GABRIEL MARCEL ON THE FAMILY

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GABRIEL MARCEL ON THE FAMILY
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LIFE

• Born in Paris, Dec. 7, 1889, the son of French
  ambassador to Stockholm
• Mother died when he was 4 yrs. Old
• Rich cultural upbringing, extensive travel
• Wide reading in German and Anglo-American
  philophies
• At 18, took diplome with thesis on The
  Metaphysical Ideas of Coleridge and their
  relation to the Philosophy of Schelling.
• 1910, Ph.D. at Sorbonne, passed agregation

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• Early readings on Bradley (immediate experience),
  Royce (loyalty) and Hocking (Absolute)
• March 23, 1929, conversion from no religion to
  Catholicism. While reviewing Francois Mauriacs
  work, was asked, Why are you not one of us?
• Still anti-scholasticism
• Died October 8, 1973.

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Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of the Family,
Homo Viator

• Outline
• The Family as Mystery
• The Family as Value Presence
• The Family as Mystery of the Incarnation of the
  Pact Between Man and Life
• The Family as Mystery of Fidelity
• The Family as Mystery of Hope

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The Family as Mystery

• .Why Mystery and not Problem?
• Family, not just one problem but infinity of
  problems
• Family belongs to reality of presences.
• Problems facts exterior to me
• Mystery realities bound up with my existence
• e.g. union of body soul less a given than
  giving, root of presences presence to myself and
  presence of others to me.

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• Similarity between union of body and soul and
  mystery of family incarnation.
• Mystery of the family too close and too far to
  be found in objective knowledge.
• Too close a constellation of which, as a child,
  I spontaneously take for granted I am the center.
• I am the reply to reciprocal appeal of two
  beings who flung to each other.
• I am also the judgment upon those who called me
  into being, and thusnew relationships will be
  established between them and me.
• Too far I am also the link to an indefinite
  network, stretching back beyond my life.
• origins simply cannot be spoken of as causes of
  which I am the product.

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• Thus, to evoke mystery of the family is less to
  attempt to solve a problem than to recapture a
  reality and to awaken the soul to its presence.

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• Evocation difficult because of contemporary
  sceneproblems of divorce, birth control, choice
  of lover, etc. Social crisis linked to certain
  blindness of value of family.
• Philosopher has to discover roots of this social
  crisis.

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• Digression university talk on divorce to
  students, some of whom are children of divorced
  parents. Marcel did not avoid talking sincerely
  of the problem.

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• Needed is reflection on tragic situation today,
  which is linked to weakening or denial of sense
  of holiness, reverence for life deathgiving
  way to pressures of pride, pretentiousness,
  boredom, despair. It is in the family that dire
  consequences of this giving way first becomes
  apparent.
• We cannot refuse to face the danger by saying the
  family still exists. The family exists only if
  it is apprehended as a value and a presence.

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The Family as a Value and Presence

• Relive our experience as children, the
  experience of a certain pride of belonging
• Pride is a certain response made from depths of
  my being to an investiture of which it behooves
  me to prove myself worthy.
• Pride experienced on my own account, not aim at
  impressing another.
• Pride (vs. vanity) constructive, helps to give me
  foundation on which to establish my conduct.
• Vanity turned outwards the rest of the world,
  sterile and disintegrating.

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• Through pride, we can trace in what way family is
  a value.
• Family is a recognized hierarchy, authority,
  which I do not have to integrate myself into it
  because I have been caught up in it from the
  origin, involved in it, rooted in it.

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Family as Presence

• As Presence, family is a protective skin between
  me and foreign, threatening, hostile world.
• Painful experience of tearing away from this
  tissue, cradle, cocoon (by sudden or slow
  process, e.g. death, separation, nameless power).
• Awareness of this primitive privileged us in
  the family inseparable from a home of our own.
• Home connected with permanent habit-ation
  familiar objects which gives a sense of
  perpetual life, an always.

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• Traumatic house move.
• One chief cause of disappearance of family
  consciousness nomadic lifestyle of workers in
  industrial centers
• Objection these are only outward and temporary
  conditions. Marcels answer in the family, the
  outward is also the inward gt in growth of being,
  the two are inseparable.
• Disappearance of settled habitation inseparable
  from fading away of traditions. Traditions are
  to the inner man what family setting is to the
  visible.
• Home is not just environment, but settings also
  form the human being.
• Without setting, development of the human person
  exposed to dangers of incoherence.
• Traditions bear upon the continuity of the
  family, secure the bond between generations.
• Every family produces a certain ritual to secure
  solid foundations.

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• Why the disintegration of the familys
  architecture? Reasons varied and deep.

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• Certainly, extraordinary acceleration of rhythm
  of life prevents slow sedimentation of habitus
  necessary for family.
• Still such acceleration could not take place
  without reckless waste of reserve accumulated by
  living.
• Gustav Thibon on tragic aspect of contemporary
  life denouncing squandering of reserves, he
  makes the distinction between improvidence of the
  saint and the improvidence of the decadent man.
• Saint does not worry future because he has laid
  up treasure, source of eternal life, within him.
  Decadent man yields to immediacy of egoism, does
  not economize.
• To economize to keep in order to give more
  effectively.

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• Technological progress, not in itself, but as
  incorporated in the daily life of individuals,
  has also effected a loss of human substance.
• seen clearly in craftsmanship
• in human relationships, standardization of
  individuals, little respect for individuals and
  local customs and peculiarities.
• Close relationship between acceleration of rhythm
  of life and impoverishment.

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• Analogy in traveling across Brittany empty when
  you travel fast, mystery rediscovered at
  leisurely travel.
• Mystery of places conceals human presence. From
  philosophy of duration, the two are inseparable.
• So also in the family depopulation of the
  country linked to dissolution of the family.
• Existence in towns makes pretension of triumph
  over laws of change, strives to inaugurate a
  certain order of life.

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• American cities, prototypes of preservative
  processes to escape from cosmic rhythm and to
  substitute caricatures of eternity. But this
  human rhythm tends to become the machines and
  automatons, which are not super-organic but
  sub-organic.
• Thus, inexpressible dismal sadness in great
  cities, belonging to everything that is
  devitalised, is bound up with decay of the
  family.
• This sadness is sterility, a disavowal felt by
  the heart, which concerns the very conditions of
  life.
• Think of those changes which weaken the ties
  between us and our loved ones loss of
  transparency in the intimacy of couples,
  separation, collision, hurtsa dislocation of man
  and life, related to the misunderstandings of
  married couples.
• Thus, family attacked in the double spring from
  whence it derives its special vitality fidelity
  and hope.

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• Example of woman in depopulated village,
  complaining of monotony and
• lack of amusements.
• Need for amusement, need for diversion, is bound
  up with ebbing of lifes tide. Ebbing of lifes
  tide human being imagines he regains life by
  seizing every occasion of experiencing violent
  sensations (stimulants)
• These stimulants supposedly protect one from
  boredom. But what is boredom is not an escape
  from what? From oneself.

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• Ego faced with dilemma to fulfill oneself or to
  escape. Without fulfillment, ego experiences a
  gaping void.
• Anyone who is absorbed does not experience this
  void he is caught up in plenitude, life envelops
  him and protects him.
• Countryside woman suffers more of boredom than
  man because she has more time to think of such
  things unless she is occupied with motherhood
  which is not a burden but a support for her.
• Gabriel Seailles One is borne along only by
  ones responsibilities.
• Ebbing of life or consciousness repudiation of
  ones fundamental commitments. What are these
  commitments?

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.The Family as Mystery of the Incarnation of the
Pact between Man and Life

• Pact (nuptial bond) between man and life, within
  mans power to untie but when he does so, he
  loses the notion of existence.
• Man, the only being capable of adopting an
  attitude towards not only his life but life
  itself.
• It is through this faculty of adopting an
  attitude that he is spirit. Another way of
  speaking of mans transcendence over life and
  death.
• Pact of man and life confidence which man
  promises life and the response of life to this
  confidence.
• It is precisely in the family that this pact is
  worked out..

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• Example in Marriage Marital Act, not a pure and
  simple mating, not a satisfaction of instincts,
  impulse, caprice, but one which is to last.
• Many false marriages legal union but nothing
  in the depths of character or will that
  corresponds to this socially binding form or the
  sacramental character of union entered into.
• Neither is marriage a simple contract
  (exclusively rational idea of marriage), which
  can be renounced by common accord. Thus, divorce
  can readily be admitted.

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• Society can argue that for the sake of
  convention, individuals must be sacrificed, so no
  divorce. But individual can claim to be an
  exception.
• The only condemnation of divorce that can be
  justified is the condemnation which they must
  recognize as being pronounced in the name of
  their own will, a will so deep that they could
  not disown it without denying their own natures.

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• If conjugal union finds its consummation and
  sanction in the appearance of a new being, it is
  absurd to think that the same couple should
  become free again whenever their sentiments
  change.
• They are no longer united by a reciprocal common
  accord which they can annul but by the existence
  of a being for whom they are responsible and who
  has rights over them which cannot be set aside,
  unless we are to argue that in the animal species
  there comes a moment when male and female lose
  all interest in their offspring because it no
  longer needs them.
• Here, formalism easily slides to animalism or
  naturalism.
• Common element of formalism (rationalism) and
  animalism (naturalism) lack of generosity.

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• From both extremes, we lose sight of the unity of
  the family, without which we lose sight of the
  mystery of the family.
• Unity of the family not possible without
  generosity of the heads of the family.
• Family not created by man who generates by
  chance, produces offspring like animals without
  accepting consequences of his acts he produces a
  brood, not a family.
• If family is a reality, neither should marriage
  simply be a mere association of individual
  interests but should regulate itself in some way
  to the offspring.

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• But marriage concluded only in view of
  procreation is in danger of degeneration, is a
  violation of the dignity of the person the union
  of two persons is just a means of reproduction.
• Not true that procreation is the end of marriage.
• Marital act and procreation are two complementary
  phases of our history as creative being.
• Creative denotes contribution of each to the
  universal work in our world, like that of an
  artist who is the bearer of some message he must
  communicate and pass on.

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• On the human level, the operation of the flesh
  ought to be the hallowing of a certain inward
  fulfillment, an out-flowing not forced but
  springing from experience of plenitude.
• Operation of the flesh loses its dignity and
  degenerates if it is not an act of thanksgiving,
  a creative testimony.
• From this point of view, difference between
  husbands and wives who secure themselves an heir
  to succeed them and husbands and wives who sow
  the seed of life without ulterior motive by
  radiating the life flame permeating them.

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• These observations shed light on the meaning of
  the sacred bond which is mans lot to form with
  life.
• U this renderalm, all generalizations are
  deceptive, because each soul constitutes a
  microcosm. Thus we have no right to judge
  individual cases, like childless couples.
• But we have right to judge social order, such as
  increase of divorce, contraception, abortion, etc.

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• But question not of proclaiming the immoral or
  anti-social of any conduct or action but of
  discussing the symptoms in such action of a
  disaffection of beings from Being.
• Disaffection of beings from Being, not the denial
  of an explicit promise but the drawing back by
  which a spiritual organism dwindles shrivels,
  cuts itself off from the universal communion
  which is its nourishing principle of life and
  growth.

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The Family as a Mystery of Fidelity

• The crisis in family institutions can be traced
  to deeper misunderstanding of the virtues through
  which the unification of our destiny is
  consummated.
• Wrong fidelity a safeguard to preserve existing
  order.
• True fidelity creative

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• Example bond between child and parents, open to
  double risk of deterioration
• a) Narrow traditionalismchild, entirely in debt
  of those who gave it life.
• b) Child as creditor because they view life
  as
• crushing burden.
• Applied to birth control practitioners out
  of pity for possible descendants (not yet living!)

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• This is related to cynical egoism, which measures
  value of life by pleasures and comforts.
• For both, life transmitted in procreation, is
  really neither a blessing nor a curse in itself
  but possibilities for good and evil because the
  being is a subject.
• As subject, the being is able to enjoy and
  suffer and capable of attaining someday the
  consciousness of what he has at first only felt,

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• Of course, children should share this generosity.
  Unfortunately, they do not always do, because of
  individualism that is prevalent in society.
• It boils down to the spirit which is to be
  incarnated, established and maintained, the
  spirit spreading beyond the self, the spirit of
  creative fidelity.
• The more our hearts and intellects keep before
  them the idea of our lineage, of the forbears to
  whom we are responsible, the more this spirit
  will succeed in freeing itself from selfishness
  and cowardice.
• Inversely, the more we lose this sense of
  lineage, the less we discern our ultimate
  responsibilities, the more the family will tend
  to be just an association with common interests.

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• Creative Fidelity here does not depend on any
  particular religious belief.
• There exists a form of Christianity,
  overemphasizing eschatological, that undermines
  the souls love of life.
• On the other hand, a certain religio exists among
  pagans themselves reverence for dead, for gods
  residing at home, which gives evidence to this
  pact between man and life-force.
• Unfortunately, this religio has given way to
  pressures of the progress of technics that we
  lose sight of the natural morality and order
  recognized by our forefathers.
• Need to restore this religio.

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The Family as Mystery of Hope

• Deafness to call of creative fidelity due to loss
  of sense of hope.
• Hope linked to sense of communion I hope in
  Thee for us.
• The more this for us confines itself to the
  self, in the domain of the family, to ways of
  safeguarding a certain Having, the more hope
  deteriorates.
• It is only by breaking through Having, manifested
  in anxiety, that hope can effect an entrance into
  our soul.

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• Anxiety seen in decadence of our youth today.
• Renewal can only spring from a religious
  principle, but not the work of Christians alone.
• State must not paralyze initiatives of people of
  all complexions as they unite to revivify
  society.
• Life Incarnation, and the family is the meeting
  point of the vital and spiritual.
• Creature condition acknowledgement of Divine
  Fatherhood

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• Vs. naturalismregards man as link of endless
  chain of causes, he arrogates to himself an
  absolute sovereignty.
• Vs. Materialismman humiliated, no special
  identity, the more he develops pride which impels
  him to deny any human order to which he might owe
  obedience.
• Family choked between these two systems
• Family relationships afford no guarantee of
  solidity unless referred to superhuman order.
• Humanity is only truly human when it is upheld by
  foundation of consecration.
• To recover reverence for life, we must start not
  from below (biology, eugenics) but from above.