Environmental Ethics

Volume 16, Issue 2, Summer 1994

Gabriel Marcel’s Kinship to Ecophilosophy

Gabriel Marcel spent most of his life developing a phenomenology of human intersubjectivity. While doing so he discovered the extent to which an authentic human community depends upon the relationship it has to nonhuman nature. By exploring Marcel’s critique of technology, as well as his religious phenomenology, I show the proximity to which Marcel’s philosophy approaches the current egalitarian response of the radical ecology movement. Even though the bulk of Marcel’s work is concerned with human intersubjectivity, his writings advocate a transcendence of anthropocentricism to what Marcel calls “cosmocentricism,” an existential attitude toward the world which submits to the sacredness of all beings, as well as to the bioregions within which all earthly creatures share the sacraments of life.