Gabriel Marcel and the Mysteries of Death and Despair
We are still a long way off from receiving final and confirmed data for 2024 from the CDC, but, unless there is a surprising and unexpected aberration from recent trends, the U.S. is likely to have experienced another year of historically high or even record setting rates and overall numbers of deaths by suicide. 2022, the most recent year for which the CDC provides confirmed data, saw the most deaths by suicide in the U.S. ever—49,476—corresponding to the highest rate of deaths by suicide since World War II (1941). More and more, people struggle to find a reason for living. We wake up each morning to challenge, perhaps simply to the challenges of existing, and increasingly many, unable to find a source of resolve to endure and persevere, desire to close their eyes to a sleep from which they will never awake. They desire their own self-destruction and death.
What is it that gets you out of bed in the morning? When you ponder this question you likely imagine some person: a spouse or loved one, children, parents, friends, or neighbors. For me, often it is quite literally my children as they wake me up and pull me out of bed, depriving me of the final twenty or thirty minutes of sleep before my alarm was supposed to go off. There is an old trope from children’s cartoons wherein a sleeping character—perhaps Mickey Mouse or Jerry of Tom and Jerry—is pulled out of his sleep by the wafting scent of delicious foods, a scent that takes the form of a hand that literally pulls them out of their sleep and carries them to the pie or cheese awaiting them. Maybe the thing that pulls you out of bed in the morning is not a person. Maybe it is your farm, your garden, your community, or an institution within your community.
Now imagine what it would be like to wake up in the morning and to have nothing pulling you out of bed. Imagine that there was no cheese or pie, no family, children, community, or anything that you cared about, or that cared about you, for which to wake up. Perhaps your alarm goes off because you have to get to work at a certain time, but it is not entirely clear to you why you go to that job, or to any job in particular.
You wake up and go to work today like you did yesterday and for uncounted days before that. You will do the same tomorrow and for uncounted days into the future. All this but with no understanding of why it matters that you go to work or do not go to work, wake up or do not wake up. The experience of having nothing to pull you out of bed in the morning would be an experience of suffering that would be difficult to bear, an experience that might drive one to madness or even to suicide.
Gabriel Marcel was a philosopher of hope who thought deeply about the experiences of challenge and suffering that would tempt one to despair and suicide and also about the experience of hope that carries one through and beyond experiences of challenge and suffering. In his book Homo Viator, Marcel describes hope as “breathing for the soul.” According to Marcel, human beings have a basic need to participate in the being of something greater than or outside of ourselves, in its life and dynamic existence.
It is helpful to think of “being” in concrete terms. I participate in the being of my wife, the being of my daughters, the dynamic existence of my community, the life of my garden (in fact, it is my wife’s garden). Marcel thinks that we have a basic need to participate in the dynamic existence and life of something outside of ourselves because in so doing we also experience the dynamism and life of our own being. When we experience and participate in life that exists outside of ourselves, we feel ourselves to be alive. Our souls can breathe. To the contrary, when we experience our own existence as static, unchanging, and suffocating, we can begin to feel as though we are already dead.
How do we get pulled into participation with being such that we can feel ourselves to be alive? How do we hope?
To understand hope and how to hope, we must consider one of Marcel’s key philosophical contributions, which is the distinction between mystery and problem. Marcel develops this distinction in an early essay titled “On the Ontological Mystery,” which is included in a short collection of essays published under the title The Philosophy of Existence. He develops this distinction more fully in his Gifford Lectures, published in two volumes under the title The Mystery of Being.
Marcel identifies two kinds of questions distinguished by their objects. Questions of one sort have an object that exists wholly apart from the existence of the questioner. For example, I may ask a question about the effect of a new chemotherapy drug on cancer cells contained in a petri dish on the table in my laboratory. Those cancer cells and that chemotherapy drug exist wholly apart from me, the researcher, and this separation empowers me with the ability to objectify both, to subject them to my scientific control, manipulation, destruction, and to quantification and calculation of effect.
Marcel refers to this kind of question as “problem” and he refers to the kind of investigation appropriate to problem as “primary reflection.” Primary reflection is objectifying thought that abstracts, stabilizes, concretizes, analyzes, reduces, functionalizes, and controls. All scientific, mathematical, and quantitative thought is primary reflection. Primary reflection can provide answers or solutions to problems such that the question is dissolved; there is no more need for continued reflection on that question.
Questions of another sort are about objects that are part of the questioner’s own existence, such that contemplation of the question necessarily involves the questioner contemplating his own existence. For example, I may ask a question about the nature of human life and existence. Because I, the questioner, am myself an alive human being that exists, my investigation into the nature of human life and existence cannot avoid reflection on my own life and existence. Thus, objectification is not possible. Further, because my life and existence is always changing and on the move, my contemplation of the nature of human life and existence must similarly be changing and on the move.
Contemplation of such a question can never return a solution that dissolves the question entirely. Rather, the question must be asked continually and reflection must be ongoing. The question never goes away. Marcel calls this kind of question “mystery,” and he calls the appropriate form of reflection for mystery “secondary reflection.” In secondary reflection, one subjects oneself to participation in and recollection of mystery. One way that Marcel describes secondary reflection is as “re-collection,” which has the two-fold meaning of remembering and of bringing together into a unity. One contemplates mystery by participating in mystery—which is to subject oneself to mystery—and by remembering and bringing together into a unity one’s experiences of mystery. Whereas primary reflection is characteristic of the scientist or the mathematician, secondary reflection is characteristic of the playwright or the musical composer (of which Marcel was both).
It is important to be clear about the differences between problem and mystery, and between primary and secondary reflection. A problem is something static, objectifiable, and that can be made the subject of the questioner’s control. A mystery is something that is dynamic and wrapped up in one’s existence, making objectification impossible. Primary reflection, which is appropriate for problem, abstracts, concretizes, masters, and controls. Secondary reflection, which is appropriate for mystery, participates in mystery, remembering one’s experience of mystery and bringing those experiences together into unity.
The question that our attention is turned to—“How do we get pulled into participation with being such that we can feel ourselves to be alive?” which is the question of hope—is a mystery and not a problem. To participate in being—the being of my wife, of my daughters, my garden, etc.—means to be present with, fully attentive to, giving myself wholly over to the dynamic existence and life in which I participate. It is to love an other. In so loving the other, we are broken free from the temptation to despair. Love is a mystery and not a problem, and in loving the other we feel ourselves to be alive.
To participate in being, one must willingly subject oneself to it, relinquishing control, becoming vulnerable to it and to being changed by it. Participation in being requires openness to mystery, what Marcel calls disponibilité, usually translated from French into English as “availability” or sometimes “disposability.” Intuitively, this makes sense. When my daughters come into my bedroom in the wee hours before my alarm goes off, I can be open and available to them, making myself vulnerable to their pulling me out of bed, being at their disposal, or I can be closed off and unavailable to them, refusing to give up control of my sleep schedule. If participation in the mystery of love helps us feel alive, then we need to be open and available to love and to the mystery of being in general.
Problem and mystery are distinct questions that require distinct modes of reflection. One is not more noble or of higher worth than the other. Our lives are filled with both kinds of questions, and both kinds of questions need responses. To respond appropriately to these questions, they must be rightly identified such that the appropriate form of reflection may be employed. Rightly distinguishing problem and mystery is a challenge, though, because they tend to be wrapped up in each other and it is difficult to disentangle them.
One example of this is the experience of bodily symptoms and pain, and also the experience of suffering. A person with end-stage cancer of the bone will experience many symptoms and much bodily pain that can be identified and treated with medications or other interventions. Symptoms and pain are both problems that are appropriate for primary reflection. Suffering, though, is a mystery, because contemplation of the nature of suffering redounds back upon the ego who is the one who suffers. However, the suffering of the person with end-stage cancer of the bone cannot be separated from the person’s pain and symptoms.
What must not happen—a threat with which Marcel was gravely concerned—is the degradation of mystery to problem. To degrade mystery to problem is to treat a question of mystery as though it were problem by objectifying what ought not to be objectified, concretizing what ought not to be concretized, reducing what ought not to be reduced, and controlling what ought not to be controlled. To degrade mystery into a problem is to apply primary reflection on mystery. One example of such degradation would be to reduce the mystery of suffering to the problem of pain and symptom management, and to use the techniques and interventions of palliative medicine as a means of addressing non-medical suffering, such as existential suffering.
The reason why degradation of mystery to problem is something that must not happen is because it denies one the possibility of disponibilité—openness and availability to mystery—which denies one the possibility of love and hope. One way that Marcel describes availability is that it is a willingness to be used up by mystery. For example, when one loves another and is available to the other, then he is at the other’s disposal for the sake of the other’s good. Taken to the extreme, the ultimate act of love and availability is to sacrifice one’s life for the sake of the other.
Once mystery has been objectified, abstracted, concretized, reduced to functions and subjected to one’s own control, which is what primary reflection does, then there is no longer any mystery to which to be available. Mystery has been destroyed and what remains is some mere simulacrum, devoid of all dynamism, deprived of all life. Before we said that participation with being helps us to feel ourselves to be alive, and that this requires a disposition of openness toward being. But if we reduce the mystery of being to a problem, then we deny ourselves of the possibility of openness, love, hope, and of feeling ourselves to be alive.
Marcel looked around at his post-war Parisian, French, and European societies and saw despair everywhere he looked. His diagnosis of Europe’s despair, detailed in his book Man Against Mass Society, was that his fellow citizens had been deprived of the possibility of availability to mystery, and that the cause of this deprivation was a culture that had become quite effective at degrading mystery to problem. Marcel saw techniques of degradation at work everywhere from the Nazi concentration camps to the offices of the socialist bureaucracy, where the primary concern was effective and efficient control of masses of individuals.
The result of this, in Marcel’s view, was that the people of Europe had become so degraded that they began to view themselves in problematic terms, as objects and as bundles of functions. His fellow citizens, having been subjected by social and cultural institutions to primary reflection, came to view everything, including themselves, as problem, with no mystery to which to be available or in which to participate. They could not feel themselves as alive, but instead experienced a zombie-like existence as living-dead. When one’s experience of existence is as though one is already dead, then the natural conclusion is to desire actual death as the only means of relief from this peculiar form of suffering.
Death and dying are mysteries and not problems. One cannot contemplate the nature of death or the experience of death apart from contemplating one’s own existence. We contemplate death and dying by experiencing it—the deaths of our loved ones, our family members, our neighbors—and by recollecting those experiences. We participate in the dying and death of our loved ones by being present with them, fully attentive to them, and giving ourselves wholly over to them throughout the process of their dying and being laid to rest. Participation in the mystery of death is relinquishing control, recognizing that we are subject to a mystery that holds power over us, and journeying with the dying on their final pilgrimage in life.
This journeying may involve gently dropping water onto a parched tongue or wiping spittle from the dying loved one’s mouth, keeping watch late into the early morning hours while listening to and feeling dying moans, speaking prayers and singing hymns, stumbling through words that do not quite form full thoughts, washing the body of your dead loved one. Paradoxically, loving participation in the dying and death of our loved ones helps us to feel ourselves as alive.
The dying of our loved ones pulls us out of ourselves and turns our attention, presence, care, and love fully toward the dying, removing from our mind any question as to why we needed to get out of bed that morning. That participation in the dying of our loved ones helps us to feel alive explains some of the jarring and disturbing grief that comes with a loved one’s sudden death or death by suicide: there was no opportunity to be with, to be present to the dying loved one, to care for the dying loved one in their suffering.
On the other hand, we cannot solve the problems of dying and death by submitting them to primary reflection. Dying and death cannot be objectified by throwing them under the microscope. To concretize, analyze, and functionalize death for the sake of our own control is to degrade the mysteries of dying and death to problem. Assisted suicide is the degradation of the mystery of dying and death to problem. It places dying and death under one’s own control, presenting assisted suicide as a solution that dissolves the problem. It deprives everyone of the opportunity to participate in mystery.
The one who will die is denied the opportunity to be the recipient of attention, care, and love, and those who would have given it are denied the opportunity to do so. With assisted suicide, death is a problem that can be solved effectively, efficiently, cleanly, at the time and in the location of one’s choosing, and with the approval and facilitation of the medical and state apparatuses. Loved ones may be around or involved, but even this is under the control of the one who will die. Most regrettably, assisted suicide reinforces the tendency of degrading mystery to problem, which denies us the possibility of availability, of participation in being, of love, and of hope.
Ours is a society of people who need to feel themselves alive. It is a society in need of mystery. Increasingly, citizens struggle to find a reason to live, preferring non-existence and capitulating to desires for self-destruction and death. A complete analysis of the social and cultural causes of this epidemic of despair is necessary, but it would be complex and would need to have a wider gaze than mere economic and material causes. A society that is attuned strictly to problems and not at all to mystery is ill-equipped to understand despair, or to find hope through participation in being.
Acceptance of techniques of degradation such as the legal adoption and implementation of assisted suicide will exacerbate the problem of despair by teaching citizens unavailability that will deny them the possibility of hope. The more that techniques of degradation proliferate across a society, the more that the society’s citizens are deprived of their ability to be open to mystery, to participate in being, to feel themselves as alive. They will be unable to get out of bed in the morning because there will be nothing to pull them out of bed in the morning. Feeling as though they are already dead, societies with assisted dying programs have a solution for that problem.
As U.S. rates of non-medicalized suicide rise, so also are rates of assisted suicide. It is likely that 2024 will have a historically high or even record-setting rate and overall number of deaths by assisted suicide in the U.S. (Data related to assisted suicide are not included in the CDC’s reported suicide data.) In the eleven U.S. jurisdictions where acts of assisted suicide are legally permitted, year after year both the overall number and the rate of deaths by assisted suicide rise. While the U.S.’s rate of deaths by non-medically assisted suicide is higher than the rest of the Western world, other nations far outpace the U.S. in deaths by assisted suicide and euthanasia.
According to Compassion and Choices, in the U.S., up to and including 2023, 10,211 people have died as a result of a legal act of assisted suicide. In 2023 alone, the Netherlands—a country with a population about one-twentieth that of the U.S.—recorded 9,068 deaths by assisted suicide and euthanasia. In Canada, in 2023 alone, 15,343 people died from assisted suicide and euthanasia. Techniques of degradation that subject mysteries such as dying and death to technical control for the sake of effectiveness and efficiency contribute to the epidemic of despair and threaten to make living impossible.
The appropriate response to temptation to despair—whether caused by a society and culture of degradation or by a terminal diagnosis and a prognosis of six months or less—is not more technical mastery and primary reflection, but becoming open and available to participation in being. And it is helpful to think in concrete terms: the being of your spouse, your children, your neighbor, your community, your garden. Turn toward these in love, and your soul will breathe. You will feel yourself as being alive.
EDITORIAL NOTE: The author would like to thank Lydia Dugdale, Brewer Eberly, and Steven Knepper for providing valuable comments on an earlier draft of this essay.