Dramas, Words, Encounters. Evil in Gabriel Marcel

Inaugurating a new voyage leading to an appointment with evil means, for Marcel, taking apart the abstract forms of logic winding through western tradition. Paths that are as commonly trodden as they are incorporeal, which, when attempting to speak about evil as about any other problem, lose their concreteness without ever coming to a sincere encounter with it. Marcel accuses these approaches to open up a new phenomenological path which allows him to concretely come up against evil and talk about it in a different way. In addition to opening up for him the possibility of a close experience of evil, the phenomenology of evil offers Marcel a very powerful weapon for defusing the processes of removal or annulment of evil itself. Encountering evil means allowing evil to encounter us, but always existentially, without referring a priori to an abstract idea of it. Evil in flesh and blood, far removed from the evil in which ethical manoeuvres and intellectual or spiritual experiments bask, which are only apparently similar to evil but actually reveal a closure that removes or nullifies first-hand experience.