A short note on Gabriel Marcel
30 April 2009
Thursday
Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973)
Last week I was in Powell’s with enough time to randomly browse the shelves. I was interested to find a copy of Gabriel Marcel’s Man Against Mass Society in a mass market paperback edition published by Gateway (who also published paperback editions of The Mystery of Being).
Firstly I was surprised to find this in the mass market paperback edition, and secondly I was surprised to find this book filed in “Leftist Studies,” which seemed to me to be an odd shelving choice. Mostly I find Marcel’s books in the “philosophy” section, when I expect to find them. Marx’s books one expects to find in “Leftist Studies.” I find Machiavelli volumes in the “Philosophy” section, the “early modern Italian classics” section, as well as in the “General Politics” section. If you want to be thorough in searching for Machiavelli, you have to walk all over the store, which is fine with me.
When I walk though a bookstore or a library and see the succession of titles in passing, the research and learning of lifetimes flitting by at a steady pace, I am not humbled, but rather I feel something like exhaustion, knowing that I could plunge in anywhere, at any point, and immerse myself, never looking back. Any one such plunge would be enough to exhaust a life; all of them collectively inspire a profound weariness such as Tibetan Lamas must experience when meditating upon the infinite cycle of death and rebirth. Each book is like a prayer wheel, and when I see them collectively I imagine them all spinning simultaneously in my head.
Sometimes it is quite surprising to find what unlikely books have been issued in mass market paperback editions. For example, I have a copy of Althusser’s For Marx in a mass market edition. Some of these volumes are exceedingly difficult to find, and it makes me wonder how “mass” the mass market was.
I rather enjoy Marcel’s writing style. His language is always beautifully conversational, almost casual, while the content is meditative, with the feeling that great effort of thought has preceded his conversational exposition. Also, despite the conversational style, he doesn’t dodge the difficult ideas; there is no sense in which his is “popular philosophy” even though he deals with issues of immediate interest to the popular mind.
I wonder what Marcel would have thought about being shelved in the “Leftist Studies” section. The label he is usually tagged with is that of “Christian Existentialist.” I haven’t looked, but maybe Powell’s also shelves his books in the “Theology” section as well. And why this particular book of Marcel’s? Is Man Against Mass Society a leftist tract? No.
It could be argued that Marcel’s concern with the individual — his existence, his faith, his hope — is the antithesis of the leftist focus on rights of groups of persons, collectives, and classes. As a member of the proletariat, a representative of the working class, or as a citizen of a republic, the individual is one face in a crowd, one raised fist, one voice that joins in with the “call and response” chant. Collectives and communities are uninterested in the individual as an individual, but are concerned with the individual as part of a social group. While Marcel never belittled the social group, that individual as individual is his central concern and focus.
I am not going to here consider in detail the content of Man Against Mass Society, though it is quite pertinent to my recent preoccupations, such as expressed in my recent Mass War and Mass Man (which is one reason I was willing to pay $3.95 for a used mass market paperback). However, I do want to mention that the concern with mass man, alienation, and de-humanization that has emerged since the industrialization of western society is, in a sense, quite paradoxical.
An individual today, even in repressive societies, and even in the most de-humanizing and de-personalizing industrial working conditions, is more of an individual — possessing more individuality, more autonomy, greater freedom, and more of a sense of self and self-worth — than virtually any individual from pre-industrialized society. In societies in which individualism as an idea doesn’t even exist, and in which individuality is actively discouraged, few have the opportunity to develop as individual. How can an agricultural proletariat become a splendid individual? The society in which they live militates against it, and, before industrialization, almost all of the world’s population consisted of agricultural proletarians.
It is only when the idea of individualism — one of the great contributions of Western civilization to the world — emerges that it simultaneously becomes problematic.
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