Marcel, Gabriel(1889–1973)
Gabriel Marcel, the French philosopher, dramatist, and critic, was born in Paris. His father, a highly cultured man, held important administrative posts in the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Musées Nationaux. Marcel's mother died when he was four. Raised in a home dominated by the cultured agnosticism of his father and the liberal, moralistic Protestantism of his aunt, and nurtured in a scholastic system concerned only with intellectual achievement, he later sought refuge in a modified type of idealism. The shaking experiences of World War I, during which he was an official of the Red Cross concerned with locating missing soldiers, brought home to him the failure of abstract philosophy to cope with the tragic character of human existence. His conversion to Catholicism in 1929 did not substantially alter the direction of his thought, although it intensified his conviction that the philosopher must take into consideration the logic interior to faith and hope.
Relationship to Existentialism
Marcel's name has most often been linked with "theistic existentialism." Because of the ambiguities of this term and the association of existentialism in the popular mind with Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy, to which his is almost diametrically opposed, Marcel has preferred the designation "Neo-Socratic" for his thought.
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