GABRIEL MARCEL ON TESTIMONY AND EXISTENTIALISM

 

By Fr. Jose Conrado A. Estafia, Ph.L, M.A.

I.       INTRODUCTION

Existentialism may sound familiar but not easy to define.  It is very vague and too broad to understand.  In his essay “Testimony and Existentialism”, Gabriel Marcel never attempts to give a direct and definitive answer to what existentialism means.[1]  Rather he gives us key concepts as a clue to his standpoint.  Indeed, the issue in question is truly extensive.  To explain it is to resort to other concepts that would lead us to our comprehension of it.  Thus Marcel makes a distinction between testimony and statement of observation to which our first consideration may now turn.

II.      DISTINCTION BETWEEN TESTIMONY AND STATEMENT OF AN OBSERVATION

When we speak of a statement of observation, what is observed is outside of ourselves.  I observe a phenomenon and take note of it.  This reminds me of my years as a chemical engineering student.  In those years, I was exposed to a lot of laboratory work.  In performing some experiments, I was able to observe how chemical elements reacted to one another.  However, my observation never modified the phenomenon I saw.  Moreover my observations were not personal or true to me alone.  I shared the same observations with my group mates.  We only recorded what took place during the experiment and submitted the report to the professor.  There was no personal element involved.  In the sciences, according to Marcel, we often use such phrases as “One observes” and “It is stated.”  The “I” here is “an indifferent specification of the indefinite pronoun.”[2]

            To illustrate more, I am an avid fan of the UST Growling Tigers.  During my years at UST, I used to attend their games.  One time, attending one of their games, I was an hour ahead of the scheduled game.  I sat relaxed with my eyes roaming around.  The game was still being played between UE and Adamson.  I was there sitting silently without any gestures of involvement.  I was only waiting for the next game between UST and La Salle.  I was reduced to a mere observer of that game.  There was no personal involvement yet.  But during the UST - La Salle game, I was shouting and cheering at the top of my voice with the rest of the UST crowd.  I was already involved.  My shouting could have inspired or discouraged the Tigers.  In other words, I ceased to be a plain observer.  I became a part of the game, sharing with the players and the rest of the crowd the joy of winning and the pain of losing.

            What is the meaning of testimony for Marcel?  For him it is a personal engagement - “always and inevitably I, and if not myself, then another, who is yet another I.”[3]  We can no longer say here that it’s the one who bears witness.  For who is that “one”?  It’s quite abstract.  Marcel believes that the individual in testimony emerges with his proper identity.  It is like saying: “I can testify”, “I am in a position…” “I have the right”, “I must bear witness (different from simply saying “I must take note of”)”, “I am obliged to note (already beyond the realm of pure observation for one is now admitting a sense of owning).”[4] 

            When I undertook my spiritual and pastoral formation in Cebu in 2000, one of the modules I went through was Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE).  For almost three months, I was engaged in hospital visitations.  In that module, I was required to submit to my director twelve verbatim reports of my conversations with the patients.  Being obliged, I recorded everything I remembered from every visit I planned to make a verbatim report (of course one could not write the report right there in front of the patient, for that might be too impolite).  However, the experience was personal.  I put myself into the shoes of the patients.  In return, I processed my own self.  There was an exchange of feelings, of being.  After that module my life had never been the same again.  As John B. O’Malley says, “Value and presence, however, we have seen to be correlative and to develop in unison through communion with other persons.”[5]  Moreover, presence is an encounter with beings.[6]  Now Marcel’s next concern is to bring out the finality immanent in testimony.

II.     FINALITY IMMANENT IN TESTIMONY?

For Marcel, “to be a witness is to act as a guarantor.”[7]  It follows that to be a witness is to commit oneself.  A witness must have committed himself when he suddenly came out into the open to accuse a very powerful man.  The witness then is always standing in the presence of someone.[8]  One sure thing is that true witnesses are bringing with them the truth.  Usually witnesses are insiders, for they can clearly reveal the depth and the intricacy of the crime.  It’s no joke to be a witness for one has to take an oath.  By doing so, one is bound to tell the truth and nothing else but the truth.  There is no more possibility of withdrawing what one testifies.  Everything in the witness now becomes essential.  His or her words, even his or her gestures count a lot and are being studied carefully by the judge.  As Marcel puts it, “…every effort is made to ensure that the oath is a genuine and effective act…”[9] This is the finality immanent in testimony.   Now we proceed to the next question Marcel poses.

III.   IS TESTIMONY ESSENTIALLY A SOCIAL ACT?

One’s testimony is “given before a transcendence”.[10]  Is it essentially a social act?  For Marcel, society has nothing to do with it.  The whole Philippine society was a spectator during the unprecedented impeachment trial of former president Estrada.  Our eyes were focused on our television sets (ears for those who only have radios.  I was in a remote barrio at that time for my farming exposure.  There was no TV there.  I even missed the thrill of Edsa II).  We were a country divided in opinion about the credibility of the witnesses presented.  Could we say that Clarissa Ocampo had a commitment before all of us?  Clarissa, Chavit, and all other true witnesses are whom Marcel may consider as the most honorable and courageous persons.  It is indeed great courage to come out and fight for the truth.  Witnesses then testify before their conscience or before Truth.  For Marcel, the testimony of the witness is objectively real (essentially has an objective end).[11]  It’s something independent from the witness, he believes.  In other words, those who testify are not committed before us but their commitment is inward.  Therefore it is “existential in the highest degree.”[12]  One’s testimony is unique and irrevocable.  When Clarissa Ocampo testified that the Jose Velarde account was Estrada’s, her testimony was unique and irrevocable.  Once a testimony is uttered, it could never be retracted.  But Marcel asks: are we obliged to bear witness?

IV.  TESTIMONY’S INJUNCTION: “THOU SHALT BEAR WITNESS.”

When one has the truth, he is obliged to bear witness. The reason is that he holds a particle of light and to keep it to oneself would only extinguish it.[13]  Marcel even adds that not bearing witness is a form of betrayal.  But if it is a betrayal, whom are we betraying against?  Against society?  Never.  We already mentioned above that society has nothing to do with it.  Against the victim?  Again, never.  The witness has no commitment to him.  For instance, you were walking along CPG Avenue late at night.  Then suddenly a crime was committed a few meters away from where you were.  You saw exactly what happened.  You could have run and hid yourself.  You could have gone home and sealed your lips, pretending that nothing had ever happened.  You could have buried the truth in you.  But you came out to bear witness not because of your commitment to the victim, for actually you did not have any.  Maybe your conscience troubled you.  But most of all, Marcel points out, you came out to bear witness because of the injunction: “Thou shalt bear witness.”

            Marcel tries to go deeply into the roots of this seeming injunction.  His concern is the witness’ relations to the world, his manner of belonging to it being implied in his function (role).[14]  Actually, the witness is always free to reject.  He can always shut up and say nothing about what he has seen.  This will lead us to Marcel’s distinction between the onlooker and the witness - two opposite metaphysical attitudes.[15] 

An onlooker is only a spectator.  As we have seen, a witness is not a mere spectator.  But Marcel warns us that we are facing a false dilemma here: either we are only onlookers (not involved in reality) or we are active and free beings.  In a word, we are nothing but this choice.[16]  Marcel is asking whether this dilemma is leaving out the essential factor in testimony.  Is it not essential in our lives that we are witnesses and that this is the manner of belonging to the world?  He asks: If we are witnesses and this is the way we belong to the world, what are we witnesses to?  Before whom?  Marcel answers that we are witnesses before a Transcendence.  He continues saying that it’s not even anyone at all, for such visage is not discernible - the face of the other.

Marcel wonders:

Above all, witnesses to what?  To the inextricable mixture of best and worst which we find in our experience?  Are we to testify to all that - to the absurdity and the horror as well as to the nobility and the greatness?   And how are we to bear witness?  Are we to relate, to consign, to keep a diary for anticipation of an immense lawsuit?[17]

According to him, our issue loses meaning in this way.  The problem here is that we conceive of testimony as making a report.  Therefore, how do we look at it?   Testimony is tied up with some form of “fidelity” which is embodied in our life.[18]  Marcel says, “The value lies in the faithful following, through darkness, of a light by which we have been guided and which is no longer visible to us directly; indeed, it can be said that it is because there is a darkness, an eclipse, that there can be testimony - attestation.”[19]  A witness confirms what has been said as true, accurate and genuine.  He is like a lighthouse giving an assurance to the navigator that he is nearly approaching the port of his destination.  Again for Marcel, testimony is faithfulness to a light or to a grace (no religious connotation for him) received.  The point here is that we have received something.  Whatever that be, we may turn our attention to Marcel’s next concern.

IV.  NOTION OF RECEPTIVITY

We Filipinos are very hospitable.  We give the best we have for our visitors. We even vacate our own rooms for their sake.  We communicate the whole of ourselves to others.  We often show an all-out creativity to them.  Indeed, the notion of receptivity involves the concept of suffering and self-giving.  Look at the lives of martyrs for example.  This kind of receptivity is not like a vessel only filled with substance - like that of a glass of water.  Receptivity is deeper than this because it has gone through the skin of one’s being - like a tattoo becoming a part of you.  Indeed, for Marcel, receptivity “is an act, and even an art, like that of the host who brings out the best in his guest and creates a genuine communication and exchange.”[20] 

            One is a gift to others.  “To give is to give to someone,” Marcel says.[21]  Only a being can give to another being.  However, receptivity has not been given sufficient attention by the empiricists.  The idealists also have only been preoccupied with the “notion of spirit as activity and constructive power.”  They regard receptivity only as a property of material things.  Moreover, “to give oneself is to devote or consecrate oneself to another…”[22]

            What are the conditions which can make such consecration possible?  Marcel answers that we embody in it something of ourselves.  This is called “Transmutation”.  Our intention counts much.  In transmutation, if my intention is personal and it’s revealed in the object I give, the object acquires a new quality, a “being-for-another.”  Remember that in a gift, it’s not the price of it that counts but the intention of the one who does the giving.  Truly an “accretion of being” in the one who receives the gift appears.[23]  If I give to someone this way, he receives a genuine communication in the giving.  The gift, if truly a gift, is not an addition to what the other possesses.  For Marcel, it exists in the abode of testimony - a “gage of friendship or of love.”[24]  Unless recognized and responded in this way, the gift can never stand in this testimonial dimension.  Marcel believes that it is a sin against love if we fail to recognize the gift as such.[25]  Therefore the value of such gift must be acclaimed.  But the immense problem is that oftentimes we are ungrateful creatures.  We fail to respond.  We are unable to see that life is a gift.  We seem to live only in isolation.  Like the being of Heidegger and of Sarte, we are only thrown into this world bound by nothing.

V.    CONCLUDING REMARKS

Life is a gift.  Our response must be one of humility and gratitude to the Giver.  Remember that an ungrateful heart cannot give.  We give praise and thanks to God through serving others.  “Give, and there will be gifts for you: full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap; because the standard you use will be the standard used for you” (Lk. 6: 38).  In serving others, we give our time, talent, treasure and even our health to them.  In short, we give our total being to them.  Only a being can give to another being, as Marcel says.  Life is shared even without expecting any recompense in return.  God knows our generosity and let him alone give us the reward.

            Moreover, giving is self-giving.  This is the harder part of giving.  It’s actually not easy to sacrifice. It’s easy to be indifferent, unmindful of the needs of others. Who cares? We have our own lives to attend to, we may say. But Christ has given his life for us. Can we not do the same for others?  Maybe we protest that only heroes and martyrs are destined for that. No, each one of us has obtained a special gift from God. Therefore, as good and responsible stewards we use these graces of God for the service of others (Cf. 1 Pt. 4: 10).  What matters most in our giving is not how grandiose the gift is, but how much love we put in it.  Even little things count a lot.  A little help if given with a big heart becomes a treasured gift.  Why don’t you give love and life to someone?

                    

 

 

 

ENDNOTES                                                                                                    

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[1] Marcel says that it’s too difficult or it would take too long to explain what existentialism is all about.  But this answer seems to be disappointing if given too often, according to him.  Instead of a definition, he gives only key concepts. (See Marcel’s essay “Testimony and Existentialism” in his book The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harari [New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1949], p. 67).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., p. 68.

[5] John B. O’Malley, The Fellowship of Being: An Essay on the Concept of Person in the Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel  (The Hague:Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 94.

[6] John Barich, “Reflection on Marcel’s ‘On the Ontological Mystery’,” http:/www. rigeib.  com/barich/papers/marcel.html.

[7] Marcel, o.c., p. 68.

[8] For him the witness is not alone (a - monadic).  He is before someone (Cf. Ibid., p. 69).

[9] Marcel, o.c., p. 68.

[10] Marcel is even saying ambiguously that testimony is before transcendence itself.  I find it difficult to grasp what he means by this (Ibid., p. 69).

[11] Ibid., p. 70.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., p. 71.

[15] Ibid.

[16] “The idea that freedom essentially consists in freedom to choose probably derives from a confusion of desire with will and from a mistaken emphasis on autonomy” (See O’Malley, o.c., p. 106).  It reminds me of Levinas’ distinction between need and desire.  We can only have control over those things we need.  But those we desire evade us for they are beyond us.  They are “unsatiable.”  For me to need is to fall into the sphere of one’s autonomy wrongly emphasized.  But the only thing that we have a strict control is the acceptance or non-acceptance of our ontological destiny.  Our set of values is determined only in accord with our participation in Being.  To be indifferent is to avoid one’s movement of transcendence.

[17] Marcel, o.c., p. 72.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid. [Emphasis mine]

[20] Ibid., p. 73.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid., p. 74.

[23] Cf. Ibid., p. 75-76.

[24] Ibid., p. 75.

[25] Ibid.