Marcel defined availability as the openness that resists life’s habitual shell

Evidence

In his essay ‘On the Ontological Mystery’, written in 1932 and published in the fateful year of 1933, Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes. Instead, he urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining ‘available’ to situations as they arise. Similar ideas of disponibilité or availability had been explored by other writers, notably André Gide, but Marcel made it his central existential imperative. He was aware of how rare and difficult it was. Most people fall into what he calls ‘crispation’: a tensed, encrusted shape in life — ‘as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him’. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 287

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Marcel’s key terms: disponibilité/availability and crispation, the hardened shell of habit.
• XREF: Disponibilité/crispation pairs naturally with Husserl’s epoché and notions of habitual encrustation elsewhere in this book and in phenomenology more broadly. — connects to: Marcel’s availability concept parallels Husserl’s epoché of clearing rigid preconceptions — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 288; Marcel made disponibilite, remaining available to situations, a central existential imperative — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 287

Broader Connections

• Marcel’s availability concept parallels Husserl’s epoché of clearing rigid preconceptions #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 288
• Marcel made disponibilite, remaining available to situations, a central existential imperative #expands (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 287