The Epistemological Question: Primary and Secondary Reflection
While in Thomistic philosophy being is affirmed implicitly and formally every time when we affirm something of the particular, in Marcel, it is affirmed in concrete experiences like fidelity, hope and love. I affirm being when I stop treating my body as something external to me but recognize that I am my body; I affirm being when I stop treating my friend as an object but recognize him as a presence and be open for him; I affirm being when I resolve to have hope in the depths of my despair. Ricoeur's question is whether one can explain in intelligible terms how the ontological affirmation is made. Indeed, if being is uncharacterizable, how can I be sure of what I affirm in these experiences? This question is particularly crucial in an ontology like Marcel's in which being is less observed (
) than recognized (GMKJ 78). A potential fideism is inherent in this way of philosophizing.
Ricoeur deems that each of the experiences of existence in fact has a structure that distinguishes it from others and renders it thinkable. Following Kant's distinction between reason and understanding, he proposes that the work of determination, which belongs to reason, should not be confused with that of objectification performed by understanding (GMP 489/71). Ricoeur is sympathetic with Marcel's reservations about this approach because a rationality that would not be understanding, would not be the rationality of objectifying science can hardly be found today. That is why any re-conquest of the ontological dimension has to be made against the propensity to problematize and to characterize. But Ricoeur finds that in order to render the ontological affirmation understandable we have no other way but to deliver reason from its modern reduction. The production of limit-concepts (concepts-limite) by reason should be encouraged and be considered as inseparable from the strategies of negating the objective view and making positive global affirmations. This suggestion, Ricoeur claims, is not without roots in Marcel: "My critique is therefore not outside Marcel's work. I would even say that it has an ally in his work" (GMP 490/72). He seems to suggest that in Marcel's philosophy there is already the apparatus to articulate in a more intellectual way how mystery is recognized in our experience, but just Marcel has not taken full advantage of it. The method that Ricoeur refers to is "secondary reflection". It provides us with a kind of rationality which is not an expression of having, that is, not a totalizing rationality, so that we can speak about mystery without reducing it to the content of a concept.
First of all, the term reflection is understood by Ricoeur as "a return to (retour sur) the experiences of transcendence with a view to understanding and articulating them" (GMP 489/71); more specifically it is "a return to the conditions of affirmation" (GMKJ 80). In this sense all metaphysics is reflection, and being is the real stake (enjeu) of reflection (GMKJ 80, 34). Ricoeur observes that Marcel is concerned more with the conditions of affirmation than with the structure of being. In this connection, Marcel remains faithful to his idealist formation, since the Greek and the medieval philosophers pay more attention to the being that is affirmed than to the immanent conditions of affirmation (GMKJ 363). Reflections are of two kinds which correspond to two levels of affirmation: primary and secondary. In Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers, Ricoeur explains primary reflection in terms of the Kantian "understanding": it looks for the a priori conditions of the validity of objective knowledge in the impersonal subject from which embodiment and social condition have been stripped off (GMKJ 80-81). Primary reflection reduces the object to the subject-who is now the master of the objective world-but pays the price of detaching both from existence. Primary reflection is identified with the objective way of thinking and the hardening of the self. On the other hand, secondary reflection is a recuperation of the concrete, a reflection of the integral "I" in its concrete links. Secondary reflection reconsiders the very conditions of primary reflection; it exposes its purity as exile, as loss of existence and its mastery as a triumph in the void. In this sense Ricoeur defines the dialectical nature of secondary reflection as a "reversal" (retournement), as an "overflowing from inside" (debordement par l'interieur) where the subject of affirmation finds itself betrayed by its own affirmation (GMKJ 81). At the same time, this overflowing of the immanence from inside is what Marcel means by transcendence (GMKJ 363). It is being itself that rejects any reductive formulation from inside; and secondary reflection is the manifestation of this protest. Secondary reflection is therefore the epistemological condition of transcendence.
The dialectical character of secondary reflection is further illustrated in Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers in a rather Hegelian fashion by the fact that it is negative. It indicates that being is not objective, not problematic, not representable, not characterizable etc. Nevertheless, these negations are made against a reduction, a reduction in the sense of a denial of participated existence; they resist a resistance and deny a negation-"it is this double negation that conjures rationally a fullness of presence" (GMKJ 82). Two things are said in this statement: first, by virtue of its laborious process of double negation secondary reflection proves itself to be a rational act; secondly, secondary reflection is not purely negation of objectivity, for it is founded on an immediate positive experience of "presence". The negation of negation is supported by something that is not negative, but positive, namely the intuition of being. Ricoeur is not interested in the neo-Thomistic affirmation of being which he considers to be purely logical, but he admires very much the idea of "original affirmation" (l'affirmation originaire)-coined by Jean Nabert who comes from the French reflective tradition. When Ricoeur speaks about intuition of being, he speaks in terms of Nabert's "original affirmation" or Marcel's "presence" which are associated with concrete human experiences. That ontology begins with an intuition of being is one of Ricoeur's earliest convictions; being is the ultimate principle which the mind posits without being able to grasp it like things.7
It is in this positive dimension of secondary reflection that a strong link between secondary reflection and mystery can be seen. This relation is visible already in Marcel's own work, but Ricoeur clarifies it, structuralizes it and stabilizes it. The original affirmation is indeed a "blind intuition" (intuition aveugle); mystery is that which cannot be captured in front of me for my description. The question is how the transition between problem and mystery can be understood without being seen as a kind of philosophical fideism; and here the dialectic of primary and secondary reflection provides a clue. We have to admit that secondary reflection is a reflexive motion of the mind and not a heuristic process, as Marcel himself holds; it confirms being without being able to display it in a clear vision; the intuition remains blind (Marcel, Being and Having, 121). However, a rigorous labour of thought-negation of negation, resistance of resistance-is required before that blind intuition can be posited. This is how Ricoeur understands Marcel's point that "in order to begin understanding again, we are always bound to refer back to the order of the problematic" (GMP 491/73; Being and Having 112). [YHW1]Mystery as "metaproblematic" can only be recognized as such in the very process of overpassing the problematic; mystery is the problem that is turned inside out by a reflection that examines its very condition of possibility. And in this dialectical relation, the importance of the work of concept is finally re-established.¡@