Like many existentialists Marcel eschews systematic thought or interlocking philosophic abstractions. He presents his "various data" in a manner that is always reflective, exploratory, occasionally contradictory—proceeding from flashes of insight or acute psychological dissections of particular, concrete situations, rather than from consistently elaborated premises. His style is properly matched to his favorite journal form—periodic entries which return to, as well as abandon, a few dominant themes. Nonetheless, in two major works, The Mystery of Being and Being and Having …, something like a system of concerns can be identified.
For Marcel, intersubjectivity, that is, the intimate, subjective relation between two persons (I and Thou in Martin Buber's terms), is the "cornerstone of a concrete ontology." Hence, in this "metaphysic of we are as opposed to a metaphysic of I think," Marcel asserts that "love as the breaking of the tension between the self and the other, appears to me to be what one might call the essential ontological datum. I think, and will say so by the way, that the science of ontology will not get out of the scholastic rut until it takes full cognizance of the fact that love comes first." Through intersubjectivity, through love of the other, especially as the I and the other exert reciprocal "calls" upon one another, man, for Marcel, begins to identify and distantly satisfy what he calls the "urgent inner need for transcendence."
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