In Transit to the Afterlife
Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) was a Catholic French Existentialist whose thought marked the transition between modern and postmodern ideas about human subjectivity. He had the foresight to move beyond a time when most philosophers believed that selfhood constituted, in both a philosophical and social sense, the focal point of reality.
Modern philosophical thinking on subjectivity began with Descartes’ doubting ego and culminated in Hegel’s “Absolute Spirit.” With Descartes, human thought became, contra the Medieval principle of “faith seeking understanding,” the foundation of knowledge and truth. With Hegel’s “Absolute Spirit,” human thought came to constitute not merely the foundation of knowledge and truth, but the whole of reality. Following the prominent Catholic philosopher William Desmond, Modern philosophy can be said to have created a “counterfeit double” whereby the belief in God as the source of all truth and reality was increasingly replaced by the primacy of the thinking subject and, by extension, human subjectivity itself.
Reacting to the deification of human subjectivity in Modern philosophy, Existentialism brought subjectivity back to earth by focusing on individual consciousness as its authentic locus. As opposed to something like the human spirit or the unfolding of human thought as ultimate, each individual subject became godlike (Nietzsche’s “Ubermensch” and Sartre’s “radical freedom” stand out as apt examples). Or, as some Existentialists maintained, it may be that any fully authentic life involves the individual’s direct, as opposed to socially mediated, encounter with the Absolute (Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Miguel de Unamuno are prominent representatives of this line of thought). In either case, Existentialism made the individual subject—rather than human thought—the juncture at which humanity and the Absolute meet.
Against this intellectual backdrop, Marcel emerged as an early critic of Modern and Existentialist theories of subjectivity. While he maintained an emphasis upon the personal dimension of existence, he also moved the discussion of personhood toward a foundation in human relationships. In this vein, Thomas Busch sees Marcel’s thought as anticipating, even prophesying, Post-Modern philosophy’s emphasis on intersubjectivity:
[For] the course of philosophy has turned very much in the direction taken by Marcel. Emphasis upon embodiment, his decentering and socializing of the subject, his deliberate undermining of systematization, his critique of instrumental rationality, his incipient views of interpretation and communication—these are mainstream notions today. (Busch, Circulating Being, 40)
The Post-Modern critique of subjectivity relies on an ontological claim that the self is fundamentally social. Opposed to Modern and Existential philosophy’s emphasis upon self-creation, most dramatically exhibited in Hegel’s “Absolute Spirit” and Sartre’s sense of radical freedom, Post-Modern thought exposes how deeply embedded the self is within its social context, including everything from gender to race to class to disability. By “decentering” and “socializing” the subject, Marcel anticipated Post-Modern philosophy’s turn toward intersubjectivity.
To examine Marcel as a transitional thinker, I propose an analysis of what I call Marcel’s love-based view of the afterlife. In Marcel’s philosophy, the subject-centric approach to the afterlife gives way to an intersubjective approach. The starkness of the shift is evident when contrasted with another religious Existentialist, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936). His entire corpus could be understood as a meditation upon what he viewed as humanity’s inexpungable desire for personal immorality. Capturing the sentiment, Unamuno proclaimed in The Tragic Sense of Life (1912) that “I do not want to die—no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever. I want this ‘I’ to live—this poor ‘I’ that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now.” The longing for personal immortality in the context of a reality that is structured to negate such a longing generated Unamuno’s characteristically existential conclusion that existence is tragic. Faced with the desacralization of reality in modern life and the depersonalization of reality via modern science, the individual’s passion for eternal life becomes a desperate plea or, in the case of Unamuno, a pitched battle for the legitimacy of faith against the dictates of reason.
Against his passionate plea for eternal salvation—a plea, it might be noted, that Unamuno located at the heart of all thought—Marcel’s “de-centering” approach is evident. Responding to a debate where Marcel was accused of being fixated upon his death, Marcel recounted that “the only thing worthy of preoccupying either one of us was the Death of the being whom we loved.” Marcel reiterated the point when he wrote “of what appears fundamental to me, that is, in its most profound perspective, the consideration of the Death of a loved one is infinitely more important than that of one’s own Death.” The “only thing worthy of” preoccupation is not, as it was with Unamuno, the preservation of one’s self, but rather, the question of whether the depth of value experienced in the beloved culminates in the actuality of his/her immortal life.
For Marcel, love is a revelation, and the first moment of that revelation involves a recognition of the beloved’s worth. The beloved is experienced as a person of inexhaustible value as well as an irreplaceable moment within reality. To say, as Marcel did, “thou, thou shall not die” is not, therefore, a desperate plea nor a psychological coping mechanism, but a way of remaining faithful to the implications of what one has experienced in the beloved. In this line of thought, a belief in the afterlife becomes a natural extension of an experience where one comes into contact with a profound form of goodness incarnated in the specific persons whom we love.
Beginning with the beloved’s worth, Marcel decentered afterlife belief in his explicit denial that the beyond ought to be thought of as a mechanism to assure a person’s personal survival. Yet his further point is that any authentic afterlife belief or, more generally, any authentic hope requires such decentering. Marcel wrote,
[the] only true authentic hope is one that relies on something that does not depend on us; hope’s wellspring is humility, not pride, which consists in finding its strength in oneself alone. The latter attitude separates the one who experiences it, in that way, from a certain communion among beings, and tends thus to play its role as a principle of destruction.
It is not simply that Marcel redirected the origin of afterlife belief from the preservation of the self to that of the beloved. His point is that it is only through such decentering that the hope for life beyond death can gain access to a source of value that grants it existential vivacity.
There are important implications to Marcel’s approach. First, his approach resists the individualism often associated with the pursuit of personal immortality. It also deemphasizes a justice-based conception of the afterlife, where the prospect of eternal reward and punishment becomes a mechanism to enforce particular kinds of behaviors or allegiances. Further, it challenges a Marxian or Tolstoyan vision of the afterlife where the beyond essentially emerges from a sense of lack and despair.
Leaving aside an investigation of these broader implications, what is of interest at present is how Marcel’s approach to the afterlife does not remain confined to the beloved. Rather, Marcel’s approach is essentially a reflection upon the way in which love involves one in relationships that point toward the prospect of eternity. Testifying to such a trajectory, Marcel wrote in his essay “Theism and Personal Relationships,” “[a]s a rule, nothing is easier at a certain time of life than to accept death for oneself if one considers it a dreamless sleep without awakening; what cannot be accepted is the death of the beloved, more deeply still the death of love itself.” Beginning with a recognition of the beloved, Marcel’s account progresses into a relationship-based movement toward eternal life. Hence, while the beloved’s death is unacceptable, “the death of love itself” speaks to an even deeper well-spring from which a Marcelean hope for the afterlife arises. Hence, it is the experience of communion, even more than the presence of the beloved, which serves as the fullest wellspring of Marcel’s love-based hope for everlasting life.
Marcel’s path to the beyond travels through the beloved and returns one to oneself, yet not in the form of a return to one’s individuality, but in the recognition that one’s reality is already intersubjective. Instead of moving from one’s self to eternity, Marcel discovered an enriched, expanded self as a consequence of his hope for eternity. More generally, Marcel’s intersubjective approach is philosophically significant insofar as he maintained a personalist basis for the afterlife that avoids reducing the concept either to an individualistic or other-based hope. It is as if Marcel translated Unamuno’s personal passion for immortality into an interpersonal passion.
Still, the “decentering” motion of Marcel’s thought would be incomplete should analysis rest at a consideration of human intersubjectivity. Marcel wrote that “hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me, which cannot but will that which I will, if what I will deserves to be willed and is, in fact, willed by the whole of my being.” Given the fact that nothing is more deserving of being willed than those ends dictated by love, the strongest form of hope is identified with the fullest possible experience of love.
For Marcel, love is not only a recognition of profound value, but it leads one to hope that the personal resides at “the heart of being.” To be brought to the personal at “the heart of being” is, for Marcel, “to hope in Thou for us.” Simply, one is brought, via the experience of love, to hope for a reality both intertwined with and destined for union with God. Marcel, with uncharacteristic vigor, wrote, “hope is a surge; it is a soaring leap! It is not only a protestation dictated by love; it is also a sort of appeal, a boundless recourse to an ally who is also love.” For Marcel, communion is a pathway to “the heart of being,” and this heart is defined by ever more profound forms of communion, including communion with the Divine.
Providing an admittedly mystical as well as autobiographical sense of what the depth of communion entails, Marcel wrote,
There is one thing I discovered after the Death of my parents; it is that what we call survivor (survivre) “one who lives after,” is in truth, sous-vivre, “one who lives under”; and those whom we have not ceased to love with what is best in ourselves now become as it were an invisible palpitating canopy, the presence of which is sensed, even lightly touched, under which we advance, even more bowed, always more detached from ourselves, toward the moment when everything will be swallowed up in love.
Even while one is left to wonder whether Marcel’s pursuit of intersubjectivity culminates in a kind of dissolution of the self that resembles nirvana, there is little doubt that the path to what is ultimate travels not simply to the beloved, but to the depths of intersubjective reality.
Sun Setting over a Lake by JMW Turner
Marcel is a thinker both of and beyond his times. In decentralizing subjectivity in favor of intersubjectivity, Marcel transitioned from Modern and Existential to Post-Modern thought. In his analysis of afterlife belief, this decentering was quite profound. Contrasted with the extreme subjectivity of Unamuno, Marcel moved afterlife belief from an origin in the “I” to that of the beloved. Marcel’s decentralization subsequently involved a movement beyond the self-other dichotomy to the primacy of intersubjectivity. This movement then reached the apex of decentralization insofar as those who love are brought out of themselves to an encounter with God.
Geoffrey Karabin is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Neumann University. His work focuses on issues related to death and immortality as well as the philosophy of the French Existentialist Gabriel Marcel.