【Reading】Feeling God’s Presence in the Whole Body and Mind｜Gabriel Marcel "Being and Being"

Speaking of the most familiar thought in the history of Western philosophy, "Existentialism", most people will think of the founder of the word, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980).

What is less known is that Saud actually divides “existentialism” into two categories: one is atheistic existentialism, that is Sartre himself and Heidegger ( Martin Heidegger, 1889-1976 ). The other group is the theistic existentialism represented by Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) and Jaspers ( Karl Jaspers , 1883-1969).

However, if we actually go back to Heidegger's life, we will find that in his early years, he intended to become a clergyman, so he attended seminary and never gave up Christianity in his life. In other words, Heidegger was not actually an atheist. (Not to mention that Heidegger doesn't agree that he is an existentialist)

It turns out that there are actually more theists than there are atheists in the broad existential spectrum.

How is this going? The reason is very simple, because regardless of the coining of the term "existentialism", the earliest source of this idea is actually the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855). He questioned his own existence and situation under the spiritual phenomenology Hegel used to explain the self-dialectics of God.

To put it simply, although in the divine realm beyond the physical world, everything is reasonable and perfect; yet, relatively speaking, the individual, as a believer who is intellectually and physically imperfect, lives in a place that often makes us feel good. In an imperfect world that cannot have good rewards, how to establish a relationship with that transcendent being, and at the same time to find a place for one's troubles and hesitation in this perfect system, can theism be born The original concern of existentialism.

Considering Marcel's "Being and Being" along this coordinate, we can understand why Marcel's diary begins with Descartes's most famous problem of mind-body duality.

Most people's impression of Descartes should be the famous saying "I think, therefore I am" (Cogito ergo sum.) [1] . But this sentence does not mean that Descartes was a fool who did not even know his own existence. (He also said in the book that only lunatics would think this way, this is just an assumption) But in the era of Descartes without the Internet, there was also a lot of "fake news" disguised as knowledge.

A worried Descartes, a mathematician and a philosopher, wanted to find a criterion for distinguishing between true and false, in order to give all knowledge a clear and unambiguous benchmark. Therefore, in "Meditations", with a determination that he would rather kill 10,000 by mistake and never let one go, he threw all known things into the basket of doubt, excluding any situation that might be suspicious, see See what will be left as a result of this separation of knowledge.

In the end, it was determined that "only thinking itself" is the most unquestionable existence. I do think as a mind, and this fact is unshakable whether I'm awake or dreaming (like the movie "Full On"). In this way, he set this sentence as the cornerstone and starting point of all knowledge, and went out step by step to ask the reliability of other knowledge. From this background, Marcel's starting point reveals his intention to rethink the scale of truth.

However, just like the reason why this sentence was later turned into an Internet meme: it is too absurd to exist only because of thinking. The same is true for Marcel, when Descartes only affirmed the existence of the thinking self, but ignored the body that carried the mind, and regarded the flesh as another heterogeneous existence opposite to the spirit.

Thus, "I think, therefore I am" severes the intimate connection between the body and the mind, making the body an object of my consciousness, like another other outside of me, something less stable than the thinking me. This separation creates a profound problem in belief: if the spirit and the body are both gifts of God, as the Bible says we are created in the image of God, and reflect the glory of God like a mirror. Does this body not have the truth that God has revealed to us?

Here comes the real theme of being and having: what is the relationship between that transcendent being (i.e. God) and the body I have? Here, Marcel uses an existential interpretation to break down the various oppositions between me and others, between me and God, and between me and myself.

He pointed out that when we regard our body as something other than ourselves, we are actually alienating this body, which makes our body seem to be an object that can be counted and counted. This kind of perspective makes us estranged from the body, instead of truly grasping the sacred meaning hidden in the body.

Conversely, it is the body we occupy that actually consumes us while we are engaging in various creative activities like painting, dancing, cooking. That is, I may think that the body is just a passive substance, but when the activities I undertake are integrated and devoted to it.

In this moment, I will be loved and connected to all things and will be elevated to a living being. In this kind of love, not only the truth of things is illuminated, but also the light that belongs to God is revealed from within things. Under the light of this truth, I am my body, and my body is me. Only then can I find my own essence and return to the embrace of God.

===
[1] Some people say "Je pense, donc je suis." in French is the original text, and Latin is the translation. This sentence is actually wrong. Because the general official language of the intellectuals and the Holy See in Descartes' time was Latin, which means that if you want to prove that you are an educated person, you have to write in Latin. The ethos of writing in the local language was not yet on the rise, and if I remember correctly, it should not have started until after the religious revolution that Martin Luther accidentally overturned.

The full text is simultaneously reproduced in: Marcel's "Being and Being": Feeling God's Presence in the Whole Body and Mind | | SquareGood