Conclusion: Towards a Marcelian Reading of Oneself as Another
The foregoing account covers the main views of Ricoeur's on Marcel's philosophy from the early period of his career up till the 80s. The main concern of Ricoeur has always been the way how the original intuitive affirmation of being can be intelligibly retrieved. The dialectic of problem and mystery which is supported by the dialectic of primary reflection and secondary reflection is what he obtains from his critical reading of Marcel's works. This dialectic provides the necessary background for understanding the use of analytic philosophy in Oneself as Another.
In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur sets for himself the aim of a hermeneutics of the self which is characterized by the "indirect manner of positing the self" (OA 17/29). The self understands itself only via certain detours and never directly as in the case of Descartes. The basic methodological detour is "reflection by way of analysis". It is a detour taken by all the studies of the book that belong to what he calls the first order discourse, namely those which have the accent on the phenomenological aspects of the self. But what does it mean by reflection by way of analysis? And why is it necessary? I think an adequate answer can only be found on the basis of the dialectic of mystery and problem. The relation between reflection and analysis as a "constructive confrontation" or a "competition" is not different from the relation between primary reflection and secondary reflection as presented above (OA 17/29).
The work of "analysis" is carried out with the help of analytic philosophy which is precisely the kind of philosophy well known to be committed to the analysis of language and concepts; and even more importantly, it is the method that treats action as thing-like objects which can be observed and characterized from a neutral point of view. The aim of analysis in the hermeneutics of the self, as is indicated in the beginning of the first study, is precisely to "determine" the self according to a "general framework" (
) based on Strawson's theory of basic particulars-an approach which would be rejected by Marcel as treating existence like a problem (OA 31/43). In Ricoeur's earliest work on Marcel, namely in Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers, language does not receive particular attention; but in the later ones which are analysed above, language is always the issue. I admit that the reconstruction of the dialectic of mystery and problem and the underlying dialectic of primary and secondary reflection are affected by Ricoeur's analytic turn which took place in the early 70s. But the use of the latter cannot be understood without the former. The reason is that Oneself as Another is not a work that just uses analytic philosophy, but rather a critique of the latter. It is exactly by virtue of this critique that the deeper reality of the self can be recognized. In the book, Ricoeur does not juxtapose the interior view with the exterior view, but sets them in a dialectic, so that the being of the self can be reached only when the exterior view is overpassed in a secondary reflection.
With regard to the meaning of "reflection", it has a lot to do with Ricoeur's understanding of what reflection means in Marcel. As mentioned above, reflection designates the reconsideration of the conditions of affirmation-but affirmation of what? In Oneself as Another, it is the affirmation of action and its agent. As his critique of the Cartesian cogito in the "Introduction" shows, Ricoeur is faithful to Marcel's insight about the embodied nature of the self. According to Marcel, reflection is to be performed either on feeling or on action.10 While Marcel reflects more on feeling, Ricoeur puts the emphasis on action, and the self is reflexively implied in its action. I think this decision on the part of Ricoeur is not without reason, since feeling is less amenable to objective analysis. Furthermore, a reflection on action may also include that of feeling but not the other way round, as there can be feeling without action but rarely action without feeling. The theme of action may do a better job than that of feeling in providing a dynamic philosophy of being which Marcel himself favours. In what sense is the reflection in Oneself as Another a recourse to the conditions of affirmation of action and person? A brief overview of how Ricoeur introduces the task of the first two groups of studies may illustrate.
The whole inquiry of the self has the question "who?" as the guiding thread; but the identification of someone starts with the identification of something in general, be it a person or an object. The Strawsonian concept of basic particular is introduced in the first subset (study 1 and 2) as that without which "nothing at all can be identified" (OA 31/43). Ricoeur refers explicitly to Kant, the critical philosopher, for the necessity of this step: "What we are going to undertake is indeed a sort of transcendental deduction of the notion of person, by showing that if we did not have available to us the schema of thought that defines this notion, we could not engage in the empirical description that we make in this regard in ordinary conversation and in the human sciences" (OA 31/43). Therefore, the conceptual framework of basic particulars has a "transcendental status"; it prescribes the condition of possibility of any statement about an individual. In the second subset of studies (study 3 and 4) the theme is theory of action. Ricoeur speaks of a conceptual schema that consists of notions like circumstance, intentions, motives, deliberations, voluntary or involuntary motions etc. which form a "network" of intersignifying terms. This conceptual network of action "shares the same transcendental status as the conceptual framework of basic particulars...the entire network serves to determine what 'count as' an action" (OA 58/75). That means one cannot make sense of an action without referring to this conceptual framework of action. Therefore, reflection is first of all the reflection on these conceptual frameworks which are the conditions of any knowledge of the person and its action. These two examples do not only show what reflection means in Oneself as Another, but also illustrate what is called primary reflection, given the fact that they presuppose the subject-object relation. The conceptual frameworks are taken as that by means of which the person and its action can be grasped objectively. In this connection, the question "who?" is the question of secondary reflection; it keeps challenging the different analytic approaches of person and action, exposing their incoherence [YHW2]and the difficulties they create. Oneself as Another demonstrates how the self is recuperated through a critique of the analytic tradition and in the process enriched by its linguistic resources.