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

0:07 Wes: Hey.

0:08 Mark: This is the Partially Examined Life, episode 334, part 2. We've been talking about Gabriel Marcel's essay on the ontological mystery. We had just finished talking about trying to figure out what he means by a mystery. I mean it's. We've said it is not a problem, because a problem. I think there's a Meno's paradox kind of thing here where for something to be a legitimate problem, you have to know the general field of its solution.

0:31 Wes: Right.

0:31 Mark: You have to know something in order to even ask a question. Marcel is claiming that we're sort of begging the question when we do that with some of the most important things, when we, you know, our fundamental relationship toward meaning in our own lives. We've mentioned the mind body connection as being another mystery, right? Yes. You can be a brain scientist and talk about correlations between consciousness and brain states and things like that, but as a person actually having this experience, there is something that just at least seems fundamentally mysterious.

And he's. Marcel is suggesting that the way to deal with mystery is it's not just a matter of like, oh, it's just a mystery, let's just go home. Like, we still deal with it. These are the most important things in our lives. But you don't necessarily try to solve it. It's not necessary to solve it. You can leave some things mysterious about it and still deal with it, you know, intelligently in a desirable way. Does that seem accurate so far?

1:28 Dylan: Yeah, except that I think that ultimately there's something in place of Solution, Right. So when you problematize something, you turn it into something that has a particular kind of answer available to it. And all of his stuff about, I think hope, his stuff about presence, his stuff about activity, those are all aspects of what the solution or the solution is going to be. The wrong word, the engagement with mystery that leads to a fusion of meaning. It leads to whatever the corresponding. This is going to be a way Marcel would object to the corresponding component of the ratio between a mystery is to a problem as a blank is to a solution. So whatever the missing element of that ratio is, that corresponds to mystery. That is like a solution to a problem. That's what he's talking.

2:25 Wes: He gives two examples to of the degradation of mysteries into problems. One of them is with regard to the mind body problem. And his point is that having a body in a way and feeling oneself in a body is the basis for having any data in the first place. I have to be present to myself at a lower level than self consciousness in order to even embark on that. The project of figuring out the relationship between consciousness and the body at a different level. So I'm already assuming this union. And then the same thing with the problem of evil. These are ways in which, right the data, I get implicated in the data. How does he say that again?

3:06 Dylan: Encroached upon.

3:07 Wes: I encroach upon the data. I'm part of the data in a sense. So the problem of evil. How did the all knowing perfect all good God create a world where there's so much evil in it? And then we ask the question, well, is it just apparent to us or from the bird's eye view, is it really the best possible world? Is it like St. Augustine, the evil is just privation, all that stuff. And what he's going to say, that's the kind of thing we do when we look at it from the outside and we ask whether it's apparent or real, but it's not even evil until I'm looking at it from the inside. I got to be involved in order to grasp it as evil. I can't do a God's eye point of view there.

3:43 Dylan: This example to me was pretty poignant because it would point to the disengagement we have with say, solving a problem that has some kind of evil component to it. Genocide or child abuse or stuff that really is horrible. And the way in which when we, you know, do inevitably what you have to do when you're. It might not be affecting you, you might not be involved with it, is it's just another thing on the list of stuff to deal with in the world. Right. And that is the recipe for not being involved in the way he's talking about it. So the really problem of evil is an example of how involvement really makes it clear that you need that in order to understand what it is.

4:26 Wes: He objects to reduction in general. So he'll say things like trying to reduce love to libido, to will to power, to the struggle for existence, the will to live, as he puts it, thinking of Darwin, those sorts of reductionist projects. He doesn't like either. And I think these are very solid points.

4:42 Mark: I like the quote about evil. Evil which is only stated or observed is no longer evil which is suffered. In fact, it ceases to be evil in reality. I can only grasp it as evil in the measure in which it touches me. That is to say, in the measure in which I am involved in as one is involved in a lawsuit. I'm not sure why I like lawsuit

5:00 Wes: there, but I have to have a grievance. Yeah.

5:04 Mark: And I was thinking about, you know, the brothers Karamazov and Ivan. Ivan being consumed by child torture such that he's collecting these newspaper stories and letting them outrage him. So he's really trying to grasp, I think, Dylan, what you were saying in the ratio, probably coping strategies. Right. If solution is the problem, coping strategies is to mysteries. Like the mystery is just there. How are you going to live with the fact that there is evil? And so Brothers Karamazov has separate strategies of dealing with this fact. You know, you could deny it. You could just try to small acts of kindness or you could just be outraged.

5:46 Wes: He was saying at the end, right, this he talks about a middle way. So there are two of the ways to fill in Dylan's ratio. One of them is just to say, well, we don't know, we're agnostic, Everything's mysterious. Another way is to become dogmatically religious and say here are the answers. It's in this book. And then he wants to say there's a third way that involves love. I think love might be the word that fills out Dylan's ratio.

6:09 Dylan: I would put in in parentheses hope as well. Both love and hope are preserving and living in this realm of mystery because neither of them involve a derivation of reason. Derivation of cause.

6:23 Wes: They're non reductive.

6:24 Dylan: They're non reductive. That's a good way to put it.

6:27 Mark: Yeah. You might wonder what makes this guy an existentialist. And there are certainly things that look like Sartre or camus, on page 26. Despair is possible in any form, at any moment, to any degree. And this betrayal may seem to be counseled, if not forced upon us by the very structure of the world we live in, the problem of evil, the fact that there is this evil. And yes, you could just disengage yourself and treat it as a problem to be solved or to be ignored, frankly.

6:53 Wes: But to actually the other, the other thing he means by structure, those ontological need and vital need come apart. Those two things are different. So we have these needs that go beyond our just existence as biological organisms. In the context of the essay, that's what I think he means by this inherent structure. It's. That's the tragic structure of the world. He wants to use this word, tragedy.

7:12 Mark: Yeah, of course I'm wanting to problematize it and saying, like, well, but do we have a need for drama or a need for, you know, what makes Ivan in the Brothers K collect those stories to engage himself with the problem of evil? It invites psychoanalysis. And he's saying, you know, that that is not. Certainly if you were he analyzing your own life, that would not be the way to approach it. In any case, the facts are the same like that life strikes us as absurd. And for Camus it was like, you better acknowledge that, you better ride that. Be the, I want to say the ubermensch, but that's of course not his term, the badass who is like, I can live with the absurd.

I'm a very strong willed person. And if you just accept some religion or something, then you're just denying the absurd. You're trying to settle it. In some ways you have to live with it unsettled, unreconciled. Whereas Marcel at least, and I assume other religious, you know, Buber or other religious existentialists are maybe going to acknowledge that the tragedy, the absurdity, the contingency is there as a phenomenological data, but say, no, no, there actually is a healthy way to react to it, which maybe you have to take a leap. But there's not even the sense in Marcel that like, oh, I'm totally unjustified in taking a leap.

No, we're actually very much justified in taking a leap, you know, for our own health. If you're looking for justification in the sense of a logical proof, you know, you're not going to find that. But there's definitely just like, you know, Sartre says there is nothing external, you know, moral laws or whatever that really determine us any particular way. We just do stuff and it's arbitrary and it's unjustified. We're responsible for it. But then he has a very strong, oh, but if you do it with this way, you're in bad faith. If you do it that way, you're in bad faith.

There's actually still only a sort of very narrow path that is existentially respectable, which then Beauvoir outlined with this whole, like, don't be the serious man, don't be the adventurer, don't be, you know, all these obstacles to avoid. So I don't think Marcel is that different than these others in saying, oh, love is the way actually that you deal with despair, actually engagement with the world, engagement with other people. You will not actually feel that despair. You will not want to kill yourself.

9:26 Dylan: I realized that the word. You use the word coping mechanism. And I started thinking of the word therapy and engaging in the therapeutic as opposed to something that's a solution. And it partly reminded me of this book, Therapy of Desire by Nussbaum, who's thinking about in that case. She's characterizing the way in which pre Socratic Greeks are talking about, and even some post Socratics are talking about the ways in which we regulate our bodies and our experiences in life in order to deal with adversity. So you have the Epicureans, the Stoics and so forth, all of which are trying to. She envelops them in this notion of a therapy of desire. This seems to be the kind of thing that we have here going on. So Marcel is again seeing it through this lens of how do we avoid the pitfall of despair?

10:21 Wes: I want to throw in another word before we get to hope, which is where I know we're going. You know, so other than hope and love, there's recollection.

10:28 Dylan: Yes.

10:29 Wes: Which is really what replaces intuition. He doesn't like the word intuition, but the recollection is the way we apprehend the ontological mystery, in a sense. So I think he directly says that this is on page 23. What am I doing when I recollect? So this is the ontological version of memory. But it's not just memory. Right. Memory is where he uses pejorative terms like effigy. And memory is just the.

10:52 Dylan: Or the.

10:52 Wes: The ordinary aspect of subjective consciousness. Recollection is something deeper, something you do with your whole being. So he'll say, I withdraw from life not as a cognitive subject, but to a being that is beyond life, beyond all possible judgment and representation and ontological basis of memory. Well, these are my words.

11:11 Seth: Sorry.

11:13 Wes: Now pretend I'm quoting him when I'm just giving my summary. But it's an ontological basis of memory that is in this non representational unity. But I think the idea is that this is the way we unify ourselves, re dash collectively ourselves.

11:28 Dylan: Well, he says that explicitly.

11:29 Wes: These unities. Yes.

11:31 Dylan: The act whereby I recollect myself as

11:34 Mark: a unity, which is yet is relaxation and abandon. It is a fundamentally giving contemplative. I like contemplation. That it's not self absorption that would be sort of forming a solid crust around yourself and, you know, being concerned only with your interests and making a very solid dividing line in your circle of concern between you and the rest of the universe. No, this is a relaxed contemplative reflection on the course of your life so far.

12:02 Wes: And be in the presence of, so, let's say, abandon and relaxation. In the presence of what? In the presence of the mystery. This idea, right, has a precedent in Kant's synthesis of the imagination. How is it that we put together a personal identity? How is it we persist over time? It involves memory here, not just memory, something deeper, recollection. We synthesize ourselves. And maybe that's the wrong way to put it here. We recollect ourselves as unities. Recollect suggests that we already are unities and we just have to be in touch with being to grasp ourselves as a unity.

It's not an intellectual intuition of the transcendental ego. It's not synthesis of the imagination. It's some third thing where we can be aware of our fundamental unity in this presence and relaxation and all that. Or we can forget that and we can live totally in the world of the problematic, treating ourselves as functions and feeling divided against ourselves, which is probably where many of us usually are. Despair versus fit. That comes up in 25. If that's where we want to go.

13:04 Mark: It throws in, you know, what do we find when we withdraw into oneself and recollect. You find that you are not your own. He quotes the apostle Paul. And this ends up coming up, I guess this is just supposed to be phenomenological data. And he says later at the end of the essay, when he's like, is this just hidden Christianity? Like, well, look, Christianity was invented, enabled new reflections, new kinds of experiences. And so maybe this is, you know, not necessarily phenomenological data for everybody. Maybe you. Only if you think of things in certain, according to certain frameworks, you're going to get the idea that you didn't build, that you didn't make yourself. Even though the Self is supposed to be a project that we're working on ourselves. But still like you find that you is the you are not your own. I mean is that just follow straight from the being with the fact that

13:55 Wes: the social you are for others, you are most free and most yourself when you are available to others, when you are there for others in need. It does sound very Christian. But that's what he's going to say later.

14:06 Mark: Yes, which. That's much more concrete than you know, I was looking up earlier, we never actually talked, I think about Heidegger's concept of Mitsein, which is the precursor to. Marcel just quotes the Latin coesse, being with. But the Mitsein for Heidegger is just about that I see things through your eyes and vice versa. Because we are part of a shared culture. So we use similar conceptual schemes, similar framework strategies so that there ends up being some sort of Geist, some sort of group cohesion. But that has nothing to do with like you being present for me it's just like we both watched the same TV shows and heard the same, you know, all the. Had the same teachers and grew up in the same ethic.

14:49 Seth: Yeah. I don't think the Heideggerian construct touches on this until you get to. Being with is still a mode of Dasein in its like kind of isolation or self. Self standingness. And in fact it's. One of the criticisms. Right. Of Heidegger is that he doesn't really give a good explanation of Kasein and Dasein together. So there's really never a recognition, there's never a strong declaration by him of what the existential mode of being present with another Dasein would look like. Did we get off of hope and despair or are we coming back to it?

15:24 Mark: We still haven't quite got to hope. But yeah, we're getting there.

15:28 Wes: We are almost there. I mean this is all leading up to that section. I thought recollection was important.

15:33 Seth: Okay. I struggled with the recollection section. And there's no need to take a Heideggerian detour. So.

15:38 Wes: So it's on. Just to finish that up, it's on 24 where he. The end of 24, I think, where he brings up the objection by recollection. Isn't that just intuition in the tradition of German idealism? And he'll say no, intuition can apprehend the intuiting being. Tell that to Schelling. I don't know. I thought Schelling thought it did. But anyway, it can't reflect, it can't do what he wants, which is to quote, unquote, collect simple experiences. We have to fill that in for ourselves what he means by simple experiences. But he'll say it's not intuition.

Recollection is not intuition, but it's an assurance which underlies the entire development of thought, even discursive thought. So again, I think the way to think of it is this ontological version of memory. And it's going to be important, I think, to the concept of hope. Hopefully I'm right about that and I haven't just distracted us, but. But that's what's coming up now in the next section.

16:31 Mark: Yeah, I had planned to start this second half here on hope because it seemed like it was a good second case. After considering alleged destiny at the end of our first half of the discussion.

16:41 Wes: Alleged destiny. And he was found innocent. He was found innocent and I accept that result.

16:47 Mark: So page 28. Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being beyond all data, beyond all inventories and 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, God is on my side. That's basically what that means to me. But like, it doesn't have to be God, it's just having a feeling that this hope that I have is not just a feeling that I have that's probably wrong. He gives an example of. To hope against hope. That a person whom I love will recover from a disease which is said to be incurable is to say it is impossible that I should be alone in willing this cure. It is impossible that reality in its inward depth should be as hostile or so much as indifferent to what I assert is in itself a good.

17:34 Wes: Before that, on 27, he identifies despair with this idea that there's nothing that seems to withstand the process of dissolution. So everything can be reduced scientifically to these elements that aren't intrinsically meaningful. They're just material, inert, whatever, not inert, but you know, they're material and they're non normative facts. There's no inherent meaning in the world. So there's nothing to which I can give credit is the way he puts it. And hope implies credit. There's something very pessimistic for him about this naturalistic way of looking at the world. And hope is a counter to that. But of course, yeah, it sounds weird because it sounds like we have to say things like, you know what you just quoted Mark in Which being cannot help will that which I will. What do you guys think of that? Can we accept that? I can't.

18:20 Dylan: I like this characterization of what hope is. Surely you can put any number of sort of religious spins on it, right? I mean, I think that you're going to end up being able to do that with anything that is in this sort of non reductionist direction. But I thought that the notion that what hope is is the position that what I will deserves to be willed as a fact. And I will that with my whole being. That seems like hope to me is

18:47 Wes: the universe in a. In connivance with you.

18:50 Dylan: Well, it's the idea the universe ought to be. Right.

18:54 Seth: I wrote in my notes in this section that the way he's characterizing hope, you could just as easily call it faith. But there's an interesting part on page 28 and it's that example you were talking about. So somebody's got an incurable disease and the doctors say less than one half of 1/10 of 1% of patients ever recover from this. There's effectively zero chance this person's going to die. And he says that if I don't give me cases or examples or statistics. That's the world of the problematical, that's the world of the scientific, that's the world of data.

He says, I assert that a given order shall be re established. That reality is on my side and willing it to be so. I do not wish. I assert such as the prophetic tone of true hope. And I'm kind of with Dylan on this one where it's a really kind of nice characterization. It's essentially saying, not just in the absence of data, but contra the whole stance of taking a quote unquote rational statistic, scientific.

19:58 Wes: He'll say hope excludes counter examples. It excludes them. Yeah, fuck the data.

20:04 Seth: Well, it's you saying this is a thing that I want and I believe that it will happen. He doesn't say believe, that's interesting. I assert it will happen.

20:11 Mark: And he doesn't say want. He says will is different than want.

20:15 Wes: He's not a fan of desire in general because that's the world of the problematic. I hope for Lamborghini I will it with all of my being because hope

20:25 Mark: is essentially about something that is external to me. Right. Doesn't he say that somewhere?

20:29 Seth: It's actually on page 30. This is one of the things I've been waiting to get to because I really found this to be a really nice passage, if I may. So he says the world of the problematical, the intellectual, the scientific, the rational, the functional is the world of fear and desire, which are inseparable. It is at the same time the world of the functional. And in fact the kingdom of techniques of every sort and techniques serve or can be made to serve some desire or fear. In fact, every desire or fear tends to invent its appropriate technique.

So when you think about, if you think about the world of problematical being, the world of fear and desire and functional techniques that serve to satisfy desires or alleviate or avoid fears are what you build. And he says, you know, despair, which we need to kind of baseline before we get to hope, is. Despair is a recognition of the inefficacy of all techniques to reach being. In other words, being itself is beyond fear and desire. And when you recognize that being is beyond fear and desire, meaning, basically when you recognize the being is, which is meaning, which is hope, faith, whatever is beyond the means that we have at our disposal essentially to access it as data or as some sort of subjective experience, then you can fall into despair.

21:45 Wes: Solving our material problems with technological progress, that doesn't solve the problem of meaning in life. It doesn't solve other problems, including intimacy, human connection. In fact, it can work against those things as we, as we well know. But we tend to give a kind of quasi religious and mystical aura to the technological. That's where a lot of our, I think, focus goes today. So for instance, with smartphones, it's practically a religious object in some ways. It's magical, right? It feels and it's beautiful. So we might even try to delude ourselves that that technology can solve this problem of meaning, but it can't.

And as we get more and more powerful, the contrast, he'll say that this contrast between what we can do with technology and our own fragility, our own fragility as physical, material beings, we're going to die inevitably anyway. That contrast creates even more despair. We get more powerful in one domain, but it just highlights our powerlessness in the other.

22:44 Seth: Yeah, not only do we get more powerful, but it's exceeding our ability to control it. On page 31, he says we're unable to control our own control. And there's, like you said, a dialectical correlation between technical progress and the philosophy of despair. Now this is a point at which he brings in, this is the point at which I see a romantic turn. He brings the notion of creativity and creativity being connected to accessing of being. And there's a very non religious way in which you can interpret this, particularly because he's talking specifically about artistic creativity, but it's kind of just a rehash of the German Romantics in some sense, which, again, had a very religious tone. They just used the infinite. Right. So we have being, God, the infinite. Take your pick.

23:26 Mark: A couple things that have been said recently have made me want to read this quote from page 14, right near the beginning of the essay, defining what being is. Being is what withstands, or would withstand, an exhaustive analysis bearing on the data of experience and aiming to reduce them step by step to elements increasingly devoid of intrinsic or significant value. So it's just defining being. I like, Seth, that you were sort of saying anything that exists has being. No, no, Being is more like God. Being is this sort of central. It is the heart of mystery.

Being is the essence of mystery. It is the thing we are most concerned with, the ontological need is we want to get hold of being, this thing that cannot be. So that's by definition, nothing that we do via technics, which is about problems and creating technical solutions to these problems, can address ontological mysteries, can address being itself.

24:21 Seth: Yes, but the main differentiator between Marcel and any of these other people we've read or any of these others, is that he actually has something positive to say. But, you know, Heidegger spent his entire career trying to figure out a way to characterize being, and he ended up turning to poetics and creativity, artistic creativity as well. But Marcel, with this notion of presence, is able to really neatly tie up what it would mean to inhabit being or be inhabited by a being, as well as connect it to the artistic creativity and the artistic output, the output of artistic creativity. And I think, to me, a more material and concrete way than you got from the Romantics. And I know we have to go through that, but I'm just setting the stage. Yeah, this is where it really took off for me.

25:09 Wes: Before we get into the creativity part, I just want to. The end of this whole progress part, he gives an analysis of pride, which he. In contrast to Spinoza, the quote that springs.

25:19 Mark: That is. This is what I was referring to before on 32. Speaking metaphysically, the only genuine hope is hope in what does not depend on ourselves, hope springing from humility and not from pride. So that sets up what you're going to. So why? What is pride?

25:34 Wes: Well, Mark, what pride is,

25:39 Mark: what he

25:39 Wes: wants to say is, belief in progress is not true hope. It actually true hope springs from humility rather than pride. And pride is really about. It's not, as Spinoza said about estimating oneself too highly. It's not really about self love, but it's about a complete self reliance. Self reliance. It's so complete that it actually cuts you off from others. It's actually self destructive. It actually can be a manifestation of hate. And so he'll say pride is really drawing one's strength solely from oneself. And hope by contrast. Well, does he say, does he give a good contrast there? But hope obviously will. Will have something to do with. Not entirely. This comes a bit later, actually. But not simply relying entirely on oneself. It's, you know, he associates it with humility, but it involves our connectedness to

26:30 Dylan: others and in activity. So he follows up. The section on his reply about hope is to note that it is. It's not inert. It is the promulgation into the unknown of an activity which is central, that is to say, rooted in being.

26:46 Wes: Well, he's going to respond to an objection that says, hey, if we can't be proud, how is it that we could even be active? Aren't we supposed to be. Ambition is an action itself. Pride isn't hope. Just this inert thing, isn't it quietism? And then I'll say, no, it actually is the most active kind of thing. There's a great quote on 33. Hope is the prolongation into the unknown of an activity which is central. That is to say, rooted in being.

27:11 Mark: So this is where I wanted to bring in Kierkegaard to see does hope. I think, Seth, you were saying before that hope just looks like faith. There's no separate consideration of faith in here. There's creative fidelity that we'll get to very shortly. But we sort of ended the fear and trembling discussion. I'm going to blame Dylan here of like, no, there's nothing practical that you can get out of this. He's just giving an unattainable thing. Well, we have got a very practical thing about I'm going to hope against hope, hope against the data that my loved one survives.

I liked in Kierkegaard, just to bring in a specific example we had in the aesthetic section and the ethical section of either or, he talked about this romantic love of the aesthetic. The aesthete is like love should be romanticized. I, you know, there's a nymph off somewhere and that's where all my love lies with this idealized nymph. And then the ethical person says, that's not a very serious way to be. You should, you know, actually find someone that you can make a real connection with. So that then turns up in Fear and Trembling. This is on page 43 of Fear

28:16 Wes: and Trembling, if you care.

28:18 Mark: A love for a princess transfigured into love of the eternal being, which, true enough, denied the fulfillment, but nevertheless did reconcile him once more in the eternal consciousness of its validity in an eternal form that no actuality can take away from him. In other words, it's sort of going back to the aesthetic position of loving this unattainable person. You know, I'm in love with Princess Diana or, you know, Beyonce. That's my love. And you might think this is just delusional. Just in the same way that I'm going to beat this cancer that everybody says There is a 0.0001% chance of surviving, I'm going to beat it.

That's just as unrealistic. But somehow, the way Marcel puts it, it can be shown that there exists in an ascending dialectic of hope, whereby hope rises to a plane which transcends the level of all possible empirical disproof, the plane of salvation, as opposed to that of success in whatever form. So this is a way, you know, we were wondering about destiny is making unsubstantiated claims about causality out in the world. And is hope then making unsubstantiated claims about, I just think probably God's going to swoop in and fix my cancer or my loved one's illness, whatever this thing is.

But no, actually, empirical success is not what it's about. It's not about what actually happens in the external world. It's about something greater than that, the plane of salvation. And I gave, you know, the weird way that Kierkegaard talked about this, of the eternal consciousness, of his validity in an eternal form that no actuality, nothing that actually happens can take away from him. Does this clear up? Does this help explain what Kierkegaard was going after with faith, what Marcel is saying here?

30:02 Seth: I don't think so. And I think also, do you remember when we were having the Kierkegaard discussion, how we were like, man, this is really dangerous. To just be like, oh, I'm going to deny all empirical reality. This is how people become deniers and all that stuff. And I think that Marcel is potentially open to the same criticism, except, you know, he's established, at least at the beginning of the essay, the validity of the functional methods. It's almost like you're saying, I don't know. Now I'm saying it out loud, and it doesn't sound right.

I was like, it's like you accept the validity of the functional methods, you accept the problematized world and data and you believe in it, but then you don't when it's. When are you allowed to do that? Like when it's a matter of life and death or can you just say like, oh, you know, yeah, there's no fossil record. I realize the data says that there's a fossil record and there were dinosaurs and all that stuff, but I have hoped that the earth was 6,000 years old and was created whole cloth by God.

31:03 Wes: Well, I think this is more in relation to the practical than the theoretical. So he will say hope is the will when it is made to bear on what does not depend on itself. This sort of rounds out the contrast between hope and pride. Pride is about complete self reliance. So it's about willing things that you can actually do something about. And I'm going to, I will this happens and I'm actually going to make it happen within the world of the problematic. I'm going to fulfill my desires, I'm going to create technologies, I'm going to do things. Hope is about stuff you can't control the disease you have.

It's not about saying I'm going to go to the doctor or I'm going to take the natural route and take all these supplements. I'm going to conquer this disease. It's not about that. It's beyond that. Where you say I will myself to be better even though I have no control over that and I submit to being. I guess there's the idea that being is a connivance with me. So it's a bit weird. I'm expecting being to will the same thing as me, but on another level. Right. I have to know I'm probably, it's probably not going to work out. I'm not deluded. I don't think from his point of view, I'm just deluding myself.

But I'm not probably going to die from this disease. But I maintain this mental. It's like praying. I think in a way.

32:17 Dylan: Here's the question I have in this kind of context when he identifies hope with will and an activity of despite all evidence, for instance, that's those examples that hope is a willing of the world to be in a way that is in alignment with what you most will. If it doesn't turn out that way, is that a failure?

32:41 Mark: No.

32:41 Seth: Okay.

32:42 Mark: That somehow hope is self reinforcing. Maybe it's so healthy to have hope in itself. And we get kind of thinking about what was Abraham's faith as described by Kierkegaard. And was it specifically that, oh, God is going to, in this world, give me what I want, what he promised, which is, you know, that my son will live and have a thousand children and whatever, whatever, you know, that I'll have this long lineage that I was promised? Or is he just having faith that God knows what he's doing? And so somehow I don't really understand how this could possibly work out. It looks pretty bad. It looks like everything's.

33:22 Dylan: I understood the latter. That's what I understood.

33:24 Mark: Kierkegaard is saying, yeah, so in having, you know, I hope against hope that my loved one will survive this disease and then they die, do you then say, oh, I had hope, but now my faith is dashed. I'm in despair? I would think Marcel said, you're doing it wrong. If that's actually what comes out, that the hope, the faith is that sort of things will work out according to the best plan. Right. It's like the problem of evil. It's trust in the universe. Trust that. So my petty desire, oh, I want my spouse to stay alive forever, you know, that's never going to be fulfilled. Hope is a form of reconciliation which is compatible with it actually not working out. I mean, this. I. I don't know. Does that add up?

34:10 Wes: It better. It better be compatible with it not working out. I don't think Ivan would like any of this. And I kind of feel sympathetic to

34:19 Seth: Ivan, so I can't remember if we've already talked about this or if it's later on in the book. To get back to the theme of presence, let's say you are sitting with your terminally ill spouse and the doctors are telling you that nobody has ever recovered from these cases. And you spend your time worrying about whether the numbers are right or wrong or trying to read papers or whatever. You're not being present for that person. You're not. In essence, hope is a mechanism to allow you presence. Even if, regardless of what the topic would be or whatever data you feel like you're contradicting or not. I assume it's possible to have hope. You don't necessarily have to be contradicting statistical data. You just have to be doing something, you know, beyond or ignorance of it. So really, hope is the mechanism of presence.

35:08 Mark: Yeah, there's your presence. Your availability to the other person means that they are a presence to you. So you contrast that with, you know, you just hear about some tragedy you read in the newspaper and you can't just be really upset about everything. You read like you just always. You have to have a circle of concern. That I hear my. My sister in law is going through this thing, then I'm going to feel it. But if I just hear some rando. But you know, he wants to emphasize that we do have to realize that that circle of concern is contingent and sometimes we break out of it and we do feel, you know, have this honest feeling for something far off.

35:45 Seth: Yeah.

35:45 Dylan: He calls the zones of interest.

35:47 Wes: Yeah. He will talk about concentric zones of concern. This is on 41, but I think he thinks those ought to be, you know, the chance encounter with someone special is the kind of thing that can break that. I think he does want us to transcend that.

36:00 Seth: Yeah. Because he says it can concretize and lock you in.

36:03 Mark: Yeah. We have the power to make someone present to me. So by my being available to you as, you know, consoling you as you're dying, then I'm making you a real presence to me, not merely an object to be managed, which I don't know how I would feel. I haven't been exactly this circumstance, but things that I've heard secondhand of, you know, somebody's spouse is dying and you just want them to be comfortable. I want, you know, sort of. You're like, you're managing that. I've certainly done this with pets. You know, I'm taking the pet to get euthanized because it's in such bad shape. I don't know if I understand. I might be a little autistic or whatever in the way that I'm not sure I get presence as he is

36:45 Wes: talking about it here, unfortunately, in terms of availability. Yeah.

36:49 Mark: I mean, so he contrasts his existentialism to Sartre's, where Sartre is all about. This is what existentialism is normally thought of, is we're all alone. You know, we all face death alone. We're all born alone. We can be around other people. We could be irritated by them. But, you know, in some ways, hell is other people because he doesn't believe in real intimacy. And so this is Marcel's big beef with Sartre and the thing that he wants to press over and no real intimacy, real love. This acknowledgment of presence is like just a key thing that Sartre just doesn't have a clue in. It just doesn't show up in his phenomenology, I guess. I'm not sure where I stand on which of those I most agree with.

37:26 Seth: Let me ask you. He gives a very, very simple example of listening. And he says there are people that when they're listening to you, they're wholly invested. And when you're, you need support or understanding or whatever, these are the people you talk to and they're people who listen. And you can tell even if they can like help you out some way, like give you money or take you, drive you somewhere, they're just not invested, they're not present for you. And he's like, I can't tell you one or the other. I can't prove to you one or the other. But surely you've had this experience.

And I thought, well, yeah, of course, you know, you've had conversations, intense eye to eye contact, like conversations with somebody where you're just both fully invested in. Even if it's regardless of what the subject was, you know, probably philosophy, religion, you know, you've surely had that. And then you've had conversations where you're not invested or they're not invested or you're both not invested, even if you're talking about the same subject. Like, there are definitely people who I have that level of intimacy with in my circle and people I don't.

That just was like absolutely true to me.

38:31 Wes: Yeah. I mean, he'll even go so far to say, as I'm not just talking about someone who's an attentive listener, even if they're attentive and conscientious, they may not be present. Present goes even beyond that. He says it's going to be a way of giving as opposed to a way of refusing oneself. And it reveals itself in body language, right? A look, a smile, intonation. It's about being at another person's disposal with the whole of oneself. It's not a temporary loan and it's not about the other person as an object at all. So I'm trying to think of.

So I kind of now I do. I do this for a living as a therapist. Right. And my job is to be a good listener, an attentive listener and a conscientious listener. So it sort of surprised me that he says, well, there's something beyond that, that being attentive and conscientious is not enough. And then the question is, well, what does that mean? What does it mean to be present?

39:21 Dylan: Well, I mean, I think it depends on enough for what? Right. Because what he's describing as the kind of the level, the intensity of presence he's describing doesn't sound to me like that is maintainable for somebody who is a therapist. It seems like it's antithetical to their, to the ability to do that work.

39:39 Mark: You can't actually be present for them because it is your job. And yes, you can learn skills to make it look like you're pre and to actually be really paying attention. This is why I'm just, I'm thinking

39:51 Wes: this is what people who are not therapists think about what it means to be. Oh, you're just getting paid and it's. No, it's a real relationship. And if you're good. I'm not saying, I'm saying I don't quite understand the concept of presence here. So. But it, you know, you do get into the zone and you do get into a very meditative state and you are trying to relate to people at a level at which one does not as a psychoanalyst, specifically at a level which you're not normally relating to people. You're trying to be very aware of your own, of what's going on underneath what the subtext is, but also of one's own reactions and thought and feeling.

You're trying to be hyper aware of the things that we're normally not hyper aware of, but also you're trying ultimately to be maximally curious. You're trying to let curiosity guide the relationship as opposed to having pre established answers or knowing things. So it's actually a very pleasurable and authentic experience. And I don't think he thinks that being present to someone requires that we know them well or that we're not paid for our services. You can be paid for your presence.

40:58 Dylan: Sorry, he could just be wrong about this. He's pointing to a level of presence that would. I think he intends to point to a presence that would not admit of any of these kind of practical engagements with the world. And he can just be wrong about that. That the kind of presence that you're describing, Wes, is no different than the presence that he is pointing towards. That it's a distinction without a difference.

41:24 Mark: I think he's setting a very high bar. I don't actually think I'm on the spectrum, but I feel like however much I work on being present and paying attention and doing, I think by his description, some people just have a personality type that like, they just look at you and you feel like you're just the focus of this radiant attention. And I feel like I just don't have that. I'm too inwardly directed, self conscious. There's always something else going on, an analytical thing. This is why I think that a therapist, as much as you're paying attention you're also sort of processing what is coming in to hook it up with your diagnosing them, you know, so all that.

42:03 Wes: No, I don't.

42:03 Mark: According to. I think what Marcel is saying, that that rules out complete presence and that they can tell that even if you're there looking the right way, you're making the gestures. According to Marcel, it's just intuitive. It's an immediate thing that they can tell that you're faking it, that you're not really present.

42:24 Wes: No, it's not an act. And it's not. I don't want to continue to defend therapy. It's not about acting. And it's also overly processing. That's a danger for new therapists. They, you know, diagnosing, trying to overly process. You really do. You're trying to get into a meditative zone where you are connected with another person at a deep level. But I'll just leave it at that because I'm not sure that it's presence. I'm just saying I'm not.

42:47 Dylan: Yeah.

42:48 Wes: I'm not sure how to. To distinguish. Is that just attentive, conscientious listening, or is it something more? I'm agnostic about that. But he does. Right. When he brings up this idea, it starts with. He says some people who reveal themselves as present, that is to say, at our disposal when we are in pain or a need to confide in someone. This really. A lot of this is about confiding about someone. Even though he says it's not about attentive listening, it is about a certain kind of listening. It's about more than attentive listening. But it's still about someone who's there to receive your confidence.

Right. So in religion, it would be confession. This would be a priest in the role of a confessor, so. Or someone receiving confession. And I don't know. I honestly don't know how high the bar is. It's unclear to me how high the bar is here. I think that there are some people who, on his account, are. I don't know how common such a person is. But it's not just this extraordinary. It's not just Jesus or. And it's certainly not even just the priests, and probably many priests can't even do it.

43:44 Mark: But, you know, we still haven't really gotten to fidelity. You know, the. The idea of. Once we get this idea that there are some people that are present to you in real life, well, then there's that issue of our relationship to the dead and feeling like someone is.

43:57 Wes: Is with you.

43:57 Mark: It's an activ. You're not just cherishing, you know, their. Their photograph, their memory in your mind. That's not what a recollection is. It's actually engaging with them and keeping them alive. So this creative fidelity is an important question. He says the dialectic of creative fidelity is the same as the dialectic of hope. I was a little confused about that. That's page 39.

44:19 Seth: In short, artistic creativity is deeply rooted in being. In the sense that an artist who creates a true work of art is themselves present to the world and to themselves and to their work in a certain sort of way. And so what happens is the fidelity in that sense. Presence is mystery. Artistic creation is the creation of something that is an anchor for presence. Or is presence. The work of art is present, if you will. And then fidelity means that you're actively perpetuating presence. So it's almost like true art, or art that is present is an artifact which brings us back to being becomes an anchor. We can be with a work of art and be present with it. And that's what hope is like.

45:10 Dylan: Yeah.

45:10 Wes: Creative fidelity, I think, is. Is just a way of describing recollection as a ontological version of memory. Where it's not just creating a image which is a degraded. You know, there's a reference to Plato here sort of as a. The im. As a degraded form of reality. It is its own reality. And so we can, in a sense, maintain the presence of the dead, a witness with the dead, through this creative fidelity. And Mark, I think the reason why he says that the ascending dialect of creative fidelity corresponds to that of hope. What he'll say is that this coerci.

This genuine intimacy. It's more valuable when it comes to relation of the living to the dead than it is in the case even of pure charity. So even real relationships between living human beings which involve charity. Charity is the version of. That's the attentive listening in this analogy, you know, doing generous things for people in the realm of the material world. The higher thing, as we saw, was presence in some higher sense than mere attentive listening. And I think here it's very similar. There's something higher than charity in the sense of maintaining the presence within us of someone who's died.

46:19 Mark: We said that hope is relying on something fundamentally outside yourself. But I am seeing by saying I can have hope and it can be fine. Even if the physical world does not work out the way my hope said it should. I'm sort of trying to wedge, like, where does Stoicism go in here that, you know, stoicism seems to be exactly what Marcel would hate because it is relying only on yourself. It is building these walls around yourself. You're saying everything outside of this is not my concern. But on the other hand, if you actually asked Massimo about this, I bet he would say, oh, this is exactly what I'm talking about, is that you can have this openness and love and faith and connection with people, but at the same time, if it doesn't work out, if the person does end up dying, if the hope is not fulfilled in the terms that you thought it, you're humble about that.

You say, oh, that was just my desire. I will give up that desire and I will be in harmony with the universe. And so this actually is a very Stoic philosophy.

47:20 Dylan: That's exactly what Massimo would say.

47:23 Seth: The mistake so often made here comes from Stoical representation of the will as a stiffening of the soul, whereas it is, on the contrary, relaxation and creation. Yeah, he's.

47:32 Dylan: He just would disagree with Massimo interpretation of Stoicism.

47:36 Wes: I mean, I think contemporary Stoics, they're engaged in a lot of apologetics. Right. Which can make it consistent with anything they want it to be consistent with. Sure. I have even tried to assimilate it to psychoanalysis. So it shows you how far one can go.

47:52 Mark: Let me read a quote to sort of wrap up here for myself. 43. The soul which is at the disposal of others is consecrated and inwardly dedicated. It is protected against suicide and despair, which are interrelated and alike, because it knows that it is not its own and that the most legitimate use it can make of its freedom is precisely to recognize that it does not belong to itself. This recognition is the starting point of its activity and creativeness. So being present to others this sort of connection, creative fidelity like this, is the solution to the ontological need. The last couple pages are just like addressing, is this just Christianity dressed up? And he argues, no, that you don't actually have to be any. A Christian to believe any of this stuff that he's laid out.

48:35 Seth: Yeah, there's some really beautiful quotes on

48:37 Wes: the last few pages from the very final.

48:39 Mark: Go ahead.

48:40 Wes: On the contrary, it seems to me that any study of the notion of a created nature, which is fundamental for the Christian, leads to the conclusion that there is, in the depth of nature as of reason, which is governed by it, a fundamental principle of inadequacy to itself, which is, as it were, a restless anticipation of a different order. I think that's really cool. This Idea that a restless anticipation. Why don't you guys try to explain that first?

49:03 Dylan: Well, this isn't the.

49:05 Wes: So the. The different order, Right, is the coming of, you know, the divine. Yeah.

49:09 Seth: No, no, no. The different order is that if you look at nature and you try to explain it functionally. This is what I thought. It's like you'll come to understand that that governing kind of like scientific approach is inadequate to its explanation, which will lead you to a mystery of human experience. Right. He contrasts revealed mysteries from mysteries of human experience. That's what I got out of this.

49:31 Wes: The context is he's saying the supernatural is the flowering of the natural. So that in a way religious revelation follows. He wants to distinguish religious revelation from the kind of revelation he's been talking about, which involves this more involvement, committedness, but at a meta. Religious level. And the religious flowers out of that. So the idea is that this idea of a restless anticipation of a different order. The different order is the ontological order, you could put it that way. Or it's the order that is of the divine that's recognized religiously.

50:05 Seth: If you believe there is anything like a supernatural, then you are saying that the natural is inadequate to cover all modes of experience or existence or what have you.

50:14 Wes: I think what he's saying in the end is that, you know, we don't need Christianity, but we need. He'll say we need radiation from revelation. I think he thinks we might. It might be the case we need some religious trapping to fully feel the force of it.

50:27 Mark: What a nitpick. Just the 46 supernatural life must, when all is said and done, find a hold in the natural. Which is not to say it is the flowering of the natural. I don't know how much to care about. I don't understand the metaphor of flowering well enough to say your interpretation was fine.

50:43 Wes: No, I think I would make the same point regardless. But yeah, I misread that. But yeah, so it's finding a hold in the natural as opposed to the flowering of the natural. Yes. It's not the telos of the natural, but yeah. So the finding a hold in the natural. Right. Is a way of saying, you know, religion gives all this trappings. It's. It doesn't just stay at this abstract level where you're talking about the ontological mystery. You can talk about these very specific things. You can talk about Christ and you can talk about the Eucharist.

51:09 Mark: And I believe this wine is blood. I don't care if you've tested it.

51:13 Wes: So yeah, in that sense, you can get more of a foothold, let's say, when you're talking about specific religious trappings, and you do when you're just doing this essay.

51:23 Mark: I have faith that I'm a vampire and that all the juice I drink is actually blood. And nothing you can say will make me doubt that. Seth, you have any last words?

51:32 Seth: Yeah, yeah, just that, you know, I really enjoyed this. I have a way of grasping it, which I think doesn't necessarily commit me to some notion of Christian revelation. But what I think is really nice about it, in addition to it being very well written and being concise and kind of, again, giving some distinctions and useful thoughts, is he uses metaphors to talk about some of these things that are, I think, much easier to grasp than you get with Sartre or Heidegger or some of the other existentialists. And, you know, ultimately his use of presence versus absence, he talks about opaque versus transparent and the notion of influx as a metaphor for talking about being open to this experience with people.

You know, when you think about everybody's got a friend who dropped acid and experienced the oneness of life, you know, and it's like that whole notion of transparency and connectedness is the story of not just religious experience, but all kinds of mystical experiences. And so he's just, I think, given a really nice, academically respectable way of talking about it, philosophically respectful.

52:38 Wes: I think listeners should know that Seth put friend in quotation marks.

52:42 Seth: Yes.

52:42 Wes: Which seems to imply.

52:45 Seth: Anyway, I'm implying that it's possible, Wes, that that person who had that experience must be not one of your friends.

52:52 Mark: All right, Dylan, is your closing. Wrap it up, guys. Wrap it up. Or do you have something else?

52:57 Dylan: I enjoyed it. The other phrase that I put in there, other correlation, which we didn't talk about explicitly but I think sort of stands on its own, is early on he says that the most important dichotomy in philosophy is not the one versus the many, but the full versus the empty. And I think that on its own, based upon what we talked about, it should be pretty clear based upon what we talked about regarding presence and all the other aspects of creative fidelity, why he would say that.

53:27 Seth: Yeah.

53:28 Mark: All right, thanks for listening. Reach out to us pelarsheleexaminlife.com or make a comment on the blog post associated with this episode@PartiallyExaminedLife.com to tell us what you thought, to recommend other things for us to read. We are about to embark for the new year on a long awaited voyage into Aristotle's metaphysics. So we will be posting on Twitter, I think, as we go. What part we're taking on next? I think we're starting with Book Alpha. You know, unless we read something that says we should skip that. I have no idea how many episodes this will take, but we're gonna choke down as much as we can for a couple episodes. At least two episodes, let's say.

54:10 Dylan: God,

54:13 Wes: that is the proper relation to being actually choking it down. Choking down.

54:20 Mark: Good night, everybody.

54:21 Dylan: Good night.