Gaudium Essendi:
A catnap with the gods

I’ve just been out raking the yard for the third time. Well, I wanted to be outside...and it’s either rake now or rake in the spring. There aren’t a whole lot of leaves so you feel like you’re making great progress without much effort, like canoing with the wind to your back. Nevertheless I stopped every four minutes to assess my progress, ponder the universe, and pat myself on the back for simply being alive. I have had this problem ever since I was a child. (Just ask my dad.) I astound myself whenever I set out to do something on my own initiative, and stop so often to relish the situation that I have trouble getting the job done.

On the other hand, such moments of aimless reverie are good for the soul, I think. It’s important to touch bottom every once and a while—to reground ourselves in that cosmic purring je ne ce qua which is the source of both life’s meaning and its delight. I liken the experience to taking a catnap with the gods.
I ran across a choice expression the other day that seems to refer to the experience I’m describing. It appears in one of the last essays written by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel before his death in 1973. Marcel is sometimes credited with coining the word existentialism, though he spent much of his career politely distinguishing his views from those of Sartre, Heidegger, and other thinkers who ended up wielding far greater influence than he. I return to his essays from time to time, confident that his supple prose and sincere yet unsystematic thoughtfulness will prove stimulating, and I’m seldom disappointed.

The expression I’m referring to is gaudium essendi—which means “the joy of existing.” The essay in which Marcel makes use of this phrase carries the somewhat ponderous title “Authentic Humanism and Its Existential Presuppositions.” Here Marcel is once again attempting to limn the significance of our presence here on planet earth. In the passage in which gaudium essendi appears, he’s making a parenthetical aside directed at one or two of his colleagues.

The central deficiency in existentialist philosophies of anxiety, I think, is the completely arbitrary overlooking of a fundamental experience I like to call the gaudium essendi, the joy of existing. A certain threat does, in fact, menace this gaudium essendi; a serious shadow is projected upon it. And there is the tragic aspect of our situation. But if this primordial fact of the gaudium essendi is overlooked, then we will have only a mutilated and deformed idea of our situation.

Marcel is suggesting that an analysis of life focused exclusively on anxiety, dread, shame, and other debilitating emotions won’t give us an accurate picture of our place in the universe, any more than the study of a human body in decay gives us a complete picture of human physiology. There are plenty of lively emotions that also serve to illuminate our condition. The joy of existing is one of them. Marcel even goes so far as to call it a primordial fact.

Marcel himself doesn’t spend much time defining this condition, however. Perhaps that’s just as well. Clearly the expression refers to something other than the pleasure we get when engaged in any particular activity, because joy is not the same thing as pleasure, and existing, considered in and of itself, is a rather vague and seemingly passive condition. Whatever else we may be doing, we’re also existing. Is this, in itself, sufficient reason to be joyful?

It seems to me that there is no way that any of us can “reason” our way into a state of joyfulness. Joy is an emotion that comes upon us, gurgling up from who knows where. We may be watching TV or raking the yard or enjoying a meal with friends, or perhaps doing nothing at all...when we’re struck by a sensation that takes us beyond the situation at hand, whatever it may be, to a subtle awareness of the all-encompassing coolness of simply finding ourselves here in the midst of this ongoing stream of life. It’s a great feeling—a metaphysical feeling. An awareness of ourselves, of life...of the beauty of the moment. A mind game, perhaps, but one that’s loaded with significance, if there is any merit in Marcel’s view. Wouldn’t it be worthwhle to learn to play this game well? To figure out how the joy of existing can be identified, acquired, and maintained through thick and thin?

I don’t have an answer to those questions, however. I don’t have a method. But it might help if we made an effort to differentiate gaudium essendi from other similar emotions.
It needs to be differentiating, for example, from the ego-centered satisfaction of have won something. I love to win things—I guess because it makes me feel “special.” But I don’t like being the cause of the disappointment my opponents may feel at not having won. Winning things provides us with a wave of self-worth, and that’s important, but it also separates us from others...and from life.

By the same token, the sensual pleasures we often look forward to—sampling, say, a choice serving of fois gras or a subtle wine—certainly add interest to life. But such experiences are invariably transitory, and they’re also bound to a particular time and place, which is likely to be a source of anticipatory regret (this meal will soon be over, alas!) and incipient desire. (I’ve got to get my hands on another bottle of this!)

Gaudium essendi, on the other hand, fills us with a quiet warmth that extends itself in every direction and has nothing to do with either pride or personal pleasure. It’s a secret thought, an inner glance, a bemused recognition of ... life’s basic goodness? It’s a quite emotion, and it lacks the brash assertiveness of a Whitmanesque embrace. All the same, it makes us want to sing, or at least to whistle. We may be driven to expotulate “Look at the color in that leaf!” or “Listen to the stillness,” or “You’ve got to let me read this passage to you.” In a word, gaudium essendi is less a matter of feeling good about ourselves than of feeling good about everything.

You may argue that the experience of this emotion, no less than, say, the joy of sampling a fine Bordeaux wine, is underscored by a sense of incipient loss. The feeling itself is transitory, after all. And perhaps our appreciation of life, and of our own existence, can only be thrown into high relief against the backdrop of eternal night—that is to say, of our death. One thinks here of Puccini’s Carivadosi, who smokes his final cigarette while awaiting the execution squad on the rooftop of the Castel san Angelo, and cries out:

And never has it felt so good to live!

This is the line of reasoning that more than one existentialist thinker has followed, but it doesn’t ring true to me. It may be that some sort of extreme emotion overcomes us when we find ourselves in dire straits. Something draws us out of ourselves at such times—which may explain the popularity of auto racing and horror films, and the bonding that takes place between men in the trenches together. Yet I truly doubt whether imminent death invariably makes people cry out with ecstatic exhuberance. And I have felt the joy of existing many times, though I’m not due to face a firing squad any time soon. In short, the connection between gaudium essendi and death is interesting but not essential.

A more serious objection may be that the act of feeling our oats existentially—of relishing the richness of being alive—means little. The energy seems to be everywhere, but when we bring our fingers delicately to our lips to cradle that infinitesimal kernel of vibrant and precious perfection with which our heart and soul is pulsing, perhaps it’s only a gurgle of selfish emotion, like the call of a passing robin in the per-dawn light.

I suspect that one reason the concept of gaudium essendi has not figured prominently in existential disputes is that an individual in its grip would be more likely to write a poem or simply succumb to reverential awe than to take up a line of logical analysis on its behalf. Those who lie in its grip don’t need to define it’s significance very carefully. They feel no need to philosophize.

Yet I think it would be worthwhile to examine the subject more carefully, because the fact is—who can explain it?—gaudium essendi is very imperfectly distributed. Some individuals seem to bath in it daily, while others have never caught even a fleeting whiff. Perhaps it was not quite fair, therefore, for Marcel to suggest, in the passage I quoted above, that some of his colleagues have casually overlooked the phenomenon. After all, the “the joy of existing” does not lie in front of every one of us like a sailboat in a slip, which some of us wisely commandeer, sailing off to explore the Isles of Bliss, while others pass it by in order to defend a more fashionable nihilistic position. There are plenty of good-hearted, good-natured people among us for whom it is a daily struggle to enjoy life even slightly. Perhaps if we were better able to describe it, we could share it more readily with others.

The real foundation of Marcel’s philosophy is intersubjectivity—the experience by which beings, stimulated by one another’s company, share their experience and grow to respect and love one another. He argues that this interchange is often illuminated by a shared, albeit often implicit, awareness of the larger—shale we say transcendental?—reality that supports both the individuals involved as individuals, and the communion between them. Yet I would be surprised to find that Marcel does not also somewhere acknowledge a joy that may strike us now and again in moments of solitude. Perhaps he would simply describe such an experience as a communion on a higher level—just as I have irreverently called it a catnap with the gods.
A parting thought: I have found that in the course of probing my own thoughts on the subject, this peculiar “joy of existing” has begun to strike me with increasing frequency. The first step, perhaps, is simply to familiarize ourselves with the phrase. By calling the words to mind, we may begin to reflect more seriously on what they mean, thus clearing a pathway, step by step, toward those sublime depths.