Marcel, Gabriel (1889–1973)

Marcel was a distinguished French playwright and music critic as well as philosopher. It was he who coined the term ’existentialism’, although he was reluctant to be pigeon-holed a ’Christian existentialist’. Born into a well-off family of civil servants, Marcel – never a healthy man – worked for the Red Cross during the First World War, an experience which shaped his view of human relationships and confirmed a religious conviction that led to conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1929. After an early flirtation with F.H. Bradley’s idealism, Marcel independently developed a phenomenology of human existence and a religious conception of being similar, in several respects, to those of Karl Jaspers and Martin Buber. He was much in demand as a lecturer in his later years.