Secondary Reflection and the Discontinuity of Experiences

The idea of secondary reflection is further developed by Ricoeur in his another article on Marcel published some ten years later in 1984 entitled "Reflexion primaire et reflexion seconde chez Gabriel Marcel". This essay was written at a time when Ricoeur had just finished writing Time and Narrative and before the writing of Oneself as Another. The chronological order is noteworthy because the major themes that Ricoeur treats in this article appear again in Oneself as Another and the related essays. These themes, as Ricoeur himself discloses, are the results of his recent reading of Marcel's works (L2 51). Right in the beginning of the article, secondary reflection is introduced as "constitutive of the properly philosophical moment of Marcelian thought" (L2 49). It is described as a labour of thought and a work of rectification that consists in an unceasing attempt to suggest the closest concepts and the less inadequate words in order to reproduce the reflective equivalence of the ontological experiences (L2 50). That secondary reflection is a work of concept and language aiming at reconstructing the experiences where the ontological affirmation is made brings the relationship between secondary reflection and these experiences to the focus of inquiry, and it is precisely from this very perspective that the full meaning of secondary reflection can be defined.

The experiences of transcendence are now called "foundational experiences", "cardinal experiences", "major experiences" or "nucleuses-experiences" (); the change in terminology already suggests that these experiences are taken here as the ground, the foundation or the nucleus of something; and that something is secondary reflection. The recuperative work of secondary reflection is guaranteed () or magnetized () by these experiences held to be irreducible (L2 50, 51, 55). As foundations, these foundational experiences are the sole reason for the different locations where the resistance of primary reflection and its critical moments take place; and the ontological weight of the foundational experiences provides the sole dynamism that presides over the transition from primary reflection to secondary reflection. The significance of this understanding is that it excludes two sorts of deductive reasoning. First, there is not any connection of implication between the different places of emergence of the foundational experiences where the dialectic of primary and secondary reflection operates. Secondly, it is not by any deduction or restrictive implication that one passes from primary reflection to secondary reflection; the critique of primary reflection is provoked solely by the irreducible fullness that the foundational experiences unfold. This view of the foundational experiences allows Ricoeur to argue for the "discontinuous character of philosophical front" which is for him the key point in Marcel's non-systematic approach (L2 51). The foundational experiences that Ricoeur analyses in this essay, namely embodiment, freedom as gift and invocation, are discontinuous or "incoordonnable"; they do not form a systematic whole in which every element are linked to one another by implication. Thus, "there is not experience, but experiences, multiple experiences" (L2 64). The fact that secondary reflection is in every case just a localized and recuperative operation prevents it from developing into a totalizing rationality. However, Ricoeur also admits that experiences participate in one another: there are bridging experiences that permit certain connections and thereby certain tensions between the foundational experiences. It is the job of secondary reflection both to restore the foundational experiences and to discern the bridging experiences. Most of Ricoeur's effort in this essay is invested in illustrating the discontinuous feature found both on the level of existence and between existence and being, and how secondary reflection functions in each of the foundational experience discussed.