THE PRINCIPAL AIM OF A BOOK ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF GABRIEL MARCEL
ought to be to send the reader back to the original works in all their
non-expoundable concreteness. Actually, in the case of this relentlessly
unsystematic thinker, even to speak of "his philosophy" has a hollow
ring, for it suggests just the kind of carefully constructed edifice of doc-
trine which Marcel deliberately renounces. An attempt to "expound"
such a thought inevitably runs the risk of distorting it. And yet the risk
seems worth running. For Marcel's thought, while original and fasci-
nating, is so extremely elusive that it is a rare reader for whom it does
not seem to cry out for interpretation. The paradox is that this elusive-
ness is an essential constituent of his thought, and any exposition which
sought to eliminate it would be self-defeating. In the pages that follow,
I have sought to find the source of this elusiveness, not in order to
banish it, but rather in order to discover its philosophical significance.
My hope has been that, through a progressive penetration of Marcellian
themes, the animating principle behind his thought will gradually
emerge. What follows, then, is an exposition--in the sense that an at-
tempt has been made to bring the contours of Marcel's thought into
dear focus--but one which preserves the freshness of his approach. The
success of such an attempt is bound to be uneven, but it is hoped that
it will be of service in providing much-needed direction to many a
reader drawn to Marcel's style of thought, yet adrift in its uncharted
expanse.

It is certainly time that such an attempt was made. Marcel has been
for over thirty-five years one of the world's most influential thinkers,
but he is still too superficially categorized as an "existentialist," a title
which has a limited validity but is about as misleading as any other.
He does not derive from the line of descent to which so many of the
"existentialist" thinkers owe their origin, the line that is vaguely drawn

-ix-