The Mystery of Being contains the most systematic exposition of the philosophical thought of Gabriel Marcel, a convert to Catholicism and the most distinguished twentieth-century exponent of Christian existentialism. Its two volumes are the Gifford lectures which Marcel delivered in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1949 and 1950. Marcel's work fundamentally challenges most of the major positions of the atheistic existentialists (Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus), especially their belief in an absurd, meaningless, godless universe. These volumes deal with almost all of the major themes of Marcel's thought: the nature of philosophy, our broken world, man's deep ontological need for being, i.e., for permanent eternal values, our incarnate bodily existence, primary and secondary reflection, participation, being in situation, the identity of the human self, intersubjectivity, mystery and problem, faith, hope, and the reality of God, and immortality.
There was a time in my life when I read and reread this work. This does not mean that I understood it fully. But the idea of 'intersubjectivity' and that it is through being with and understanding others that we become most truly human is one which had great influence on me. It took me away as I was looking to be taken away from a kind of philosophical solipsism a kind of sense that all should rest only in 'I' and 'I' that would prove upon reflection 'unstable as water'. Marcel is a humane thinker, one who tries to take us from the celebration of Nothingness and Death to the celebration of life in community with others. I doubt that he is read much today in the English- language world, but to my mind he is a very valuable and helpful thinker . A mensch of philosophy.
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