Ep. 334: Gabriel Marcel’s Christian Existentialism (Part One)

0:08 Mark: Examined Life, a podcast by some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 334 is something like do we need life to have a meaning? Or maybe what justifies faith? And we read Gabriel Marcel's 1933 essay on the ontological mystery. More information about the text and the podcast please see partiallyexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer encroaching on my own data In

0:35 Seth: Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin. In the existential standpoint of being that is presupposed by epistemology.

0:41 Wes: In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan, more than an Agglomeration of functions in

0:46 Dylan: Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey giving hope a chance in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:51 Mark: And I know Wes just had Covid. Seth, you don't sound so great either. What's going on?

0:56 Seth: Oh, not illness.

0:58 Mark: Okay.

0:59 Seth: Had a couple margaritas last night, so maybe that's it.

1:02 Mark: We are recording at 9am Central Time. I was looking for some something that would be self contained, just some author that we had not hit before. And Marcel was suggested to me by Fear and Trembling that we just did that I knew Marcel is sort of known as a Christian existentialist, but I never read any of him and just looked at syllabi. What are people reading? There's some longer books, but then this self contained essay on the ontological mystery seemed a good choice and I think it worked out pretty well. It's. It's in a collection. The Philosophy of Existence or the Philosophy of Existentialism. I think it was published under both names with a couple other essays which are also okay, but this seems pretty central. Your thoughts?

1:48 Seth: I really liked it. I really, really liked it. Don't know if it's the translation or the original writing, but very clear, interesting, finely made distinctions and definitions gave me a vocabulary to talk and think about. Some things that I've been sympathetic to for a long. Ever since I read Heidegger in whatever it was, graduate school. But it's funny because he's talking about mystery but without using a lot of mystical language. I think it is very existential though, and the use of its terms and the way he approaches it, I just found it super compelling and really fascinating.

2:25 Wes: Yeah, he replaces being mystical with being French.

2:30 Seth: Oh, aren't they synonymous?

2:31 Wes: When I started out reading it and I saw things like, oh, he's complaining about the person collecting subway tokens and what a bad life they have, I thought, oh no, this is going to be a rough one. But he's a great writer. There's a lot of interesting ideas when it comes to the idea of being engaged with oneself as a being and a way that's ultimately mysterious as far as that experience goes. And ultimately, as Mark suggested, maybe that does amount to something religious. I don't know if I experienced that or if that means much to me. But there are also some things in here that say some things about epistemology, for instance, that I think are very interesting.

3:13 Dylan: Yeah, I recognized why we would read this. After having engaged with Kierkegaard and similarly to Seth, I had Heidegger come up in my mind regarding the merely functional and the functionalization and the technification of the world. And the diagnosis of modern man's despair as a result of a focus on technique and function as being a disengagement with being. All sounded very Heideggerian to me. And his focus on the avenue of our being through ourselves and it being radically individual and unspeakable, made me think of Kierkegaard. I'm interested to talk about it more.

There's parts of it that I've, you know, distinctions that I found provoking, thought provoking, just trying to make a distinction to get us to how we get out of despair. Part of it is for us to talk a little bit about existentialism in general as a reaction to despair about the world and what it means to not have meaning. And I think that he doesn't talk about this a lot. He sort of presumes that it's clear that if we go down this road, life doesn't have meaning. We become skeptics and nihilists and we can't move forward. And he's pointing to hope and love and presence as being the avenues towards having action and activity in the world.

So I guess, ultimately, in the end, being an active being is the way to prevent despair, be out of despair. But the previous conclusion, that without it we've become full of despair. Maybe it has as much to do with the history of existentialism and two world wars as anything else.

5:02 Wes: So it's an interesting way to put it. I think, Dylan, as you're saying, what he really wants to talk about is the meaning of life. But he only puts it that way in a few places. Instead, he wants to put it in terms of quote, unquote, ontology. And this all begins with. The essay begins with an account of man's lack of a quote unquote ontological sense. And that lack has something to do with. We find out first, it has something to do with this seeing ourselves, a hierarchical assemblage of functions. So, for instance, the social function is like being a consumer or a producer or a citizen.

And then there are vital functions, which I just. I think he assumes having to do with being a biological organism. He mentions psychology briefly, just to say something about the dangers of a reductionist approach. And he mentions Freud there. I think socially he's. He's thinking of Marx, but. So, for instance, the reduction of the human mind to things like blind libido or death drive or things like that, these more in a way, principles that end up being quite abstract. What's the replacement for that? The recognition of something that he calls an ontological need, which in that context, and this is page 14, he'll say, well, the world can't just be a tale told by an idiot.

The need is to find meaning in the world. But it also sounds like a need to be able to be in touch with one's own presence. So the word he uses and then the presence of. Of others. So it sounds like it's a need for meaning. It's a need for intimacy and connection. Maybe it's a need for God. Those things all get. And then it's a need to be aware of one's own ground in being, which is something that. It's a lower level layer to one's own existence as a cogito, right? As just a cognitive subject who has empirical experiences of the world or something like that.

I am isn't just, hey, I'm conscious. I have this consciousness. I am is something I do with my whole being, body and mind and soul, spirit, everything together. And then if we want to talk about cognition, all of that is built on top of that lower unified layer. The point is we lose touch with that layer.

7:18 Dylan: He says right after that quote, a tale told by an idiot, he says, I aspire to participate in this being, right? So participation, presence, those kinds of words of being actively involved is the aspiration he's pointing to. And I think that he's just saying that that's what we all want to do. We see most consciously in modern life the attenuation of the satisfaction of that need by turning it into satisfaction of that need, turning it into a problem solved by functional activity. In that way, it's another criticism of modern life is becoming all about efficient cause, all about how you get from here to there.

And that our lives and the world is a sequence of chemical interactions and one problem to solve after another that we can mechanize our way out of it. It's all in that line. And he's trying to both diagnose that we know that is unsatisfactory from just reflecting on ourselves through our aspiration to participate in being, and then goes on to try to characterize that some more.

8:37 Mark: Yeah, let's talk about the use of ontology here. So ontology for Aristotle, say, is sort of the most abstract science. What ultimately, philosophically, is the universe made of pretty remote from human concerns. Although maybe the soul is a fundamental thing. Depending on who you ask, the modern analytic philosophers we've read Quine Carnap, they might see ontology as completely relative to the activity that you're engaged in. So if you're doing math, okay, numbers exist for the purposes of doing math, but there's no like real ontology. It's all just what entities do.

You need to posit per Occam's razor for the thing that you're engaged in. If you're in physical explanation, you're going to figure out an ontology for that. Per, I guess Heidegger. I think of this more in terms of Merleau-Ponty that the life world is the fundamental. We were just referring to this as the thing Wes was saying, that this is the standpoint that is before knowledge, that's before science, before technics, before analysis, and that to enter that technical frame of mind is to break from the originary position, to falsify in some ways, and this is put specifically by Marcel in terms of our own involvement.

You know, the fact that we're in the middle of something means that we can't just objectify the situation that we're in and make it into a problem. So the fact that you're in it, you're encroaching on your own data that makes it a mystery. So we are interested in ontology. You know, he wants to make ontology absolutely central. It is the things that we care about in the world, right? They have being for us. We want to have being. Not nothingness, not a gap in being, not a mere annihilation, but, you know, an act of participation in things. So what does that mean?

You know, so there's a lot of talk of presences. And even though he doesn't say the presence of God, in my mind, you know, in the way that Kierkegaard might talk about Abraham having this presence of God, that is overwhelming. But I feel like, you know, all the Christianity was sort of usually just hinted at it was that these are phenomenological things, me being present to you, you being present to me in relationships of friendship, of love, of attentiveness, of caring, and even have the dead being present to us. So there's all these things that kind of build up.

If there's a presence. Well, that's part of your ontology. It's having those being present, having those presences, having this intrinsic relation to the world is going to make life meaningful. It's going to make us avoid despair and suicide.

11:18 Wes: I think when listeners hear the word ontology in contexts like these, they should be thinking of the social or the. The subject, in a sense, which is different than, say, just a Cartesian subject. So, Mark, as you mentioned, what ontology was for Aristotle, it was certain general categories of being. Like what are some of the categories? Unity, substance, attribute. Categories, yeah. Substance, attribute, yeah. So and then when Descartes is doing ontology, there's mind and matter. And so that's really kind of the framework with the advent of modern science.

But matter gets privileged and everyone's trying to figure out. So matter is the basic thing, and everyone's trying to figure out, how do you get mind out of that? The turn that things take. And this starts with Hegel, really. The idea is that we ought to see the social or the human subject or self consciousness, let's say, as something fundamental to our ontology, or we think of some lower layer. Again, we don't just start out by assuming there's matter and then there's mind, which is radically separate from matter. We think about something more fundamental and unified, but something that implicates our humanity.

Let's say, I want to say mind or subjectivity. But subject is a kind of ambiguous word in this, because he's unhappy with the Cartesian subject.

12:41 Seth: There's a nice turn of phrase on page 18 where he says he's comparing ontological inquiry with epistemological inquiries or intellectual inquiries. So that's what Wes, you're talking about. It's the Cartesian stance, traditional knowing subject, world or self as object. And he says, from that standpoint, I'm the subject. But when I'm doing an ontological inquiry, I'm not taking it from the standpoint of the subject. And I'm not treating my discourse of inquiry or my field of inquiry as a subject, as an object in the traditional sense. He says I'm the stage on which being is taking place, as opposed to I'm the subject who is taking a critical stance or a stance, any stance, vis a vis being.

So I like that terminology because this is the Exact same problematic. I know in the introduction he said that he had, I think this was written in 1925 and he had not read Heidegger at the time. And I'm fairly certain Being and Time came out almost contemporaneously. It was like 27, 28, something like that, I think. But it's exactly that point. And later on he's going to say the, you know, ontological examination or an ontological experience transcends the categories which I think Dylan and Wes mentioned earlier. So what Heidegger is trying to do in Being and Time and what Marcel's driving at here is how would you delve into that not part of yourself, but how would you delve into yourself as a being versus yourself as a subject, a functional subject at that.

And he says it's, you know, it's not easy, right? We only have the tools of functional discourse. So we have science and we have psychology and we have poetry and whatever else that we use to examine our world and to break it down and try to come to some understanding about what's happening. And I think when he characterizes the difference between the intellectual standpoint and the ontological standpoint, and I do think he makes a very, he gives us a very compelling way to think about it when he talks about mind, body and presence. But it's the same problem that all of these folks are going to have.

Makes me think that Merleau-Ponty is probably headed in the right direction. But it's ultimately like we don't have a language for describing what it is they're talking and driving at. And if you are convinced by the intuition of presence, then how do you cash that out in non intellectual terms? And this is exactly the problem that Wes mentioned in his intro, which is it can become religious. Although Marcel makes an argument that it doesn't have to be. There's a lot of different ways you can go.

15:27 Dylan: I like that you brought up intuition there because I think that he puts this intuition of presence and its self validatingness, its manifestness, right alongside what Descartes would have put on for intuition about the way in which we figure out the world. It's that kind of manifest understanding.

15:49 Wes: He doesn't like the word intuition right later on, but not that we have to discuss that right now, but he

15:55 Dylan: wants to replace it. But to me he was replacing the thing that someone like Descartes would call intuition.

16:02 Mark: It's like a transcendental. The way Kant would talk about it, you don't have an intuition of the transcendental Self. It's just that there has to be. For experience to make sense, there must be this thing that's there. This is how I was interpreting the entire. Maybe a better. You know, I said at the beginning, my questions were, do we need life to have a meaningful. In other words, do we need the ontological point of view? Do we actually have an ontological need? Or what justifies faith, which is just a way of connecting it to Kierkegaard. But there's a number of these mysteries, and faithfulness is only one of them.

And we've talked about some others. Maybe a more general question is how do we talk about things that we can't really talk about, but things that are so central. Right. The things that Wittgenstein says about which we should be silent, the really important spiritual things. So, yeah, it's this sort of Heisenberg that interacting with it modifies the data. Is that. That's Heisenberg, right?

16:57 Dylan: Yeah.

16:58 Wes: The more you try to measure one aspect of it, the less you can measure another aspect of it. Right.

17:03 Mark: The layman's version of it is just you can't actually get in there and analyze it and problematize it in this sense without screwing up the data, without actually changing the thing that you were trying to look at. In fact, I want to read. Seth, you mentioned that I'm the stage rather than the subject. This is page 18. The way that he puts this is weird. He's not just saying, hey, you know what? We're the stage rather than the subject. He said it might be said by way of an approximation, that my inquiry into being presupposes an affirmation in regard to which I am, in a sense, passive and of which I am the stage rather than the subject. So a lot of.

17:39 Wes: He's going to reject that. Yeah, he's setting that up.

17:41 Mark: But this is only at the extreme limit of thought, a limit which I cannot reach without falling into contradiction. I'm therefore led to assume or to recognize a form of participation which has the reality of a subject. This participation cannot be by definition an object of thought. It cannot serve as a problem. It appears beyond the realm of problems. It is meta. Problematical. So our just our very essence as a subject, as how we interact with being, is itself going to be one of these mysteries that we can't actually. There's nothing wrong with trying to pull it away and, you know, do some analytic philosophy on it. But you are going to be missing a very central thing. You are going to be actually missing

18:20 Wes: the most important Thing, it must be conceived as transcending the opposition between the subject who asserts the existence of being on the one hand and being as asserted by that subject on the other, and as underlying it in a given sense. This is why I keep referring to it as a lower layer that kind of transcends the subject object distinction that comes out of being. So we're, it sounds like we're trying to get to an original primordial union. And then he'll use this phrase, the primacy of being over knowledge. He says knowledge is environed by being, which is a great way to put it because again, the way we usually tend to think about this is that knowledge or cognition or mind, right, and being are very far apart.

And so we can be radical skeptics if we like. There's these two primary substances, they're far apart and then we have to figure out how they're related. And maybe if we're naturalists, we have to think about how mind comes out of matter. But if we think about that whole process, even of knowing things as like matter being a part of being, fundamentally our perspective actually has to change a little bit about how we pursue that project. It becomes much more complicated simply to go about it in the Cartesian way.

19:38 Seth: Yeah, this section comes right on the heels of his exploration of Cartesian subjectivity. And he has a fairly standard critique which is that the cogito doesn't get Descartes what he thinks it gets him. Right. You know, it comes up. All it concern is that I can't remember how he puts it, but.

19:53 Wes: Well, it's about the indeterminate epistemological subject of objective cognition. It's not about the whole self, it's not about the total I, as he puts it.

20:02 Seth: Part of that critique is that he's saying in order to recognize yourself as the thinking subject, you in a sense already have to get subjectivity. So it he's saying like you have the similar kind of problem trying to get a perspective on yourself as being. And what he's saying here is it's not like you can just take a different point of view from the perspective of being the Cartesian subject, nor can you just take a non subjective position vis a vis your own being. You know, there's this very Sartrean when you talk about a horizon or a limit and it's like as you approach that limit, you begin to get a sense of the. But it's not something you can ever reach or grasp.

20:46 Wes: Prior to our conscious cognition of the world, we have to be glued to the world at some deeper level. And we can't even explain cognition unless we can talk about the lower level being glued, which is mysterious. And then the same thing with ourselves prior to self consciousness in the more abstract sense is this self acquaintance, which he's going to talk about a little bit later, in terms of the body inhabiting a body and all that. Which is why I said, you know, I was saying in our chat prior to the show that there are things in this remind me of more Wittgenstein, because like those arguments is an anti skeptical argument and it's in Hegel as well.

And the idea is that skepticism limits itself because we may have to make lots of assumption assumptions before we even begin that argument. And these are the types of assumptions we're making and they limit our skeptical project because we're presuming a lot when we go down the path of talking about the. I think and all of that stuff. And I think in this case, you know, what he thinks we're presuming is this more fundamental relationship to being.

21:50 Dylan: This very section we were keying on page 18, that self limiting nature of skepticism, Marcel would basically say your whole skeptical stance is enveloped within being and assumptions about being and completely limited by, I think Marcel would argue a kind of atrophied understanding of being because he would reject strong skepticism.

22:17 Mark: So we already have established by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, et cetera, the idea that Cartesian skepticism in the existence of other minds, for instance, is incoherent because there's a fundamentally social underpinning of any individual bit of knowledge. But that's different than saying you can't be skeptical about this particular experience.

22:39 Wes: Right?

22:39 Mark: In the Wittgenstein sense of, you know, I have a hand. Can I be skeptical about that? So specifically with this notion of presence, which I know is more talked about later, but it is brought up right at page 15. That's early on in the essay. And the idea that if you feel a presence, part of this might just be somebody is in the room with you and they can be present or they can be sort of not really paying attention to you, or even if they are paying attention to you, they might still not be present. So there's something about the connection between people that like we just.

I want to still say intuition like Dylan was, but I think we should discuss why he might have a problem with that. He says this has implications for our relations with dead people. You know, when somebody dies, you could sort of preserve them as an effigy and sort of just try to remember them the way they were as like an object in your mind, an image, or you could kind of keep them alive, keep them as a presence in you. And this is all hinting up. He doesn't specifically talk about the presence of God, the Holy Spirit or something, but I think he's trying to use this very sensible charge against global skepticism to then say, I can legitimately not have doubt about, have faith about these very specific religious experiences.

23:56 Wes: I think this example of presence is a very good one. He wants to talk about being with. He makes a big thing of the word with, right? Yeah. It's an interesting question. What does it mean to be with someone? There's the. On a cognitive level, you're in a room with a physical someone who is, is also a body and a physical object, and your mode of access to that person is through the senses. And then we kind of think, well, we kind of build up a conception of another person's mind by interpreting their behavior, listening to their language and. But what we're getting is all through the senses.

And the question is at a lower level, is that the correct description at a certain level of explanation, that is the right description. I think Marcel would admit that we're in, in the problematical world, in the world of science and empirical data and all that. I think that's how you have to describe things. But there may be this lower level where our withness with another person is more than that. And prior to that, and it sounds a bit, you know, okay, on religiously, we might describe that as the two souls can be present to each other regardless of what's happening in the world, in the material world.

And it can go even for, you know, the soul of living person and the soul of a dead person, they can be in some sense with each other or we can, as Mark said, keep them alive in us. But in any case.

25:15 Seth: So before he talks about live real time presence, he talks about recollection in the past. And like you say, kind of like the fetishizing or the turning into an image or an icon, an effigy, there's a language he used somewhere else. I don't remember when it first comes up about something being within you. And I was put in mind of like when he talks about how somebody may have influenced your upbringing and you carry them around with you in the sense that what impact they had on you, how they were present to you, is changed. Who you are or who you were and who you became.

And they're an Essential part of you, but that's not something that you can access. Accessing a memory of that experience is not the same thing as what actually occurred. And I'm thinking, like, if you had a teacher who got you interested in a certain subject and kind of changed the trajectory of your life by getting you excited about learning or creativity or something like that, you know, even if it was like, in elementary school and you don't remember anymore what you know, you don't have a strong recollection of them or that experience. But it was formative.

That's a way in which that's within you and it's part of your being, but it's not any kind of objective or categorical knowledge.

26:39 Wes: This is page 21, by the way. He's talking about fidelity, and he's talking about the idea that we could have an experience of deep spiritual significance, which the kind of experience that a philosopher might disdain because it doesn't concern rational being in general. The way he puts it. It affects only a particular person as a person. There are kind of hints of Kierkegaard here, and his example is meeting a person with whom one has a quote, unquote intimate and unique affinity. So you meet a special person, maybe on a vacation, and you think, according to your problematical, ordinary frame of mind, that this is just a coincidence.

And it's nice. It wasn't foreordained, it wasn't destined to meet this person. And he wants to say, no, this could be something rooted in a reality that is beyond the domain of the problematical. Quoting again, that it is something that we could treat as foreordained or something that's the way I'm interpreting this. And that it's a betrayal to say it might not have happened or to say I would have been the same person if it didn't happen. Ultimately, what he'll say, this acts within me as an inward principle. So this meeting with the person isn't just some contingent thing that happened to me in my life.

It is sort of one of the fundamental principles. It sounds timeless, right? It sounds like we have to step outside of time to even articulate this. But it's one of the principles that makes me who I am. You could think of this in a timeless sense as, okay, that's one of the things that was there from the very beginning. And that was going to define who Wes is, that formative influence. It's not that I just could have gone down one of many, many tracks. Wes is what he is, and the data kind of assembled themselves within time, within experience, to reflect that.

28:23 Dylan: Let's say this aspect of the essay to me is probably the most interesting because it's the way in which he's making the argument for mystery, right? And he's doing some work to try to point to, I'll call it the existence of mystery. Right? So the approach to, besides, you know, doing a kind of what feels now typical, pointing to technology and functionalism as leading to despair or lack of meaning, he's trying to also point to what are the things in experience that I'm going to argue are incontrovertible. This is real, this happens. And I'm going to sketch it out for you so that you are persuaded that at the very least, this thing I'm pointing to, this thing that I'm going to call mystery, which in some way is unspeakable, exists and is in fact fundamental to the way in which we exist without, as was noted earlier, without sort of being mystical about it.

He's trying to do, in words, something that a person who is really a mystic would basically grab your hand and take you along the way and then say, well, you just have to experience this in order to understand what it is we're talking about.

29:39 Mark: Yeah, I feel like we don't come into contact that often on this podcast with what might be called, you know, their whole podcast that are about what one might call woo woo philosophy.

29:49 Seth: Right?

29:50 Mark: The idea, like, if you put energy out in the world, it'll come back to you, or God never gives us more than we can handle. Like, there are deistic and non theistic versions of most of these sorts of proclamations, but it's easy to like, well, there's something true about that, but it's only true psychologically. And that might be where Marcel is coming down. What would be wrong with one of those statements? Like I said, the energy going in is that it's pseudoscientific, is that it sounds like it is a statement of physics. Marcel himself talks about being receptive to the influx of being.

And he says, look, if you put this in terms of physics, it's nonsense. You have to see it as mysterious, as metaproblematical. And so the question is, you know, I get how, you know, there are things that science can't capture about human relations, about how we make meaning for ourselves. That all is great. That, yes, a strictly analytical, scientific worldview is going to pull you away from what you humanistically need out of philosophy. Maybe you should read a good novel instead. We get this trend in A lot of philosophy. But for it to cash out specifically in terms of.

I'm just not sure whether it's going beyond a limit that I'm comfortable with to say it's okay to say it was destiny that I met up with this person who changed my life. Because I'm using destiny in this sort of mysterious, meta. Problematical way. It just seems like I've added a couple words, a special technical definition of mystery that the fruitiest philosophers that you would want to dismiss could make use of.

31:30 Wes: It's hard for me to get on board with this idea. This is, you know, this idea that a happenstance meeting with someone could be thought of as destiny or something like that. He doesn't use that word, but it's something like that.

31:43 Dylan: Are we sure about the interpretation of that? Right? I mean, in terms of it being destiny with the way in which you guys are ladening it with that it was foreordained, eternal.

31:53 Wes: Page 21. Say that I've made an encounter which has left a deep and lasting trace on all my life. It's commonly ignored by philosophers. It can't be universalized.

32:01 Mark: I think you already quoted the relevant passage, Wes, which is if you say that it's contingent, you're somehow diminishing the importance of it. So I was reading that as, at least psychologically, that you're interpreting it as you're having some sort of communication with the universe and the progress of your life.

32:18 Wes: Suppose I'm told you met this person because it's a coincidence, basically, you know, you went to this place to get your health treated, and so did they, and blah, blah, blah. But neither the supposed identity of tastes nor this common affliction has brought us together in any real sense. It has nothing to do with the intimate and unique affinity with which we are dealing. At the same time, it would be a transgression of this valid reasoning to treat this affinity as if it were itself a cause and say it was precisely this which has determined our meeting.

Hence I'm in the presence of a mystery. Well, no, I mean, I think, Dylan, you maybe you have a point here. It would be a transgression of this valid reasoning. Which valid reasoning? His opponent's reasoning or his? He may want to be saying that some somewhere in between. So maybe destiny is too exaggerated a reading of this. But he wants to say there's something as central as opposed to it's not just a random meeting. Maybe it's not destiny, but it's also not just a random meeting. There's something essential about that meeting, he wants to treat something about relationships as if they could be necessary and essential to us and not just accidental and purely external.

33:25 Dylan: And maybe this is in part the mystery of it, right? But it makes me think about eternal recurrence and the notion that where we're at, we have to most embrace the path that got us there. So that makes everything that has happened essential to the circumstances of ourselves now. And it's not exactly the same. So destiny to me ties up with the notion that there is a actor or an activity of the universe that is pushing us along in a particular direction, which may be there. I mean, it may be. That's exactly the way he wants to go with it. The other is, is that there is a dependency in the past that becomes realized and preserved in the future, so that that interaction gathers its force, in fact maintains its tendrils on that past intimate occurrence as it flourishes and it has effect into the future.

And therefore there is this dependency upon it such that the things that happen afterwards somehow were utterly required that effect, meeting in the past. And there is a mystery about that. And there's a mystery of like, well, was that supposed to have happened? Did that have to happen in order, for, you know, me to be who I am now? What is mysterious about it is the causal nature of it. And what he's saying is that if you try to turn that sequence of events into a set of sequence of efficient causes, you will destroy the very thing that you're talking about.

That's what he's saying.

35:01 Wes: So he'll say in the next paragraph, shall we avoid the difficulty by saying that it was, after all, nothing but a coincidence, a lucky chance. The whole of me protests against that. And I, who inquire into the meaning and the possibility of this meeting, I cannot place myself outside it or before it. I am engaged in this encounter. I depend on it. This again, this speaks to this whole idea of there's something at a lower level than the problematical, right? This is the ontological and this is the mysterious. I'm inside it, in a certain sense, it envelops me and it comprehends me, even if it is not comprehended by me.

Thus it is only by a kind of betrayal or denial that I can say, after all, it might not have happened. I would have still been what I was and what I am today. Nor must it be said I have been changed by it as by an outward cause. No, it has developed me from within. It has acted in me as an inward principle. I know I already Read some of this. But that's why I wanted to call it destiny. It's because it's just. It's necessity. It's not contingency, and it's something that comes from within side me. It's as if my essence is there prior to me, even existing as an empirical being.

And a meeting like this, in a way, is like an expression of my essence. So this is the way I have to try to understand it.

36:16 Mark: This is like hermeneutics on how to interpret your own life. That if you're a historian trying to uncover, like, why did Hitler do the things that he did? Or whatever, then you might do a psychological profile. You might look at the historic, you look at for efficient causes, and that is trying to resolve this other person as a problem. But when you're yourself, you know, you're in the story, you're not trying to unravel yourself as a problem. I mean, again, there might be circumstances in which you kind of want to do that. Why do I have these violent tendencies?

Let's externalize. Let's try to be. I'll try to achieve some sense of objectivity regarding my actions and try to work on myself as a machine, do some cognitive behavioral therapy with myself. But that can't be all you do as therapy. Like, you can't just treat yourself as an object or as an animal to be tamed or something like that. How could I best sublimate these urges that I have? You have to make sense of yourself as an ongoing project, a story, something like that. And so, yeah, the word destiny is not so helpful in that, because that does sound like I was just here passively and destiny came along and put me in this.

Like, no, that doesn't capture the inner participation that went on and how the story unfolded.

37:31 Wes: I don't know what else to say is the opposite of, this is a chance meeting. From my standpoint, it is a chance meeting, Right. For me, there's no way to. I can't find a way to accept his claim that doesn't involve either something religious or something that evokes destiny or something like that. But if, despite the fact that I tried to save the appearances pretty well with my explanation about a timeless essence.

37:53 Dylan: So I understand why you would go down the avenue of words like destiny. Like, I don't know if Marcel ultimately wants to go that direction, that there's a kind of foreordained aspect to it, but what he's talking about is the aspect of which you encounter someone or some event in your life. You experience a connection to it or to yourself that connects to. It's like a node in your life towards your future that feels like it is so meaningful as is. If it came right out of you and it connects to you. And this is language he's using. You know, it connects to your very being. And he's to me trying to capture, you know, in words, point to that existence while acknowledging that it's mysterious. Right. Because you're not going to be able to analyze it into its efficient parts.

38:57 Wes: After all, it might not have happened. I would still have been what I was and what I am today. One could treat this as saying, if I take this very strong formative. This is like the necessity of origins. Kripke. Our birth becomes a necessary condition. How does Kripke put it?

39:12 Mark: It's a rigid designator.

39:14 Wes: Yeah, it's a rigid designator. We can't do a counterfactual on. What if I hadn't been born to these parents? Well, I would have been a completely different person. You could do the same thing about a strong form of influence in your life. The special person you met. What if I had never met them? Well, you would have been a different person. So you can't even do that counterfactual because it's you doing this thought experiment because they are part of who you became. It doesn't make any sense to do it. That would be the most probably rational, I think, interpretation of this.

39:43 Seth: But yeah, like it doesn't make sense to me to say like, well, if I had different parents, I would have been a different person. That's like if you're a different person, different parents. I don't even know.

39:53 Wes: A different person would have existed.

39:54 Seth: A different person would have existed. Exactly.

39:56 Wes: I think those counterfactuals are. There is something genuinely mysterious when you try to get into them. It's actually quite. Wow, this is really.

40:02 Seth: Yeah, well, but that's. And I think that aligns well with Marcel's thesis here, which is those things which are constitutive of your personality building and we've been talking about for it feels like months now, the self as a creative, constructive act and building a path for yourself and taking a conscious, positive, active role in your own existence and all that sort of thing. Obviously recognizing that there are so many things that are out of your control, but recognizing that you are built yourself as a self is built over time through your experiences and many contingencies and many choices, if you want to call them that, and the way in which those are constitutive of you is mysterious.

40:45 Wes: Right.

40:46 Mark: We wouldn't want to be too self conscious about how we're doing it, of treating yourself like. But you know, Heidegger says, make yourself a project. That sounds like, oh, let me problematize myself. How can I. Let me make some lists of things, you know, goals, where do I want to be in five years? What are concrete steps I get? Like the New Year's resolution project of externalizing everything and trying to be self conscious about everything can't be the way that the self gets formed. It is much more primal than that. I wanted to let you have the last word, Seth, and I just couldn't do it. I'm sorry. We're ending part one here. We're going to talk more. Come back next week. Or if you are a supporter through our website or through Patreon, you can get it in your citizen feed. As the next thing, go to personal examinlife.com support to look into those options. See you in a bit.