The Discontinuity between Existence and Being
The three themes of existence, taken together, or as a whole, are bound up with a movement of transcendence that drives them to a philosophy of being in which participation plays a crucial role. Nevertheless, no matter how close they intertwine with one another, one cannot ignore the fact that they are two different planes of inquiry in Marcel. The question of being is inspired by the question of God. It has the starting point in the negative experiences where one suffers from despair, betrayal or the reduction of human relation to utility. The meaning of being is the reply to these temptations. Already at the time of Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers Ricoeur speaks of three levels of transcendence according to an ascending dialectic. The "I" is transcended from below (par en bas) towards my nourishing and enigmatic body, then transcended at the sides (par les cotes) towards my friends and anyone who may become for me a you, and finally transcended from above (par en haut) towards the supreme You (GMKJ 26). The overpassing of existence is "a gesture of reconciliation in view of renewing a pact, of retaking roots and of recovering the sources" (GMKJ 27). But now referring to the same schematization in "Reflexion primaire et reflexion seconde chez Gabriel Marcel", he sees it as a way of systematization and warns that it could be detrimental to each of the terms. His point is that when one reads the schema as a Platonic ascending movement that goes from the lower to the higher, it may create a wrong impression that the lower stages are lower in value and hence dispensable. However, our own body is not a tomb; fidelity and hope are not ways of escape from life; each of the terms bears its own ontological weight and its own specificity. "It is therefore necessary to leave the relation between existence and being undecided and refuse all that could be put together in a systematization which may transform the surpassed regions into abandoned sites" (L2 64). Once again, Ricoeur insists that all the fronts are important; they are parallel experiences and there is no way of sacrificing any one of them for the sake of another.
Now, if the foundational experiences are independent from one another and a dialectical parallelism is the only relation between them, they would come very close to Leibnizian monads; but Ricoeur has not gone as far as that. On the basis of the respect of a certain heterogeneity of the foundational experiences, he admits some "bridging experiences" (experiences-passerelles) that mediate between them (ibid). Between feeling and the transcendence of being, there is the experience of test or temptation (
); it is the link between the despair arises in our embodied condition and the resources of hope. On the other hand, feeling also has a bearing on intersubjectivity: embodiment provides a "space", a "milieu" of hospitality which is expressed by the preposition "at" chez (chez moi, chez toi), joined by the "in" (dans) of incarnation and the "with" (avec) of communication (L2 65). The third example of bridging experience is attestation; it joins the me who attests, the you who is called to bear witness and being that is attested. To trace these bridging experiences is again the role of secondary reflection, but unfortunately, Ricoeur's exposition of the bridging experiences is very brief and no further explanation is given about this new function of secondary reflection. According to the foregoing study, secondary reflection is the critique of a previous reduction in a primary reflection. However, the restoration of the foundational experiences is already the result of the recuperative secondary reflection. Ricoeur does say that the effort of secondary reflection is an endless one, but it is mainly due to the deep-rootedness of the resistance of primary reflection (L2 53, 57). It seems to me that this new task of uncovering the bridging experience is in fact a recuperation of recuperation-to regain connections between foundational experiences after the first recuperation of their irreducibility that favours a discontinuity. Ricoeur is careful not to leave any irreconcilable opposition.
Just as the major experiences in Marcel are discontinuous, the series of studies in Oneself as Another are held to be "fragmentary" by Ricoeur (OA 19/30). We find there the same antipathy of system and of undue simplicity. The different ways of asking the question "who?" (with respect to speaking, doing, narrating etc.) present a certain "contingency of questioning" that comes from the contingency inherent in the grammar of natural languages and the historicity of questioning. Having a fragmentary feature seems to be an inescapable consequence of any inquiry by way of "concrete approaches" which Marcel advocates. However, given the fact that all the studies centre around the theme of action, the author of Oneself as Another admits a thematic unity-one which does not give rise to an abstract deductive system. The logic of continuity and discontinuity inherent in Oneself as Another is made even more evident by Ricoeur in his recent article "From metaphysics to Morality Philosophy" where the relation between ontological experience and moral experience is at stake.8 It seems to me that this style of investigation is what allows Ricoeur to pull together theories from a variety of schools and recontextualize them in the hermeneutics of the self. For him, borrowing theories from other traditions is not a question, the essential thing is to have a "proper rule of coherence" or a firm "line of construction".9