Two More Existentialists: Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel

The storm around existentialism rages mostly about Sartre and the French atheistic school — of whom even Heidegger is said to have said, “Mein Gott! Das hab’ ich nicht gewollt!” But on the periphery of the movement are writers — apart even from the Barthian theological heirs of Kierkegaard — for whom God has not yet died, and for whom, moreover, even the loneliness of the Kierkegaardian self is, at least ostensibly, conquered by the discovery of immediate communication between selves. So, it seems, the stress on personal existence may serve the lonely vision of God, as in Soren Kierkegaard; or it may stem from the denial of God, but issue in a self equally solitary, as in Sartre or Heidegger. Or it may, as in the Protestant Karl Jaspers or the Catholic Gabriel Marcel, involve a recognition both of faith in God and of direct communication with other finite selves as necessary elements in personal existence itself. The only permutation I have not seen stated is an existential philosophy affirming direct communication while denying God. This is, I think, historical accident rather than logical necessity; for it appears to be the result of coincidence rather than logic that both Marcel and Jaspers insist on (in Jaspers’ terms) both communication and transcendence. That faith in God does not imply direct communication we know from Kierkegaard: for whom indirect communication is a necessary consequence of the kind of subjectivity that alone leads to true faith. That the acknowledgement of communication, conversely, does not imply a transcendent faith, one can only guess — for example, from the weakness of the attempted union of the two in Jaspers or Marcel. But lacking such a philosophy, we may fill out historically if not logically the outlines of actual rather than possible existential theories by examining some aspects of the Protestant and Catholic varieties respectively in Jaspers and Marcel.

Both these men belong to the increasing group of those who lament the mechanization of personality that has accompanied the mechanization of industry. In an essay on contemporary irreligion, published in Être et Avoir in 1934, Marcel attacked three contemporary philosophies: the idealistic, the technical, and what one may call the vital — that is, the philosophy which identifies the human in man with the merely living. Of these, it is the second which seems to him most important and most dangerous. As Marcel sees it, the principal characteristics of a technical view of the world are: that it understands things only in terms of some hold (prise) that human agents have on them, some way of manipulating them; that such techniques of manipulation, and consequently the world itself, appear perfectible even natural catastrophes are looked on as unaccountable flaws in the machinery which we have not rectified, but of course will ultimately rectify; and that in the light of this way of regarding things, man himself becomes for himself only an object of such techniques, knowing himself only by reflection as another object to handle — and to perfect, when he fails to run right. The moral results of this world view are, for Marcel, conspicuous and deplorable. ‘The “interior life” being minimized by such an externalizing attitude, human aspirations are reduced likewise to their minimum: i.e., to the mechanical pursuit of instantaneous pleasures —which Marcel calls “le Anglo-Saxon having a good time.” (The epithet seems a bit unfair to the Puritan tradition!) Moreover, if good is reduced to mere momentary pleasure, neither is the real nature of evil understood in our technical age. Marcel’s point here is a rather provocative, though of course not a new one: that it is just the notion of an imperfect world which is combined in our time with the denial of radical evil. The world as God made it was perfect, yet it had a devil in it. The world of the machine has its breakdowns — but it also has no mysteries, and therefore no flaws which cannot be righted by new and improved techniques. Evil really beyond our power to conquer does not exist. There are grievous social consequences, too, of the technical philosophy. By reducing man to another object of his own technique, we have, Marcel thinks, turned society from a genuine community to an aggregate of deadened, pleasure-seeking, pain-shunning units that bear no inner, spiritual relation to one another. Marcel’s model for a genuine community, of course, is the Church, where faith forms the spiritual bond that unites its members. And the common source for all these ills of our time is our forgetfulness of the only part of man that makes him man: his soul. It is to save this better part of our nature from its present decline that he turns to the analysis of personal existence as a philosophic Leitmotif.