How is Mystery to be Recognized?

At the end of his account of the two thinkers' approaches to phenomenology, Ricoeur admits that although it may give an impression that he is more sympathetic to Marcel than to Husserl, Marcel's approach does not leave him without any question. And this eventually leads him to reconsider the work of Husserl. But let us first look at Ricoeur's criticism of Marcel. In the foregoing comparison, his emphasis has always been on the intellectualistic distinction of subject and object. Husserl's way of reduction favours such a distinction and the spectator's perspective that follows, whereas Marcel's insistence on starting with a situation forbids both: existence and co-esse are non-problematizable. The movement from problem to mystery requires a "complete reversal of the question" (GMP 485/66). This is also where Ricoeur's criticism comes in:

The fundamental difficulty that has continually beset Marcel's existential ontology concerns the status of its own statements. In this regard a simple, non-dialectical opposition between mystery and problem could not be established without immediately destroying the philosophical enterprise as such, threatened with a shift to a philosophico-religious fideism...If the ontological affirmation were in no way an intellectual act, then it could not be elevated to philosophical discourse (GMP 498/70).

Here Ricoeur suggests a kind of dialectical relation between mystery and problem. How this dialectical relation is to be conceived is precisely my concern. But before we can go to that point, we should first understand better the question raised by Ricoeur. Just as the intellectualists have to face the questions posed to them by the existentialists, the reverse is also unavoidable. The strictly anti-epistemological approach of Marcel will finally leads to the question of its own truth. In fact, Ricoeur asks the intellectualists' questions already in his earliest book Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers (78) in 1947: how would Marcel respond "to the criticism of subjectivism in the experiences of existence and to that of fideism in the experiences of transcendence"? The first question is not asked any more in "Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology", probably because Marcel himself addressed the question of universality later in The Mystery of Being which was originally delivered as the Gifford Lectures in 1949. With regard to the charge of fideism, Ricoeur's point is that if the recognition of transcendence is not an intellectual act, it can hardly be handled by philosophical discourse. In order to avoid all sorts of fatal duality, Marcel takes the confused and global situation of existence as the point of departure. The basic insight that being is uncharacterizable protects mystery from turning into problem. However, this manoeuvre of overcoming oppositions institutes by itself a new opposition, namely the opposition between problem and mystery. Difficulties now arise not so much with undue distinctions as with insufficient distinctions which may lead to the question of how misunderstandings of being can be avoided.　

Indeed if being is the uncharacterizable, "the unqualified par excellence", how is it possible that it is not also the pure indeterminate (Being and Having 36)? In Marcel's work this difficulty assumes a specific form; the global affirmation of existence can, indeed, be indistinctly that of my embodiment, that of the universe taken in a global and undivided way, and that of God called the Supreme You. Although Marcel has not ignored this difficulty, he attributes it to the affirmation of being in general in neo-Thomism (ibid 27-40). But could this not be turned around? What distinguishes the immanence of thought to being from the immanence to the whole of the world's existence, which is, as in Heidegger, the horizon of every determined object? Marcel admits: "The uneasiness I feel on these subjects is partly due to my old difficulty in seeing the relation between being and existing" (ibid 37). And indeed the same philosophy of the uncharacterizable holds for "my body", for "you", and for "God". Existence is what revealed by feeling as well as by fidelity and by the recourse to being as opposed to despair (GMP 489/71).

The critical comments made by Ricoeur here appear already in Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers, and the connection of these comments with the themes in Oneself as Another is not to be taken lightly (Cf. GMKJ 355). The comments here include an ontological question and an epistemological question; the two are closely bound up with each other. The ontological question is the relation between being and existence which is the source of Marcel's difficulties; the epistemological question is about the implementation of "secondary reflection" which, according to Ricoeur, is the proper Marcelian solution to the problem of fideism. In "Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology" Ricoeur treats only the epistemological question and it occupies the rest of the article after the passage quoted above. With regard to the ontological question of being and existence, he does not write anything further. The following account of Ricoeur's view on these two questions is reconstructed from different works of his.