Gabriel Marcel – the witness in me

When Linda hears about Matt’s anxiety, she tells him that openness does not necessarily mean emptiness. In fact, existentialist philosophers generally agree that human existence is openness, but not all of them assume that this means that the world is meaningless.

An example is the French existentialist and playwright Gabriel Marcel. Marcel distinguishes between two attitudes to life: observing and witnessing. An observer is somebody who observes life without personal commitment, without giving himself to anything. For such a person, life is a sequence of objective, impersonal facts. He may be active and hardworking, but he is not really faithful to anything. In a world made only of objective facts, there is nothing to be faithful to.

As opposed to an observer, a witness is somebody who agrees to receive life. But receiving is not a passive attitude. For example, when I receive guests in my house, I am an active, committed, creative receiver. I am creative – because there are no formulas that tell me how to receive.

In a similar way, to be a witness means to accept life as if it was a gift, and to respond to that gift in an active and personal way. It means to be faithful to a light, to a vision, to a personal mission. It means that I take upon myself a commitment to be a witness to this light through my particular way of responding to it.

Human reality is open, but it is not open to an empty and meaningless world. Life gives me light, and being faithful to myself means that I respond faithfully to life.

***

When Matt contemplates Marcel’s text, his anxiety is not alleviated. He realizes that he has always been, in Marcel’s terminology, an observer. He would like to be a witness, but a witness to what?

Matt cannot think of any mission to which he can give himself, no light to which he can be faithful. The observer-witness distinction has enriched his understanding of his attitude to life, but it has not shown him any way out.

In his thoughts he starts comparing Marcel and Sartre, and after a while he realizes that there must be many other ways to respond to life’s openness. These two philosophers express only two out of many possible responses. He now has a new understanding: “So far,” he says to himself, “I have been locked inside a very narrow attitude to life, without realizing it. What these texts teach me is that I shouldn’t take my attitude for granted. What I am looking for is not a new career, but a new attitude to myself, a new way of relating to life.”

Excited, Matt tells Linda about his discovery. “The readings you gave me shattered my confidence in my way of life. They shattered the old walls of my old self and opened me to new directions. Now I want to try to explore these new directions. I want to experiment with myself, to investigate other sides in me that are less familiar to me.”

“How are you going to do this, Matt?”

“I don’t know, Linda. I have no idea. I only know that it’s going to be lonely. Whether I go with Rousseau or with Sartre or with Marcel or with some other approach, my challenge is to connect to myself. That’s something I must do by myself, me alone.”

“An interesting observation,” Linda says, “but not everybody would agree with you. Matt, I’d like to give you one more text on authenticity, alright?”

THE ‘CARE’ APPROACH – TO BE CONNECTED

Several feminist thinkers, such as the American philosopher of education Nel Noddings, hold that the traditional conceptions of authenticity are distorted: They are too individualistic, too much centered on the individual (and too ‘masculine’, according to them). They are distorted, because I cannot be a full person unless I am related to others. My relations to others are not a secondary addendum to who I am. My relations to my family, friends, or fellow human beings are an essential part of what defines me. My real self is my self-in-relationships.

Moreover, what makes me a full person (and this can be understood to mean an authentic self) is my CARING relationships. In caring relationship I give and receive, I am open to others, I share experiences with them, and I can take part in their joys and concerns.

Interestingly, at this point these feminist ‘care ethicists’ are similar to the earlier philosopher Martin Buber (see my ‘Voices 1’). For him, too, I can be authentically myself only in I-thou relationships to others and to the world around me.

***

Something is happening to Matt. He feels disoriented by the multiplicity of approaches. Each of the four is eloquent, enlightening, and each makes sense in its own way. But they seem to contradict each other.

“Your disorientation is precious,” Linda says to him. “Be with it, listen to what it says. Don’t suffocate it with answers and solutions.”

“But how is this going to help me make a decision?” he asks Linda. “I came to you because I wanted to find out what I really want to do, how to be true to myself. Don’t you expect me to choose one of these four theories? Don’t you want me to decide whether my true self is my natural self, or my openness to emptiness, or my response to a light, or my relatedness to others, or perhaps something else?”

Linda smiles. “So now you are telling me that you want to choose for yourself a little cozy cave and close yourself in it.”

“But I have to choose something, don’t I?”

“Well, go ahead and choose, then.”

“I wish I could,” Matt replies sadly. “You see, when we started working on these texts I thought it would be easy. I expected to discover the best theory on authenticity; or at least the best theory for me. But now I am even more confused.”

“Don’t lose heart. What seems like an obstacle is sometimes an open door. After all, are you sure you need to choose?”

Linda’s question takes Matt by surprise. For a long time he thinks about it. “The truth is,” he finally admits, “that in my last reading I had a thought, a kind of glimmer in my mind: that there is no need to choose. That I don’t need to make a decision. That I can just look at all those approaches and let them be. Very strange, I don’t understand this completely.”

“Why don’t you go with this understanding? Let it guide you.”

“But I must make a decision, don’t I? If I don’t decide what is true for me, how can I decide whether to remain in my job or to quit and become a journalist or gardener?”

“Yes, on a practical level. On a practical level you need to decide what is true for you, because you have to work somewhere and to make money somehow. But your disorientation, and the glimmer you had in your mind, are suggesting to you that on another level you don’t need to choose. On another level it doesn’t even make sense to choose.”

Matt looks at Linda. Her words are both strange and seductive. “What other level are you talking about, Linda?”

“Call it the level of disorientation. Or, the level of awareness. The name doesn’t matter. From this perspective, these theories are not really theories. What is important about them is not what they describe, but where they come from. They are like the footprints of something, like voices that come from somewhere.”

Matt shakes his head. “When I had this glimmer, I felt hanging in the air. It was a moment of nothingness.”

“Alright, Matt, call this other level ‘the point of nothingness’. That’s the point where you don’t have any opinion, you have nothing to stand on, no cave to live in. You are just there, in awareness, a testimony.”

“But a testimony to what, Linda?”

“A testimony to the life that gave voice to these theories, a testimony to the reality that is at the source of these voices, a testimony to your confusion, and to everything.”

Voices of Human Reality