ABSTRACT
French existentialism is often described as a variant of German phenomenology. But in the light of Gabriel Marcel’s contribution to the birth of a specifically French tradition, such a designation is clearly inadequate. For Marcel had already elaborated the broad lines of an existential phenomenology well before the 1930s. Marcel developed his philosophy of existence initially through a critique of what he called Idealism. Empiricism, which he regarded as the traditional alternative to Idealism, he found so unacceptable that he rarely engaged in an extended or serious critique of it. Writing shortly after the Second World War, Marcel laments that, in the modern world, technological approaches to life and the ‘spirit of abstraction’ have come to predominate, along with the predominance of the ‘masses’. Marcel once described himself as ‘a liberal who has become more and more painfully aware of the limits of liberalism’.
