Estimate of Marcel's drama can satisfy several related curiosities: the function in a distinguished philosophical career of these numerous dramatic compositions; the kind of play that will satisfy a thinker's need to yoke a basically religious speculation and dramatic composition; and the light that Marcel's theatre casts on a more general attempt to explore religious themes in the modern theatre. These are interrelated questions, and the best way to take them up is to recognize that Marcel, as a dramatist, remains a certain kind of philosopher and finds a place for his dramatic compositions in perspectives traced in general by his thought.
The person who has read Marcel's philosophical "journals" (the term Marcel frequently applies to his formal philosophical works) as Being and Having, The Mystery of Being, Homo Viator, and Creative Fidelity can place Marcel in a general tradition of twentieth century philosophical speculation and can also assign him a special niche in that tradition. Marcel belongs—such a judgment might run—to the vein of existential speculation that has found itself uneasy or impatient with both German idealism and Cartesianbased rationalism and positivism. Like other modern existentialists, Marcel is uneasy in the presence of much German philosophic thought that reduces our direct knowledge of human experience to a minor place in a more inclusive system. For Marcel, at any rate, concrete human suffering and aspiration must not be thought of as a minor and not particularly crucial manifestation of a set of transcendent ideas that realize themselves in particular human lives. And those lives also escape the reading of them made by rationalists like Descartes and Spinoza and by latterday positivists who push farther the efforts of Descartes and Spinoza to make man's contemplation of the universe an act of complete comprehension. From this latter point of view—the second "front" on which Marcel fights his long battle—man is just the manifestation of determining social forces or some physical and psychological inheritances which human reason can grasp fully.
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