Gabriel Marcel
1889-1973 · Existentialism · Obscure
Marcel was a French Christian existentialist who wrote plays alongside his essays. Some questions you can stand outside and take apart, the way you take apart a problem. Others include you in them: your own death, whether you are loved. Marcel called the second kind mysteries, and built a philosophy on fidelity, hope and disponibilité, making yourself available to another person. He argued against Sartre and against abstract reason.
Signature
The position Marcel is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Identity
- leans Changing
- Highest Good
- Harmony / Love
Positions on the 5 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- leans Purposeful (75 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain (75 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Identity
- leans Changing (75 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Ground of Being
- mildly leans Transcendence (63 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- War
- leans Militarism (75 on a 0–100 scale from Pacifism to Militarism)
15 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Marcel refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Harmony / Love
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Moral Realism
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Eidetic Intuition
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Embodied Cognition
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Relational / Divine Command
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Synergism / Libertarian Free Will
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Authority
- Divine Revelation / Charismatic Authority
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Language
- Expression
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Law
- Natural Law
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Judgement
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Imago Dei
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- The Divine / Friends
What is your primary bond and loyalty?