Gabriel Marcel Quotes on Mind
Gabriel Marcel's philosophy turns on a distinction in the use of the mind, and the quotes gathered here develop it. Marcel separated a problem, which lies outside the inquirer and can be solved by detached analysis, from a mystery, in which the inquirer is himself implicated and which is metaproblematical, beyond the realm of problems. The mind, on his view, must learn the limits of objectifying thought; in a formula marked here as attributed, the intellect's deepest task is to safeguard the mystery. Marcel nonetheless prized the critical spirit, praising it for tending to cure fanaticism and lamenting its disappearance in fanatical times. He also held that grasping anything as a whole requires a sort of voluntary halt in the restless movement of thought. Drawn from his Gifford Lectures and later works, these passages present a mind called to reflection, wholeness, and reverence before mystery.
Quotes
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Attributed to Gabriel Marcel:
“The intellect's deepest task is to safeguard the mystery.”
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“Is there such a thing as being? What is it? etc. Yet immediately an abyss opens under my feet: I who ask these questions about being, how can I be sure that I exist? Yet surely I, who formulate this problem should be able to remain outside it - before or beyond it? Clearly this is not so. The more I consider it the more I find that this problem tends inevitably to invade the proscenium from which it is excluded in theory: it is only by means of a fiction that Idealism in its traditional form seeks to maintain on the margin of being the consciousness which asserts or denies it.”
Wikiquote -
“I am therefore led to assume or to recognise 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 solution - it appears beyond the realm of problems: it is metaproblematical.”
Wikiquote -
“The great pessimists in the history of thought [...] have prepared our minds to understand that despair can be what it was for Nietzsche (though on an infra-ontological level and in a domain fraught with mortal dangers) the springboard to the loftiest affirmation.”
Wikiquote -
“The greatest merit of the critical spirit is that it tends to cure fanaticism, and it is logical enough that in our own fanatical times the critical spirit should tend to disappear.”
Man Against Mass Society(1952) | p. 143 -
“There can be no whole without a thought which grasps it as a whole; and this grasping of what is before the mind as a whole can be effected only by a sort of voluntary halt in a kind of progressive movement of thought.”
Man Against Mass Society(1952) | p. 123 -
“It would be relevant … to point out the sinister part played by speed, by belief in speed as a value, by, in a word, a kind of impatience that has had a profound effect in changing even the very rhythms of the life of the spirit for the worse.”
Man Against Mass Society(1952) | p. 144