Marcel Delivers First James Lecture

Gabriel Marcel, who has remained among the foremost of French existentialists for nearly half a century, said in his first William James lecture yesterday that a philosopher only remains a philosopher so long as he retains the child's capacity for "wonderment."

"Any philosopher worthy of the name," Marcel asserted, refuses to submit to the negative attitudes and disillusionments which constantly confront him. He clings to his capacity for wonderment "despite everything surrounding him, and even within him, that tends to dispel it."

Marcel, who is known as a dramatist, musician, and literary critic as well as a philosopher, pointed especially to the danger of "agnostic resignation . . . , which can effect the vividness of a philosopher's original aspirations like a kind of atmospheric blight."

The person who submits to such resignations will ask himself: "Do not the sterile efforts of so many philosophers prove that their search is in vain; that either it is meaningless, or else it is impossible to reach a solution that can compel universal recognition?"

But this attitude, Marcel claimed, conflicts with the philosopher's "demand for intelligibility." As early as the Greek philosophers, he saw "a need to clarify the nature of the act of comprehension, and to discover . . . how what we call reality lends itself to comprehension, and within what limits."

Marcel described his own philosophical work as a continuing "research" process. Beginning before World War I, he said, "the notion of research compelled my attention, a type of research that should remain no less inquiring as it progresses and becomes more enlightening."

This research, Marcel said, does not seek to set up propositions which must be recognized as true, but rather to discover the mental processes by which such propositions are reached.

Marcel compared the philosopher with the explorer, in the sense that both carry on their "research" without preconceived notions, and therefore without conflict between expectations and discoveries. The detective, in contrast, is searching for something specific, and rejects everything else he finds as irrelevant.

But Marcel added one important qualification to his emphasis on the philosopher's inquiry and "wonderment." Philosophical questioning, he said, may be used with "blind obstinacy" and degenerate to something "mechanical" if it is separated from experience.

Though he agreed that there have been some "precocious geniuses" in metaphysics, he added: "At my advanced age I am inclined to consider warily any philosophical thought which its author has been so bold as to formulate before living authentically." Experience in books is "never anything but a substitution."