Gabriel Honoré Marcel (7 December 1889 – 8 October 1973) was a French playwright, music critic, and philosopher. He is known to be one of the major figures of existentialism, but he dissociated himself from figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, of whom he was a staunch critic, and preferred the term "philosophy of existence" or "neo-Socrateanism" to define his thought.
Marcel was born in Paris, an only child to Henri-Camille "Henry" Marcel, a French diplomat, and Laure Meyer, a Jew and daughter of a banker. Laure died when Marcel was four, and he went on to be raised by his father and Berthe, his aunt and the sister of Laure; Henry would later marry Berthe. Henry, who was raised a Catholic but stopped practicing the faith in favour of agnosticism, raised Marcel without any religious upbringing.
Marcel excelled in his studies, especially when philosophy was involved, and enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1907. There, he completed his diplôme d'études supérieures (roughly the equivalent of an MA thesis) and obtained the agrégation in philosophy from the Sorbonne in 1910, at the unusually young age of 20. Afterwards, he taught philosophy intermittently in Sens, Paris, and Montpellier, but his main professional occupations were that of a drama critic and editor.
When World War I broke out in 1914, Marcel served in the French Red Cross, working to conveying news of injured soldiers to their families. He kept a series of philosophical notebooks that reveal his thought weening away from academic philosophy and drawing extensively from the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, one of the leading figures of existentialism; it also shows an examination of the question of transcendence, especially considering that he had to deal with Laure's death at a very young age. These notebooks came to be published under the name of The Metaphysical Journal (1927). After the war, Marcel married professor Jacqueline Boegner in 1919; they adopted a son, Jean-Marie.
