Struggling Against the Specter of Dehumanization

Abstract

One could interpret Gabriel Marcel's religious existentialism, or what I prefer to calls his method, as being founded upon at least two commitments.1 First, Marcel's reflective method is founded upon commitment to an ethico-religious insight where the highest ontological exigency human persons is to participate in being.2 Second, his reflective method is dedicated to struggle against the ever-present specter of dehumanization in late Western modernity,3 as embothed in our current technocratic socio-historical milieu. This essay will trace how Marcel's second foundational commitment serves as one of the experiential origins of his reflective method. Accordingly, the first section traces the experiential origins of Marcel's reflective method back to his response to the sociopolitical milieu in which he lived during the 1910s and 1 920s. Given mat Marcel's struggle against the ever-present threat of dehumanization is partially directed at early and mid-twentieth-century technology, the second section explains precisely what Marcel means by technology and how it often dehumanizes those who use it and are affected by it. The third section is dedicated to answering the critics of Marcel's philosophy of technology who have argued that it is just an outward manifestation of his technophobia. This is accomplished by translating Marcel's philosophy of technology into the philosophical framework of Albert Borgmann's neo-Heideggerian philosophy of technology, as much as possible. The last section of this essay describes how Marcel conceives of his reflective method in sociopolitical terms as perpetual struggle against the dehumanizing forces in late Western modernity. The Experiential Origins of Marcel's Reflective Method If we had to describetheconcrete experiential origins of Marcel's reflective method in sentence, we could describe it as follows: Marcel devised his reflective method as means of conserving the ontological significance of human existence in technocratic, ideological, and bureaucratic age in which many Westerners have, to their own detriment, forgotten their ontological exigency being. The above statement depicts how Marcel initially describes the experiential origins of his reflective method in his noteworthy essay Concrete Approaches to Investigating the Ontological Mystery. There he diagnoses me origin of dehumanization in late Western modernity (from roughly 1910 onward) as subtle, often intuitive, unease felt by many Westerners for whom any sense of being or the ontological is lacking, or who - more exactly - have lost all consciousness of having had any such dimension to their lives.4 He sometimes calls living amid this general sense of unease, living in a broken world.5 To live in broken world means to Uve in world in which human societies are so bureaucratic mat everything persons do is subject to regulation. This means that we lose the intimate sense of human existence and replace it with sense of being cog in massive, social machine. Expressed in more contemporary idiom, to live in broken world is to be merely node in vast, complex neural network. However we happen to articulate the nature of this broken world, living in broken world means our being is identified with some abstract individual all of whose 'particulars' can be contained on the few sheets of an official dossier.6 What is left of us in such world is an empty shell of person. This shell of person is an abstraction, namely, an individual who is equal with all other individuals. Of course, this equality is detrimental one, it is merely formalistic notion, one which could only be obtained by leveling down every person to the point at which no one is unique and everyone is the same.7 We shall revisit Marcel's critique of equality later in this essay when we examine how his sociopolitical thought fits into his commitment to struggle against the threat of dehumanization in late Western modernity. …