I, others, suffering. Thinking about evil with Gabriel Marcel

A sincere discourse on evil, beyond the rhetoric of clichés, can only begin for Gabriel Marcel after the defusing of the logic of abstract thought, which just as it wants to discuss evil as any other problem implodes upon itself, without ever reaching a real encounter with it. Marcel bluntly accuses these traditional paths, deconstructs them, and leaves them behind to open a new phenomenological path, one that allows him to concretely encounter evil and speak about it in an alternative way. An evil in which one stumbles daily, which surprises and destabilises. An evil that looks at me and concerns me. Which concerns us, all of us. And others even more than myself. It is not enough for evil to become the evil over which I have triumphed. Beyond all heroism and self-eroticism of evil, beyond all centralisation and entrenchment in oneself to which suffering leads, this evil of mine must become our evil, ceasing, once and for all, to be an attack on a self-centered love.