The Experiences of Existence

Three major Marcelian themes of the human condition are chosen by Ricoeur. The first one is Marcel's evaluation of the Cartesian cogito which is read through Kant and is considered to be the ancestor of all modern idealism. The transcendental subject claims itself to be the master of meaning and the ground of objectivity, but this critical approach is based on the subject-object relation. Marcel's critique, now a critique of critique, consists in showing the primacy of embodiment and feeling which all idealism neglects. He seeks to reveal their mistake of seeing sensation as a message to be captured by a disinterested subject and the body as an instrument which an uprooted subject can claim to manipulate from nowhere (L2 55). The task of secondary reflection is to recuperate the foundational experience of "indubitable existence" from the cogito. But just as in the previous article, Ricoeur criticizes Marcel's whole statement () on existence as extremely fragile and that it runs the risk of passing into silence (L2 54). Thus, the following comment becomes ambiguous: "The indubitable can only be recovered by oratio obliqua, that is, by showing the inconsistency of every reformulation in terms of transcendental objectivity and of subjectivity (they are the same), and of sensation and of one's own body" (ibid). The emphasis made in last part of the sentence may certainly refer to the view of sensation and body prescribed by the subject-object relation, but it may also refer to the unsatisfactory formulations of sensation and body suggested by Marcel! It is possible that both meanings are intended by Ricoeur. If this is true, then secondary reflection is not just a critique of primary reflection as previously understood, but also a critique of any attempt to formulate the foundational experiences by means of concepts, including Marcel's own. It seems that Ricoeur has come up with the idea that the critique of inconsistency or inadequacy is the central mechanism of secondary reflection: "In this sense, a certain obligation of not to contradict oneself, of keeping a coherent discourse is always presupposed. If it is required of the thesis of the cogito and of its correlate, namely objectivism, it is no less required of the thought that aims at accounting for, or making sense of the nucleuses-experiences" (L2 55). If language and concepts are just approximations of the original affirmation of being, the latter remains the ultimate condition of any ontological statement; it overflows from inside of any particular formulation and exposes its inadequacy. Reflection as the return to the condition of affirmation is inescapably an effort without end.

The second theme is that of freedom. On this point, Marcel attacks Kant's notion of autonomy by challenging the very alternative of autonomy and heteronomy. For Marcel, freedom is essentially the joyful response to the liberating appeal rather than the anxious power of choosing between alternatives. Freedom is defined by and ordained to the transcendence that takes hold of me (GMKJ 224-225, 297). The internal critique of the idea of autonomy goes together with the evidence that freedom as gift has the primacy over freedom as choice. Secondary reflection consists in pulling together all the experiences, such as readiness, admiration, consent, that bear witness to freedom as gift and in the attempt of articulating them conceptually. On the negative side, as resistance to resistance, secondary reflection seeks to show that the autoposition of the free action is destructive in the sense that it is the gesture of cutting myself off from the creative powers in which I participate and of which I am not the master. But once again, the requirement of consistency turns back against Marcel in the sense that the vocabulary of freedom as choice is hardly avoidable in the transition between despair and hope, and between betrayal and fidelity in his own philosophy.

The third theme has to do with the tension between the you (toi) and the him/her (lui). The same rhythm of recuperating the foundational experience and resisting the resistance operates here. The attestation of the second person has to be re-conquered unceasingly from the reduction of the you to the him/her-understood as a repertoire of information or an inventory of predicates. Since much has been said about the mechanism already in the previous two examples, Ricoeur moves his focus to the discontinuity of front. In a certain sense, the reduction of the you to the him/her might be considered as a case of objectification which brings the question of the second person close to the recovery of existence from objectivity, but there are specific differences between the two types of concrete approaches. The theme of feeling concerns the gnoseological question, whereas the theme of other people has to do with the dramatic aspect of existence (dramaturgie de l'existence) which is first explored by Marcel in theatre before being re-inscribed in philosophical reflection (L2 58-59). There exists no compelling implication that leads the theme of feeling to that of other people, but only a parallelism in the dialectical treatment. It is not the indubitable experienced in the global existence or in my embodiment that resists the resistance in the case of the second person; it is an evidence of another kind, namely the reciprocity in the relation between question and response. Ricoeur even says, "I insist here: one cannot say that the you is indubitable; a source of doubt other than that proceeds from the thought of object erodes the confidence (confiance) in other people" (L2 59). The order of the "indubitable" is not the same as that of "confidence"; the latter hinges upon my openness to the capacity of other people to respond to me and to respond to me sincerely (L2 60).

Drawing upon the kind of proportionality expressed in Marcel's statement that "the you is to invocation what the object is to judgement", Ricoeur argues for a "dialectical parallelism" that links the diverse orders of investigation without confusing them (L2 62). In all these investigations, there is the same localized procedure of critique of resistance, emergence of major experiences that incites the investigations and their restoration in secondary reflection. Some reciprocal reinforcement between the recuperative attempt on the different fronts is also conceivable owing to the similarity of style. Having established the discontinuity between the different major experiences on the plane of human existence, Ricoeur proceeds to deal with Marcel's difficulty of the relation between existence and being in a similar way.