[loveandknowledge]

“In his essay ‘On the Ontological Mystery’, written in 1932 and published in the fateful year of 1933, [Gabriel] Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes. Instead, he urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining 'available’ to situations as they arise. Similar ideas of disponibilité or availability had been explored by other writers, notably André Gide, but Marcel made it his central existential imperative. He was aware of how rare and difficult it was. Most people fall into what he calls 'crispation’: a tensed, encrusted shape in life - 'as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him’. Marcel’s 'shell’ recalls [Edmund] Husserl’s notion of the accumulated and inflexible preconceptions that one should set aside in the epoché, so as to open up access to the things themselves. In both cases, what is rigid is cleared away, and the trembling freshness of what is underneath becomes the object of the philosopher’s attention. For Marcel, learning to stay open to reality in this way is the philosopher’s prime job. Everyone can do it, but the philosopher is the one who is called on above all to stay awake, so as to be the first to sound the alarm if something seems wrong.”

— Sarah Bakewell, ‘At the Existentialist Café’