MEN AGAINST HUMANITY

The tone of this work is alternately one of alarmed lucidity and of defiant despair. But if we dwell too much on the themes of lament, if not protest and denunciation, we forget about the numerous pages where it is clearly said that a philosopher should not claim to be a prophet : the prophet tells words that are not his and, besides, benefits from the uncommon gifts of a visionary. Marcel doesn’t claim for himself this authority, or this gift. His only weapon, he says again and again, is reflection – a “second reflection” that reconsiders the evidence articulated by a primary thought sometimes fascinated by all the forces working for death.

This philosopher is, of course, a Christian philosopher, and it is in his faith that he finds reasons of not despairing. True. But right away we must say that when the Christian relays the philosopher, it is a nonconfessional Christian, a Christian forewarned of religious fanaticism, and above all a Christian who puts his motives of hope at the service of the philosopher’s reasons to resist, explicitated by “second reflection”, by which he can resist to invitations to despair suggested by his lucidity alone.

Marcel’s spirituality is very far from irrational fideism, and we are not to be surprised by the praise he gives of great rationalism. True, the work’s philosophical core remains the famous distinction between problem and mystery. But in the 1950’s Marcel took the utmost care not to let this distinction become a slogan “in which the word mystery would be glued as a label saying : ‘Touching is forbidden, thinking is forbidden’.”

Paul Ricœur