by Marianne Aquino
14 August 2012
Discussed Text: Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being
It is a natural tendency nowadays for people to misconceptualize truth. It is often conceived as something that is universally valid or something that is akin to a mathematical formula, an architectural blueprint or a scientific methodology. Truth is deemed transmissible through the presupposition of a technique, which can be taught or passed down to anyone and can be reproduced anytime, anywhere. In the text, Gabriel Marcel asserts otherwise. According to him, there must be a dissociation between truth and universal validity. But throughout history, with the emergence of intellectual or knowledge-based transcendence, the notion of truth has been transformed to just a mere result that of which can be attained by dint of technical activity.
Humans are now obsessed with techniques. They use these sets of procedures to achieve concrete and often materialistic results. This is for the reason that they've been made to believe or fooled even that more possessions correlates highly with happiness, pleasure, and satisfaction. Who has never heard of stories of men who are disgustingly rich with great deal of money but never really completely satisfied and never really truly happy? They've become too absorbed in the manipulation of both mental and physical objects that they lose track of what is really important. They are in dire need of reevaluating priorities.
In turn, this reinforcement of the humans' will to dominate all things that are external to the thinking mind leads to a "broken world" where no real relations exist and therefore, no real unity as well. The relations that persist today have no sense of brotherhood in that there is a reduction of the individual into just agents with his or her own "identity card" consequently making each one substitutable. This is a manifestation of one important malady of society. That is its susceptibility to ignore "exigencies of reflection". The call to spiritual values, creative and productive imagination, and reflection have been all been debunked. For Marcel, the only cure to society's tenuous grasp at truth is reflection by placing ourselves in that place of light and at the same time throwing all processes and techniques into the shade.
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