Gabriel Marcel (1889– ) as a phenomenologist

pp. 421-444

in: Herbert Spiegelberg, The phenomenological movement II, Berlin, Springer, 1971

Abstract

In his pioneering survey of Phenomenology in France Jean Hering concludes his two-page discussion of Gabriel Marcel as "an independent phenomenologist" with the following statement: "We believe we may affirm that, even if German phenomenology (to suppose the impossible) had remained unknown in France, nevertheless a phenomenology would have been constituted there; and this, to a large extent, would be due to the influence of Gabriel Marcel." Hering, an old-style phenomenologist and anything but an existentialist, supports this remarkable estimate by referring to Marcel's "concern for research" and for exploring the "essence" of things without separating them from the consciousness that presents them to us; to his sense of the "inanity" of Weltanschauungsphilosophie; and to his concrete studies of such phenomena as "having," which keep free from the "mania" of reducing the phenomena to "nothing but" something else.¹