Abstract

Many philosophers have also been littérateurs. Plato, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, and Maritain are just a few. However, has there ever been a philosopher who was both a littérateur and a musician/composer? Moreover, has there been a philosopher whose musical compositions and literary works were actually integral to his philosophical writings? Gabriel Marcel most probably holds a unique position in history. He might well be the only thinker whose philosophical works developed progressively from his musical compositions and his literary dramas, a development through which probative philosophical reflection served to clarify, to illumine, the sentiments of the resonances of his music and the meanings of the existential anxieties of his dramatic characters.