic, math)—something that will do our thinking for us.

Technology transforms the human being into a subject, one that lives in a world of objects/resources at our disposal. What he wants is not so different from what Nietzsche wanted: creativity, authenticity, the capacity to think differently, yet this is what the domination of science has made increasingly improbable. Now, Heidegger is not anti-science, and nor is he anti-technology. What he’s opposing is dogmatism, scientism, positivism, rationalism, or any form of the idea that we will ever find an absolutely certain or objective point of view on what is true. We are left with interpretation. This is what science is—an interpretation of the world. It’s a very useful interpretation, but it also has an unfortunate tendency to become dogmatic or to claim for itself an authority that is false. Science is not a uniquely and supremely authoritative system of knowledge but a way of seeing the world. It is a remarkably useful but finite perspective on the world.

One of his more important later concepts is what he calls the “frame” (Gestell). We see the world today as a picture that is contained in a frame. The frame is something man-made, but we have lost our freedom regarding it. He might have called it the box, as in the modern expression, think outside the box. How are we to do this when the box has us all? Thinking outside the box is exactly what he’s calling on us to do, but how are we to do it when everything in the world is contained in this frame? The frame is the world that science knows, and beyond it there is nothing—or nothing that we know of and are able to speak about. What is so dangerous about the frame is that life inside it is one-dimensional; it has no alternative and it impoverishes our experience. Consider the technology of the screen. Obviously, screens didn’t have the kind of pervasiveness in Heidegger’s day that they now have, but what would life be like if all of our experience—of other people, of nature, of everything—were mediated by a screen, if the screen had no alternative? We would surely say it is impoverished, shallow, and one-dimensional. The idea is horrifying, but for Heidegger our thinking is already in this condition; it only happens within this frame and for the most part we don’t even regard it as a problem. It’s a sign of progress, we commonly think.

We’ll return to the topic of thinking, and one of his key statements will be this: “Questioning is the piety of thinking.” Why? Because the act of questioning opens up a new line of potential discovery. The act of answering closes it down. The real work of thinking is asking questions, and there is no technique that shows us how to do this. What we ask, and how we ask it, is ultimately more important than any answers we propose. A truly innovative thinker is one who poses new questions, not one who proposes new answers to old questions. We are not being philosophically original when we merely take up the questions of the past but when we pose new questions. The question of Being, for Heidegger, is a new question, not in the sense that he’s the first to pose it but he’s the first to pose it in the way that he did: in the form of a phenomenological ontology rather than as a metaphysical question, and by dwelling on the distinction between Being and beings and the relation of Being and Dasein.

The above is by no means an exhaustive account of the major themes in Being in Time, but let’s turn to the next (much shorter) text.

“Letter on Humanism,” 1947

This important essay, written 20 years after Being and Time, originated as a letter to a French colleague, Jean Beaufret. Beaufret had written to Heidegger to ask him a series of questions about humanism and existentialism, and this essay is Heidegger’s long reply. Both Beaufret’s letter and Heidegger’s reply arise from Sartre’s essay “Existentialism is a Humanism,” in which Sartre borrows heavily from Heidegger’s BT. In fact, Sartre did a great deal to rehabilitate Heidegger’s reputation in France after World War II. Sartre had argued that existentialism as he formulates it—much of which he thought of as an elaboration of Heidegger’s BT—is a kind of humanist philosophy, emphasizing the theme of human freedom, especially the freedom to act. After the war, Sartre thought, humane values need to be reasserted and given new philosophical expression, against the barbarism of twentieth-century fascism. For Sartre, individual freedom is the source of human dignity, so Beaufret’s question for Heidegger was, “In what way can the word ‘humanism’ be given a meaning?”

Heidegger is skeptical of philosophies that are centered around the idea of subjectivity or the individual. His own philosophy is centered on Being, not the human being, and his account of the human being is not especially individualistic. Heidegger also believes very much in tradition and community, although not “the they.” In this essay, then, we see Heidegger responding to Sartre indirectly and also talking more about how he sees the human being, and of course Being. It is a friendly critique of Sartre, not a hostile one. Heidegger did respect Sartre very much, who at this time was quite famous. Today, Sartre is commonly regarded as Heidegger’s junior, but Heidegger was very impressed by Being and Nothingness, especially the passages where Sartre writes about skiing. Heidegger was an avid skier. He thought about writing something philosophical about skiing himself, but he never did.

This essay marks Heidegger’s famous “turning,” which should not be understood as a radical departure from his earlier writings but a partial change in direction that he undertook after BT or a subtle change in emphasis, from accentuating (in BT) themes like authenticity and resoluteness (which can look like humanism) to a philosophy in which Dasein has a less central place—and Being has a more central place. It’s a turn away from a conception of philosophy in which the human being stands at the center, although in BT Dasein wasn’t exactly depicted as the center of the universe. Far from it, but it would move further away from the center after the turn. He now begins to speak of the human being as the “shepherd of Being.” There is a new accent here on human finitude and a profound intellectual humility.

Heidegger sets out in this essay to provide a critique of humanism, so what is humanism? This is a concept with many meanings. It has its origins in ancient Rome and was revitalized during the Renaissance. Essentially it is a philosophy that in one way or another places the human being at the center, and more specifically it makes the human being the standard of all values. The ancient Greeks and Romans often defined human beings by contrasting them with the brutes. The human being is a rational animal; the brutes are not, the customary view had it. Our humanity and dignity stem from our reason. Heidegger doesn’t reject the definition of the human being as a rational animal, but he makes some qualifications (as already mentioned): we are also the speaking and the thinking animal. Human happiness lies in living a properly human life, especially the life of contemplation and reason. An example of this is Christianity. Christianity may be understood as a kind of humanism because it is centered around the idea of human salvation. Other examples of humanism include Marxism, utilitarianism, liberalism, and Sartre’s existentialism. Each is a philosophy of human liberation, human dignity, humane values.

Heidegger is uncomfortable with philosophies that are centered around the notion of the human individual, such as Descartes’ rationalism in which the meditator is radically subjective, worldless subjectivity, or Hobbes’ materialist account of the individual in the state of nature. For Heidegger, conceptions of philosophy that are centered around or that have as their foundation a worldless subject are false for the reason that this represents a misunderstanding of human existence and of how the human being stands to the world, which is as subject to object. The human being, or Dasein, is always already in the world/lifeworld, belongs to it, dwells in it, is of the world. As we have seen, for Heidegger, we are social, cultural, historical, and linguistic beings in a very strong sense. We are not mere social products in the sense of being effects of environmental conditioning and we are not unfree, but to say that we are free does not mean that we are removed from the world. Moreover, Heidegger is opposed to the Nietzschean view that the essence of human life is the will to power. On the contrary: the essence of human life—and thinking—is to let things be what they are, to let the things themselves show themselves, an attitude he calls “openness to Being.” This is a kind of radical open-mindedness, and it’s something that the presocratics (especially Parmenides and Heraclitus) appreciated, but it was eclipsed by Plato and Aristotle and remains in eclipse today and culminates in Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power where the thinker is a kind of legislator. In humanism, the human being is the measure of all things while for Heidegger it shouldn’t be. Being should be. Now, does Heidegger’s opposition to humanism mean that he is opposed to humane values? No, instead he asks us to examine the meaning of the word “values.”

More on language, thinking, and (yes) Being

“Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells” (217). On page 260 he quotes a line from his favorite poet, Friedrich Holderlin: “Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this earth.” We inhabit a world of language. Yet in the modern age, language has fallen out of its element. It has become an instrument for dominating things. Today, for example, we commonly say that “knowledge is power.” Scientific knowledge and scientific language are instruments for controlling our environment, for subjecting the world to human purposes, for measuring, calculating, predicting, and controlling basically everything in our world.

What, then, is language’s element? For that matter, what is language? “Language is the clearing-concealing advent of Being itself” (230), or it is in language that we understand the world. Also, we stand in “the truth of Being” or in a kind of “clearing” (one of his favorite words). To understand what he means by a clearing, imagine you are walking through the Black Forest on a path. This is what thinking “in a preeminent sense” is essentially like, walking along a path in the woods. What is that experience (which hopefully you’ve all had many times) like? You can’t see far in any direction. You are searching, but the thickness of the forest obscures your vision until all of a sudden you come upon a clearing. Now you can look around and see for a greater distance. You’re finally able to look up and around, and what was dark and mysterious is now clarified. The world, or a corner of it, becomes suddenly intelligible.

We commonly speak of thinking as an activity. We speak of “critical thinking,” problem-solving, arguing, deduction and induction, following methods, rule following. For Heidegger, thinking is not just following technical rules such as the rules of logic or the scientific method. The whole business of philosophy is thinking—especially thinking about Being. What is ultimate in philosophy is not logic but thinking in a larger sense of the word. He is not anti-logic, or anti-reason, or anti-science, but his view is that thinking is deeper and more fundamental to philosophy than logic or science. To judge thinking by the standard of logic—the norm in much of conventional philosophy—is like judging a fish by how well it can live on dry land. Thinking is richer and more ambiguous than this—and it has to do with (by now you can probably guess) Being. Being is its proper object, or as he puts it, “Said plainly, thinking is the thinking of Being” (220). Thinking also “listens to Being,” so it is a form of listening. What he rather likes about listening is that it is in a sense more humble, more receptive, than seeing, which tends to be the philosopher’s favorite form of perception.

Thinking, in a higher sense of the word, has a humility about it in the sense that it is receptive and involves letting things be: “Thinking accomplishes this letting” (218). Thinking lets itself be claimed by Being, or there is a passivity to thinking. This is in contrast to Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power, where knowing is essentially a matter of imposing form on a formless world. For Heidegger, thinking is not a violent imposition of form but is more like allowing something to speak for itself, allowing something different, novel, and unexpected to say something that we did not expect. It’s more like learning about something foreign than filing things in pigeon-holes or familiar concepts. Consider the example of appreciating a work of art. Here we are thinking, undoubtedly, but in what sense? We are attuned to the thing itself, absorbed in listening, letting it be, letting it speak for itself. Consider what happens when someone fails to appreciate a great work of art. Suppose they say something like: The meaning of Crime and Punishment is Jesus saves. This is not exactly wrong, but it is oversimplifying, filing something rich and complex into a simple and familiar pigeon-hole. The person who says this is not thinking about what they read. Other examples: Nietzsche is a fascist; Plato is a communist; Heidegger is a Nazi. Here we are slotting things into categories; we’re not thinking. We’re not engaging with the thing.

Is Heidegger a humanist, then? Not in the traditional sense; the human being is not “the measure of all things,” although in another sense he is a humanist. What is ultimately wrong with humanism is that it fails to understand in what the highest dignity of human beings consists. In what does it consist, then? In openness to Being—in thinking of Being, in understanding but in an almost religious or aesthetic way. This is an understanding that does not file things in pigeon-holes, simplify, or reduce to simplicity or familiarity, or legislate: “Man does not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the clearing of Being, come to presence and depart. The advent of beings lies in the destiny of Being” (234), or it is not entirely up to us how the world appears or becomes understood.

“Man is the shepherd of Being” (234). We stand to Being in the role of shepherd: guarding, caring, solicitous, mindful, cautious, and somewhat reverent. Sheep need a shepherd, for otherwise they will wander away or be killed by a predator. But there is a kind of mutual dependence here, as there is between Being and the human being. In thinking in the highest sense of the word, we let beings be: we bring them to language, articulate them, speak for them (since they don’t speak for themselves).

Is Heidegger a humanist? In a sense yes: “It [Heidegger’s view] is a humanism that thinks the humanity of man from nearness to Being” (245). Also: “Humanism now means, in case we decide to retain the word, that the essence of man is essential for the truth of Being, specifically in such a way that what matters is not man simply as such” (248). This is a humanism that has little in common with traditional humanism. The human being is not the measure or the center of all things; it is the correlation between Being and the human being that stands in the center.

If Heidegger is not a humanist in the traditional sense, does this mean he is against humane values? No, but he then says something very interesting about the concept of “values.” There is a kind of presumption that comes along with the notion of values. When we say, for instance, that nature is of value, are we not degrading nature by declaring ourselves the judge and the measure of what is good? “Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing. It does not let beings be. Rather, valuing lets beings: be valid—solely as the objects of its doing” (251). Heidegger opposes the presumption that is implicit in all talk of values. Values are already human-centered or subjectivizing. Even when we declare something of intrinsic value, it is we who are declaring it so. A Heideggerian ethics, if one is possible, must not be an ethics of values. Instead, it must emphasize the humility of human beings in the face of Being, openness, and so on. It would be an ethics in which the human being does not stand in the center at all. The human being’s way of existing is to “ek-sist”: we stand out into an openness toward Being, or we are receptive toward Being. “It [thinking] lets Being be.” This sentence encapsulates his entire later philosophy.

Because of the dominance of science-technology, human beings are in a state of spiritual “homelessness.” We are becoming “estranged” or alienated from the world and from experiences of meaning. Precisely by controlling and dominating the world, we become alienated from it. The modern orientation of scientific experimentation, prediction, controlling the world, and looking for certainty impoverishes human existence: “Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being” (245). Again, we act as the shepherd of Being by cultivating a kind of openness to seeing the world or things in the world differently.

What Heidegger is ultimately hoping for is for Being to reveal itself anew, but in order for this to happen human beings must cultivate the kind of openness he has been talking about. In later years, Heidegger will suggest that even openness isn’t enough; there is nothing human beings can do to usher in a new era when Being can reveal itself anew and when a new kind of out-of-box thinking might happen. If it isn’t up to us, who or what is it up to? A god, metaphorically speaking: “Only a god can save us” (Der Spiegel interview). Heidegger appears to see himself not as offering a new philosophical system but as a kind of John the Baptist figure: I am not the messiah and I don’t have the answers, but I want to prepare the ground for some new way of thinking to appear. He also seems to see himself as a kind of medium: we don’t think, thoughts come to us—but they only come to us if we are appropriately receptive. “Hermann Heidegger, his son, confirms this impression. His father, he reports, would sometimes say to him: ‘It thinks in me. I cannot resist it” (Safranski, 315).

Heidegger never developed an ethics, but he does make a few remarks in this essay on the topic. He says that if there is an ethics that emerges from his writings, it is not centered on humane values, and it is not centered on values at all. He is skeptical of the concept of value, since the very idea of value presupposes that we—human beings—are the judges of it, that we are the center of things. Is there a way of thinking about ethics that doesn’t make us the measure of all things? If there is, he doesn’t develop one. If there is a Heideggerian ethics, it is an ethics that bears on our thinking more than our acting. The basic principle of ethics is to think well.

“What Calls For Thinking?”

This is an essay from What Is Called Thinking?, a lecture course from 1951–52, after Heidegger’s teaching ban was lifted. What calls for thinking, or what needs to be thought about, is—I’ll give you a hint: it begins with the letter B. But there is more to the story, and of course it’s complicated.

Heidegger’s assessment of modern culture or of the spirit of the times resembles Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism but with a difference. It is, he thinks, a condition of spiritual homelessness, existential drift, and especially a certain thoughtlessness, so Heidegger repeats numerous times in this essay: “We are still not thinking.” Moreover, “we are not yet capable of thinking” (369). Heidegger even includes himself in this: “we are still not thinking; none of us, including me who speaks to you, me first of all” (379). Related to this, he writes: “Science does not think” and it “cannot think” (373), or it doesn’t think “in the preeminent sense.” It is this higher or “preeminent sense” of thinking that Heidegger is after (391). What is that, and why is it so elusive in our time?

Ours is an age of science-technology. Our whole worldview—how we understand both the world and ourselves—is dominated by scientific-technological concepts. Being shows (un-conceals) itself in different ways in history. During the European middle ages, Being revealed itself as God: to be meant to be a created thing (to make a long story short). In the modern period, it reveals itself in the form of science-technology: to be is to be a material object that is empirically observable, measurable, calculable, predictable, and controllable. How did the ancient Greeks see the world—the world of nature, for example—and how do we? For the Greeks, nature is something that emerges, that shows itself on its own. For us, we dictate the terms in which it emerges; we dominate it, control it, manage it, bend it to our purposes.

What is Heidegger’s problem with modern technology? In short, it is totalizing and ultimately dogmatic; it closes off the possibility of other ways of thinking. Heidegger isn’t asking us to reject science—something he regards as absurd (“the sciences are in themselves positively essential” [378])—but to stop regarding science as a total picture of the world. There is more under the sun than what is scientifically knowable; there are other ways of understanding, thinking, and experiencing. His favorite example would always be art and especially poetry. Poetry thinks by showing, revealing, letting things speak, not by stating or arguing. It says what is true, but it doesn’t speak in formal propositions. It makes visible; it shows.

Notice that Heidegger begins this article with the following: “We never come to thoughts. They come to us” (365). There is an emphasis on the humility and receptivity of thought—almost a reverential quality. It’s not exactly religion that he is calling for (although this is not clear) but an attitude of receptivity and humility that is not unlike the religious attitude, also the artistic attitude. Think about the kind of thinking that the poet engages in. If you have ever written poetry or created any work of art, what attitude of mind is called for? This is a kind of thinking that is very unlike scientific thinking. It is inexact, uncertain, non-methodological. It is creative, un- or loosely regulated, and it is also very elusive. Poets and other artists have never been very good at explaining the creative process. When you ask an artist, how do you do what you do, they always give very unsatisfying answers. It begins to look like artistic or creative thinking is a mystery, since it is so elusive to description. It is elusive because it does not follow a method.

What more does Heidegger have to say about thinking? It is, he tells us, what the modern age desperately needs and we are not doing, we are not even capable of it. He’ll say this: it has a lot to do with Being, that is, Being is the proper object of thought. Specifically, thinking concerns the relation between Being and human beings. Recall the above-noted relation between the flock of sheep and the shepherd. We are the shepherd and Being is the flock, so thinking exhibits an attitude of concern or active solicitude. When we think about something, we must incline toward it or be completely oriented toward the thing and not preoccupied with other things or ourselves: “Only when we are so inclined toward what in itself is to be thought about, only then are we capable of thinking” (370). Thinking, then, begins with an inclination and an attitude—of openness toward Being. Heidegger had argued in BT that one of the most basic characteristics of the human being is care, and care not in the usual moral sense of the word but in a larger ontological sense: we care in the sense of providing, preparing, looking after, foreseeing, and relating. Our very way of being is care in the sense that it is care that makes human existence meaningful and that makes life matter to us. What we care about determines the direction our life takes and the amount of energy we put into our caring defines the intensity with which we live.

Heidegger then entertains an objection: how dare he say that we are not thinking? Does this include philosophers, whose whole business is to think? Yes, them most of all. Philosophers too are not thinking. What are they doing, then? For the most part they are solving puzzles, and Being is not a puzzle. Today there is more interest than ever in philosophy, and less than ever in thinking. If we would learn to think, first we must “radically unlearn what thinking has been traditionally” (374), so what has it been traditionally? Science, technology, philosophy, “critical thinking,” logic. We don’t have to reject these things, but we must not regard them as the highest forms of thought.

What also makes it so difficult for us to think is that what must be thought about—Being—is highly elusive; it turns away from us, he says. The very thing we need to think about turns away from us or defies our efforts to understand it. What does this mean? Being turns away from us, but how? He appears to be saying two things: (1) human beings have turned our backs on Being, and become locked into a scientific-technological worldview, and (2) Being has turned its back on us. This second point is very elusive. He may mean that because Being is a context of meaning rather than a thing or set of things, it always remains in the background and eludes our efforts to put it in the foreground. He may mean something else. It’s an elusive point, but anyway, it is up to the human being—the thinker—to pursue it, elusive though it is.

Now, it would appear that thinking as he’s describing it has more to do with mythos than with logos. Philosophy has long been thought to have undertaken a kind of transition in the ancient Greek period from mythos (stories about the gods and heroes, which may or may not be true) to logos (rational knowledge about what is true). This, Heidegger tells us, is simplistic. As mentioned above, logos means not only reason but language, and language straddles the domains of mythos (e.g., in poetry) and logos. Consider poetic language: it has the power to reveal to us the meaningful dimension of something, but it is not to be understood literally. It works with literary devices such as metaphors, which are not scientifically accurate descriptions but poetic devices. Literally, a metaphor is false. “Man is a wolf” is a contradiction and therefore logically false. But poetically it reveals something that is true, and it reveals something that could not have been revealed in any other way (in a literal statement). Take any metaphor and try to translate it into a literally true statement. It falls flat. We can’t translate metaphors into literal statements without losing much in the translation because understanding happens in different ways. If thinking and understanding came in only one (scientific) form then we could express everything fully in that one form. But human beings live in two worlds—mythos and logos—and thinking straddles the two. Myth and reason should not be conceived as opposites. This is an error that philosophers have long made and that we continue to make. For Heidegger, there is no opposition here. Poets have always known something that philosophers have not. The task of thinking is to recover this ground, to think mythos and logos together, which in a scientific age is very hard to do. We tend to regard myth as a lie or so much make-believe, but its whole point is not to lie but to show, to say what is “telling.”

Heidegger then gives us an example of thinking, or an analogy: consider the cabinetmaker’s apprentice. Thinking is like learning how to make furniture. This involves more than accumulating information. It involves above all a certain kind of “relatedness” to wood: “A cabinetmaker’s apprentice, someone who is learning to build cabinets and the like, will serve as an example. His learning is not mere practice, to gain facility in the use of tools. Nor does he merely gather knowledge about the customary forms of the things he is to build. If he is to become a true cabinetmaker, he makes himself answer and respond above all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood—to wood as it enters into man’s dwelling with all the hidden riches of its essence. In fact, this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft. Without that relatedness, the craft will never be anything but empty busywork, any occupation with it will be determined exclusively by business concerns. Every handicraft, all human dealings, are constantly in that danger. The writing of poetry is no more exempt from it than is thinking” (379). Thinking, then, involves a similar relatedness to Being. Heidegger would often write that the old-world craftsman has a kind of knowledge that is lacking in the modern technological age. Consider next the teacher: what is it to teach? Why is it that, as a common saying goes, teaching is more difficult than learning? Is it because the teacher must have more knowledge than the student? No. Is it because we have to write out these excruciatingly long lecture notes and you just have to read them? No. It’s because the teacher must be more open to learning—more teachable— than the student. Students (except for mine) don’t always realize that they have a lot to learn. Some students think that they know everything that is important already. Good teachers know that they do not, and that the teacher doesn’t either. The good teacher is not a know-it-all but the opposite.

Heidegger then tells us that “the purest thinker of the West” was Socrates. Why? Because he “place[d] himself into this draft, this current, and maintained himself in it” (382). What draft or current is he speaking of? It’s the draft (the wake) caused by the withdrawal of Being. Remember, Being withdraws from us, but as it withdraws it leaves a kind of wake that pulls us along. When we think, we allow ourselves to be pulled along in this wake. This is what Socrates did: he gave himself over to thought and devoted himself to the effort to understand things in general. This, Heidegger says, is why Socrates wrote nothing; he was too absorbed in thinking.

Toward the end of the chapter Heidegger returns to the question, what is called thinking? Do we now know what thinking is? Not entirely. We are merely on the “foothills” of thought. We are not there yet, but we’re on the way.

Finally, there is a quality of thought and experience that Heidegger is calling for, and it’s an experience that he associated with ancient Greece. It’s elusive once again, but he would try to describe a kind of ideal manner of thinking and being in the world: here the human being doesn’t imagine that one is at the center of the universe, in control of everything in its world, master of its fate. Instead, its whole way of life is defined by openness. He writes, “The existent is that which sprouts and opens itself up, that which, as being present, comes upon man as he is present; in other words, upon him who opens himself up to that which is present by perceiving it. The existent does not become existent as a result of man first looking upon it, let alone in the sense of imagining…. Instead it is man who is looked upon by the existent, by that which opens itself up to that which is present and assembled around him. Looked upon by the existent, included in its openness, and contained there and borne by it, driven around by its contradictions and marked by its discrepancies—that is the essence of man in the great period of Greece” (Safranski, 295). Heidegger would sometimes speak in his later writings of an “experience of Being” which he terms Gelassenheit. The word itself he borrows from Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century German mystic and theologian. Eckhart described it as a state of divine peace arising from a suspension of the will. The root of Gelassenheit is lassen: to let or allow. For Heidegger it’s a kind of “let it be” attitude. It’s not indifference but a relinquishing of control and expectation and allowing things to be what they are. He compares it to the act of waiting, which is not pure passivity. I am waiting for something, anticipating something’s arrival. But Gelassenheit has no concrete objective. The experience he’s describing is also an experience of the inexhaustibility of reality and a sense of wonder and amazement at the richness of the world, an astonishment at the fact that there is a world at all, that in the midst of nature an “open place” has revealed itself where nature opens its eyes and notices that it is there. Imagine that you were just born, with all the capacities of mind that you have now. You would look around you with astonishment at what you see, and by the sheer fact that there is a world, that there is something rather than nothing, and that the world is intelligible to you. You would have a sense of the freshness of the world.

The point of a question like, why is there a world at all, why is there something rather than nothing, may be unanswerable, but the point of the question may not be to answer it but to unsettle our normal experience of life, where things are what they are and don’t really come into question. The point is to inspire a sense of wonder about the world. There is mystery in the most ordinary experiences, but we largely don’t see it. The experience he is describing is one of allowing something to show itself on its own terms rather than force it into our familiar concepts and expectations. To quote Safranski one last time, “These two attitudinal modes toward nature—challenging it and letting it emerge—were impressively characterized in the lecture Heidegger had delivered a short time before, “What Is Called Thinking?”. One is facing a tree in bloom. Only at a scientifically unguarded and practically disinterested moment will its bloom be correctly experienced. From a scientific point of view one will let the experience of its blooming drop as something naive. However, says Heidegger, ‘the thing that matters first and foremost, and finally, is not to drop the tree in bloom, but for once let it stand where it stands. Why do we say ‘finally’? Because to this day, thought has never let the tree stand where it stands.’ We therefore do not let nature emerge but challenge it and tackle it in a way that ‘it appears in some quantifiable manner, remaining determinable as a system of information” (Safranski, 398). He’s asking us, albeit vaguely, to see nature in a more everyday way but also more as an artist sees it and less as an engineer. In his lectures in later years, he would often draw semi-circles on the board to illustrate the primary openness of Dasein to the world.

Works Cited

Krell, David Farrell. “General Introduction: The Question of Being” in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell. London: Harper Perennial, 2008.

Safranski, Rüdiger. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. E. Osers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

PART TWO

Edith Stein (1891–1942)

Religious name: Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Major Works (several of which were published posthumously):

1917: On the Problem of Empathy

1922: Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities

1925: An Investigation Concerning the State

1931: Potency and Act: Studies toward a Philosophy of Being

1936: Finite and Eternal Being

1985: Life in a Jewish Family: An Autobiography, 1891-1916

1993: Knowledge and Faith

2000: Essays on Woman

2003: The Science of the Cross

2004: The Hidden Life: Essays, Meditations, Spiritual Texts

Biography

Edith Stein is known for being at once a philosopher and a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. She died in the Holocaust in 1942 at the age of 50. Stein was of Jewish origin and converted to Catholic Christianity in 1922 at the age of 30. Eleven years later she would become a contemplative nun in the Discalced Carmelite Order of Roman Catholic nuns. Prior to becoming a nun, she had been first a student and then a collaborator of Edmund Husserl’s, the founder of twentieth-century phenomenology, and was an important participant in the phenomenological movement that included such figures as Martin Heidegger, Roman Ingarden, Adolf Reinach, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Max Scheler, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, and Hans Lipps, many of whom were colleagues and friends of Stein’s through the 1910s and 20s. She met Heidegger in 1916, and while the two appear to have been on friendly terms they did not develop a close friendship, nor would Heidegger be a major influence on her work. Despite her life being cut short in such tragic circumstances, she has had a major influence in both phenomenological philosophy and Catholic theology, two traditions that she believed to be not only philosophically compatible but mutually illuminating. One may describe her larger philosophical project as a bringing together of what has come to be called “realist phenomenology” and Thomistic metaphysics or the metaphysical and theological thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-74). How she goes about navigating these two traditions is a large and complex topic. Some of the major themes that emerge in this larger project we shall discuss in what follows, however our focus in this course is on Stein’s first book On the Problem of Empathy, which she completed in 1916. This book was Stein’s doctoral thesis and we shall be reading it in its entirety. First, let’s have a look at the life of this fascinating figure.

Edith Stein was born on October 12, 1891 in the German city of Breslau, which today is Wroclaw, Poland (in the south-west of Poland). Breslau became part of Poland in 1945 as a result of border changes after World War II, but the city was part of Germany in Stein’s lifetime. She was the youngest of seven siblings who survived to adulthood (four others did not). Her father, Siegfried Stein, died of an apparent heat stroke prior to Edith’s second birthday, leaving her to be raised by her mother and her older siblings. Her mother Auguste was a rather formidable woman who upon her husband’s death took over and successfully managed his lumber business, an usual accomplishment for a woman in early twentieth-century Germany. The family lived in what Stein would later describe as a “small apartment.” As she would write in her autobiographical work Life in a Jewish Family, “Feeding the family became a real problem; the new business, burdened with debts, took a long time in getting on its feet. My mother never said a word about [any] difficulties she had in her marriage. She has always spoken of my father with a warm loving tone in her voice; even now, after so many decades, when she visits his grave, one can see she still grieves for him.” The seven children ranged significantly in age and were often divided by Auguste into the boys, the girls, and “the children.” This last group consisted of Edith and her sister Erna who was her senior by 18 months. These two “afterthoughts” would form an especially close attachment that would last throughout their lives. “The older sisters used to say she [Erna] was as transparent as clear water while they called me a book sealed with seven seals” (Life). Erna would go on to become a physician in later years, their mother having encouraged especially the two youngest children to move into professions that had been barred to Jews since the middle ages but that were slowly becoming accepting of this community before the Nazis assumed power. Through these challenging years, the Steins remained a tightknit family and would remain largely so through the war years, notwithstanding difficulties that included Edith’s conversion to Catholicism, of which her mother thoroughly disapproved. More on that later.

Biographical accounts of Stein’s childhood paint a picture of her as a somewhat difficult child with a short temper when she wasn’t getting her way. She experienced a number of what she called “sudden transitions, incomprehensible to the observer” (Life), making her somewhat of an enigma to her family many years prior to her religious conversion. She was also an unusually sensitive child, and reported that when she heard that a murder had been committed she would lie awake at night for hours. She was largely silent about her inner life and very strong willed, and the latter quality especially would remain with her throughout her life. She insisted upon beginning school at the age of six, a year before the usual age, so as not to be separated from Erna, and she immediately became a very strong student and would remain so throughout her school years. One of her “sudden transitions” around this time was to replace the earlier temper tantrums with a precocious diligence and self-mastery which would also become permanent traits. “In my dreams I always foresaw a brilliant future for myself. I dreamed about happiness and fame, for I was convinced that I was destined for something great and that I did not belong at all in the narrow, bourgeois circumstances into which I had been born. About these dreams I said as little as I had about the fears which had plagued me earlier. However, that I was given to daydreaming was apparent; and when anyone noticed that I was oblivious to what was going on, they would startle me out of my reverie” (Life).

Academic success and a love of learning eventually led her to the university, but not before an episode in 1906 when at the age of fifteen she announced to her family that she was quitting school, which her mother permitted her to do. Stein stayed with her sister Else and her young family in Hamburg during the several months of this break from school. Also at this time, Stein appears to have decided to abandon her mother’s faith at least in part and may have become an agnostic or atheist, although this is disputed. In later years she would report only that she stopped praying at this time, from which many inferred that she opted for atheism although the inference is uncertain. Within a short time of returning to school she was again at the top of her class and would eventually move on to the University of Breslau where female students were now being admitted. Her hometown of Breslau had of population 400,000 and included one of Germany’s largest Jewish communities, many of whom were gravitating into the universities, and Stein would follow suit. She became interested at this time in the women’s rights movement, a central issue in which was the question of whether a woman could pursue a career and family simultaneously. “I was alone in maintaining always that I would not sacrifice my profession on any account” (Life). From 1911 through 1913 she was studying psychology, philosophy, history, philology, and German history in the Department of Experimental Psychology. It was at this time that she first encountered the writings of Edmund Husserl.

In 1913, at the age of 21, she transferred to the University of Göttingen which at this time was home to Husserl and a circle of his graduate students. This was the institutional home of the early phenomenological movement in which Stein would become an important figure, and she would remain at this institution for several years. While sharing Husserl’s new phenomenological method, the various members of this movement would defend a range of positions both philosophical and theological. As one scholar writes, “Several followers of Husserl converted to Catholicism or Protestantism; this occurred not because Husserl encouraged such a move … but because his work restored respectability to various domains of experience and thus allowed people to cultivate their own religious development without hindrance” (Sokolowski, 215).

World War One broke out in 1914, at which point classes at Göttingen were suspended and Stein went to train as an assistant nurse with the Red Cross, despite her mother’s objections. Her enthusiasm for the war effort, like so many of her generation at the time in Germany, seems to have been motivated by considerations that were equally or more cultural than political. As one scholar puts it, “Like so many others, [she] believed that the values at stake in the conflict were those of Kultur, values threatened by French cynicism, British commercial self-seeking, and Russian barbarism” (McIntyre 69). Stein was sent to work in a military hospital in Moravia in the spring of 1915, by which time she had received her qualifications to teach philosophy, German language, and history at the secondary school level. Her assignment with the Red Cross was short lived, although she remained available for service throughout the war years. This allowed her to continue her doctoral studies while also teaching regularly. In 1916, Husserl received a new appointment at the University of Freiburg and Stein would follow him there until the completion of her dissertation in August of the same year. Husserl was a very prolific writer and employed an assistant whose job it was to translate his manuscripts, written in shorthand, into legible form and also to organize and prepare for publication his rather disorganized writings. He would later hire Heidegger for this purpose, but in 1916 Stein would become Husserl’s professional assistant. Stein was honored by this appointment but would become increasingly frustrated by a role that was less collaborative and more secretarial than she had hoped.

Stein’s doctoral dissertation, On the Problem of Empathy, was completed in 1916 and several chapters of it would be published the following year. The usual career path for a German academic upon completion of the doctorate is to write a second dissertation called a Habilitation which qualifies one to be a university professor, however, at this time in Germany this path was still barred to women. Stein attempted this feat anyway, working independently on her Habilitation while teaching university students privately in Breslau. As her niece would later write, “Edith Stein’s aims for a university career were thwarted because, in her lifetime, the prejudices against women and Jews stood like an immovable wall between her and academic advancement. Her doctorate, passed with highest honors, her early successes in her field, her acclaim as a lecturer, her diligence as a translator and author, were all nipped in the bud, and her future in all these areas cut off” (Scaperlanda, 79).

In 1917 her friend and fellow phenomenologist Adolf Reinach died in the war. Reinach and his wife Anna were important figures in Stein’s life, and upon his death she visited Anna and was profoundly moved by this Christian woman’s peace of mind in the face of her husband’s death. Stein would later write, “It was my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power that it bestows on those who carry it. For the first time, I was seeing with my very eyes the Church, born from her Redeemer’s sufferings, triumphant over the sting of death. That was the moment my unbelief collapsed and Christ shone forth—in the mystery of the Cross” (Herbstrith, 56). Her conversion would not have greatly surprised her colleagues and friends at Göttingen, many of whom were also Christians. She would spend the next couple of years discerning whether to opt for Lutheran or Catholic Christianity, ultimately choosing the latter by 1920. Her mother’s reaction was one of extreme disappointment and betrayal. She never forgave her daughter for what she perceived as a personal betrayal and an abandonment of the family and its faith.

Edith Stein converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of 30 and was baptized on New Year’s Day of 1922, however exactly what led up to this decision is difficult to determine. An important factor undoubtedly was her reading the New Testament as well as the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila, a sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite nun and Catholic saint. A biographer notes, “Fascinated, Edith read the book in one night, proclaiming simply, ‘This is the truth!’ Her ‘long search for the true faith’ simply and suddenly came to an end” (Scaperlanda, 80). She was also reading Kierkegaard around this time, however his influence on her thinking seems to have been minor. Whatever her reasons, Stein’s conversion to Catholicism was bound up with her decision to become a Carmelite nun, although she would not take this further step for another eleven years. The same biographer writes, “whenever someone asked Edith, the woman once described by her family as ‘a book with seven seals,’ why she became a Catholic or why she chose Carmel as her destination, she would reply in Latin, Secretum meum mihi (This secret belongs to me)” (Scaperlanda, 80).

The Carmelites are a Catholic religious order that was founded likely in the thirteenth century on Mount Carmel in northern Israel. Becoming a nun in this order and entering the convent did not make for an easy life. Stein would live with her fellow nuns at a monastery in Cologne where the way of life was demanding and strict. Stein’s spiritual directors urged her not to enter the convent immediately upon baptism but instead to devote herself for the time being to teaching and scholarship, so she would spend the next several years teaching in Catholic schools while living in a room next door to the nuns. Through the 1920s she would remain an important participant in the German movement for women’s rights, and by the end of the decade she had become a leader in the Catholic women’s movement, often speaking at various Catholic women’s organizations. Arguing that “there is no profession [apart from the priesthood] which cannot be practiced by a woman,” her brand of feminism was relatively radical by the standards of the time. She rejected the idea that there are no significant differences between male and female and instead focused on ontological and spiritual questions about the nature of woman within a Christian framework. Her larger political stance was mainstream for the time and fairly moderate. After the war she supported the newly formed center-left German Democratic Party which called for a democratic republic on a basically western European model.

Throughout this period of Stein’s life, her writings were various and difficult to classify. As a philosopher, she was working within the traditions of Husserlian phenomenology and Thomistic theology, but in addition to writing philosophical books and essays she was publishing book reviews, lectures, autobiographical work, and increasingly more theological works. She also maintained a very active correspondence with numerous colleagues, friends, and relatives. Many of these letters she destroyed to prevent them from being discovered by the Nazis while others survived and were later published. Her scholarly work through the 1920s and 30s focused on the philosophical and theological underpinnings of Catholicism, focusing on the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas. She translated Aquinas’ De Veritate (On Truth) into German as well as some writings by Cardinal (now Saint) John Henry Newman. By the 20s she had become “a much-sought-after lecturer throughout German-speaking Europe—in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany in particular—talking to Catholic groups on the education and role of Catholic women and on spirituality. She frequently put herself at the disposal of large Catholic organizations—teachers associations, women’s groups, academic organizations” (Scaperlanda, 98).

By the beginning of the 1930s, after having worked as a schoolteacher in Speyer for eight years, she gave up this position in order to concentrate on writing her major work Potency and Act: Studies toward a Philosophy of Being, which was completed in 1931 although it would not be published until 1998. She would then write a broadly similar and equally major work titled Finite and Eternal Being: An Ascent to the Meaning of Being, which would also be published posthumously. Both books sought to weave together several major concepts in scholastic theology and contemporary phenomenology. Among the major themes these works would take up are the relation of faith and reason, time, freedom, evolution, individuality, and of course being, her analysis of which would differ significantly from Heidegger’s. Around this time she made two final attempts to obtain a professorship at the Universities of Freiburg and Kiel, both of which were unsuccessful for the same reasons mentioned above, following which she took up a position teaching philosophy at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster in February, 1932.

In 1933 she made the decision finally to enter the Carmelite order. This had been her aim for nearly twelve years by this time. She had resolved on this goal upon her conversion but was waiting until the time seemed right, as it now did. Her reasons for waiting seem to have been both the advice of her spiritual advisors and Stein’s worry about her mother’s reaction to what she was sure to see as another insult to the family. “For grandmother Stein, it was the severest blow imaginable. Her daughter Edith was about to enter a cloister in Cologne, a contemplative order with strict rules. She would not be allowed to come home for a visit, ever, and though she could receive visitors, her 84-year-old mother, who had given up all traveling, would never see her again” (Scaperlanda, 113). Edith Stein entered the Caramel convent at Cologne on October 14 of that year, the feast day of Saint Teresa of Ávila whose autobiography had so inspired her. It was at this time that she assumed the religious name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Teresia Benedicta a Cruce) and began wearing the habit. Life in the convent was regimented and demanding, and visits with outsiders, including family, were few. The way of life at the convent was contemplative and devoted largely to prayer and labor, however the convent’s Prioress, esteeming Stein’s scholarly abilities, encouraged her to continue with her work as a writer and translator. Work on Finite and Eternal Being was completed in the summer of 1936.

Her mother would die of cancer in the fall of that year. During the final three years of her life, Auguste Stein would communicate with Edith only slightly by letter, adding a few lines to her daughters’ letters to their sister. The same biographer reports, “As her mother’s terminal illness progressed, Edith heard from her sisters that Frau Stein was ‘constantly brooding,’ wondering why her youngest had ‘forsaken [her]’ (Self-Portrait, 233). ‘I was never able to make Mother comprehend either my conversion or my entrance into the Order,’ Edith wrote in a letter two months before her mother’s death. ‘And so, once more, she is suffering greatly because of our separation, and I am unable to say anything that will comfort her’ (Self-Portrait, 230)”.

Shortly after this, Edith’s sister Rosa also became Catholic and, intending to follow in her younger sister’s footsteps, became a Third Order Carmelite and doorkeeper at the same convent in 1939. By this time, German Jews were in clear danger from the Nazis and Catholic nuns who had converted were not protected. Edith requested a transfer outside of Germany, likely to the Holy Land, and was denied. She then requested and was granted a transfer to a Carmelite monastery in the Netherlands at the end of 1938. Around the same time, her siblings were fleeing Germany for Norway, the United States, and South America with the exception of her sister Frieda and her brother Paul, both of whom died at the Thereseinstadt forced labor camp.

Edith and Rosa Stein spent their final three years of life at the above-mentioned monastery in the small town of Echt in the Netherlands. There Edith continued to write, including another major work titled The Science of the Cross which would be published posthumously. This period of relative safety would be short-lived and ended after the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940. Their efforts to flee the country were now in vain, and the two sisters were arrested along with about 700 other Dutch Catholics of Jewish descent, roughly half of whom were nuns or priests. The monastery nuns would find the manuscript of The Science of the Cross in her room in the summer of 1942. During these final years, she would also work with the younger nuns, teaching them philosophy and Latin as well as involving them in various plays that she composed. Stein would also write works of poetry and various fictional pieces and religious meditations at this time. She would retain a phenomenological and Thomistic orientation through her final theological and philosophical works.

In 1942, Stein and her sister Rosa were both taken forcefully to Auschwitz concentration camp and were likely immediately killed in a gas chamber on August 9, seven days after their arrest. “The last words that are remembered to have been uttered by Edith as the two sisters left the convent were to Rosa, ‘Come, let us go for our people.’ The exact details of Edith’s final days will probably never be fully known” (Scaperlanda, 149). One source has it that “A Dutch official at Westerbork was so impressed by her sense of faith and calm, he offered her an escape plan. Stein vehemently refused his assistance, stating: ‘If somebody intervened at this point and took away [her] chance to share in the fate of [her] brothers and sisters, that would be utter annihilation” (Mosley). One Auschwitz survivor said of her: “It was Edith Stein’s complete calm and self-possession that marked her out from the rest of the prisoners. There was a spirit of indescribable misery in the camp; the new prisoners, especially, suffered from extreme anxiety. Edith Stein went among the women like an angel, comforting, helping, and consoling them. Many of the mothers were on the brink of insanity and had sat moaning for days, without giving any thought to their children. Edith Stein immediately set about taking care of these little ones. She washed them, combed their hair, and tried to make sure they were fed and cared for” (Herbstrith, 183).

Numerous of Stein’s unpublished writings which she had hidden from the Nazis would be published gradually after the war and translated into numerous languages.

Pope (now Saint) John Paul II declared Edith Stein a saint in 1998 under her Carmelite name Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

More on phenomenology

As noted above, Husserl attracted first at Göttingen and then at Freiburg a group of emerging scholars of whom Stein would be one. Uniting them was the method of phenomenology which took as a philosophical starting point the concept of human experience as it is actually lived by human beings rather than in the more artificial way of the earlier British empiricism. One of the defining characteristics of such experience, this movement asserted, is that we experience objects in the world not atomistically but contextually and holistically. When one listens to a piece of music, for example, one is not hearing separate notes or sounds which one then strings together to form a melody or larger musical arrangement, as empiricism had made it seem. Rather, one hears a song. One hears the piece as a whole, and if one later carves this up into discrete musical elements, this is a separate activity of mind which is abstracted from the experience itself rather than a feature of the experience.

A major theme in this movement, as we have seen, is the notion of intentionality: consciousness has what phenomenologists call an intentional structure. This means that the mind either apprehends an intentionality that is in the world or it produces such intentionality. When Husserl spoke of the “intentionality of consciousness,” he meant (although interpretations vary) that intentions are a kind of outward projection of the mind. They originate in minds and are imposed onto the world as we experience it. For example, space and time don’t belong to the world but to minds. The mind itself and its various operations “constitute” in the sense of produce or construct the various objects in our experience, or the world as it’s experienced by us is essentially a construction of our own consciousness. This, in a nutshell, is Husserl’s “idealism” (of course, there’s a lot more to it). Some within the phenomenological movement, including Stein, would reject this hypothesis, instead taking the view, sometimes termed “realist phenomenology,” that the intentionality that belongs so fundamentally to our experience is not a projection of mind but is in an important sense real, or it has being. Husserl’s students believed they could find elements of both idealism and realism in their teacher’s writings, and scholars to this day continue to debate whether that philosopher ought to be read as an idealist or a realist.

However one chooses to interpret that writer, and more important for our purposes, Stein herself places herself squarely in the realist camp. The world as she sees it is not a construction. It has being even as it presents itself to the human mind in various modes, and complexity, ambiguity, and mystery abound. As she expressed it, “All of us had the same question on our minds. [Husserl’s] Logical Investigations had caused a sensation primarily because it appeared to be a radical departure from critical idealism which had a Kantian and Neo-Kantian stamp. It was considered ‘a new scholasticism’ [or a new form of Thomistic ontology]…. Knowledge again appeared as reception, driving its laws from objects not, as criticism has it, from determination which imposes its laws on the objects. All the young phenomenologists were confirmed realists. However [Husserl’s latter book] Ideas included some expressions which sounded as though their Master wished to return to idealism” (Life in a Jewish Family, 250). The debate in phenomenological circles between idealists and realists turns essentially upon whether experience and knowledge are fundamentally “constitutive” of the world as we experience it or, as Stein believes, they are “receptive.” The latter view, she would argue, could be squared with the older scholastic or Thomistic viewpoint, and this formulation would remain fundamental to her work both before and after her conversion.

One more idea from Husserl’s writings that is important to note is that his Ideas of 1913 made several references to the concept of empathy without explaining how he thought this important concept should be understood. Stein took it upon herself to pursue this topic in considerable detail in what would become her doctoral dissertation, written under Husserl’s enthusiastic supervision, which is the book that we are reading. If Husserl expected (and he likely did) Stein to write the dissertation as something of a disciple of his, she wasn’t exactly the type to be a disciple and what she wrote was an important and original work which went on to have a fair amount of influence on others in the phenomenological movement and beyond.

As we have seen, Stein served for a period of time as a nurse during World War One, and her hospital experiences brought her into regular contact with a wide variety of people speaking a variety of languages. Communication with patients could be difficult and called forth a capacity for empathy that she would now have occasion to conceptualize philosophically. Her argument defends the view that a good part of self-knowledge, or how one is aware of oneself as an embodied subject in a social world, is rendered possible by one’s knowledge of others. No one understands him- or herself in a social vacuum. Rather, empathy—feeling and experiencing things with others—is a necessary condition of self-knowledge and is thoroughly bound up with it.

In taking this view, Stein was disagreeing directly with John Stuart Mill, who had argued that one knows another, or what another is experiencing, by drawing empirical inferences based upon their expressions. If someone is feeling angry, they might express this outwardly by forming a fist, and at the site of the fist someone else infers what they’re likely experiencing. This is how, broadly speaking, we know others, Mill says. The basic model didn’t satisfy Stein. In the phenomenological account she would offer, there is no separating an ostensibly “inner” state such as anger from its “outward” expression, such as forming a fist or raising one’s voice. The latter in our experience are so bound up with the former as to exhibit an experiential unity. Phenomenologically or experientially speaking, anger is present in the fist; it communicates and embodies anger in a more immediate way than by inductive inference and is experienced immediately by another as such. I do not see your fist and subsequently infer anger; I see your anger in the form of the fist. Your anger, then, is observable publicly and is not the altogether private or inner state of mind that Mill and other empiricists had maintained. As MacIntyre puts it, “what is expressed is not an external sign of some inner thought or feeling. It is the inner thought and feeling. So a blush is not an external effect of an inner sense of shame. The blush is not caused by the shame as it might be caused by exertion. The shame is present in the blushing. And our recognition that someone is ashamed makes their blushing intelligible” (MacIntyre, 4).

This form of empathic awareness is distinct from knowledge. Stein is aware of the uncertainty that belongs to this form of awareness, as is evident when a fist or a raised voice indicates some other meaning and my perception of anger requires correction. Misperceptions are commonplace, however Mill’s account draws conclusions from this that are excessive and contradicted by our experience.

Consider the basic experience of self-knowledge or self-perception. What makes it possible for you to know who you are? This is an old question in philosophy, but phenomenologists were taking this up in a new way. Remember Descartes: the mind is transparent to itself, or the meditator knows itself immediately, directly, and certainly. There is no way to be mistaken about myself or about my own mental states since there is no space between my consciousness and the object of my consciousness, when the object is my own state of mind. If deception by others is possible, self-deception is impossible in principle. For Stein, this view is belied by the fact of self-deception which we experience around us on more than rare occasions. Experiences of this kind suggest that self-understanding is more intimately related to both how I perceive others and how others perceive me than was hitherto believed. We know from experience that how I perceive myself may be corrected by someone else. I may be delusional, in the extreme case, or in more ordinary cases I may have either an inflated, debased, or otherwise inaccurate sense of myself which it falls to others who know me to correct by means of empathic awareness. It is an essential human characteristic to know myself in some measure as others know me.

On the Problem of Empathy, 1917

Some years after the Stein wrote this book, she summarized its argument as follows: “In the first section, basing myself on a number of indications Husserl had given in his lectures, I examined empathy as a particular form of the act of knowing. Thereupon, I proceeded to a subject of great personal interest which would occupy me in all subsequent writings: the structure of the human person. Even within the context of this early work, it was necessary to take up this theme as a means of clarifying the distinction between the act of comprehending intellectual interconnections and the simple awareness of psychic states. Of prime importance to me in investigating such questions were the lectures and writings of Max Scheler and the works of Wilhelm Dilthey. Once I had finished treating the extensive literature on the subject, I went on to add a few chapters on empathy in its social, ethical and aesthetic dimensions” (Life, 279).

Her friend and fellow phenomenologist Roman Ingarden would later say about Stein’s book: “What interested her most was the question of defining the possibility of mutual communication between human beings, in other words, the possibility of establishing community. This was more than a theoretical concern for her; belonging to a community was a personal necessity, something that vitally affected her identity. At Göttingen … a community of this type existed among the philosophers…. It’s also clear, as I learned from her recollections, that she needed to belong to a national community—to think of herself as a member of a particular country. I still remember how she went through the entire war with the attitude of someone always on the verge of beginning a one-man battle. She was determined to serve; there was no question about it” (Herbstrith, 82).

Now to the text itself. As the preface indicates, On the Problem of Empathy was Stein’s doctoral dissertation. “The degree was awarded in 1916 at the University of Freiburg in Breisgau, and the dissertation in this form was published in 1917 at Halle” (xiii). The book would go on to have a fair amount of influence among her fellow phenomenologists, and none more so than Maurice Merleau-Ponty, especially concerning the notion of embodiment or “the lived body.” More on that later. (By the way, the translator’s introduction to our edition is well worth reading.)

In the book’s Foreword, the author immediately notes that the phenomenon of empathy is not limited to the familiar ethical meaning of this word. The ordinary definition of empathy is “The power of mentally identifying oneself with (and so fully comprehending) a person or object of contemplation” and is closely related to the concept of sympathy, ordinarily understood as “An affinity or correspondence between particular subjects enabling the same influence to affect each subject similarly or each subject to affect or influence the other, esp. in a paranormal way” (Oxford English Dictionary). I’m not at all sure about that paranormal bit, but anyway, we commonly use these two words, empathy and sympathy, almost interchangeably to mean something like a capacity or activity of relating closely to another person in the specific sense of understanding intellectually and (especially) appreciating emotionally what another person is experiencing, knowing what someone is thinking or feeling, or some such. I empathize with someone when I “get where they’re coming from” or know what they’re going through, or such is the usual and very rough understanding of this word. Empathy is an affinity of mind, a kind of intimacy that is somewhat mysterious and in need of phenomenological clarification. It is an elementary human and (especially) ethical capacity, but a capacity of exactly what kind?

Stein immediately notes that there’s more to empathy—much more—than this, and that it’s not limited to the ethical. There is “aesthetic empathy, empathy as the cognitive source of foreign experience, ethical empathy, etc.” (1). In aesthetic empathy, what I am trying to understand or empathize with is not a person but a work of art, and while it is not identical to ethical empathy it warrants being called empathy rather than some other kind of activity since here as well I’m trying to overcome a kind of barrier between my own subjectivity and the work of art. I’m attentive to it, attuned to it in a certain way. Similarly, in what she calls for “foreign experience,” I’m getting out of my own head and overcoming a kind of barrier, an activity that can be likened to visiting a foreign country.

The “basic problem” Stein wants to solve is what she calls “the question of empathy as the perceiving [Erfahrung] of foreign subjects and their experience [Erleben]” (1). There are two words in German for experience: Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Erlebnis is a technical term in phenomenology that means “lived experience.” Erfahrung is an older word that refers to experience in general and it’s not a technical term, as when I say: in my experience, ... or: I have experience in.... I have seen something, been through something. Erlebnis is focused on individual experiences. It means life itself as we meet it immediately, and at particular moments. This kind of experience bears a meaning. For instance, I can have an experience of a piece of music; the music has a meaning to it. Empathy, then, is a certain kind of “perceiving,” where the object of my perception is a “foreign subject,” often but not necessarily another human being and especially what that subject is experiencing or what is the quality or flavor of their experience, what something means to them, and so on. It is often said that knowing what another person is experiencing, feeling, or thinking is either difficult or impossible. On Stein’s account, empathy is the opposite of impossible; it is a natural human capacity that most all of us exercise more often than we might think. But what is it? After a one-page preface we are into Chapter 2.

Chapter 2: The Essence of Acts of Empathy

She’s going to beginning this book with a brief discussion of some methodological issues, focusing on some basic themes in phenomenology. “All controversy over empathy,” she writes, “is based on the implied assumption that foreign subjects and their experience are given to us” (3). For empathy to be possible for me, the subject I’m trying to empathize with and their experience must be given to me. What does it mean to be “given” to me? This is a basic question of phenomenology: how is the world in general given to us in the sense of knowable, available, or accessible to us? The world is intelligible, and the things and people that make it up are likewise intelligible, but how so? What is it to be given?

In order to answer this, she says, we need to perform what is called the phenomenological reduction. If we want to grasp the essence of any phenomenon, we begin to clarify it by reducing, bracketing, or eliminating from view anything that doesn’t belong in a strict sense to the phenomenon as we actually encounter it in an everyday way. Any beliefs—scientific, philosophical, economic, political, and so on—about the object or phenomenon in question should be put aside in order to attend to the thing itself as we (not just I personally) actually and commonly encounter it. The first-person perspective here is crucial, and the “we” more than the more idiosyncratic “I.” In performing the phenomenological reduction we bracket even the question of the existence of the world and my own existence as well and describe the phenomenon as it shows itself or as it is given to us. I can doubt even the existence of the world and myself, but I can’t doubt the experience or the phenomenon that is before me. We begin, then, with such experience.

The world as we experience it is comprised not only of material objects but of people who are not me. These people as I experienced them are not mere things like tables and chairs; rather, they have experiences, and while their experiences belong to them and not to me those experiences are at least sometimes also accessible to me. What she calls “the phenomenon of foreign psychic life is indubitably there” (5). What is the phenomenon that is the “psychic life” of another? When I look in the direction of another human being, what do I see? I’m not seeing myself, clearly, but someone “foreign” or other. I’m seeing you, but what is that? She calls this person “a psycho-physical individual,” and she distinguishes it from a material or physical object. The person I’m seeing, then, is a composite of psyche and body—not two entities but one, hence the hyphenated phrase. As she writes, “This individual is not given as a physical body, but as a sensitive, living body belonging to an ‘I,’ an ‘I’ that senses, thinks, feels, and wills. The living body of this ‘I’ not only fits into my phenomenal world but is itself the center of orientation of such a phenomenal world. It faces this world and communicates with me” (5). In other words, when I see you, I’m seeing not a mere object but another I, a subject of experience and a “center of orientation.” I’m seeing someone who has experiences as I do, someone who thinks, feels, performs actions, and so on. You are an agent, and you stand to me as I stand to you.

Let’s think some more about this face-to-face relation between two human beings. My experience of you includes an experience both of your expressions (your words, facial expressions, body language, etc.) and also of what is “hidden behind” such expressions. “Perhaps I see that someone makes a sad face but is not really sad. I may also hear someone make an indiscreet remark and blush. Then I not only understand the remark and see shame in the blush, but I also discern that he knows his remark is indiscreet and is ashamed of himself for having made it” (5-6). There’s a lot going on in these sentences, and she’ll go on to clarify this as we go. But in short, when I see the blush, I’m seeing not only the reddened face but the meaning that is behind it or the feeling of which it’s an expression or symptom. I see shame, and it’s a shame that is in a sense one with the blush. There is no appearance/reality divide here. The blush is not a mere outward appearance of an inner reality that is the feeling of shame, as philosophers have often described this.

Empathy, for Stein, is a form of awareness, but of what sort? Her question is what empathic awareness is, not how it comes about. She begins with an example: “A friend tells me that he has lost his brother and I become aware of his pain. What kind of an awareness is this?” (6). First, it is an awareness in which there is no separation between the expression and what it is an expression of. When you tell me that your brother died, in a quiet voice and with a downward expression, I am aware of your pain—not as an intellectual inference but in an immediate and direct way. The pain is in your voice and facial expression; it is not inferred from them. The pain is given to me; it’s right there in my experience. Were I Commander Data, I would perform the following mental operation: (1) this person’s brother has died; (2) people are often sad when their relatives die; (3) therefore this person is probably sad. Stein is saying not that we never form such inferences but that empathy is a form of awareness, or a way of being conscious, in which we see the sadness in an immediate way. The sadness or pain is “at one” with the outward expression of it. Empathy is not the same as what she calls “outer perception”—let’s say the perception of a house in front of me. When I see the house, what I’m seeing is the front of the house, not the back. Of course, if I want to see the back of the house I can walk toward the back, but then I’m no longer seeing the front. When I look at the front of the house, the back is, so to speak, implied even though it is not in my direct visual field. The back is still contained in the perception, while what is “primordially given”—that is, what I am directly and immediately aware of here and now—is the front. Empathy is different from outer perception, but what the two have in common is that “the object itself is present here and now” (7).

She mentions a distinction here between those experiences that are “primordial” and those that are “non-primordial.” To speak of an experience as primordial means that something is immediately present to me here and now; there is no need to inquire into the object or to speculate about it. My outer perception of the pencil on the desk is primordial in this sense. Other things may also be given to me primordially. She mentions as examples geometric axioms, valuing, and “our own experiences as they are given in reflection” or “[a]ll our own present experiences” (7). Examples of non-primordial experiences are those involving memory, expectation, and fantasy. In each of these cases, what I’m thinking about or perceiving is not immediately in front of me but has to be called to mind, either recalled from previous (primordial) experience or created. Is empathic awareness primordial? She’s going to say yes and no, now how so? We’ll see.

She gives a brief analysis of non-primordial experience, for example, fantasy. What is happening in fantasy is not happening in the here and now but is a creation of the mind, as is also the case with memory where I must recall some past experience. Also, there’s a division in fantasy between the I that creates the fantasized world and the I that is acting in that world. The first is primordial (here and now), the second is not.

Unlike fantasy, empathy is primordial in a way: “Here, too, we are dealing with an act which is primordial as present experience though non-primordial in content. And this content is an experience which, again, can be had in different ways such as in memory, expectation, or in fantasy. When it arises before me all at once, it faces me as an object (such as the sadness I ‘read in another’s face’)” (10). I experience or “read” the sadness in an immediate way and not as an inference. “Thus empathy is a kind of act of perceiving sui generis [it is a distinctive act or mode of perception]…. Empathy … is the experience of foreign consciousness in general, irrespective of the kind of the experiencing subject or of the subject whose consciousness is experienced” (11). I am perceiving another’s consciousness or conscious states—which is not the same as feeling what someone else is feeling. I don’t feel your feelings; only you do. I feel my feelings, but it’s “as if” I am feeling your feelings. The “as if” is important.

The point she is making here regarding empathy applies, she believes, quite generally: “This is how human beings comprehend the psychic life of their fellows” (11). She applies this even to God or to how God perceives human beings as well as how we perceive “the love, the anger, and the precepts of their God”: “God can comprehend people’s lives in no other way. As the possessor of complete knowledge, God is not mistaken about people’s experiences, as people are mistaken about each other’s experiences. But people’s experiences do not become God’s own, either; nor do they have the same kind of givenness for Him” (11). Unlike God, I can misperceive what you are experiencing. Empathic awareness for humans is not epistemically infallible, and even when it’s accurate I’m “having” not your experiences but my own.

Stein goes on to discuss a few competing accounts of empathy, especially that of her fellow phenomenologist Theodor Lipps. Lipps’ account I shall mention only as it relates to Stein’s position. The basic agreement between these two is that empathy is a kind of “inner participation” in someone else’s experiences. Again, to “participate” in the experience of another person is not to “have” their experience. I can’t have your experiences. All my experiences are mine, even while I participate through empathy in yours. Empathy does not allow me to leave my own mind or subjectivity and enter yours. Nothing can do that. Where these two begin to disagree is on a few additional points. First, Stein disagrees with Lipps’ view that empathy involves a “full experience” of another person’s mental states. On her view, while I’m “drawn into” another’s experience, this is not a full or “complete coincidence” with the latter. Their experience never becomes fully primordial for me but is non-primordial in the way that my own remembered experience is.

Second, we can describe empathy as a case of “fellow feeling” or sympathy in the sense that when, for instance, my friend Mary experiences joy at getting a new job I can experience joy along with her. Mary’s joy and mine have the same content, that is, we are joyful about the same thing. While the content of Mary’s joy—what it’s about—and my joy may be the same, the quality of the two experiences is not. Empathy and sympathy are not identical, although the distinction is subtle. We can think of empathy as a consciousness of or a participation in the experience of another person, whereas sympathy is a feeling-with (in Greek syn = together, pathos = feeling) another person.

Stein also rejects Lipps’ view that in empathy “there is no distinction between our own and the foreign ‘I,’ that they are one” (16). There is, both philosophers believe, a kind of unity or sense of oneness between myself and another in the experience of empathy, but what is this “feeling of oneness”? Lipps mentions the example of watching an acrobat perform; as I watch his motions I also “go through his motions inwardly” (16), just as I might flinch or wince at the sight of another’s pain. Stein writes, “I am not one with the acrobat but only ‘at’ him. I do not actually go through his motions but quasi” (16). There is a quasi or not entirely genuine quality to my flinching; I’m flinching “at” another’s pain, not undergoing it. I’m not feeling their pain or even my own; instead, I am with them in their pain. If we must speak of a “feeling of oneness” at all, we must remember the “as if.” You and I can experience joy or anguish about the same thing. She mentions the example of shared joy at the falling of an enemy’s fortress and asks, “Have thus the barriers separating one ‘I’ from another broken down here? Has the ‘I’ been freed from its monadic character? Not entirely. I feel my joy while I empathically comprehend the others’ and see it as the same” (17). I see your joy as in a sense the same as mine, but I don’t become you, nor is my joy strictly identical to yours. We are not monads to each other in anything like the way that atoms are, nor are we walled off from each other, however we are separate beings.

She has already stated that empathy is not entirely primordial; another person’s experience isn’t given to me immediately, here and now, although “we may turn toward the foreign experience and feel ourselves led by it” (19). We might also speak of perception and knowledge as involving a kind of leading, but empathy is identical to neither. How so? When I perceive an object, I am again being led by it in the sense that I am trying to access or grasp it, as is also the case with knowledge. In the case of all three—empathy, perception, and knowledge—I am coming in contact with an object of some kind, and (against empiricism) without an intervening idea or mental representation, but “[p]erception has its object before it in embodied givenness; empathy does not” (19). Knowledge also, as she puts it, “reaches its object but does not ‘have’ it” (19). In empathic awareness, someone else’s experience ‘“is there’ for me” but not in the way that the perceived or known object is; it is not “objectively given as something facing me” (19).

She makes this point rather quickly and moves on to discuss a few theories that try to explain the genesis or origin of the understanding of “foreign consciousness.” For these psychological theories, the question is not what empathy is—Stein’s main and more phenomenological concern—but how it occurs. She begins with the theory of imitation. Consider the case of a child (Jean) witnessing a second child (Jacques) crying and then Jean cries as well, in imitation of Jacques. Jean, we often say, is imitating Jacques, or the cause of Jean’s crying is Jean’s perception of Jacques crying. The crying here is said to be contagious, as many experiences are. A great deal of our experience can be described as an empathic imitation of other people’s experiences, where empathy itself is an effect of another person’s expressions. Stein will reject this account, arguing that there is a difference between empathy and the kind of transference or contagion of experience that happens in imitation. The two experiences are different. In the example mentioned, Jacques may be crying because he’s hungry while Jean cries out of sadness at the sight of Jacques. “I do not arrive at the phenomenon of foreign experience, but at an experience of my own that arouses in me the foreign gestures witnessed” (23).

She then discusses the theory of empathy by association. The idea here is that I know and experience what another person is experiencing by associating their outward expressions with similar expressions of my own. She mentions the example of seeing someone stamp his feet: “I remember how I myself once stamped my feet at the same time as my previous fury is presented to me. Then I say to myself, ‘This is how furious he is now’” (24). The other person’s anger is inferred from the association of his foot stamping and my own. Again she disagrees, for the reason that my perception of his anger is not an inference—whether based on association or anything else—but an immediate perception.

Similar to this is the theory of inference by analogy. This view was defended by John Stuart Mill and has it that empathy is again based on an inference, this time an empirical inference based upon an analogy. The only time I have ever stamped my feet is when I was angry; I now see you stamping your feet, and based on the analogy or similarity between my former action and your present one, I infer that you must be angry. Her reply is again that empathy is a perception, not an inference, and that while such inferences are sometimes helpful in enabling us to know what someone is experiencing, this knowledge is not itself empathic awareness. To know what someone is experiencing is not to experience it: “It does not yield perception but a more or less probable knowledge of the foreign experience” (27). We don’t, Stein concludes, come to know on the basis of these theories what causes empathy, nor (more importantly) do we know what empathy itself is.

She finishes Chapter 2 with a discussion of phenomenologist Max Scheler’s theory of empathy or of “foreign consciousness.” According to Scheler, “we perceive the foreign ‘I’ with its experience inwardly just as we perceive our own ‘I’” (27). In his view, we must speak of “a neutral stream of experience” that is prior to any division between my experience and someone else’s, as is suggested by the fact that we can experience a thought as our own, as foreign, or as neither of these. That is, there are thoughts and experiences that seem to belong to one and all before they become mine or yours. Every one of us find ourselves placed in “a world of psychic experience” which is had in common prior to my experience becoming my own. Could this be true?

Stein doesn’t think so, although she does find something attractive in the notion of “a neutral stream of experience” out of which empathy emerges. The basic problem with this view, she says, is that it seems generally characteristic of human experience that all of it belongs to some particular I. What she calls an “I-less experience” doesn’t exist, or at least it can’t be exhibited. If it did exist (and it’s not obvious what would serve as an example of this), it would still have to be shown how an experience that is originally I-less comes to be mine for yours, and Scheler hasn’t explained how this could possibly come about. To be sure, there are shared expenses—a concert audience may have in common a particular aesthetic experience—but in every case that experience belongs to this I, that I, and so on, rather than to some collective entity. What collective entity or experiencer is this?

Further, it is not quite right to speak of perceiving foreign experience “inwardly” in the way I have my own experiences. My experience is given to me primordially, here and now, in an immediate way. Your experience is given to me in every case non-primordially, and even if your experience is fundamentally similar to my own, it remains that your experience and mine are two rather than one: “If I experience a feeling as that of another, I have it given twice: once primordially as my own and once non-primordially in empathy as originally foreign” (34).

Before ending Chapter 2 Stein gives us a very brief discussion of Hugo Münsterberg’s theory of empathy which will lead into her argument in Chapter 3. Münsterberg contends that empathy is an experience of another in which I understand specifically the other’s acts of will. He says the “foreign will enters into mine” even as it remains foreign. Stein replies, first, that she sees no reason to limit this to acts of will and, second and more importantly, Münsterberg’s contention that we are able to have “an immediate awareness of foreign subjects” that precedes “the constitution of the individual” calls for a larger inquiry into the constitution of the individual or what she will call “the psycho-physical individual” that each of us is (35).

Chapter 3: The Constitution of the Psycho-Physical Individual

Her inquiry now broadens out considerably, and it’s no surprise that this is the longest chapter of the book. Her question, in short, is the question of human nature: what is this, or how is the human being constituted as both a psychological and a physical being? The human being is more than a material object but a being with a capacity for experience, a subject or an “I” of some kind.

She now introduces several important concepts: “the pure ‘I,’” the “stream of consciousness,” the soul, the living body, and the “transition to the foreign individual.” Let’s look at each of these. The “pure ‘I’” that each of us immediately experiences ourselves as being is what she calls an “indescribable, qualityless subject of experience” (38). Over and above being an object—a material entity that is empirically observable by myself and others—I am the kind of being that has experiences, or I am a center of awareness. I think, feel, remember, imagine, and so on. I am myself and not someone else, and this being myself is something of which I am immediately aware. As she expresses it, “This ‘selfness’ is experienced and is the basis of all that is ‘mine’” (38). You are another “I,” and I come to know who I am by contrasting myself with you and various others in my world.

The “stream of consciousness” is an idea that she borrows from the American psychologist and philosopher William James. Consciousness or awareness may be likened to a stream in that it’s always on the move, process-like, and without any obvious beginning or end point. It’s dynamic or living, and so is my awareness. The I is “the unity of a stream of consciousness” (38). The I finds itself always in the middle of this stream and not outside it, and my experiences in general do not come out of nowhere but follow upon or arise within a context that is stream-like.

The soul she will speak of as “the individual unity of the psyche” and as the “bearer” of its individual experiences (39, 40). In order for there to be an experience, there must be an experiencer (recalling Descartes). Experiences belong to someone, some subject or agent, and she speaks of this bearer of experience as “the substantial soul” (40): “This substantial unity is ‘my’ soul when the experiences in which it is apparent are ‘my’ experiences or acts in which my pure ‘I’ lives” (40). Two or more souls may be said to be “of the same kind” (not identical) when their streams of consciousness are similar in content (40). We’ll come back to the soul in a bit.

Next is the notion of the lived or “living body” and its relation to the I. The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty would later develop this notion of the living or lived body in detail and was very much influenced by Stein on this important topic. She begins by pointing out that I am not only a psychic being, or a being with a mind, but a psycho-physical one. I am embodied, and my being embodied is not an incidental fact about me but is in some deep way part of my being. In some sense I “am” my body, as I am also my psyche. My body and my psyche are likewise experienced as “mine.” They are “given” to me in a certain way. In what way, she asks, is the body given to me?

It’s given to me as “living.” What does this mean? My body is obviously living in the simple sense that it’s alive, it’s not dead, it’s functioning in the way a living organism is supposed to, and so on, but her meaning is deeper than this and has to do with the manner in which my body is given or appears to me. How does it appear to me? It can be given to me in the sense of “outer perception”; for example, I can see my body reflected in a mirror as something that is in a sense “over there.” That’s a physical body that I see in the mirror, and it appears to me in much the way that other bodies do. It’s something that I look at from without or stand at arm’s length from. It’s foreign. But it’s not given to us in this way alone. Foreign bodies or objects I can turn toward or away from; I can walk away from you, or from your body, but not from mine. It goes where I go, and not in the way that my clothing does which can be put on and taken off at will. My body appears to me as living or vital, as a center of awareness and a subject of thoughts and actions. Other bodies appear to me in a great many ways; their appearances and positions in space change constantly, but not so with my own body. My body is always “here” and “is given to me in successive appearances only variable within very narrow limits. As long as I have my eyes open at all, it is continually there with a steadfast obtrusiveness, always having the same tangible nearness as no other object has. It is always ‘here’ while other objects are always ‘there’” (42). My body “belongs” to me, and not in the way that property does (something I “have” or own) but as something I am “bound to perpetually” (42). This notion of “belonging” suggests an experienced unity or oneness of being.

Think about the act of holding a stone in your hand, an example she mentions on page 43. The spatial distance between the stone and my hand is virtually nothing, and yet we find no difficulty in separating in our experience the foreign object from the hand that is a part of my body. There is a world between them, but how so? The stone is given to me in outer perception alone while my hand is given to me in this way and also in a kind of inner perception. I can feel my hand in an act of outer perception—let’s say by touching it with my other hand—but I also experience my hand in a different, in a more immediate or living, way. This second way is difficult to describe, but we are familiar with the way in which my hand is given to me in this everyday sense, where it’s not an object foreign to me but me myself, an aspect of the subject that I am or the place from which I have experiences. “The living body as a whole is at the zero point of orientation with all physical bodies outside of it. ‘Body space’ and ‘outer space’ are completely different from each other,” not in the sense that they are separated by any great distance but in the way they’re given to me (43). My body is experienced in a twofold way: in outer perception and inner perception. When an object in the outer world changes its location in space, it goes from being “over there” to a different “there,” but as my living body changes its spatial location, it remains always “here.” Even my extremities are not “over there” but are bound up with the subject that I am. Also, an object such as a ring that goes everywhere I do, or everywhere my body does, remains foreign and is given to me as always in a sense “out there.”

The living body clearly experiences a range of feelings which are both specific and general. Some feelings are inseparable from sensations (such as the pleasure brought about by delicious food) while others are more like general or background moods that pervade my experience in its entirety for as long as the mood lasts. Thus, when I feel joyful, every particular perception and experience is pervaded by joy. My living body is pervaded by joy; the joy is not merely a feeling that the body “has.”

She returns here to the notion of the soul and its relation to the living body. Her contention here is that the soul, which she has spoken of as the bearer of individual experience, “together with the living body forms the ‘psycho-physical individual’” (50). The psycho-physical individual is what each of us is, and where the psychical indicates the soul and the physical indicates the living body. My psyche is not a material being, such as a brain, but is experienced as the ground of my experience. This experience is also bound to a body, as is the soul itself. As she writes, “the soul is based on the living body,” and “[t]his is shown in the phenomenon of ‘psycho-physical causality” (49-50), where feelings, for instance, produce effects in the body and bodily states produce effects in the psyche.

Remaining on the topic of the living body, Stein considers the question of the relation between feelings and the body. Feelings are not purely inner states of the psyche but demand to be expressed outwardly and bodily. “I blush for shame, I irately clench my fist, I angrily furrow my brow, I groan with pain, am jubilant with joy” (51). Blushing doesn’t merely accompany the feeling of shame but is its involuntary expression. The feeling, she says, “is not something complete in itself” but “terminates” in the physical manifestation or expression (51). Feelings can also terminate in bodily actions, as at the sight of Bigfoot I run away in fear. They can also terminate in or generate acts of will, as I resolve to eat something to satisfy my hunger. Feelings demand expression, and the ways they express themselves—in volitions, actions, or bodily states—are analogous. “The same feeling that motivates a volition can also motivate an appearance of expression” (52). Moreover, “Feelings and expression are related by nature and meaning, not causally” (53); feeling fear at the sight of Bigfoot and running away are one in meaning, but the first is not strictly causing the second. I am free to stand my ground and maybe get a photo, although it’s generally prudent to get out of there.

Before leaving the subject of the living body, Stein briefly discusses the will and experiences of willing. Without getting into the metaphysical debate regarding free will versus determinism (although elsewhere she will defend the freedom of the will), Stein notes that “will externalizes itself in action”; we experience volition, as with feelings, not as purely “internal” states of consciousness but as generating actions in the world (55). These actions are one in meaning with willing. Here again we see a unity of the psychic and the physical rather than a metaphysical mind/body dichotomy. There is nothing in my experience that corresponds to such a dichotomy. The opposition is a metaphysical fiction.

Stein spends the rest of this chapter discussing the “transition to the foreign individual” that occurs in all acts of empathy. What she has outlined in the chapter to this point is not an exhaustive philosophical anthropology or theory of human nature but an outline of some major themes pertaining to the psycho-physical individual. The “I” that each of us is, is “a unified object inseparably joining together the conscious unity of an ‘I’ and a physical body,” where “the physical body occurs as a living body” and “consciousness occurs as the soul of the unified individual” (56). Her topic now is the transition in our experience from the I that I am to a foreign I. Her question isn’t why does this happen but what is this happening itself.

What makes it possible for me to perceive another human being as a living body, an “I” rather than an “it”? I don’t perceive the person standing before me in the same way I see a mannequin. They are given to me in different ways, but what’s the difference? I see the mannequin as a material object only and the person as a living body, a subject of experience like myself. I sense in an immediate way that the other person is an “I” to itself, a foreign living body that is “of my type” (59). I experience it “as a sensing living body and empathically project myself into it” (61). As my living body is a “zero point of orientation” in a spatial world—the place from which left and right, up and down, etc., are determined—so is the foreign living body (61). I do not “project myself into it” in the sense of exiting my own consciousness and occupying someone else’s mind and seeing the world through their eyes. I don’t have your experiences; your experiences are non-primordial to me, such that when you say the table is located to the right of the chair while for me, given my location in space, the table is left of the chair, I am able to “obtain a new image of the spatial world and a new zero point of orientation” (61). The table, I now say, is on “your” right and on “my” left. It is not on “the” left. Its position in space is not absolute but is relative to a living body, whether yours, mine, or someone else’s. Every living body is a “center of spatial orientation, and in certain spatial relationships to the rest of the spatial world” (61).

Empathy, for Stein, is what she calls “the condition of the possibility of constituting our own individual” (63). In experiencing empathy for another, “I must no longer consider my own zero point as the zero point, but as a spatial point among many.” Again, there is no “the” left; there is my left, your left, and so on, so my zero point is one of many. As well, I’m able to see my living body as one among many and as a physical body to others. Your—to me—physical body is—for you—a living body. In the social phenomenon of what she calls “reiterated empathy” we have a “mirror-image-like givenness of myself” where “I first am given to myself as a psycho-physical individual in the full sense” (63). I’m not, then, fully aware of myself apart from experiences of empathy. My awareness of the world as well is contingent upon others and their experiences of the world. The world outside me is constituted (comprehended and in a sense formed) not by myself alone but socially or intersubjectively in our shared experience. Were there no experiences of empathy, I would be locked within my own mind and my subjective perceptions of the world. All I could know of the world is how it appears to me, not how it is in truth or even whether it exists independently of me. The possibility of its independent existence, she writes, “is demonstrated as soon as I cross these boundaries by the help of empathy and obtain the same world’s second and third appearance which are independent of my perception. Thus empathy as the basis of intersubjective experience becomes the condition of possible knowledge of the existing outer world” (64).

The discussion now moves on to what she calls “the phenomena of life,” meaning those experiences of “growth, development and aging, health and sickness, vigor and sluggishness” which are “general feelings” that pervade both the psyche and the living body. Consider the experience of vigor or being in good health. This is inseparably mental and physical; she speaks of it as “filling” body and soul at once, as “color[ing] every spiritual act and every bodily event” (68). Your state of health (sluggishness, vigor, etc.) is visible to others in how you express yourself and move through the world, both mentally and physically. Your good or ill health is something that I see, just as I see your fatigue in or through your posture. Phenomena of life “participate in the structure of the individual” and “appear in the living body and also as psychic experiences” (68). Max Scheler had spoken of overall experiences of life as either ascending or declining (a point he likely borrowed from Nietzsche), and this may be empathically apparent to others, comparable to the way in which a gardener might see plants or a physician sees patients.

Human beings continually express themselves whether we intend to or not and whether we are aware of it or not, and we also continually read one another’s expressions. In empathy, unlike other forms of perception, I perceive, for example, shame in another person’s red face. In other circumstances their red face may be caused by something else (like spicy food) and not be an expression of shame or of anything else. The latter is merely a physical effect and not an expression of some meaningful experience. When this is the case she will speak of this as a sign, and where a sign is an indication of something else (something apart from the sign). The red face is a sign or an effect of your having eaten spicy food, as smoke is caused by fire but is distinct from it. Smoke and fire appear together and “I comprehend the one with the other” (as effect and cause), but in the act of empathy any such distinction disappears and “I see the one through the other” (75). I see your shame “through” your red face, or “in” it, and not merely “with” it as a causal accompaniment. There is an experiential oneness, a “natural unity,” between shame and a red face that is perceived in the act of empathy (77). Another example: “Fear is at one with the cry of fear just as sadness is with the countenance” (78). The sight of another human being, then, is not merely the perception of an external object but an empathic awareness of another “I,” a “foreign living body” which is also “the bearer of phenomena of expression” (75).

How do I know when your red face is a sign that you’ve just eaten something spicy and when you’re feeling shame (or something else), and can I be wrong about this? Indeed I can, and when I am mistaken I must look to the “meaning context” of the situation. If you just said something stupid or embarrassing, I’m going to see your red face differently than if you hadn’t but you had just eaten something spicy. Context gives us a pretty good clue and is usually sufficient in making these distinctions. This perception is a kind of reading, and while it’s a reading that happens very quickly, it isn’t self-evident but involves a certain amount of interpretation. Empathy, then, is an act that involves some amount of contextual interpretation, and it’s also epistemically fallible. Deception is always possible, although detecting deception itself requires an act of empathy. If you lie to me, for example, by claiming you don’t feel shame when you do, I may detect your lie through another expression, such as you failing to look me in the eye while you speak. Your deception is visible in your looking away, although of course this can also be compounded in further acts of deception. Also apparent to me in empathy, at least at times, is not only the meaning of your present expression but general attributes of yours which this expression betrays or announces. In this instance, your lie announces that you may be a liar, not only on this occasion but characteristically.

The chapter ends with a brief discussion of the point that my empathic awareness of other people is necessary to my own self-understanding. As she expresses this important point, “To consider ourselves in inner perception, i.e., to consider our psychic ‘I’ and its attributes, means to see ourselves as we see another and as he sees us” (88). I don’t perceive or know myself in a social vacuum but in a manner that is bound up with my perceptions of others and their perceptions of me. What she calls “foreign psychic life” (other people and their experiences) is difficult to disentangle from my own psychic life, such that if I wish to know myself I cannot disregard others’ empathic perceptions of me. “Empathy proves to have yet another side as an aid to comprehending ourselves,” while “empathy and inner perception work hand in hand to give me myself to myself” (89). She also allows for the possibility of another person, whose capacity for empathy may exceed my inner or self-perception, perceiving and judging me more accurately than I do.

Chapter 4: Empathy as the Understanding of Spiritual Persons

This final chapter of the book provides further elaboration of Stein’s notions of spirit, soul, and the person. Many of her later works would take these themes in a more overtly theological and specifically Catholic direction, but in this early work the theological overtones would be subtle. Her methodological approach remains phenomenological, as it would throughout her later work. We must speak of the individual, she now writes, not only as a being in nature but as spirit. In the German philosophical tradition in which she is working, there is nothing terribly surprising in this. Her claim at the outset of this chapter is that if we wish to understand the psycho-physical individual phenomenologically, we require a nomenclature that goes beyond natural categories alone.

She begins with the notion of spirit or the spiritual person. Empathy is an understanding of such a person, but what is spirit? Is there any place for this notion in modern philosophy? She writes, “We have already taken along the ‘I’ of the foreign living body as a spiritual subject by interpreting this body as the center of orientation of the spatial world” (92). The foreign I is a subject of awareness, as I also am, and it lives in a world not only of nature but of spirit or what we might call culture. She refers to the German term Geisteswissenschaften, which is a slightly awkward technical term that translates what John Stuart Mill had called the “moral sciences” but which we usually translate back into English as the humanities, i.e., those disciplines that study culture, history, language, ideas, or the entire world of human thought and expression, including philosophy. If you are familiar with the work of Wilhelm Dilthey (whom we study in my Philosophy 273 course), the philosophical underpinnings of the Geisteswissenschaften was a major preoccupation of his, and Stein is replying quite directly to him in this chapter. Her point at this stage of the argument is that the human being is thoroughly embedded within an historical culture, as Dilthey and many other philosophers in Stein’s tradition believe and are trying to conceptualize philosophically.

Human consciousness, as she puts it, is “object-constituting” at the same time that it is “of the order of nature”; also, “[c]onsciousness as a correlate of the object world is not nature, but spirit” (91). What she is getting at here is that the human being stands to the world not at a distance or across an abyss of subject and object but in a correlative way. Our mental acts form, classify, and interpret objects in the world and provide a kind of coloring to that world. She writes: “In joy the subject has something joyous facing him, in fright something frightening, in fear something threatening. Even moods have their objective correlate. For him who is cheerful, the world is bathed in a rosy glow; for him who is depressed, bathed in black” (92). The world as we experience it has all manner of qualitative, evaluative, and meaningful connotations, and we find no absolute division in our experience between what is subjectively imposed on the world and what is objectively given in it. “Our whole ‘cultural world,’ all that ‘the hand of man’ has formed, all utilitarian objects, all works of handicraft, applied science, and art are the reality correlative to the spirit” (92). We must speak, then, of the correlativity of spirit (mind, culture, language) and nature, and of the humanities (the human or cultural sciences) as an investigation of “the products of the [human] spirit” (93). As Dilthey had also maintained, these disciplines are primarily concerned not with causal explanations of human phenomena (in a mechanical sense) but with interpretations of their meanings, and where empathy plays a central role in such interpretation. An historian, for instance, seeks to empathize with an era or a civilization that is remote from us and to understand what things meant for the occupants of that time and place. We’re trying “to relive the spiritual life of the past. (We could call this empathic comprehension.)” (95).

Each one of us is a “spiritual subject” in the sense of an individual who constitutes a world through its own acts of will. We each see the world differently, in some measure anyway, such that “everyone has his peculiar Weltanschauung [worldview]” (96). All my experiences are “subject to rational laws” and are “intelligently related”; they are related in a kind of organic way or in terms of an underlying unity (97). The various things I do and that happen to me are not random or without relationship to each other. Typically one experience “proceeds from the other” or follows along in a kind of pattern (96), and spirit pertains to this dynamic interrelatedness that belongs to the experience of each one of us. This pattern is like an experiential fingerprint in that there is always something individual about it even as it conforms to rational laws.

We are also emotional beings, of course, and our being so isn’t an incidental fact about us. The person’s “spiritual acts” include not only the constitution or perception of objects in the world but the constitution of myself in emotions. In some sense, I am my emotions. The person, she now says, “experiences emotions as coming from the depth of its ‘I’” (98). We must speak here of different levels of depth within the person, for not all our experiences occur on the same level. There are shallow experiences and profound ones, fleeting emotions and those that go to the heart of who we are. There are also feelings that she calls “self-experiencing”; these are “general feelings and moods” that pervade various individual experiences and “are bound to the living body” (100). An example is cheerfulness. This general mood attaches itself to everything in my experience, for the length of time that it lasts, and gives a particular appearance to everything I see. It colors the world and the I at once, or it constitutes everything in my experience in a like manner.

Emotions, then, or some of them, are rooted in the depths of the self and are capable of pervading our experience in general. A feeling such as “a slight resentment can fill me ‘entirely,’” as water can fill up my basement in both its full breadth and depth (104). It might also be peripheral and fleeting. It can exhibit different levels of intensity, extent, and duration. The stronger and more lasting ones guide my will, flow into my actions, and constitute me as a particular subject.

In these various ways, Stein is speaking of the person as an experiential unity of some kind. This is not a metaphysical doctrine about human nature in the abstract but a phenomenological description of how the person is constituted or comes to know itself as a distinct being and others no less. Empathy is fundamental both in how “the foreign person” is given to me and how I am given to myself, which is difficult to disentangle from how others see me. The person is nothing atomistic but is “incorporated into the whole order of physical and psychic reality,” as both an embodied and cultured being (110). The spiritual person I am is inseparable from all of this, and empathy is an act that seeks to hold all of this in view.

I must know others in order to know myself and vice versa, just as I must understand the historical past in order to understand the historical present and vice versa. The foreign and the familiar must be regarded in their mutuality if either is to be understood. I may understand myself, for instance, as belonging or not belonging to a certain type and another in the same way. To understand any human being is to understand them in relational terms and not in isolation or as a certain kind of natural object only. I am a being in nature—a body—but, as we have seen, even this is not a merely material thing but a lived body. Everything that pertains to the spirit as well is grounded in the psycho-physical, or as she puts it, it is “essentially necessary that spirit can only enter into exchange with spirit through the medium of corporeality,” and “I, as psycho-physical individual, actually obtain information about the spiritual life of other individuals in no other way” (117).

So ends the book. There are, of course, further details in Stein’s account that I have passed over. She concludes on a theological note, gesturing toward the question of religious experience and its relation to empathy, but without hazarding an answer. As I have noted, her interest in religious questions would become far more explicit after her conversion.

Phenomenology and Thomistic theology

It’s impossible to encapsulate briefly the broad-ranging argument that is contained in such major works of Stein’s from the 1930s as Potency and Act: Studies toward a Philosophy of Being and Finite and Eternal Being: An Ascent to the Meaning of Being. The larger picture in those volumes and her other philosophical work of that decade is an integration of realist phenomenology and Catholic theology especially as it is espoused in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Stein turned to Aquinas after her conversion and saw clear affinities between this important medieval thinker and the phenomenological movement of which she would remain a part. Thomistic theology is a long and extraordinarily complicated story which I shall not attempt to put in a nutshell, but the main themes she finds in his work that are consistent with or that she renders conversant with twentieth-century phenomenology include the person or human nature, potentiality and actuality, spirit and God, free will, truth, intentionality, openness, and essence and (of course) being. Her general conception of the human being in these works would remain a combination of natural and spiritual, material and immaterial, personal and cultural, elements, while the spiritual and theological would come to the fore more than in her earlier work.

Stein’s later view of the person would retain from Aristotle and Aquinas (and against Heidegger) the notion of a deep core of being within every individual person which is unique, unchanging, God-given, and contains potentialities only some of which one will actualize. The person comprises both a superficial and a depth dimension, a periphery and a center. While many of a person’s traits change and develop through the various stages of life, a person’s core does not change, and it survives into the afterlife.

Works Cited

Herbstrith, Waltraud. Edith Stein: A Biography. San Francisco, Ignatius, 1985.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913-1922. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.

Joanne Mosley. Edith Stein: Modern Saint and Martyr. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2013.

Scaperlanda, Maria Ruiz. Edith Stein: St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 2001.

Sokolowski, Robert. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

 

PART THREE

Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973)

Major Works:

1948: The Philosophy of Existentialism

1949: Being and Having

1950: The Metaphysical Journal

1951: The Mystery of Being

1951: Being and Having

1952: Homo Viator

1952: Man Against Mass Society

1954: The Decline of Wisdom

1962: Creative Fidelity

1963: The Existential Background of Human Dignity

1967: Problematic Man

1971: Awakenings

1973: Tragic Wisdom and Beyond

Biography

No book-length biography of Gabriel Marcel has been published, but fortunately for us Marcel wrote two lengthy autobiographical works: “An Autobiographical Essay” in a volume published in 1984 titled The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, and the second is a book published two years before his death and titled Awakenings. Marcel notes on the first page of “An Autobiographical Essay” that “my life, save for some brief periods, was darkened by an increasingly keen awareness of the menace hanging over humanity” (Schilpp, 3). This is no doubt partly a reflection of the two world wars that he lived through, but he was also a participant in the movement in phenomenological and existential thought that was pronouncing a similar diagnosis of the times, the relevance of which is still very much with us, or so Marcel would have certainly maintained. In the book we will be reading, Marcel is clearly in a dark mood. It would be a mistake to perceive this as merely a reflection of a war-weary post-war France, for as with similar thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Camus, and so on, he was speaking about deep cultural undercurrents that are generations or centuries in the making. It’s tempting but mistaken to regard Marcel as a pessimist about either the human condition in general or the modern world, but what he called “the menace hanging over humanity” would be a very frequent theme in both his philosophical and fictional writing.

Marcel was born in Paris in 1889 and was the only child of a French diplomat, Henri-Camille Marcel. His mother, Laure Meyer, died when he was nearing four years old, leaving him to be raised by his father and his mother’s sister Berthe. These two later married. Various aunts, uncles, and cousins were also an important part of his early life. Marcel would speak very highly of his father, although the two appear to have had a somewhat distant relationship: “Doubtless he had his defects; in his private life he even committed some misdeeds. But he was unquestionably one of the men of the highest integrity I have ever known. He discharged the important duties that fell to him with unflagging conscientiousness, no less in the directorship of the Beaux-Arts than subsequently in the administration of the Bibliothèque Nationale and still later in the national museums. But even apart from his conscientiousness, which was so admirable in him, he had an impassioned interest in all the manifestations of the spirit in the realms of art and literature” (Schilpp, 23-4).

Marcel would later speak of himself as having been a “hypersensitive child, without question, but also somewhat turned in on himself, awkward, and no doubt deeply anxious,” partly on account of his mother’s death and partly on account of intestinal issues from which he suffered (Schilpp, 8). Being an only child weighed heavily on him, feeling pressure from his father and aunt to excel both in school and in personal morality. He would speak of a “daily practice of an examination of conscience that my aunt instituted in my life. I was to keep nothing to myself; I was called on to ferret out in my life or my thought everything that could be viewed as a wrong and to communicate it at once to her who reigned more or less despotically over my life” (Schilpp, 14). At school, he would report that while he had some acquaintances he had no friends, while the absence of a sibling at home he would also feel keenly. The combination made for a somewhat lonely childhood and adolescence which was made worse by his belief that his father and aunt had married for his sake and that it seemed to him not an especially happy marriage.

In 1898 his father’s employment took him to Stockholm, Sweden for a little over a year, which Marcel reports as having been the happiest period of his childhood. Prior to entering the lycée, he was educated at home. His high school experience was decidedly unhappy, “and I can say in retrospect that I think they contributed to a retardation of my intellectual development and, in the last analysis, seriously affected my health” (Schilpp, 11). He did very well in school in spite of his anxiety. The latter problem was exacerbated by the highly competitive nature of his schooling and by his father’s and aunt’s intense focus on his academic standing relative to his peers. Philosophy wasn’t the only subject in which he excelled, but it was the only one that he enjoyed. “Everything changed, to be sure, when I enrolled in a philosophy course. I distinctly recall having said to my parents from the very first day, ‘I know now what I will do later: I will devote myself to philosophy.’ My teacher, M. Colona d’Istria, never ceased heaping encouraging words on me, and I certainly needed them” (Schilpp, 16). As he would write in Awakenings, “Today when I think about the kind of explosion than my entrance into the study of philosophy meant for me, I believe I especially see this: it’s as though I had been suddenly removed from the static world that teaching at the lycée, associated with the rather particular conditions of my family life, had made me a prisoner of, a world where I was smothering. I saw myself transported into an enchanted land where thought—as such—was encouraged everywhere and at every level. Unlike my classmates, I don’t think I found any part of the philosophy class boring, except perhaps at the very end, where ethics was covered” (Awakenings, 67-8).

He reports, unsurprisingly for a philosopher, to have been a rather cerebral person at this youthful stage of life: “In the recreation area of the lycée, I kept to myself, wishing that I would be left alone…. Should I conclude that I was a purely cerebral person? I am certain that it would be wrong to think so. What is true is that during my childhood I certainly led a life that was much too cerebral. But it was precisely against this life that something in me never ceased to protest. I loved nature; I was a tireless walker,” and he would remain a tireless walker through the better part of his life (Awakenings, 55). He was also an ambitious reader through his teenage years, especially enjoying works of dramatic fiction. He would go on to study philosophy at the postsecondary level and in 1910 he received a doctorate in philosophy from the Sorbonne. He began a career teaching philosophy the following year at a Parisian high school, which he largely enjoyed but also found frustrating.

When World War I broke out, he went to work for the French Red Cross. He didn’t have the constitution of a soldier (and felt very guilty about this), but shortly after the outbreak of war he discovered in working for the Red Cross that there was a large need to get information about wounded and missing soldiers to their relatives back home. This would become Marcel’s role throughout the war years, and he poured himself into this with considerable dedication. Also during World War I he discovered what would become a permanent interest in the occult, determining “that I possessed some mediumistic capacities” and becoming “convinced of the reality of a number of phenomena that I cannot in all honesty reject and that I cannot account for by mere recourse to an unconscious” (Schilpp, 21). The ouija board fascinated him, as did seances, telepathy, and parapsychological research. Throughout his adult life he would call upon scientists and philosophers to take such phenomena seriously, although he was cautious about making any definite claims to knowledge in this sphere.

In 1918 he married Jacqueline Boegner, who lived until 1947. Together they would enjoy a long and happy marriage. They adopted one son named Jean Marie, who grew up to become a photographer and filmmaker. Marcel and Jacqueline were both lifelong music lovers and, as he put it, “were married under the sign of music. She was then organist and professor of harmony at the Schola Cantorum” (Schilpp, 23). Marcel himself was an accomplished piano player, and the two of them would often enjoy playing and improvising on piano. They also greatly enjoyed walking and hiking together, particularly in mountainous regions.

After the war he would return to his teaching career in Paris. Marcel was never a university professor. Both before and after the war he taught philosophy intermittently in a few secondary schools in France, but his main professional preoccupation in addition to his philosophical writing was to be a playwright and drama critic for a few French literary journals and editor of one. He is the author of about thirty dramatic works, although he is better known for his philosophical writings. His plays received a fair amount of attention, and a number of them were produced in France and elsewhere in Europe, although he always believed himself to be underrecognized as a playwright. This appears to have been a major disappointment to him as he makes frequent reference to this in both of his autobiographical works. In fact, both works spend more time discussing his fictional writings than the philosophical nonfiction for which he is better known. “I was consumed by the playwright’s craving for an audience.… I still have the painful impression that except in the cases of Un Homme de Dieu and Rome n’est plus dans Rome, the audience I so ardently desired has been denied me” (Schilpp, 27). For many years Marcel was well acquainted and often on friendly terms with many well known literary figures, including Charles Du Bos, Daniel Helévy, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Garric, and many others. The same can be said of various philosophical writers, including Jacques Maritain, Heidegger, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (with whom he was not on particularly friendly terms), and Karl Jaspers (whose work impressed him but whom he met only once).

Marcel converted to Roman Catholicism in 1929 at the age of forty, and this would have a profound effect on his writings. As a philosopher he has long been classified as a “Christian existentialist,” which is a term he at first liked but soon repudiated mostly for the reason that existentialism was coming to be associated more and more with Sartre’s philosophy. Sartre was somewhat better known than Marcel and still is, although Marcel is arguably a more original thinker than Sartre. Sartre was the best-known philosopher in France through the middle part of the twentieth century, but Marcel was quite well known as well during his lifetime, especially in France but also elsewhere in Europe and also on this side of the Atlantic. His reasons for converting are slightly elusive. He relates the story of having received a letter from a friend in which his friend asked him directly whether he would consider converting. “It seemed to me that he was but a spokesman and that the call came from much higher up. It was as though a more than human voice were questioning me and putting me into my own presence. ‘Can you really persevere indefinitely in that equivocal position of yours?’ this voice asked me” (Schilpp, 29). The next question was whether to opt for Protestant or Catholic Christianity. He chose the latter for the reason that “it seemed to me that Protestantism was in fact divided among a variety of sects that were not all in agreement on the essentials and that a choice in favor of one of them would have a fundamentally arbitrary character. 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” (Schilpp, 29). His wife had long been Protestant and would remain so until a few years before her death when she too converted to Catholicism. While Marcel, an astute critic of institutions, was not uncritical of the Church itself, his criticisms pertained mainly to its administrative function and what he regarded as its susceptibility to ideological trends. Yet as he expressed it, “I still see in it, in the person of its purest representatives … an unfailing faith in Christ and in the fundamental truths, the Incarnation being very much the point of ‘enracinement’ or being rooted for me” (Awakenings, 181).

The influence of Catholicism on Marcel’s philosophical writings from this point forward is unmistakable, although he would take pains not to limit his readership to a Catholic audience. Philosophy must be written, he believed, for an audience of any faith or no faith, which is one of many attitudes that he shared with Heidegger. He always protested against being classified as a “Christian existentialist,” although it is a tag that he wears to this day. In a clear dig at Sartre, Marcel wrote: “I refuse to be classified as a Christian existentialist. In fact, I do not believe I have ever made use of the term existentialism in my writings; besides, I suspect that the idea of existentialism implies a contradiction, for I do not see how a philosophy of existence worthy of the name could be an ‘ism’” (Schilpp, 49). Like Heidegger and Stein, he was a phenomenological philosopher, but unlike the latter he was not influenced at all by Thomistic theology. His philosophical views were influenced primarily by German idealism, F. H. Bradley, Henri Bergson, Søren Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and various thinkers in the movement of existential phenomenology. To my knowledge he was not familiar with the work of Edith Stein, but Heidegger he held in high regard, making frequent reference to Being and Time in particular. In Awakenings, Marcel writes: “When I visited Heidegger for the first time in Freiburg, in 1946, I asked him whether he accepted this appellation [‘Christian existentialist’]. He strongly protested, saying in particular that he was not an atheist, but that his thought was as though suspended between atheism and theism. I would add that I am, without the shadow of a doubt, infinitely closer to Heidegger than Sartre has ever been but that, on the other hand, it seems to me at least doubtful that one can place Jaspers among Christian thinkers. Thus, all this [Sartre’s distinction between Christian existentialists and atheist existentialists] doesn’t make sense” (Awakenings, 193).

Marcel’s philosophical writings are not particularly technical or laden with jargon. He didn’t want philosophy to be practiced in a technical manner, as was becoming the norm in various circles. He wanted philosophy to begin with concrete experience, not abstractions. He was a phenomenological thinker, very much along the lines of Heidegger and Stein. He described his method as “working ... up from life to thought and then down from thought to life again, so that one may try to throw more light upon life” (Mystery of Being vol. 1). Philosophy should be unsystematic and begin with experience, he believed, and he was a frequent critic of philosophical approaches that seemed to idolize abstractions, and in particular the different forms of rationalism. Too many philosophers, he believed, were becoming abstraction fetishists of a sort. He therefore made it his goal to bring philosophy back down to earth in a way that other phenomenological writers were also doing. He also wrote his philosophical works in ordinary language, at least by twentieth-century philosophical standards. Philosophical texts, he believed, should be accessible to any educated reader who is genuinely interested in the human condition, and it is this condition, broadly conceived, that was Marcel’s constant topic of reflection. Many of his writings find him in the role of social/cultural critic, including Man Against Mass Society, which includes a sustained critique of western culture in the aftermath of World War II. Marcel reports that “I have sometimes been reproached for having made hardly any place for politics in my writings, and I freely admit the lacuna,” although in this book he would have more than a little to say on the subject of politics. “In the broadest of terms, I will say that I consider myself a liberal who has become more and more painfully aware of the limits of liberalism but who at the same time has remained convinced of the absolutely maleficent character of totalitarian regimes of any sort,” be they fascist, communist, or otherwise (Schilpp, 62-63). Man Against Mass Society would carry out a scathing critique of the Marxism that had become fashionable among French intellectuals by mid-century.

Another motivation of that book lay in Marcel’s reaction to learning about the Nazi concentration camps. As he wrote in Awakenings, “By means of the English radio I had already learned, at a time I would not be able to clearly date but which was before 1945, the fate that was reserved for those who had been deported, and this news had deeply affected me. But I was quite far from suspecting the magnitude of a collective crime that counts among the most horrible in History. The reading of certain accounts by witnesses lets me understand that, in many cases, the Nazis were not content to torture and kill their victims, but they had even striven to treat them in such a way as to make them an object of disgust for themselves. This is what I have called ‘techniques of degradation’…. I then became more fully aware than I had probably ever been of the unpardonable sin that the act of deliberately humiliating another being constitutes…. Without a doubt, that is the origin for the lectures I was to give at Harvard University in 1961 on ‘The Existential Background of Human Dignity’” (Awakenings, 167-8).

Marcel would always have a deep interest in the direction that modern western culture appeared to him to be moving, and he was not at all optimistic about this matter and would return to this theme time and again in both his fictional and nonfictional work. He would speak of himself as “a playwright confronted by a world that is broken or out of sync, where the reactions of normal people become more and more automatic, where fanaticism seems to gain daily more territory and where those who try to remain themselves feel as though they are being tracked by despair” (Awakenings, 146). This partly explains his passion for fiction and theater, where his hope was always that “the theater should help renew [his audience] interiorly” and liberate them from the opinions of their society (Awakenings, 147). His fictional writing would often serve an ethical purpose as well. In Marcel’s philosophical works he never formulated a moral theory in the manner of a Kant or a Mill. His ethical concern focused on the nature of human relationships and the mystery that is at the core of all things human. His core ethical question, one might say, is “how fraternal relationship [is] possible”: “But in the course of this search, I had to recognize that this relationship remains necessarily mysterious. Yet the meaning of this word mysterious that has been the object of such literary abuse must be remembered: mysterious means nonproblematisable” (Awakenings, 169). He would have much to say on this theme as well in the book we will be reading.

In 1927 Marcel became an editor for a French publisher which published both French and foreign authors, and it is a position that he would greatly enjoy. By 1932 Marcel, a far more astute political observer than Heidegger, became alarmed at the rise of Nazism in Germany and fully understood the threat that they represented to Europe. World War II did not come as a surprise to Marcel, who with his family was still living in Paris. They bought a house at a short distance from Paris at the time and would remain there as well as Lyon and elsewhere in France through most of the German occupation until eventually returning to Paris in 1943, a year prior to the liberation of that country. By 1940 when the Nazis invaded France, Marcel was well known for his opposition to Nazism, which made remaining in Paris dangerous. “I risked being arrested, and, moreover, the thought of finding myself in an occupied Paris was unbearable. So we decided to go to Lyon where we had relatives. My wife was attended to in a clinic [for cancer treatment] while I stayed with a cousin” (Awakenings, 154-5).

In 1945 Marcel began working as a drama critic for Nouvelles littérature. Two years later, the death of his wife from cancer affected him profoundly. A serious car accident in 1953 left him with a diminished capacity for walking, which also came as a blow to this rather dedicated walker. “In the past, the most creative ideas had come to me more often than not while I was walking; thus, in a sense, the collision that threw me unconscious from the car had a direct effect on my creative faculties. I do not believe it coincidental that the play I had finished just before the accident was in fact the last I have written” (Schilpp, 59).

The remaining years of his life would find Marcel traveling a good deal, often giving talks at philosophical conferences in Europe as well as North and South America and other parts of the world. He had become quite well known as a philosopher by this time and he largely enjoyed both traveling and philosophical conversation with whomever he encountered. He was especially honored by invitations to deliver the Gifford Lectures in 1949-1950 and the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1961 and in 1964 by the Peace Prize of the German publishers.

Marcel would live through the events in France of 1968, of which he held a dim view. He was especially critical of the political trends within French universities at that time: “Doubtless the most alarming thing is the incredible deficiency manifested by a very large number of teachers, some of whom literally prostrated themselves before the rioters while others shut themselves up in a contempt that was inevitably inefficacious” (Schilpp, 63).

To the end of his life, Marcel would remain among the more astute observers of modern times, or in his words “an attentive listener to what is happening in the world. This demand … may seem unreasonable in an old man who would be better off, some might say, to begin his retreat from the world. But here I must strongly disagree” (Awakenings, 237).

Man Against Mass Society, 1952

The contemporary relevance of Man Against Mass Society will be immediately evident when you begin to read it. Seven decades have passed since its publication, so many of the details he discusses will appear time-bound, but what matters here is the larger picture of modern life that Marcel is painting. We get a sense of the flavor of the text as a whole in the following passage from page 27: “It can never be too strongly emphasized that the crisis which Western man is undergoing to-day is a metaphysical one; there is probably no more dangerous illusion than that of imagining that some readjustment of social or institutional conditions could suffice of itself to appease a contemporary sense of disquiet which rises, in fact, from the very depths of man’s being.” There is, as more or less all the existentialists were saying, a profound crisis at the heart of modern western civilization. It does not make the headlines, although its consequences do. Marcel will speak of this crisis as metaphysical and existential. What is the nature of this crisis? If human life—not human life in the abstract but concretely, that is, the life that each one of us is currently living—has suffered some kind of loss, what is the nature of that loss?

Let’s begin by looking at some of the larger themes that Marcel discusses in this book and also several of his other major works. The main object of Marcel’s analysis is the fundamental situation of human beings. To answer such a large question, we must pose it not in wholly abstract terms but in terms of the condition of human beings at the present time. This existential question must be posed as concretely as possible or in such a way that we don’t succumb to what he calls “the spirit of abstraction.” Marcel’s account begins by recalling a couple of Nietzsche’s more important existential assertions: “God is dead” and “Man is in his death throes.” What, Marcel asks, do these two statements mean, and again not in the abstract for but for us today? The two statements must be comprehended together, Marcel maintains. How did it come to pass that modern humanity is in such a perilous condition? What is the nature of this condition and what are some of its outward symptoms? As a Christian, Marcel’s diagnosis would differ profoundly from Nietzsche’s, especially as it concerns the relative decline of religious worldviews. For Marcel, the general deadening or enervation of social life that he believes he’s witnessing is a consequence of spiritual decline and the dominance of metaphysically materialist and technological ways of thinking. In an important measure, he believes, the human being is what it thinks of itself and not merely what it is in the sense of a certain kind of object. When our ways of thinking about ourselves, or about anything, are beholden to a single and one-dimensional vocabulary, humanity is indeed in its death throes. Today a temptation exists to become enclosed in the dimension of technological thought to the point of denying that there could be any other dimension. It is a short step from this narrowing of perspective to the more thoroughgoing degradation of life that Marcel believes he’s witnessing.

The modern world is characterized by a profound spiritual disquiet, he believes, and if the disease itself is difficult to identify, the symptoms are not but are in various ways felt and experienced by all of us. Among the most important of these is the disconnection of the individual from oneself and one’s fellow humanity. In a very real sense, we are no longer ourselves. Recall how Heidegger spoke of the person as for the most part inauthentic, as the interchangeable anyone. Marcel prefers to speak of “the mass” as the name for who or what the individual that is not oneself is or how one commonly experiences oneself. The Spanish existentialist José Ortega y Gasset had described the mass not only as a collectivity of bewilderingly large scale but, more essentially, as a “psychological fact” in his The Revolt of the Masses of 1930. The mass, speaking phenomenologically, is not an object but a way of appearing and of being. Whereas in former times, as Ortega put it, the “individuals who made up these multitudes existed,” they did not exist “qua multitude…. Each individual or small group occupied a place, his own, in country, village, town or quarter of the great city. Now, suddenly, they appear as an agglomeration, and looking in any direction our eyes meet with the multitudes.” Under this condition the individual is experienced as “undifferentiated from other men, but as repeating in himself a generic type” (104).

Marcel would take this analysis in a different direction than Ortega. The issue that’s most pressing for Marcel is what he calls “the growing depersonalization of human relationships” which is expressed in the concept of “the mass.” What, he asks, has brought about this condition and what is its meaning? Mass society as both philosophers speak of it signifies far more than the overwhelming number of persons who populate modern cities. Deeper than this is the mode in which human beings now appear to us—as the multitudes, as a thingly and quasi-material being that is without a name and a face, which is the same everywhere and impossible to elude. Since it is a psychological fact rather than a simple function of numbers, it is a phenomenon that characterizes the small town no less than the city. We find everywhere a “promiscuous closeness” which is the opposite of fraternity and “human beings increasingly separated from one another the more they are herded together” such as in “those enormous housing projects which spring up like mushrooms on the outskirts of big cities.” The “agglomeration” that “was yesterday the city” exercises an ever more powerful attraction on populations at the same time that they have become dehumanized and unliveable. One does not “dwell,” in Heidegger’s sense, in the city of today but disappears into the throng, and indeed one is the throng, as are our “neighbors.” The bonds between persons become ever more fleeting, and if we often complaint that our sociability and our dignity have been undermined by this, or by the perception of oneself as “a mere statistical unit, … a specimen among an infinity of others,” it’s not obvious what any of us can do about this. What can the individual do when even the opinions one has and “which he thinks are his own, are merely reflections of the ideas accepted in the circles he frequents and handed round in the press which he reads daily” (Homo Viator, 20). Even our protest is the protest that “one” has, and we submit to the mass even in our resistance.

An example of the kind of social and spiritual deterioration that he believes has occurred is the condition of communication that is becoming increasingly mediated by technology, a trend of course that has taken on radical momentum in more recent decades. He worries especially about the effects that mass communication technology—he mentions radio in particular—was beginning to have. For us today, Marcel’s worries about radio in the early 1950s might be considered amusing when we compare it to the kind of technology we now use. Radio, he remarks, along with other forms of technological innovation now make possible the manipulation of public opinion on a scale that is unprecedented in history: “How shall we be able to grasp the fact that radio is one of the palpable factors making for our present spiritual degradation? I should be tempted to ask whether man, at the level, which is nearly always a low level, of his personal ambition, is not usurping a prerogative which looks like a distorted analogue, a caricature, of divine omnipresence. A Hitler or a Mussolini, speaking into the microphone, could really seem invested with the divine privilege of being everywhere at once” (39). Mass communication technology makes it remarkably easy to propagandize, to degrade the tone of discourse and to diminish its message, and it serves the interests of whoever commands it. It contributes to the depersonalization of social life by cheapening any thought that uses it as a medium. The art of letter writing, for example, all but disappeared when communication became electronic and instant. Technical innovation in this area was accompanied by a depersonalization and standardization of expression. The more technology intervenes between speakers, the more the level, tone, and style of communication deteriorate, yet the imperative toward ever greater convenience, control, and personal availability knows no limits. “Then there is the Press,” to take another example, “whose degraded character can never be denounced resolutely enough” (Homo Viator, 80).

This critique is part of a much broader line of argument regarding modern technology as a whole, and it’s broadly consistent with Heidegger’s critique. In addition to the narrowing of

perspective and self-understanding that it brings about, technology is becoming a totalizing and alternativeless system of thought. Modern technology demands of “the individual who takes advantage of it without having had any share in the effort at overcoming difficulties of which such a progress is the culmination, the payment of a heavy price, of which a certain degradation at the spiritual level is the natural expression” (40). Marcel, of course, isn’t calling on us to get rid of our radios or just about any other form of technology. What he wants is to harness technology and to subordinate it to self-mastery. He hopes to remind us of what happens to the human spirit when values of technical mastery and control become ends in themselves. The confusion of means and ends becomes a common phenomenon when the preoccupation with the former eclipses the more important matter of the goals that technology ostensibly serves.

The alienation of the individual within mass society is a pressing issue in a great deal of the existential thought of this period, and Marcel is hardly alone in his worries. The growing homogeneity of human beings, the uniformity of beliefs and values, the disappearance of local customs and rural life, the loss of human scale, the frantic pace of modern life and a host of related phenomena are frequent topics of discussion in this general movement. So is the disappearance of the individual into its socio-economic function. In “a world more and more completely given over to technical processes,” human beings “tend more and more to be reduced to their own strict function in a mechanized society, though with a margin of leisure reserved for amusements from which the imagination will be more and more completely banished” (53). One’s identity ever more is one’s contribution to the machinery of mass civilization and the enormous institutions on which it depends. Stripped of its function, the human being becomes essentially purposeless and worthless. There is a malaise and a pessimism, Marcel believes, that emerges from such a society, a sense that “this world is empty, it rings hollow; and if it resists this temptation it is only to be extent that there come into play from within it and in its favor certain hidden forces which are beyond its power to conceive or to recognize” (The Philosophy of Existentialism, 12). Whatever elements of meaning or transcendence still exist in such a world are matters that fall outside its conceptual framework, while what lies within it are means without ends and a civilization without spirit. The rhythm of our lives is no longer that of life itself but of the machine. A constant acceleration and sense of haste “prevent the slow sedimentation of habitus which seems surely to have been from all time the essential condition at the origin of all realities connected with the family” (Homo Viator, 79). The fundamental situation of daily life is reflected in the decay of family, the impersonality and anonymity of public life, the decline of fraternity and community, and a sense of cynicism and emptiness regarding our social existence in general. Marcel would speak of “a widely diffused pessimism, at the level of the sneer and the oath rather than that of sighs and weeping” as “a fundamental given fact about contemporary humanity, … a sort of physical nausea at life” of a kind that other existential writers were also noting (42).

Marcel isn’t denying that there remain connections that bind us to one another in the midst of a society that is in many ways dehumanized, but what he’s trying to describe is the nature of these connections. “To encounter someone” in a genuine sense “is not merely to cross his path but to be, for the moment at least, near to or with him. To use a term I have often used before, it means being a co-presence” (Creative Fidelity, 12). Marcel’s distinction here is of the essence: the mass is that with which we cross paths. We do not encounter it so much as skirt by it and if possible avoid it altogether. It doesn’t speak to us and we don’t listen. One is not “with” the mass but is confronted by it as subject to object, perhaps as an obstacle, a means to an end, or an object of reckoning and prediction. Only if certain conditions are in place do we genuinely encounter another human being in the sense of listen to and be potentially transformed by the claim that it makes. The mass is the abstract anonymity that surrounds us, in the midst of which relations of love and friendship remain possible and urgent but elusive.

Marcel would always be a philosopher of the concrete or of the concrete experience that he contrasted with the “spirit of abstraction” and an advocate of concrete forms of sociability that transcend the mundane. There’s a wisdom that grasps together in thought the concrete and the transcendent, and it’s this that he’s seeking. The nature of this wisdom and its perilous condition at the present time he summarizes in a short book titled The Decline of Wisdom: “common sense is not so very different from wisdom. It is a kind of deposit left by wisdom: instead of drifting about it settles in the average human being, but only for so long as certain sociological conditions are maintained. The nature of these conditions is shown by the word ‘common’ itself. There is and can be no common sense where there is no common life or common notions, that is to say where there are no longer exist any organic groups such as the family, the village, and so on. Yet the collectivization we are witnessing in every field is happening at the cost or even in contempt of these organic groups…. For we are confronted everywhere with enormous agglomerations which are increasingly mechanized, so that the individuals are linked in much the same way as the parts of a machine” (The Decline of Wisdom, 46-7). Our everyday experience of social life is of a process of collectivization, mechanization, and calculation while wisdom is something of an irrelevance or an anachronism. Where is wisdom or love to be found when our very existence is spoken of as a matter of material causes and effects and our social world consists in so many Hobbesian atoms? The sense of the common, of shared norms, a common tradition and common sense, has been severely degraded, he believes. Marcel’s conception of wisdom is certainly bound up with his Christianity. As he would write in Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, “All my own thinking has aimed at such a wisdom, at least since my conversion to Catholicism,” a wisdom that is “not properly speaking humanistic” but that is “grounded to some extent in an action emanating from … spiritual powers which are not at all situated within the orbit of the human world” (Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, 198). After his conversion, all his reflections would have to be interpreted in this light, yet it remains that the wisdom he speaks about isn’t otherworldly but concrete and inseparable from this sense of the common. It is this sense, he believes, that’s disappearing in a mechanized and utilitarian social order, a civilization the leaves no place for transcendence and the “deep sense of piety towards life” the absence of which “seems to us to bear the undeniable mark of sin” (60).

A mark of the degradation of social life is when the mass institutions on which we have come to depend approach all matters as “problems” in need of solutions rather than what Marcel prefers to call “mysteries.” The important distinction between a problem and a mystery turns upon the nature of the relation between the matter that we’re questioning and the questioner him- or herself. A problem is something that we stand to as subject to object; it is the obstacle in one’s path, a set of objective conditions to which one stands at arm’s length. It doesn’t enter into our being and may be solved or not solved without in any meaningful way transforming us. In the encounter with mystery the subject-object split disappears and the matter that we’re questioning or thinking about is inseparable from the being that we are. Love is a mystery in this sense of the word, as are life and death. To characterize it as a mystery doesn’t mean that we know nothing about it but that to question it is to question ourselves. The mystery is not an object before us, to which we stand in some distanced relation, but is a part of our existence. In his words, “A problem is something met with that 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, 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” (Being and Having, 100). It’s a common tendency, Marcel thinks, to try to transform a mystery into a problem and so to degrade it. There’s nothing sacred in a life that consists exclusively of problems in need of solution, nor in a social order that is devoid of mystery and organized around a set of utilitarian problems. Something inhuman characterizes such a society: an absence of depth, meaning, and community. A problem may have considerable complexity, but what it lacks is the depth dimension that the notion of mystery properly captures. A society that is organized around the supply of mass needs and the functioning of mass institutions is existentially adrift. I’ll return to this later.

When techniques rule our ways of thinking about all aspects of human existence, mystery is abolished. The basic act of being with or listening to another human being involves the crossing of a frontier and being “co-present” with the other. If institutions are incapable of this, individuals are not, yet our capacity for this is weakened when our way of thinking in general is reduced to the technological and the utilitarian. “The human condition,” as Marcel puts it, “… seems to be in some ways dependent on the very manner in which it is understood” (73). When it’s understood solely in the language of materialism and technology then “man is thought of on the model of a machine” (136), an object of some scientifically knowable and institutionally manageable kind. As the person is “conscripted into an auxiliary bureaucracy” and “more and more easily reducible to an index card,” its mode of being is transformed (135). It becomes the thing it is spoken of and treated as. The mass is not a person. It has no dignity of its own, no mystery or capacity for freedom. It is an entity with a standard set of needs and a function in the socio-economic mechanism. It is the same everywhere, an abstraction made real, while what is or was really real, an unrepeatable individual, goes into eclipse. The abstractions and statistics that institutions reckon with correspond to nothing in the world, as a matter of phenomenological fact. The problem of unemployment or health care, speaking concretely, consists in the lived circumstances and experiences of particular persons, yet this obvious fact again goes into eclipse when the spirit of abstraction prevails. The human being is neither a case, a demographic, a file, nor a statistic. You yourself are more than a biological or psycho-social entity, but only if you think of yourself as such or as the bearer of a dignity that belongs to you as a concrete individual. By contrast, the mass can only be conceived as an abstraction of one kind or another and can have no substantial reality of its own. It remains a “psychological fact” and a way of appearing under conditions of modern life. One doesn’t perceive the mass any more than one perceives any other abstraction. We perceive concrete persons, and this is all there is to a society, yet too seldom do we perceive them as such.

Marcel’s ethics is an “attempt to recall us to the feeling for our neighbor and the consciousness of our immediate surroundings,” one that cultivates attachments beyond the utilitarian and that have a sense of mystery and transcendence about them. It is the experience of concrete others, not the mass, that Marcel places his faith in, experiences of love, fraternal association and “new aristocracies” of the spirit, “groups managing to form themselves according to the circumstances around an institution, a personality, a living idea, and so on.” Groups bound together by some shared commitment, he believes, are unlikely to degenerate into the kind of herd organization that he criticizes and remain possible sites of fraternity (The Existential Background of Human Dignity, 130).

Let’s have a closer look now at several of the major themes that Marcel discusses in Part 1 of this three-part book, beginning with what he calls “the spirit of abstraction.” Marcel tells us in the Preface that he has a “horror” of abstraction, or of abstraction fetishism, and also a horror of violence. He also suspects that the two are connected. What does he mean by this? He’ll argue that it’s impossible to build true peace in the world on the basis of abstractions, and that Christianity is “the only authentic peacemaker” (3). As noted above, he does try to bracket his religious views in his philosophical writings, although in places these views do come to the surface. Most of his philosophical arguments don’t depend on his Christian beliefs. He isn’t going to try to persuade us in this book to become Christians, or not overtly.

What is “the spirit of abstraction” and why does he oppose it? A bit of background: in the first half of the twentieth century and for some time before this, philosophy or much of it had taken a turn toward various and overlapping forms of rationalism, not only in the form of Cartesian (and other) rationalist epistemology but positivism, logical empiricism, metaphysical materialism, psychological behaviorism, moral/political utilitarianism, and so on. In the process, Marcel believes, philosophy or much of it had become a prisoner of its own abstractions, concepts that are either false or that oversimplify or otherwise distort our experience of the world. The idea was taking hold, especially in the English-speaking philosophical world, that truth in general can be reduced to a set of abstract formulas and knowledge was coming to be regarded as purely a matter of scrupulously following a technique. Marcel’s response to this would be that knowledge cannot be reduced to a formula, a method, or a set of abstractions. Instead he wants to “preserve the primacy of the concrete,” where by concrete he means lived experience in the phenomenological sense of the term. In all his philosophical writings his aim is to “grasp reality in its concreteness,” in opposition to metaphysical views that reduce reality to a set of rational categories. The common mistake many philosophers and others make is to carve up the universe in terms of some set of supposedly rational categories such as (in metaphysics) essence, substance, the thing-in-itself, (in politics) democracy, the individual, the citizen, class, the nation, rights, (in ethics) happiness, duty, virtue, and then to regard the categories themselves as more real or ultimate than the world as we actually experience it. An especially important example for Marcel is metaphysical materialism, according to which all of reality is a system of matter in motion, and all motions can be understood in causal/mechanistic terms. Hobbes’ Leviathan is an excellent example of this, where his position is that all our actual experience of the world must be explained within, or reduced to, materialist concepts. If anything within our experience conflicts with these concepts, our perceptions need to be corrected or our experience needs to be brought into line with materialist categories. It’s these categories or abstractions that reveal what is really real.

Marcel, a phenomenological thinker, holds that experience itself is what reveals what is real; there is nothing more ultimate than our first-hand, lived experience of the world. Our task as philosophers is to describe that experience phenomenologically, as Heidegger and Stein also believe, not to formulate abstract concepts that soar above the world we see and that are supposedly more real than what we see. What we mustn’t do is reduce or explain all human experience in terms of our abstractions. By the twentieth century we have begun not only to use abstractions to explain what we see but to idolize them by declaring them more real or more ultimate than what is actually real, which is objects of experience as we experience them. Other examples are logic and mathematics, where many philosophers (e.g., the logical positivists) now regard these as a kind of transcendent realm of pure reason or a higher order of being than the world of sense. This amounts to an idolatry of logic and math or of the abstractions that they employ. These are useful abstractions, undoubtedly, but they are still abstractions; they are ideas, and they’re not ultimate.

What does the spirit of abstraction have to do with violence? Consider a soldier on the battlefield during World War I or II. Looking across the battlefield at the human beings pointing guns in his direction, who or what does he see? He sees “the enemy.” Who or what is “the enemy”? Is it John Smith? Mary Brown? An individual human being with a name, a family back home, a personal history, and so on? If I see the enemy in this way, as a human being like me, it’s very unlikely that I’ll be able to do what I need to do, which is to try to kill him before he kills me. To carry out that task, I need to see him as the enemy, a general category or abstraction, and not as a particular human being. This is an extreme example, but you can easily imagine more everyday examples. I may see another human being as a fascist, a communist, a terrorist, or another of the many abstractions that we project onto human beings and which make it easier to do violence to them. The spirit of abstraction removes a deep psychological obstacle to doing violence to another human being.

Marcel is going to argue that what Nietzsche called “the death of God” has left human existence bereft of meaning, or it has left an existential vacuum in our culture and within the hearts and minds of all of us. We begin to see how Marcel intends to fill that void with the distinction already alluded to between a “problem” and a “mystery.” Let’s have a closer look at this distinction. Think, for example, about the concept of evil. What is the nature of evil? This is a commonly asked question: what is “the problem of evil”? Today, for example, terrorism is commonly said to be a problem, and specifically an evil. For Marcel, we should think about this concept of a problem. Thinking and knowledge are very often understood on a model of problem-solving, where to think is to be in search of a solution to a problem, and to know is to possess this solution. In courses on “critical thinking” the model is usually one of problem-solving and rule-following (avoid these fallacies, follow these rules, adopt this technique and your thinking will be where it needs to be). Marcel will ask, what is a problem, and is evil an example of one? His answer is going to be that we need to think about the nature of evil differently or not on the problem-solving model.

For Marcel, evil is a mystery. What he means by this is not that it’s utterly unknown or unknowable. The concept of mystery lies at the heart of Marcel’s philosophy, and he doesn’t put it forward as a religious concept. He gives us a concise description of this on page 67: “What, then, is mystery? In contrast to the world of the problematic which, I repeat, is wholly apart from me and in front of me, the world of mystery is a place where I find myself committed, and, I would add, not partially committed, not committed in regard to some determinate and specialized aspect of myself, but committed as a whole man in so far as I achieve a unity which, for that matter, by its very definition, can never be grasped in itself, grasped as something apart from me; this unity is not an object of knowledge but of my creative impulse and my faith. As soon as we postulate the notion of mystery, we abolish that frontier between what lies in the self and what lies before the self.” Evil is a mystery in this sense of the word, as is love, freedom, guilt, suffering, and the deeper dimensions of human life in general. A mystery is something that I don’t hold at arm’s length; it’s not something I confront from the outside, like an obstacle in my path which I must get over or around. The latter is of the nature of a problem: something external to me, like an obstacle in my path which I need to get over my means of a technique which any rational person could follow.

To say that evil is a mystery means that I’m always already implicated or involved in it. It’s a part of me, or it belongs to my experience of being human. To be human means in part to find oneself in the midst of evil—and also in the midst of good. Here the distinction between what is within me and what is outside me breaks down. Evil is both within and without, or (better) it’s neither; the distinction between within and without doesn’t seem to apply here. This is a commonly asked question about evil: is there some being or force out there in the external world that is evil itself? The question, do you believe there is evil in the world, usually means do you believe in some entity or force apart from yourself. For Marcel, the answer is that evil is both out there and in here, or it’s neither/nor. To say that evil is a problem entails that we might one day solve it—if only we discover the appropriate solution or technique and follow it carefully. Marcel’s reply will be there is no getting beyond evil or eradicating it once and for all, and there is no technique that will allow us to triumph over it. All I can do with evil is to cope with it and to rise above it the best way I can, but there are limits here.

Marcel’s larger point is that in an age of science, we have lost the concept of mystery altogether, except for religious believers. In a scientific worldview, there are only problems that await solutions, so a mystery can only be a problem that has yet to be solved. For example, black holes appear to be a scientific mystery, but they’re not in Marcel’s sense of the word. What scientists mean when they say black holes are a mystery is that they haven’t discovered their true nature yet, in all the detail that they seek; not all the facts have been discovered. Notice how often scientists speak this way: they commonly speak of what they know—meaning what facts they have discovered and what problems they have solved—and of what they don’t know “yet”—what problems they have yet to solve satisfactorily but presumably will someday. For Marcel, a mystery is not like this. It isn’t going to be solved, because it isn’t a problem. It belongs to my very condition in the world; it always characterizes my experience—my whole being, not just a part of myself—and it’s something I’m forced to deal with in the best way I can.

Marcel’s conviction is that there is something deeply wrong with modern culture; it is existentially adrift, and part of what this means is that we have lost the notion and the sense of mystery. In principle, we now believe that we can know everything. We commonly believe (1) that all knowledge is a matter of problem-solving, and (2) that all problems can and will be solved sooner or later through the application of rational techniques. Marcel is not interested in the second claim, only the first one. In confronting a mystery, I’m not solving a problem. Instead, I myself am called into question. The mystery and the questioner are inseparable. It follows that no one can solve this matter for me. I personally need to manage my own way, and without rules to follow. There is therefore no “solution” to the “problem of evil,” no single, rational way of dealing with the fact of evil in the world and within my own nature.

Freedom and threats to it in the modern world

Marcel will say that freedom is also a mystery, not a problem. He now engages in some social/cultural critique, although not exactly in the usual way of a political philosopher. Marcel is a phenomenological and an existential thinker, one therefore who wants to understand the human condition in the broadest sense. His fundamental question is, what does it mean to exist as a human being, and this includes reflecting on the current state of social life. The main questions that now concern him are, what is freedom, what conditions make freedom genuinely possible, what conditions threaten our freedom, and especially what underlying habits of thought are leading us to surrender our freedom unknowingly? For Marcel, human freedom is in deep trouble in the middle of the twentieth century, and if he were alive today he would be saying the same thing, with some variation. The threats to human freedom in the modern west are many, and for the most part they escape our notice. The more invisible these threats are, the more insidious and dangerous they are.

The basic problem he sees is that our freedom is eroding—very slowly, almost imperceptibly—due to conditions that usually have some kind of rationale or tangible utilitarian payoff. One such threat that he mentions at some length is the focus on equality. Marcel isn’t claiming that equality has no value; his worry bears less upon equality than strong forms of egalitarianism, especially the kind of Marxism that had become fashionable among French intellectuals in the post-war period and which remains so to this day. It’s often in the name of equality that democratic states increasingly take away individual freedoms, and the consequences of this, he believes, are devastating and largely invisible. One consequence of egalitarianism is that we are becoming not only more equal in terms of our socio-economic condition but more and more similar to each other, and not only in terms of our outward circumstances (how much money we have), but (much more important) in terms of who we are. Increasingly we all have the same possessions; it’s important to most people that they have the same things that their neighbors have and that they’re able to keep up in the competition for wealth and possessions. A consequence of this is that we are becoming more and more alike: we value the same things, act in the same ways, have the same thoughts, etc. Even our inner lives become conformist and unimaginative, the same as everyone we know.

Marcel was never a Marxist (which largely explains why he is somewhat less well known than Sartre, who was a rather strident Marxist)—why not? Because political egalitarianism or socialism brings about a process of social and economic leveling of a kind that he finds uninspiring and base. This kind of leveling reduces all of us to the lowest common denominator. What socialism requires is a massive and “oppressive administrative rule” over human lives, and for little genuine benefit. The benefits, he believes, are purely imaginary: “Where does the real benefit lie? It is not a material benefit. It is an imaginary and sentimental one, and the fantasies and sentiments to which it appeals are of the basest sort: the satisfaction which this kind of equality affords me is the opportunity of feeling, if I am exposed to constraints and vexations, or am in an actual state of wretchedness, that my neighbor is in the same boat. A very negative satisfaction, it will be said…. [I]t is in fact—as Nietzsche and Scheler have seen, and have shown with wonderful clearness—the satisfaction of an aspiration whose basis lies in the resentment felt by man against his neighbor. This satisfaction, in fact, is the most degraded, the most perverted shape that can be taken by the interest that a man always has in his neighbor: it is a wretched and perverted substitute for that love of one’s neighbor as oneself of which the Gospels speak” (21). Socialism, on his view of it, is an expression of resentment against those who are better off than oneself, and equality is a fine-sounding veneer that conceals this resentment.

A second threat to our freedom is the love of security, or as we would now say, “safety.” Modern life is increasingly unpredictable and insecure whether it be economically, politically, militarily, or what have you, but especially economically. We all fear unemployment and poverty, among other things, and often in the extreme. Where do we now look for security or safety? To whom or what do we turn? Where the individual used to find security in their own work, in the people we know, and in religion, we now look more or less exclusively to the state. Increasingly we regard the state as the sole protector of our security in its various forms. Think of how often we now hear the words security and safety: “national security,” “economic security,” “energy security,” “public safety,” “medical safety,” and so on. Marcel will say this: the quest for security is an illusion, and especially when we look to the state. Why so? Because human existence itself, universally, is fraught with insecurity. This is not a problem that needs to be solved; it is our condition. This fact about our existence is not a particularly pleasant thing to think about, so we evade it and embark on a quest for security that is an illusion. In the name of security we’re now prepared to sacrifice a great deal of our freedom, and we’ve already done so. You can think of more recent examples than the ones he mentions (they are all around us), but Marcel’s main example of a contemporary threat to freedom will surprise us. It is the rise of modern technology.

Modern technology

Many existential thinkers of the early and middle decades of the last century were writing about modern science and the new forms of technology that they were witnessing. We have discussed Heidegger’s worries about this, and Marcel would be among those who were thinking along broadly similar lines. Marcel is of two minds about twentieth-century technology. Obviously, he points out, technology is a sign of the progress of human reason. The practical benefits of the technology that surrounds us are innumerable, primarily in the form of making our lives easier and more comfortable. Remember that he was writing this seventy years ago, so try to remember the state of western technology in the early 1950s and compare that to what it is today. You can imagine what he would say now about computers, the internet, social media, the ubiquity of screens, etc.

We all see the benefits of this technology, so there’s not much need for him to point this out. What he does need to point out is what we don’t see, which is the many ways that technology now threatens our freedom, and in ways that go largely unnoticed or that we regard as the small price we pay for convenience and security. Marcel will say, it is not a small price. It is our freedom we are losing. What does he mean by this?

Let’s begin with the concept of freedom itself. The title of Chapter 1 is “What is a Free Man?” Remember now his opposition to the spirit of abstraction. Freedom is not an abstraction, or an abstract principle alone. We won’t be able to articulate a purely formal analysis of the concept of freedom. It’s best understood in the context of actual social situations. Freedom “in itself” is a concept that is empty of meaning, so let’s investigate what freedom means in the context of the twentieth-century west. Is post-war Europe free? Obviously, Nazi Germany had posed a massive threat to that freedom, but the war was now over. Are we therefore free? His answer will be (1) yes and no, (2) we are less free than we think we are, (3) the threats to our freedom are increasing, (4) we don’t seem very worried about this, and (5) we should be. For one, humanity for the first time in history now faces the possibility of complete extinction thanks to nuclear weapons. Marcel was obviously worried about this, but he was worried about something else as well, which is what he calls “techniques of human degradation.” He writes, “It is obvious that as soon as one begins to speak of techniques of degradation, one cannot help calling up for the reader in the first place the notion of the massive and systematic employment of such techniques with which the Nazis made us familiar, particularly in their concentration camps. Perhaps it might be useful here to make a sort of preliminary attempt at definition: in a restricted sense, I understand by ‘techniques of degradation’ a whole body of methods deliberately put into operation in order to attack and destroy in human persons belonging to some definite class or other their self-respect, and in order to transform them little by little into mere human waste products, conscious of themselves as such, and in the end forced to despair of themselves, not merely at an intellectual level, but in the very depths of their souls” (30).

Nietzsche’s statement that humanity is in its death-throes now means that our freedom and our very humanity are jeopardized by these techniques of degradation. What are these techniques? He begins with an obvious illustration: totalitarianism. In every totalitarian country, certain individuals are compelled to act in violation of their conscience, for example, being forced to serve in the military and various forms of psychological manipulation, such as being forced to confess to crimes that a person didn’t commit. A more obvious example is the Nazi concentration camps. Obviously we need look no further for a technique of degradation, but Marcel asks us to look more closely at the phenomenon of the concentrations camps. We all know that six million people were murdered, but his question is how were the prisoners treated before they were murdered? The dehumanization that happened in the death camps went far beyond simple killing. First, the guards forced or manipulated the prisoners into abusing other prisoners, and so degrading them in their own eyes: “One can see that, for the torturers, it was not a matter of immersing their victims in material conditions so abject that they were bound, in very many cases, to acquire from them the habits of animals; more subtly, it was a matter of degrading these victims morally by encouraging them to spy upon each other and by fomenting among the deported prisoners not only mutual resentment, but mutual suspicion; in short, of poisoning the wells of human relationship so that a prisoner who should have been, to another prisoner, a comrade and a brother, became instead an enemy, a demon, an incubus” (32). The prison guards themselves, like all persecutors, humiliated their victims and did not just kill them. Really to humiliate someone means to humiliate them in their own eyes by stripping away from them their basic concept of themselves and their dignity. The victim must recognize their own nothingness. It was not a handful of Nazi leaders alone who perpetrated the Holocaust. It would not have been possible without masses of soldiers, police, prison guards, bureaucrats, scientists, and functionaries of many different kinds. The example of totalitarianism shows something important about the human being itself, which is that “man depends, to a very great degree, on the idea he has of himself” (14), that is, who I am, to a very important extent, depends on who I take myself to be. Ordinarily, I take myself to be a free, rationally autonomous being. When the state, or anyone else, strips away from you the idea that you have of yourself, it strips away your freedom and your humanity as well. This is how human beings are degraded and our freedom is lost, by depriving us of our dignity, our sense of self, and our conscience—or by forcing us to act against our conscience as totalitarian states always do. Our freedom lies largely in our conscience and in our creativity. As he writes, “it is insofar as he is a creator, at however humble a level, that any man at all can recognize his own freedom” (17).

What does this have to do with technology? Consider this desire to humiliate. This isn’t a desire that is unique to Nazis or torturers. It isn’t unique to any time or place; it is probably universal. What is new and unique in the twentieth century is the ease with which this desire can be met. The methods of torture, death, and humiliation have become readily available, especially to states, and once the methods are available it is only a matter of time before they are used. Modern technology in general has given rise to the technological imperative: technology demands to be used. We usually think of technology as a tool that serves our purposes, and purposes that the user had before acquiring the technology. For example, we need to travel from place to place, so we buy a car. We need to communicate with people, so we buy a phone. But what we now find is that technology itself, once it is acquired, demands to be used. Consider the computer: pretty much everyone now owns one, even though no one used to, even just a short time ago. Have our purposes changed that much in only a generation or two, to the point where now our lives have become highly dependent on this machine? Many people now wouldn’t know how to get by without their computer, or their phone, while only a couple of decades ago, no one had one and—more than that—no one needed one (or phones didn’t do everything they now do). No one was complaining that they were unable to do the things that computers and phones would later do. Technology seems to create desires in us: to own a thing and to use it. We’ll often think: I spent a lot of money on this thing, so I better get my money’s worth. Before phones could take pictures, who ever said to themselves: this damn phone, it doesn’t take pictures; I need a separate device for that. The answer is no one. But once we possess a gadget or a machine of virtually any kind, we become immediately convinced that we can’t live without it.

Consider now a different example: nuclear weapons. Do we need them? We might say that during the Cold War we needed them in order to act as a deterrent against the Soviet Union, but what about now? Many will say we still need them to act as a deterrent against any present or future enemies. But do we really need them? In general, we don’t destroy technology. We might not use it, but we rarely give it up. Think next of all the technology that people now own: a car or two, a computer or two, a couple of TVs, maybe a radio, an ipod, smartphone, various household appliances, etc. All of these things are new, historically speaking. Now here’s a homework assignment: try to get someone you know to give up even one of these things. Good luck to you. We have become dangerously dependent on technology, and technology that demands to be used. Technology begins to hold a kind of power over us.

Technology, Marcel tells us, cannot promote peace. There is no technology of peace, although there is a vast technology of war. A pervasive attitude today—among scientists, technologists, and the general public—is that if it can be done, it should be, which creates a sense of inevitability that once the technology exists it will be used, and this includes military technology. Technology is coming to dominate every aspect of our lives. It is getting harder and harder to find any aspect of our existence that technology does not reach into, with the consequence that our lives become deprived of any sense of mystery. It begins to appear that human existence in general is subject to our control, that we will one day be able to control nature perfectly, to control social relations, and to control our existence in general. This even seems to many like a kind of ideal. For Marcel, if this day were ever to come, it would mean that we had surrendered everything that makes us human: our freedom, our dignity, our self-reliance. Consider the old value of self-reliance: do the various machines that we own make us more self-reliant or less? If it seems that they make us more so, this is an illusion. What do you do when any of your machines stop working? Can you fix them yourself? Only a technician can fix them. You can’t fix it, and you didn’t build it, and you probably don’t understand its inner workings. You only know how to use it, and this makes us ever more reliant on the technologists and technicians. So the self-reliance and autonomy we think we now have is an illusion; we are less autonomous than we ever were.

Recall from above Marcel’s remarks about the radio—nowadays we could add TV, the internet, social media, etc. What problem could Marcel possibly have with radio? Why does he say that “radio is one of the palpable factors making for our present spiritual degradation”? (39) Marcel will say this: radio—let’s say technology of mass communication in general—makes the manipulation of public opinion remarkably easy. He mentions the example of state propaganda on the radio, while a more contemporary example would be state-controlled TV (such as the CBC) and the internet. His basic idea is this: if the state can control the “information” or “misinformation” (think of how often we now hear these works, often from government) that the people have access to then it can control their perceptions, their beliefs, their attitudes, and their behavior. They have often been very successful in doing just that, and not only in the days of World War II. This remains a commonplace in the world’s remaining dictatorships. In free countries too, state control of TV is common, albeit in a subtler form. Is the CBC politically neutral in its news coverage? It’s supposed to be, and it also claims to be. Is it really? People who work at the CBC (or CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, NPR, Fox, etc.) would be horribly offended if we compared their journalistic practices to the propaganda efforts of the world’s dictatorships. You can judge this for yourself, but the claim of such organizations to be objective invites skepticism. Again, Marcel is not advocating that we get rid of the machines. Rather, he is advocating that “every kind of outward technical progress ought to be balanced in many by an effort at inner conquest, directed towards an ever greater self-mastery” (40).

The title of Chapter 4 is “Technical Progress and Sin.” Like mystery, sin is a word that has been basically abolished from both scientific and philosophical discourse. Only religion continues to speak of sin, but for Marcel this is a word that we ought to hold onto even if we’re not religious. He’s not saying that technology is a sin, or that using it is. What he wants is to get us thinking in non-technological ways about technology and unscientific ways about science. Technology is self-justifying: it makes life easy, efficient, comfortable, and entertaining. It provides efficient means of satisfying many of our ends, but it’s exclusively about means. What about our ends? These have been all but banished from rational discourse too, such that ends now go without saying. The question, why do we need this particular technology, is now seen as ridiculous. In technological ways of thinking, it is only means that count: how can we do this or that, not whether we ought to. There is no place for something like wisdom in technological discourse. Even philosophy is no longer about the love of wisdom; it has become a technique. Also, techniques and technologies are no longer experienced as means at all but have become ends in themselves, or quasi-ends. In principle, a technique is always subordinate to the purpose that it serves, but what we find with modern technology is that this is no longer the case. It begins to appear as if technology serves itself, and that I don’t “use” it at all. It begins to have a kind of power over me, and I cease to be an agent or a user at all.

Back now to the concept of sin: consider the horrors of WWII. How are we to understand the atrocities of that time? How can we possibly wrap our minds around the phenomenon that was the Holocaust? Remember, this is a very recent memory for Marcel, not some distant historical event. What kind of things can be said about the Holocaust, beyond merely relating information about what happened and who did what? We might say the Holocaust was an injustice, a violation of human rights on a very large scale, a genocide. This is all true, but the problem with these phrases is that they don’t capture the enormity of what happened in the Nazi death camps, nor does any other concept except one: sin. He is using the word sin, of course, in the familiar Judeo-Christian sense but also in the sense of what the Greeks called hubris, which is an excessive pride or arrogance that lacks any sense of our own limits and which is displeasing to the Greek gods. The concept of sin, he notes, has essentially dropped out of our modern scientific-technological vocabulary, and along with it we have lost what he calls “a deep sense of piety towards life” (60). Consider the idea of piety. Here’s another old religious concept which also has no place in scientific, technological, or rational discourse. As he writes, “such words [as sin, piety, and mystery] have a futile and ridiculous air” today (75), but we also need them, for when we lose these concepts it’s not only our intellectual framework that is impoverished but our very existence. We become shallower and more self-centered when we think of our existence as a set of problems to be solved by technological means or as defined by the efficient pursuit of our subjective ends. Human life comes to appear as merely a pursuit of pleasure, comfort, convenience, security, and this is exactly what Marcel sees our lives as becoming. We have lost our piety in the sense of a deep reverence for much of anything. Nothing is sacred any longer, including our own lives. Our lives are without depth, and a reason for this is that we no longer revere anything. Even our ideals are hollow. Marcel mentions the example of speed. He’s talking about cars, but we could add computers. All our cars can go much faster than we will ever drive them, now why is this? Speed is supposed to be a means to an end; the end is arriving at our destination, and speed is a means of getting there in a timely way. But now speed is valued for its own sake, even when we will never actually drive that fast. He contrasts this need for speed with an ideal of travel that predates modern technology: pilgrimage. He refers to “the traveler of the old days, and particularly the pilgrim, for whom the very slowness of progress was linked to a feeling of veneration” (63). We no longer experience veneration for much of anything, nor do we have a sense of the sacred in the sense of that which in some way transcends the realm of the commonplace. Now everything is commonplace.

The transcendent and the immanent

Marcel tells us that “all philosophies of immanence have had their day” (16). What does he mean by this distinction? The immanent is that which pertains to the world of ordinary, everyday experience and a philosophy of immanence is one that remains within the limits of ordinary experience. An obvious example is empiricism in its various forms. Empiricism also appeals to experience, as Marcel does, however Marcel isn’t satisfied with experience in its mundane, ordinary form alone. There is more to our experience than the ordinary perception of objects. Our experience includes glimpses of what lies beyond the realm of the ordinary and the everyday, glimpses of the transcendent. The transcendent is not what lies beyond human experience; it lies very much within it, or the transcendent is capable of being experienced. Marcel understands the transcendent in vertical terms: it is a going beyond toward a height. He doesn’t mean going beyond experience itself toward some extra-experiential, mystical realm but a transcendence that is strictly within our experience.

The concept of transcendence has lost all meaning in modernity. In a scientific-technological order, everything that has being belongs on the same vertical level, and there are no longer any heights or depths in our experience. Marcel will speak of the transcendent as never completely comprehensible but as something we always strain to experience and never quite have within our grasp. He compares the experience of transcendence to the kind of strain we feel when in the night we hear a faint noise in the distance. We strain to make out what we are hearing. Our consciousness in a sense tries to go beyond itself; it strains itself toward something in the distance and in such a way that we don’t perfectly grasp what it is we are hearing: “There is an order where the subject finds himself in the presence of something entirely beyond his grasp. I would add that if the word ‘transcendent’ has any meaning it is here—it designates the absolute, unbridgeable chasm yawning between the subject and being, insofar as being evades every attempt to pin it down” (Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, 193). In a technological order, there is in principle nothing that is beyond our grasp. There are only problems yet to be solved, discoveries yet to be made. As he puts it, “human nature is tending to become more and more incapable of raising itself above desire and fear in their ordinary state, and of reaching in prayer or contemplation a state that transcends all earthly vicissitudes. And the word ‘earthly’ here is significant and revealing. It could be claimed that the perfecting of techniques is to all appearances making man more and more earthly; and we should note also that the more man becomes, as it were, riveted to the earth, the more he will be led to multiply and perfect the techniques which allow him to assure his grip on earth and, so to say, to assert his establishment there” (69).

For Marcel, the individual cannot genuinely be free unless one has an idea of what transcends one, and we no longer have this sense of anything that is above us or above me. We become self-centered as nothing transcends the self anymore but for such empty abstractions as race, the nation, class, etc. What Marcel is interested in is a way of thinking that goes beyond the boundaries of knowledge. Remember his stress on the importance of mystery and also mythos: human existence itself is a mystery, and to think about it requires that we go beyond the bounds of certainty. He isn’t claiming here that there is a knowledge that is beyond experience. He is claiming there is a thinking (about mystery) that is beyond knowledge, and that it is this kind of thinking that is ultimately important and that has been essentially squeezed out in an age of science, when all knowledge and all thinking are reduced to technique. Mystery and the transcendent have been banished to the realm of religion alone, and to the detriment of human experience. Our experience and our society become impoverished as a result, as we become obsessed with controlling life and everything that exists.

Let’s have a closer look now at some of the major themes of Part 2.

The philosopher and the contemporary world

Marcel has some rather harsh things to say about the state of philosophy during his time. Some of the criticisms he’ll make are still relevant, by the way, if not more so. He’s taking aim at certain trends that have gradually taken hold in the world of academic philosophy with some important exceptions, the exceptions being largely those philosophers who are working in the phenomenological and existential tradition (although some of them he isn’t impressed with either). What are his criticisms, and why is this important? It’s important because it gives us a clearer sense of Marcel’s own philosophy. Marcel, especially in the book we are reading, can often seem like he is putting forward purely negative criticisms of the times without putting forward much of an alternative, but we get a clue in this chapter as to what his alternative is. Essentially, he wants philosophy to be once again what it was for the Greeks, which is the love or pursuit of wisdom (sophia) and not merely a rather technical branch of the academic profession which he sees as escapist and removed from reality.

To be a philosopher in the modern world usually means to be a university professor of philosophy, but this was not always the case. (Recall that Marcel himself was never a university professor.) Philosophy and philosophers became absorbed into the university and the teaching profession gradually over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before that, philosophers made their living in a variety of ways, and while they were essentially thinkers and authors they were not necessarily educators. By the twentieth century nearly all philosophers had become university professors, which in some ways is a good thing and in other ways is not at all good. What’s the problem here? Consider again the ancient Greek ideal of wisdom. What has become of it? Are philosophers still lovers of wisdom? No, they are specialists and often technicians of a certain kind. The difference is that wisdom has a broad and open-ended meaning; it refers to a knowledge that has special importance for human existence. It includes a knowledge about Being, but especially it’s concerned with the nature of the good life for human beings. It’s something that philosophers pursued, not something that they ever captured completely in a system or a theory. Wisdom has a broad range to it; it is the good life that ancient philosophers wanted to know about, along with the nature of Being, justice, and some other things. Also, the great thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome were not specialists, nor were the great thinkers of early modern times. In the twentieth century they became specialists—with some exceptions—and today the norm is for a university professor (in philosophy or any other discipline) to specialize in political theory, ethical theory, logic, etc. The philosopher’s focus has become narrower and narrower over the centuries, such that it now appears as if it is no longer possible to answer the larger questions of human existence, even though these are the questions that matter most to all of us. What has made philosophy relevant and important from its inception is its ability to make contact with the world of concrete experience, and to help us understand that experience. Today philosophers have retreated into the ivory tower and become teachers, and what they teach is the intellectual systems of the past or the present. They prepare their students to write their exams, but they don’t change people’s lives, nor do they pursue wisdom anymore. They may well believe there’s no wisdom to be had, or that if there is, it isn’t the job of the philosopher to find it. In the process philosophy has become cut off from the real world of human experience and human affairs. It has become otherworldly in the sense that it created theoretical castles in the air that showed no connection with the world of concrete experience. The philosopher’s system can be understood as an “enclosed garden” which the philosopher tends to and loves, but it’s closed off from the outside world. Philosophers have become lovers of abstractions and turned their backs on the world. They speak increasingly technical vocabularies which only insiders can understand. Marcel’s view is that philosophers must speak to the world. Consider the fact that by the middle of the twentieth century the possibility of the total annihilation of human beings had become very real. What were the philosophers saying about this? Few of them said or wrote anything at all, and the ones who did mostly said it in technical vocabularies that only other professional philosophers could understand.

What, Marcel asks, are the duties of the philosopher in the modern world? We must begin, he says, by understanding the finitude of human knowledge: “Thus the very first duty of a philosopher is to have a clear sense of the limits of his own knowledge and to recognize that there are realms in which his lack of competence to make judgments is complete” (81). The specialist, for instance, shouldn’t make claims that go beyond the bounds of their specialty. Also, knowledge itself has limits, and we are losing sight of what these limits are. In principle, we now believe we can know everything, and we can’t. There are always going to be matters that escape our knowledge and our control, especially the whole realm of mystery and transcendence. We must think about these matters, even while realizing that we will never know the whole truth about them.

He then mentions his fellow existential writer Albert Camus, with whom he was not terribly impressed. Camus was arguing that the world and life in general are absurd. How, Marcel asks, does Camus know this? From what point of view could he possibly pronounce the world absurd? It could only be from a point of view outside of the world and outside of life. No human being can occupy in thought a point of view that is beyond this world or beyond their own experience. Marcel isn’t disagreeing with Camus entirely, however, and these two (what are usually classified as) existentialists have a good deal in common, including their views on the fundamental aims of philosophy. As Marcel writes, “there can be no philosophy worth considering that will not involve an analysis, of a phenomenological type, bearing on the fundamental situation of man. More clearly than their predecessors saw it, this has been seen especially by the best contemporary German philosophers, of whom one would mention first Scheler and next Landsberg, but also Jaspers and Heidegger…. [T]he essential task is to recognize, and also to make a reconnaissance of, this human situation, to explore it as thoroughly as possible” (90-1). Camus and the other existentialists would agree with this. Philosophy, they all held, must take as its aim an understanding of the fundamental situation of the human being in this world, or it must take an existential turn. Marcel would also speak of the philosopher as needing to be at once “in the world and out of the world” (91), where “in the world” means that the wisdom they seek must be worldly. We’re not building castles in the air as it’s the world of concrete experience that matters most. “Out of the world” means that we’re concerned with matters that transcend experience that is ordinary and commonplace.

He goes on to say that philosophers should also be combatting fanaticism in whatever forms it exists and they should also avoid unnecessary technicality in their writings, as we see in Marcel’s own writing. They should also avoid overspecialization and try to understand the human condition in general, from the root. They should also turn toward “essences” in the phenomenological sense of the term, i.e., they should describe human experience while trying to see beneath surfaces and to understand the human condition broadly and profoundly. Philosophy and religion, he says, must be kept relatively separate: “We must not bring in here the religious beliefs which a philosopher might privately hold, if, as well as being a philosopher, he were also, for instance, a Roman Catholic. The problem that we are discussing has no meaning at all unless we consider the philosopher either as a non-believer or as a man who, when he sets himself to philosophizing, puts his private religious beliefs aside” (88). I’m not sure that Marcel himself always follows this advice, but anyway, even if one believes that true philosophy and true religion coincide—as Marcel does—we can never demonstrate this with philosophical certainty. It’s not the philosopher’s role either to defend religion overtly or to attack it.

Finally, why is any of this important? Is Marcel only speaking to his philosopher colleagues about what he thinks of them? He is doing this, but his worries here are more important than this and concern not just the state of the academic profession but the fate of “civilization”: “I have a deep conviction, at least, that the fate of philosophy and that of civilization are directly and intimately linked. Perhaps one might say that between the world of techniques and that of pure spirituality, the mediation of the philosopher is becoming more and more indispensable. Otherwise, there is a danger of the technician’s attitude infringing on a domain that ought to remain inviolate” (97-8). The philosopher properly thinks in a realm that is intermediate between science/technology and spirituality. This kind of mediation is becoming more and more important at the same time that it’s going out of style or at a time when philosophers are becoming technicians and quasi-scientists themselves.

The idea of service and the depersonalization of human relations

Let’s think about the notion of service. What place is there for this idea in the modern world? The answer seems to be very little. The idea has all but disappeared from our vocabulary, largely in the name of equality: no person is properly a servant to another, for example, domestic servants have gone out of style. The idea of being a servant of any kind anymore now seems degrading. Not so long ago, there was thought to be honor in domestic service, and various other forms of service as well. Marcel notes that there are different senses of the verb “to serve.” Often service has a straightforward utilitarian meaning: a machine serves its user in the sense that it’s a mere means to its user’s ends and has no value or dignity of its own. A second sense of service is expressed in notions of public service and military service. This has a higher meaning and consists of serving an ideal or something that transcends myself. Consider the old notion of a politician as a public servant. Although we still use this term, we don’t usually think of politicians this way anymore. We tend to regard politicians as self-serving and power-hungry people, but the idea used to be that a politician’s raison d’etre is to serve their constituents and to serve certain political values, and this was thought to be a noble undertaking. Also, the notion of service in the modern world is increasingly associated with government. The “social services” now properly fall within the jurisdiction of the state.

Is there a problem in any of this? Marcel’s view is that indeed there is, and it has to do with a “contemporary attitude of mind” with which he isn’t thrilled. It’s an attitude of egalitarianism, or certain forms of it, and especially dehumanization. Let’s go back to the notion of service: back in the days when people used to have servants, what were the marks of a good servant? His answer is that a good servant has a kind of attachment to the employer, and it’s a similar kind of attachment that a doctor or a nurse has to their patients. A good nurse cares about the patient’s well being and isn’t just a hospital functionary. They have a function, of course, but the ideal of being a good nurse goes beyond their function. The problem Marcel sees is that functionaries or job-holders is what they are becoming. Many retired nurses talk this way about what has happened to their profession, that like so many others it has become depersonalized, coldly institutional, managerial, and bureaucratic, that it’s very difficult to cultivate any human bond between nurse and patient or between doctor and patient. In comparison with a century ago, doctors and nurses both spend far less time with their patients, and it’s not only hospitals but institutions in general that have become enormous, highly bureaucratic, and impersonal. You could easily say the same of universities and the relationship between professors and students. He calls this phenomenon “organizational giantism” (153): if you work for a giant institution, as more and more people do, it’s very hard to care about the people you see. One reason is because there are simply too many of them. For a nurse to care genuinely about their patients, it is important that there not be too many of them. Increasingly, we all see our jobs as mere means to an end, and the end is money. If our jobs involve some form of human service, it is a rather cold, impersonal form of service. If we are “servers” in a restaurant, we may be outwardly pleasant, but only because this is how one gets a good tip.

The larger problem that Marcel sees in these examples—and there are many others we could mention—is the increasing detachment in human relations. There is no longer any basis for attachment in mass society, no sense of fraternity. Consider this notion of fraternity: what is our response when a politician speaks of the need for fraternity or any kind of social unity or community, when they say things like “we are all in this together.” There is a note of falsity in this. We tend to balk at the idea, and to think, we are not in this together; I’m in this for me and you’re in it for you. When a politician says we need to unify, our common response is to suspect their real meaning is you need to get in line behind me. What has happened, Marcel asks, to fraternity? This is an old democratic ideal. Remember the motto of the French revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity. What has happened to fraternity, Marcel says, is that it has been undermined by equality. Remember his critique of socialism: it brings us all down to the same mediocre level. Equality, or egalitarianism, is a value that invites the individual to compare their lot (or their possessions) to the lot of their neighbors. It’s rather base to be forever comparing ourselves with others or to compare what we own with what others have. It invites envy, not fraternity. I judge my happiness according to whether I have as much stuff as the people I know. This makes us competitors to each other, which is about as far away from being brothers or sisters as we could be. For Marcel, the solution is to value equality (or egalitarianism, which is equality made into an idol) a little less and fraternity a lot more: “I think that I should be formulating my thoughts fairly exactly if I said that each of us has a duty to multiply as much as possible around him the bonds between being and being, and also to fight as actively as possible against the kind of devouring anonymity that proliferates around us like a cancerous tissue. But these bonds between being and being that I am speaking of cannot be anything else than what has traditionally been called ‘fraternity’” (155). It’s in the name of equality that the concepts of fraternity and service have all but disappeared, and a consequence of their disappearance is the increasing depersonalization of human relationships. The idea of commitment, attachment, or fidelity has become cheapened, and we see this in human relationships in general. They are increasingly fleeting and contingent on self-interest, without a larger sense of their meaning. In mass society human relations in general become cheapened and shallow.

The fanaticized consciousness

By the middle part of the twentieth century, fanaticism had become a very large problem. Marcel refers to it as an epidemic. What is its nature, and how might we overcome it? First, he suggests, let’s not speak of fanaticism—as if it were a kind of philosophy unto itself. There are fanatics who hold all sorts of opinions—political fanatics, religious fanatics, etc. Typically, it’s not the opinions themselves that are fanatical but the people who hold them, or the manner in which they hold whatever opinions they hold. Let’s speak instead, Marcel suggests, of “fanaticized consciousness.” What we call fanaticism should be thought of as a mode of consciousness, a way of being aware, and especially a way of being unaware. Marcel is offering here a phenomenological analysis of fanaticized consciousness. He’s trying to describe how the fanatic thinks, and what makes them fanatics, and it’s a matter that turns not upon the content of thought but the mode. First, he points out, the fanatic never thinks of himself as a fanatic—a committed person perhaps, but not a fanatic. It’s always someone else who is a fanatic, while I myself merely have convictions. Can we say that certain ideas lend themselves to fanaticism, maybe certain more extreme ideas? Marcel will say, only to a degree. We can be fanatical about our religion, but this doesn’t entail that the religion itself is fanatical. It’s impossible to separate religions that are inherently fanatical from those that are not, and the same can be said of political ideologies. Fanaticism requires some additional conditions, and the first is the presence of a group. One is not a fanatic alone. There must be a feeling of social unity or shared identity, and one that produces a sense of personal esteem or exaltation. In fanaticized consciousness there is always an us and a them, such that fanatics can see themselves as embroiled in a conflict with a demonized adversary. Usually, it’s conceived as a conflict between good and evil. But there is more to it than this.

Marcel returns to the idea of the masses, or mass society, which he refers to as a sickness of modern life or an existential malaise that is inherent to modern culture. What holds the masses together is not an idea, for they do not deliberately organize themselves into groups but find themselves already in the midst of an enormous agglomeration of human beings who are strangers to me. A kind of groupthink or herd mentality takes hold, and I begin to find comfort and security in the sheer number of strangers who surround me or who belong to my group. My individuality disappears into my being an anonymous part of this social whole. I am surrounded by the mass, not only by crowds of people I will never know but by impersonal mass communication technology. My experience of social life is one in which I barely exist in my own right, except as a consumer/producer, and the net effect of this is that I become indistinguishable from the mass, or even, I am the mass. I am no different in my being than everyone around me, except in very superficial ways. In order to belong, I have to divest myself of what makes me myself and of my small group memberships too.

Back to fanaticism: the masses are easily turned into fanatics by means of propaganda. Since individuals are not thinking for themselves, they will go along with what everyone around them is thinking with very little resistance, and modern communications technology has made propaganda a very efficient business. To work, propaganda must appeal to fear, whether it’s the fear of an enemy or some sort of evil or insecurity. Fanaticism must be rooted in passion, not any purely intellectual commitment to an idea, and no passion works quite as well in creating fanatics as fear. The propagandist must take people’s insecurities or anxiety and convert them into outward aggressiveness. There has to be a perception of danger, war, or crisis, and this common perception mobilizes large groups into becoming uncompromising in their views and aggressive toward their enemies. What especially characterizes fanaticized consciousness is the refusal to question their own basic assumptions. If I am surrounded by a mass of humanity, and none of them is questioning their own assumptions, why should I? Also, how could I, even if I had a mind to? Since I’ve already surrendered my individuality, my ability to think as an individual has been surrendered as well, probably without me being aware of it. So I show no resistance to what the group decides to do. I go along, I “adapt,” and normally the group compensates me in some way for doing so. As a result, I may be well compensated, my life may be comfortable and secure, but my ideas are not my own. I have never thought about my beliefs, my values, and my whole way of life, and nor have others around me. Even if I tried to do so, I would lack the tools.

This is the essence of fanaticism: the refusal and/or the inability to think, especially about the rational basis of my own views. The cure isn’t necessarily to give up those views but to think about them. Another aspect of fanaticized consciousness that Marcel mentions is that it is myopic. I only see, or allow myself to see, part of what is in front of me and not the whole. He calls this a “deficiency of imagination:” I am unable to think about, or to see, the implications of my own actions and am partially insensible of what is going on in front of me. This happens on a very small scale in ordinary forms of rudeness where I’m simply unaware, or willfully unaware, of people around me. I either focus on something else (not my own actions and their effects on other people) or on nothing at all. The rude person is socially oblivious, while the fanatic is the same on a larger scale. In both cases my awareness lacks a focus or it is partially paralyzed. The fanatic doesn’t think about the humanity of their enemy, for they do not see their enemy as a human being at all but a depersonalized abstraction (a fascist, counterrevolutionary, infidel, terrorist) or a mere obstacle to creating a better society. We don’t allow ourselves to perceive their humanity, and it’s this that allows us to mistreat them. In mass society, the same thing happens on a small scale in ordinary forms of social obliviousness. There as well is a refusal to think and to be aware of the effect their actions are having on other people.

The spirit of abstraction and war

The spirit of abstraction, he now says, is a factor making for war. Marcel has now lived through two world wars, and he came to be opposed to war in general. A question he poses is what are the factors that lead to war and what factors lead to peace? We’ve seen what he has to say about the spirit of abstraction: it is what happens when we idolize or fetishize an idea and in the process lose touch with the real world of experience. This is exactly what can happen in war. We become mesmerized by an idea, a political ideology, or our own fanaticism and put that fanaticism into practice, in the process killing people in very large numbers without fully realizing what we are doing. In war we often lie to ourselves about our own actions or try to camouflage from ourselves what we are really doing. We say things like, we are only acting to protect ourselves or our allies, even when it is a war of aggression.

What, he asks, is the relation between lying and the spirit of abstraction? Remember, he isn’t opposed to abstraction; it’s the spirit of abstraction that he’s worried about or the frame of mind that takes a particular idea and regards it not as one idea among others—or an idea that someone invented and which may be useful—but as a kind of sacred truth, for example, a classless society, a racially pure society, but also equality, anti-oppression, resistance, etc. This idea becomes elevated above all other ideas and stands on its own, having an unlimited field of application. As a consequence, our consciousness becomes myopic. All I can see is this one idea and we lose awareness of any other ideas and any people who get in the way of that idea. Any such person becomes in our eyes a non-human thing: “I lose all awareness of the individual reality of the being whom I may be led to destroy. In order to transform him into a mere impersonal target, it is absolutely necessary to convert him into an abstraction: the Communist, the anti-Fascist, the Fascist, and so on” (117). In war, there is no room for individual reflection. A soldier must take orders and overcome any internal obstacles to doing so. Reflection is just such an obstacle. If I see my enemy in the crosshairs as an individual, it is very hard to kill him. If he is “the enemy”—some dehumanized thing—I can. It’s not only soldiers who do not reflect on their actions in wartime. It’s people in general, including the press. The popular press “has by its nature a bias against reflection, against reflection of every type” (119).

If the spirit of abstraction and the refusal to reflect are necessary conditions of war, are there any necessary or sufficient conditions of peace? One will be to refuse the spirit of abstraction while another will be for the individual to think about the moral basis of war. Another will be the value of fraternity. This last value is especially important for Marcel. When I am at peace with the people around me, when there is a genuine human bond between myself and at least some of the people I encounter, then I can be at peace with myself as well. Being at peace with myself is among the most difficult and highest states I can attain, and what it requires is that I be at peace with the people around me. There is no sense of brotherhood in the abstract. This is a concrete sense that I have toward some smallish number of persons. I cannot feel a sense of brotherhood toward the mass.

The crisis of values in the modern world

Several decades before Marcel writes this book, Nietzsche began to see the modern world as existing in a state of crisis, a profound existential crisis which he famously referred to metaphorically as the death of God. He understood this as a crisis in values: we no longer have a moral compass, a set of fixed moral certainties that can guide our actions, so we value what everyone else values. Nietzsche urged us to choose our own values. Marcel’s reply will be, yes and no. There is indeed a crisis of values in the modern world, but how exactly are we to understand this crisis? He refers to this crisis a “terrible spiritual unease” (122), now what brought it about, what is its nature, what is the way out? Obviously, he isn’t going to be able to give a complete answer to these questions, but he does offer several observations and suggestions.

First, he sees this crisis as taking the form of a kind of cultural leveling. Our whole lives are becoming standardized; we are becoming the same in our being at the cost of our individuality and our humanity. Even the way we speak about values is symptomatic of something that has gone wrong. For instance, he says, we often say that someone is “worth” so much money, or what we call their worth is measured in terms of how much money they have or what they produce. As a result, when they reach an age when they retire and no longer produce any economic good or service, their worth diminishes, and not only their economic worth but their worth as a human being. We increasingly see an old person as comparable to a machine that has outlived its usefulness, as a being with no dignity of their own. As a result, “the very idea of man ... is decomposing before our eyes” (134). Our dignity and our personhood have disappeared into our social and economic functions. I increasingly think of myself as nothing more than a functionary, a resource, a worker, or a cog in some apparatus. In a technological order, the person is commonly thought of on the model of a machine, one that is either efficient or inefficient, user-friendly or not, one that produces a high output or a low one. Today it is common to think of the person on the model of a computer. The mind, we often hear now, is a kind of computer. Marcel’s reply is that a computer is exactly what we are becoming, but it’s not what we are. In an age of “institutional giantism” we are also seen more and more as a file, and the contents of our file determine how institutions deal with us. This, in short, is the condition of the individual in the twentieth century: we are cogs, functionaries, machines, files, while other people are seen as a mass of nameless humanity. There is no personal dignity in this, no fraternity, no transcendence, no meaning, no personhood, or at least the conditions of modern life make the realization of personhood evermore unlikely.

For Marcel, this is a very serious matter, as it was for Nietzsche and numerous other existentialists. Our lives have been diminished and we don’t realize it. Instead, we adapt to this fact so well that we don’t even see this as a crisis. Today we hear all the time about the evils of conformity, but for the most part we don’t take it to heart. Even when we think we are being different or fully self-realized persons, we are not. We don’t even have a clear idea of what self-realization looks like even while many assert it as an ideal. The “distress” that he finds pervasive in the modern world we no longer even recognize as such but instead come to believe that this is just the way things are. This is what life is about: getting a job, climbing the ladder, preparing for retirement, getting some security, having some fun, etc. and not looking too deeply into anything or stopping to think about our lives and the state of the world. We no longer genuinely love life; we love security, amusement, entertainment, consumption, and superficial things. We claim to value love, but even here, love is not a “value” but is above the order of value. It’s not a marketable commodity but has an importance and a meaning that transcends the realm of value altogether. I value my property and consumer goods, not love or the beloved. But today we speak about love in the language of consumerism; we speak of a relationship as fulfilling our personal needs or as not fulfilling them, and we do our cost-benefit analysis based on whether we are getting good value for our investment. If I’m not getting a good return on my investment, I should withdraw that investment and reinvest elsewhere, or so we now believe. This is a symptom of something that has gone wrong. Even love has been demoted to a mere value, a kind of commodity.

Technological progress brings about a kind of cultural leveling, and there is only one direction that leveling ever takes: down. There is no such thing as leveling up. Technological progress reduces human diversity to sameness, and if Marcel were here today, he would be saying that the same thing is happening only on a global scale. Whole societies are being reduced to sameness. Marcel is trying to get a handle on where the world in general is headed, and while he isn’t utterly pessimistic about what he sees, the thrust of his argument is not exactly optimistic. He’s even tempted into taking up an “eschatological consciousness,” asking whether the end of the world is at hand. He refers to a couple of clerics whom he holds in high regard, both of whom believe that the end is near. Marcel doesn’t go this far, but an optimist he is not. He says while he’s tempted to adopt this eschatological consciousness, he’s also skeptical about the philosopher playing the role of a prophet. The question, is the end of the world near, is not philosophically answerable. What he does believe is that in order for civilization to cope with the difficulties we face, a new way of thinking is called for and also a return to some old ways of thinking. Toward the end of the book, Marcel’s Christian faith becomes increasingly apparent such that it’s rather difficult to separate his philosophical views from his religious ones, even though he has already told us that philosophers in their writings should keep their personal religious convictions out of it. He finds it hard to do this toward the end of the book.

“Man against history”

What is this new thinking that Marcel is calling for? Part of what this involves is recognizing the limits of technology. It also involves putting history in its place. What does he mean by this? Marcel is against history? Is he against progress, or technological progress? Not quite. What he wants is for us to be far more mindful of the limits of these things. Technology has limits; it must be limited—and presently it isn’t—to serving human purposes. It must serve our will rather than give rise to a “technocracy” in which technology rules over us in a quasi-political way. Technocracy is the social-political-economic rule of technology over human existence in its entirety, and this idea was beginning to be taken seriously by some in the middle part of the last century. Marcel’s view is that the idea must be rejected categorically, and so should the idea that history is marching on in some identifiable direction, and specifically in the direction of the eventual triumph of some political ideology, whether it be Marxism, socialism, liberal democracy, or anything else. At this time, it was fashionable for political ideologues on both the left and the right (but especially the left) to insist rather dogmatically that their political stance was destined by the laws of history to triumph over its opponents. We still hear politicians talk this way: so and so is “on the right side of history” if they vote this way or that. For Marxists, the classless society constitutes the end of history or the culmination of historical teleology. For liberal progressivism, progress is leading in the direction of the gradual attainment of liberty and equality.

Marcel’s reply is this: history isn’t an agent, and as far as we know it’s not on the side of any particular political stance. No political viewpoint is destined by the iron laws of history to triumph over its rivals. To say otherwise is to make an idol of history, so the “history” that “man” is “against,” as he puts it, comes down to the conflict between the individual and the mass once again. What the spirit of abstraction leads to is a worshiping of abstractions to the point where we lose touch with the real world of politics and history. Abstractions become more real than reality or they take on a concrete life of their own. History itself is an abstraction. It has far less reality than actual events involving actual persons. History is but a concept that allows us to understand these events—that which is actually real—as forming a continuous story. We can become so mesmerized by the story itself and where we imagine it’s leading that we lose sight altogether of what is really real. This is what political revolutionaries always do. He mentions Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed as an example of this phenomenon. That novel depicts a group of young Russian revolutionaries in the mid-nineteenth century who are “possessed” by an ideology in the sense that they’re bewitched by it, and capable of doing terrible things because of it. When we look at the real world, history doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere, or at least not in a direction that Marcel likes.

Where is it leading, then? He makes a very favorable reference to George Orwell’s 1984 (a book that had appeared a few years before this one), not as a prediction but as a powerful depiction of where the road we are currently on could eventually lead us. The narrative of 1984 brings to our attention in a new way the fundamental importance of the individual while dramatically illustrating the theme of the individual human being against the mass. For Marcel as for Orwell, it’s the individual that ultimately matters. When we reject the spirit of abstraction and think in terms of concrete human experience, what we see in the world is particular individuals each of whom is a bearer of dignity in their own right. This is lost sight of by political ideologues who are given to speaking of historical teleology. This is one of the themes that Marcel finds especially emphasized in Christianity: a concentration on the dignity of the person. So long as the person is created by God, it is a bearer of human dignity. If God is dead, what happens to our dignity? It’s either lost or compromised. What needs to be defended, for Marcel, is the dignity of the individual, whether we do so in religious or secular terms.

The notion of honor

Another aspect of the new thinking that Marcel is calling for is a rehabilitation of the old concept of honor. Here is another idea that seems to have no place in the modern world. The idea seems to belong to an aristocratic age, and our age is anything but aristocratic. Let’s recall the meaning of this old concept. He mentions his recent experience of going to a concert of Bach music. What he experienced at this concert, he tells us, was something that transcends the realm of the ordinary and everyday. Perhaps it’s an experience of transcendence, but there is also in this music a profound sense of honor, “the assurance that it is an honor to be a man” (188). Then he asks, what is this sense, or this assurance? What kind of a thing is honor, and is there still a place for it in the modern world? Honor is roughly equivalent to the concept of pride, not in the sense of arrogance but “a proper pride,” the pride in being a human being with a dignity that is absolute. This is a pride that doesn’t scramble to make sure it’s getting its rightful share of the pie. Pride or honor is the sense within oneself that one doesn’t have to scramble in this way, that one is above this. He mentions as an example what he sees happening in the teaching profession. Teachers increasingly are forming unions and demanding more and more from their employers in terms of money, benefits, better working conditions, etc. Gone is the sense of professional honor. This was a sense that one was above having to make demands of this kind, that one refuses to fight for every dollar one can get one’s hands on.

There is also an important connection between honor and giving one’s word. Do we still give our word? The person with honor is one who can say “I give you my word” and it actually counts for something; it’s something you can rely on. This act of giving someone one’s word is more or less obsolete. We still make promises, but we break them so often that it loses its meaning. Honor is also linked to the sense of gratitude, including a gratitude for the fact that one is alive, for the fact of having been allowed to exist. Today we’re more likely to say we didn’t ask to be born.

The importance of building community

The kind of community of “intersubjectivity” or human fellowship that he’s calling for can only happen in groups that are fairly limited in size. There is no sense of community in mass society but only in smallish groups that are held together voluntarily and usually by means of a shared commitment to a set of ideals or by a spirit of love. Human life in general must be lived on a scale that is human and not one that is dictated by the requirements of technological efficiency. A new sense of aristocracy must also be renewed, but not one that is based on nobility of birth or social class. This new aristocracy would be an aristocracy on a much smaller scale. He mentions the example of an aristocracy of craftsmanship, but he is also thinking of groups that are dedicated to an ideal, a profession, a trade, or a way of thinking. The trouble with such groups is that over time they tend to become inward-looking and to forget about the outside world. But this is not a necessary consequence, he believes, of the kind of small-group aristocracy that he has in mind.

Works Cited

Marcel, Gabriel. “An Autobiographical Essay” in The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, eds. Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1984.

Marcel, Awakenings, trans. Peter S. Rogers. Marquette University Press, 2002.

Marcel, Being and Having. London: Dacre Press, 1951.

Marcel, Creative Fidelity. New York: Farrar and Straus, 1962.

Marcel, The Decline of Wisdom. London: Harvill Press, 1954.

Marcel, The Existential Background of Human Dignity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.

Marcel, Homo Viator. New York: Harper and Rowe, 1952.

Marcel, The Mystery of Being vol. 1. London: Harvill Press, 1951.

Marcel, The Philosophy of Existentialism. New York: Citadel Press, 1966.

Marcel, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond. Evanston: Northwestern Illinois Press, 1973.