Being and Having - Gabriel Marcel

This I do sec: that the privilege or primacy which I ascribe to my mental equipment, and to what belongs to it, is conceived or imagined by analogy with the fundamental and unthinkable privilege which distinguishes my body in so far as it is mine. In this privilege my ideas, in so far as they are mine, have an indirect share.

Would it make sense to say that having and being are, as it were, essential concentrations of space and time? I am not sure.

April 7th

Being and Having 1949 - Gabriel Marcel

Chapter I [A Metaphysical Diary] - Page  86

A translation by: Katharine Farrer

 of Eire et Avoir

One of the most important points, for Gabriel Marcel - as an existentialist - is "being and having".

According to him, " when we hope, we do not have hope. We are hope. Similarly, we do not have a belief. We are belief."[1]

" My body insofar as it is my body, is both something that I have and something that I am, and can not be adequately accounted for using either of those descriptions alone."[2]

So consequently, an individual never can be completely connected to h/imself in one direction. 

[1], [2] With reference to: Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy 



- Relevant:
*h/imself = herself/himself 

*h/is = her/his

*s/he = she/he

The Land of Promise - Soren Kierkegaard

" It was by his faith that Abraham could leave the land of his fathers to become a stranger in the land of Promise. He left one thing behind, took another with him. He left behind his worldly understanding and took with him his faith. .."

 Fear and Trembling . p16 - ISBN 987-0-14-102393-9

When I read these sentences, I feel something that comes from a Heart. Something that can prove what is Promise. 

Methinks 48 IX A 86 - S. Kierkegaard.

Methinks I have written things which must move stones to tears, but my contemporaries are moved only to insults and envy.

 

About Myself 54 XI I A 3I2 - S. Kierkegaard.

From very early on my life has been tormented in a way that must be hard to match; this is how I have differed from the common run. But I have differed from the common run of sufferers in turn by its never having occurred to me that there might be help to seek or to find among men; no, suffering was my distinction. 

Self - S. Kierkegaard.

The human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation's relating to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and eternal, of freedom and necessity. In short a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two terms. Looked at in this way a human being is not yet a self. 

A. That Despair is the Sickness unto Death - The Sickness unto Death

Soren Kierkegaard 

Relation with God 48 IX A 318 - S. Kierkegaard.

A person can relate to GOD in the truest way only as an individual, for one always best acquires the conception of one's own worthlessness alone, it is well nigh impossible to convey this to another with proper clarity, and it would in any case easily become affection. 

Mistaking for reason 45 VI B 70:10 - S. Kierkegaard.

When in the graveyard one reads an inscription on a gravestone in which a man mourns his lost little daughter but finally breaks out in verse: Comfort thee, reason, she lives, singed Hilarius Master-Butcher -- there's much comedy here: first, in the context, the very name Hilarius has comic effect, then the worthy-sounding Master-Butcher, and finally the outburst: reason! One can imagine a professor of philosophy mistaking himself for reason, but a master-butcher would not imagine that. 

One 37 II A 626 - S. Kierkegaard.

Sympathetic egoism. Irony.

Hypochondriac egoism. Humor. 

 one is one's own nearest.

One 37 II A 626 - S. Kierkegaard.

Philosophical Suicide - a misunderstanding of Kierkegaard's Philosophy

Religious, spiritual, or abstract belief in a transcendent realm, being, or idea: a solution in which one believes in the existence of a reality that is beyond the Absurd, and, as such, has meaning. Kierkegaard stated that a belief in anything beyond the Absurd requires a non-rational but perhaps necessary religious acceptance in such an intangible and empirically unprovable thing (now commonly referred to as a "leap of faith"). However, Camus regarded this solution, and others, as "philosophical suicide". 

Wikipedia - Absurdism

Why is it so? This misunderstanding - philosophical suicide - occurs because of having no experience of belief's state, which is not reachable for everyone. There could be also a misconception of goal of philosophy in human's life.

Lord! Give us weak eyes for things of no account (not importance), and eyes of full clarity in all truth.

The Sickness unto Death - S. Kierkegaard

Despair - S. Kierkegaard.

Despair is a sickness of the spirit, of the self, and so can have three forms:

1. being unconscious in despair of having a self (inauthentic despair)
2. not wanting in despair to be oneself
3. wanting in despair to be oneself

The sickness unto death - S. Kierkegaard.

 

If you are reading this, at least we can say that, there is a possibility for you to not be in state of (inauthentic despair) 1.

 

Despair: hopelessness of doing a thing in order to improve worrying situation.