Being available without losing yourself

Gabriel Marcel, Martin Heidegger, and the ethics of presence

We use the word available all the time.

“I’m not available right now.”
“I wish I could be there more for others.”
“My calendar is full, but I’m here, really.”

Yet with that one word we often mean a whole mix of things: time, reachability, emotional space, care, responsibility. In care, education, social work, and leadership, this quickly becomes tense. Whoever tries to be available all the time gets drained. Whoever withdraws can be experienced as absent or unreliable.

In my work on listening, I often speak about making yourself available. It sounds obvious, but what does it actually mean to make yourself available to another human being?

The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel and, from a very different angle, Martin Heidegger both thought deeply about what it means to be “available”. Not in the sense of schedules and time slots, but as a way of being human. Their thinking connects surprisingly well to questions about listening, presence, and responsibility in relationships. In this blog, I explore with them what availability can mean, beyond the calendar.

Gabriel Marcel as a dialogical thinker

Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) is often mentioned in the same breath as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas. Together they form a family of dialogical thinkers: philosophers who place the encounter between I and you at the center. Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas come from the Jewish tradition; Marcel from the Christian tradition. He is also important as an early teacher of Levinas.

What these thinkers share is that the I is no longer the starting point, but the Other. The Other is not someone I think about, or a case I assess, but a person who looks at me and asks something of me. Instead of looking down on the Other as an “object,” I allow myself to be addressed by him or her. That is also the difference between what I call listening to (taking in information) and listening with: being present with the Other. It is about the space you grant the Other to shape their story with polyphony and nuance. That takes courage, because you are willing to travel with the Other, without knowing exactly where the conversation will take you.

Marcel gives this reversal of perspective his own tone, through a cluster of concepts that belong closely together:
la rencontre je–tu (I–you encounter), présence (presence), invocation (invocation/calling), disponibilité (availability), having and being, problem and mystery, réponse-renseignement and réponse-communion.

I will sketch them briefly, each time in relation to availability.

Problem and mystery: where does availability take place?

A first key is Marcel’s distinction between problem and mystery.

A problem is something I stand opposite. It can be defined, analyzed, and, ideally, solved. When someone approaches something as a problem, they can keep themselves out of it. It hardly matters who is “managing” the problem.

A mystery is different. It is a reality in which I am involved myself: life, love, fidelity, suffering, mortality. I cannot stand outside it. Whoever thinks about these things is also thinking about themselves. For Marcel, life is not a riddle to be solved one day, but a mystery we are always already inside.

Availability belongs to that second sphere. The question is then not only: how do I divide my time, but above all: how am I present in what happens between me and the other. That immediately connects to your language of asymmetrical reciprocity: I remain the one who listens, but the listening itself is a mysterious field that concerns both of us.

Having and being: the Other as a means or as a “you”

Marcel links this to the distinction between having (avoir) and being (être).

In the stance of having, I view the world as something I can use, manage, or possess. Things and situations, but also people, can become means: colleagues as capacity, clients as files, citizens as cases. The other shifts almost unnoticed from someone to something.

In the stance of being, I meet the Other as a person. The Other is then not an extension of my plan or organization, but a you (tu) who can address me. That is what Marcel means by la rencontre je–tu: the I–you encounter. In that encounter I do not remain outside the picture as a neutral observer, but I become part of what is going on.

Availability in Marcel’s sense belongs to this second stance. It is a form of being, not of having. Not: “I have time left over,” but: “I open myself as someone to whom you may turn.” That brings us to his key word: disponibilité.

Disponibilité, présence, and invocation

Disponibilité for Marcel is inner, existential availability. He is not talking about “you can reach me at this number,” but about the question: am I inwardly addressable?

That availability is inseparable from présence: presence. The Other is then not only an object in front of me (devant moi), but a presence with me (avec moi). In listening, this becomes visible when I do not merely process information, but allow myself to be affected by the person sitting across from me. Your language of staying present and listening with fits seamlessly here.

Invocation (invocation, calling) is the other side of that movement. The Other turns to me, addresses me, calls me. Disponibilité means that I do not only hear that appeal, but experience it as an appeal: this concerns me. For Marcel, freedom is therefore not first of all “freedom of choice,” but the discovery that I am a being capable of responding to an invocation.

You could say:

• présence is how I am with you;
• invocation is how you turn toward me;
• disponibilité is the inner space in which those two can meet.

In my work on listening, this is exactly the movement from I listen to your story to I allow myself to be addressed by you as Other. There appears the asymmetrical reciprocity Levinas points to: I remain the listening party, but the appeal does not originate from me.

Answer-as-information and answer-as-sharing

In that field of encounter, Marcel introduces another distinction that is crucial for availability: between réponse-renseignement and réponse-communion.

An answer-as-information (réponse-renseignement) is an answer primarily aimed at the problem. I provide facts, explanations, advice, referrals, I send a link. That can be necessary and is not wrong in itself, but it largely leaves the relationship untouched.

An answer-as-sharing (réponse-communion) is an answer that arises from the relationship. Then I respond not only to the question, but also to the one who asks. Sometimes I say little, but I stay with you; sometimes I say something small, but in such a way that you feel seen. This kind of answer presupposes disponibilité: that I want to remain inwardly with you, and do not retreat into a role or protocol as soon as things become complicated.

Here Marcel touches directly on my distinction between listening to and listening with. Listening to can get stuck in the sphere of answer-as-information. Listening with opens the possibility of answer-as-sharing: it is the space in which you as listener also become involved, without taking over the conversation.

In his plays Marcel shows what happens when this presence is missing. Relationships break down where people reduce each other to role, function, or problem. The “disasters” for him are usually not spectacular evil, but the slow crumbling of real presence.

Heidegger: from standing reserve to letting-be

Against this phenomenology of encounter, Heidegger approaches from a different angle. His question is ontological: how does the world appear to us in modernity? He sees reality increasingly approached as Bestand: standing reserve. The world becomes stock, warehouse, data.

Then something happens to the word “available.” The river becomes hydroelectric potential, the forest becomes a timber reserve, people become capacity or FTE. To be available then mainly means: always deployable, measurable, callable. Whoever looks at themselves this way feels pressure to deliver permanently. You are there to function.

Heidegger searches for another stance toward that world and calls it Gelassenheit: letting-be. He does not mean that we should reject technology, but that we should practice restraint. Not every silent moment needs to be filled, not every question demands immediate intervention, not every possibility must be exploited. Something may appear without being immediately taken into use.

That stance connects surprisingly well not only with Marcel, but also with how I view my work. In Gelassenheit, availability is no longer: “I must always be able to deliver,” but: “I want to be receptive to what comes toward me morally.” That brings us close to what I mean by effect before intention: not what I intend and can do, but what my actions do in the life of the Other.

Being available without losing yourself

If we bring these lines together, a different picture of availability emerges than the one we often use in organizations.

Availability is then not primarily a matter of planning, but of stance:

• I shift from problem to mystery: I acknowledge that not everything in our contact is makeable and solvable.
• I shift from having to being: I do not want to reduce the Other to means, case, or function.
• I practice disponibilité: inner addressability, even when I cannot solve everything.
• I take Gelassenheit seriously: I do not have to intervene everywhere; sometimes I may remain silent and let-be.

That also means that boundaries start to function differently. In the logic of standing reserve, boundaries are annoying. In the logic of disponibilité, boundaries become a condition for genuine presence: I can only be there for the Other if I do not have to be everywhere at once. Being available without losing yourself therefore asks for choices: for whom, for what, and in what way do I want to be addressable?

Perhaps, with Marcel and Heidegger in the background, availability can be redefined like this:

Not always reachable,
but addressable.

Not doing everything,
but being present where it matters.

There, in the qualitative encounter, la rencontre je–tu, availability gains its dialogical depth. That is exactly the terrain on which, I think, listening with and asymmetrical reciprocity take place.