The Dialectic of Mystery and Problem

Same as in "Gabriel Marcel and Phneomenology", Ricoeur concludes the essay "Reflexions primaire et reflexion seconde chez Gabriel Marcel" with the theme of the dialectic of problem and mystery, but this time in even more powerful terms. Ricoeur's contention is that this dialectic is inseparable from that of primary reflection and secondary reflection otherwise its dialectical nature will be destroyed and substituted by an impoverishing disjunction. Mystery has to be held as a term of secondary reflection and it is only in this sense that a non-dogmatic discourse of being can be proposed. Ricoeur takes two points from Marcel's work to conclude his interpretation. Referring to Marcel's argument in "On the Ontological Mystery" that the recognition of being is made in an affirmation which I am rather than I utter, and that by uttering it I break it and on the point of betraying it, Ricoeur states firmly, "And nevertheless, I utter it, but in secondary reflection; by doing so, I re-inscribe it in discourse as meta-problematic" (L2 66). There can be a discourse of mystery in terms of the overpassing of the problematic. It is by bringing the problematic to the point of rupture that the primacy of the original affirmation is recognized. Then, drawing upon his favourite words of Marcel's that a mystery is a problem which encroaches upon its own data, invading them and thereby transcending itself as a simple problem, Ricoeur reinstates his position that the detour of the problematic is indispensable for the question of being. The position of mystery, though remains a blinded intuition, can only be attested to in the struggle of recovering from problematization and with the resources of this problematization (L2 66-67). Hence, the problematic is not the same kind of negativity as the Heideggerian das Man, which, when overcome, does not contribute to the authentic awareness of being. For Ricoeur, the problematic is not to be overcome and thrown away; it is just brought to its limit by secondary reflection and it is precisely by looking with the resources of the problematic which have been brought to the limit that we have a hint of mystery. This process is what allows the transition from problem to mystery to be verbally articulated and stabilized.

To sum up, the dialectic of secondary reflection on which the dialectic of mystery and problem is built is in its essence an internal critique: it challenges from inside of any conceptual formulation of our fundamental experience of being with regard to its adequacy; it repudiates any formulation that do not do justice to the original affirmation of being. The mystery of being is recuperated as mystery only in and through this labour of thought. In both articles we have read, Ricoeur applies the same internal critique to Marcel's own theory as well. This has already been felt in the early comments on the discrepancy between the neo-Thomistic view of being in general and the concrete approaches to being, and in the criticism of the incoherence between the insistence on the uncharacterizable and the suggestion of secondary reflection. All through the two articles, he argues in Marcel's own terms to show the necessity of going through conceptualization and the problematic before mystery can be posited.