What About Man Can Be Free In the 20th Century? - Ch.1 "What is a Free Man?" from "Man Against Mass Society" by Gabriel Marcel

Stephen Alexander Beach

(1500 Words)

What is a Free Man?

Marcel begins this chapter on man and freedom by making the point that we cannot understand this apart from the cultural and temporal context in which we are speaking of man. He references Nietzsche, who seventy years before Marcel's writing, proclaimed that God was dead. Resulting from this, people in Marcel's day were now saying that man too is dying. 1 This death is a type of self-destruction, such as with the atomic bomb of totalitarian governments. 2 And yet in the phrase that man is in his death throes, Marcel argues, is actually implicit that God is alive. 3 Before getting to this he refers back to the idea of man being free. He asks how we can call person or a people free when they are obliged by other countries or their own country to do things against their conscience? 4 He is not talking about absolute freedom as an anarchist might seek, but rather a freedom of a man's conscience. "This is the point at which we ought to pass to the extreme case and ask ourselves what becomes of the freedom of the individual, even of what we call his inner freedom, in a totalitarian country." 

In this vein, Marcel refers to the Ancient Stoics who held the supremacy of the individual's inner conscience. It "... implied a belief in the inner tribunal of conscience: a tribunal unviolated, and indeed inviolable, by any intrusion of external power. There can be no Stoicism without a belief in an inalienable inner sovereignty, an absolute possession of the self by the self." And yet it is these totalitarian countries which destroy this inner man. They "... consist precisely in putting the individual into a situation in which he loses touch with himself, in which he is literally beside himself, even to the point of being able sincerely to disavow acts into which nevertheless he had put sincerely his whole heart, or on the other hand of being able to confess to acts which he had not committed." 5 

This type of sincerity in which someone's identity is replaced by an ideology is perfected in totalitarian governments, but existed before them. Marcel provides an example from confessions during the time of the Knights Templar where people were psychologically manipulated. "... we must admit that there are real and practical methods that can be applied to any of us tomorrow with the effect of depriving us of self-sovereignty or, less grandiosely, of self-control: even though in another age we should have had sound reasons for regarding that self-sovereignty as infrangible and inviolable." 6 

This is a type of possession of man which will take him over completely, down to his deepest thoughts. "What we have to recognize is this. Thanks to the techniques and degradation it is creating and perfecting, a materialistic mode of thought, in our time, is showing itself capable of bringing into being a world which more and more tends to verify its own materialistic postulates. I mean that a human being who has undergone a certain type of psychological manipulation tends progressively to be reduced to the status of a mere thing; a psychic thing, of course, but nevertheless a thing which falls quite tidily within the province of the theories elaborated by an essentially materialistic psychology." 7

If, indeed, man's idea of himself has been degraded in this way, then man too will be degraded as well. "... a materialistic conception of the universe is radically incompatible with the idea of a free man: more precisely, that, in a society ruled by materialistic principles, freedom is transmuted into its opposite, or becomes merely the most treacherous and deceptive of empty slogans." 8 If freedom for men remains in materialist society, it is only because of their lived contradiction. And to try to hide from the dominating government will become impossible with technology today. In this, any private life one might have had is now destroyed. Is there anything that one could do in a society like this to fight back? 9

Marcel says that we must affirm the transcendent nature of man, his spirituality, and rebuke the tying of our identity with that the psychological manipulation of the government might force us to do. "What we have to do is to proclaim that we do not belong entirely to the world of objects to which men are seeking to assimilate us, in which they are straining to imprison us." The events and significance of this life will transcend it and exist within a larger plain of spiritual reality. 10 Thus, man will be free in the amount to which he is connected to the transcendent, metaphysical, and spiritual. 11 

This is expressed in man's freedom to create, and to be in relationship with others. "But what must be stated as forcibly as possible is that societies built on a materialistic basis, whatever place they tactfully leave for a collective and at bottom purely animal exaltation, sin radically against intersubjectivity; they exclude it in principle; and it is because they exclude it, that they grub up every possible freedom by its roots." What is someone trapped in a totalitarian system to do? 12 It seems that such a person is hemmed up on every side when it comes to following authentic moral principles. And so Marcel submits that they must become creative in their rebellion against such regimes, such as a man who accepts a job in the Nazi forces but then uses his position to undermine them rather than support them. 13

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