by Yip Hing Wah (叶庆华)
After Marcel: Ricoeur's Reconstruction of the Dialectic of Mystery and Problem
In response to a question in a recent interview concerning his use of analytic philosophy in the book Oneself as Another, Ricoeur says that a passage through the outside is necessary, given the intimist tendency of phenomenology. It is a passage justified by the fundamental fact that the body is both my body and a body among bodies; therefore, the approach of objectification is not to be ignored.1 If the analytic tradition, which Ricoeur calls "the thought from outside" (la pensee du dehors) is so important, one cannot help but ask: why his comments in the book on analytic philosophy are far more negative than positive? Why his point is always to show its inadequacy with regard to the understanding of the self? On the other hand, is the double reading of the corporeal phenomenon not already suggested by Gabriel Marcel whom Ricoeur always regards as his master? Does Gabriel Marcel not see body in terms of mystery-that in which the distinction between the interior and the exterior loses its meaning? Could a deeper understanding of Oneself as Another be attained by a detour through Ricoeur's interpretation of Marcel's distinction between mystery and problem?
This essay is written precisely with the purpose of examining Ricoeur's main works on Marcel, in order to demonstrate that there is really a significant connection between Marcel's thought and Oneself as Another, so that a Marcelian reading of Ricoeur through the latter's own account of the former may be established. To accomplish this goal, I shall consider in depth the critical remarks made by Ricoeur in "Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology" in the 70s and then relate them to his argument in " primaire et seconde chez Gabriel Marcel" (Primary Reflection and Secondary Reflection in Gabriel Marcel) written later in the 80s before Oneself as Another was published. Ricoeur's earliest work Gabriel Marcel et Karl Kaspers (Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers) will also be consulted on certain points.2 Both of the aforementioned articles are concluded with the suggestion that the relation between mystery and problem has to be understood in terms of the dialectic between secondary reflection and primary reflection. My contention is that this suggestion is in fact the principle of Ricoeur's methodology in Oneself as Another; it allows us to see more about the necessity of the analytic philosophy in the book. Along the way of my exposition, I also want to show that there are other important features in Oneself as Another which can be traced back to Marcel's philosophy.
From the Characterizable to the Uncharacterizable
The most important comments of Ricoeur on Marcel's philosophy are found in the article entitled "Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology", originally presented in a colloquium on Marcel's philosophy in 1973 just a few months before Marcel's death. In this article, Ricoeur compares Marcel's philosophical method with Husserl's. The focus of his exposition is on Marcel's attitude towards conceptualization. He starts with the point that both Marcel and Husserl maintain the value of conceptualization. In both philosophies, there is an inherent tendency of refusing any "system", but at the same time there is a persistent concern for subtle distinctions and clarity of thought. In order to make comparison with Husserl, Ricoeur brings up Marcel's "Outlines of a Phenomenology of Having" in Being and Having where he distinguishes "what one has" from "what one is". Ricoeur remarks that by trying to make conceptual distinctions between these two phenomena, Marcel shows the non-psychological character of his approach which is not unlike that of Husserl's. In Marcel's attempt to clarify the notion of having-as-possession (l'avoir-possession), a genuinely eidetic style of analysis can be observed in which meaning is directly read from well-chosen examples. Ricoeur also indicates that in his distinction between the qui and the quid, Marcel does not fail to take advantage of the significant relations suggested by ordinary language (GMP 473/55).
All the above features in Marcel's phenomenology of having enable us to put him on the same track as Husserl's until at a point in the text where Marcel speaks about "reduction".3 Marcel states that the point of his analysis is not a reduction, rather it has to do with the presence of an opaque and irreducible datum which resists our full possession. This little word "reduction", marks the profound difference Marcel and Husserl, according to Ricoeur. He admits that in the context where the word appears, "reduction" does not convey the same meaning as in Husserl. The irreducible of Marcel is the primordial dimension of being which "eludes the framework of an idea that one can have and therefore can circumscribe and dominate intellectually" (GMP 473/55), whereas in Husserl reduction is a notion connected with the epoche and designates the subject's withdrawal of his or her natural attitude to the world. Yet such an idea of the irreducible, which arises from the opposition of being and having, has the effect of moving the whole analysis "away from the plane of notional distinctions-from the eidetic plane, in Husserl's terms-to a more existential plane" (GMP 473/55).
For Marcel, "having" denotes a global way of being which is made possible by one's own body. My body, as the mediation between myself and the world, creates a tension between interiority and exteriority, manifested by the link between the desire to have and the fear to lose. But what I claim to possess and attach to exercises a tyranny over me; it devours me eventually. "Having as such seems to have a tendency to destroy and lose itself in the very thing it began by possessing, but which now absorbs the master who thought he controlled it" (Marcel, Being and Having, 164). Among my possessions are my own body, things, ideas and opinions-even characterization is a kind of possession. The findings of the phenomenology of having drive it to a reflection on the conditions of characterization in general: what makes characterization possible? An object can be characterized only when it is placed at a certain distance in front of an uninvolved observer. Hence, characterization relies on a pretension of being able to cut oneself off from the living links with things and stand before them as mere observer and dominator. Nevertheless, this is precisely the condition under which eidetic description operates. Therefore, Ricoeur remarks that "the idea that being is uncharacterizable brings an end to eidetic phenomenology, which cannot help appearing to be prompted by the will to characterize" (GMP 474/56).
This divergence from eidetic phenomenology continues in the famous distinction between mystery and problem. Treating something as a problem is to see it as data placed before me as if I were not implied in it. Mystery is rather that in which the distinction between in me and before me loses its meaning. Hence, we have the having, the characterizable and the problematizable on the one hand, and being, the uncharacterizable and mystery on the other; but the relation between them is again not characterizable. In Marcel's phenomenology, there is an ascending dialectic from the examination of examples to the recognition of the irreducible-irreducible to characterization (GMP 475/57). Ricoeur mentions that although Marcel's phenomenology stays close to Husserl's in the use of description, eidetic analysis and even imaginative variations, but this inward transcending movement from the characterizable towards the uncharacterizable seems to be lacking in Husserl's phenomenology. Marcel's phenomenology of having starts with examples and descriptions but the internal dialectic of the inquiry eventually turns back upon the conditions under which the whole inquiry begins. This ascending dialectic is for Ricoeur the most essential feature of the Marcelian style of thought which he illustrates with a quotation from "On the Ontological Mystery": "A mystery is a problem which encroaches upon its own data, invading them, as it were, and thereby transcending itself as a simple problem".4 This quotation is so dear to Ricoeur that it appears in almost all of his works on Marcel (GMP 475/57, GMKJ 361, L2 66, 95). And it is also in the interpretation of this statement that I discover the major disagreement between Marcel and Ricoeur; it shows both Ricoeur's dependence on Marcel and his critique of the master. This point will be further elaborated as my exposition proceeds. An initial comparison of the two possible interpretations of the quotation can be made by a detour through the way how the master and the disciple understand the term "transcendence". A more Marcelian interpretation may be established on the meaning of the word "transcendence" which Marcel himself defines in Being and Having as " rather than Aufhebung" (Marcel, Being and Having, 119). In that case, the statement quoted above would be the last one we can make before ending up with the ineffable. On the other hand, referring to the same passage in an early work, namely Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers, Ricoeur remarks that if transcendence is seen as "rather than Aufhebung", then metaphysics would be a discipline that "does not aspire to maintain a tension, but to solve it" (GMKJ 269). Later we will see that the difference between Marcel and Ricoeur lies precisely in whether a certain tension should be acknowledged between the lower and the higher levels of transcendence, and whether the relation between problem and mystery is just a simple either-or.
Ricoeur explains the difference between the two philosophers in terms of their "initial gestures" by which they enter into philosophy. For Husserl, the initial gesture is reduction whereby the subject suspends its belief of the natural world. The benefit of reduction is twofold. First, the objectivity of the object is revealed as the identical meaning towards which different intentional aims of consciousness converge. Secondly, the subjectivity of the subject is revealed as an intentional consciousness that is caught up in a temporal flux in which it is capable of retaining and anticipating its own identity in the flux. This twofold benefit of reduction characterizes the phenomenology of the early Husserl as "a kind of reflection, a descriptive analysis, applied to the correlations established between the structures of the object and those of the subject" (GMP 476/58). The object, or noema, is that which intended by the mind; the subject, or noesis, is that which signifies by intending meaning. Ricoeur remarks that Husserl's initial gesture of reduction, which favours a clear distinction between the subject and the object, is diametrically opposed to Marcel's. The latter starts with "situation" which he defines in the beginning of The Mystery of Being as "something in which I find myself involved".5 For Ricoeur, to be involved excludes first and fundamentally "both the distance characteristic of reduction and the promotion of a 'disinterested spectator', the very subject of phenomenology" (GMP 476/58). The situation does not only affect the subject from outside but also qualifies it from within. The opposition of the outer and the inner loses its meaning, and along with it, the typically Husserlian correlation of the noematic and the noetic is called into question. One may notice that in Ricoeur's Oneself as Another, the process of the determination of the self also begins with a situation, namely, the situation of interlocution. The self first appears as the one of whom the interlocutors speak (OA 31/44)
1."Paul Ricoeur: Reflexions sur la philosophie morale", interview by Monique Canto-Sperber, Magazine litteraire, no. 361 (January 1998): 39.
2.RICOEUR, P. (1949) Gabriel marcel et Karl Jaspers. Paris. Editions du Temps Present Cited as GMKJ.
RICOEUR, P. (1976) Gabriel Marcel et la phenomenologie. In: M. Belay et al. (eds). Entretiens autour de Gabriel Marcel. Neuchatel. La Baconniere. Pp. 53-94. Cited as GMP.
RICOEUR, P. (1984) Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology. In: P.A. SCHILPP and L. E.HAHN (eds) THE Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel. Chicago. Open Court. Pp. 471-498.
RICOEUR, P. (1984) Reflexion primaire et reflexion second chez Gabriel marcel. In: P. RICOEUR (1992) Lectures 2. Paris, Editions de Seuil. Pp. 49-67. Cited as L2.
RICOEUR, P. (1990) Soi meme comme un autre. Paris. Editions de Seuil. English translation: K.
BLAMEY (1992) O neself As Another. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press. Cited as ON.
For tFor texts that have a standard English translation, all page references are first to the English translation and then to the French text. For texts that do not have an English translation, all translations are my own.
3.GMP 473; Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 157.
4.Gabriel Marcel, "On the Ontological Mystery", The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. Manya Harari (New York: Citadel Press, 1956), 19.
5.GMP 476/58; Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, trans. Rene Hague (Chicago: Regnery, 1960), 1:10.
Subject, Object and "You"
Hereafter, Ricoeur proceeds to compare Marcel and Husserl according to the position of the object, the position of the subject, and their correlation. The part on the object mainly has to do with the way we see the world. Ricoeur first defines the term "object" as "the ensemble of distinctive characteristics underlying things we can name, and these things in turn give to the logical subject a basis for attribution in perceptual judgements and in scientific knowledge" (GMP 477/58). Hence, object has to do with the characteristics of things in the face of a logical subject which looks at them from the perspective of scientific knowledge. The definition of object provides a kind of background for Ricoeur's introduction of Marcel's critique of the primacy of objectivity in "Existence and Objectivity" published at the end of his Metaphysical Journal. Marcel's movement from objectivity to existence is for Ricoeur the opposite of Husserl's movement from natural belief to the structure of meaning. Marcel's anti-Cartesian arguments in the essay are equally anti-Husserlian. While the term "existence" appears to be quite elusive in Marcel's text, Ricoeur gives it a rather clear definition: "Existence designates the fund of massive, indivisible, undeniable presence attested to by the sensuous presence of the world at the most radical level of feeling" (GMP 477/59). Experience of the world is therefore inextricably bound up with my embodiment. Existence is a global experience of the world in which the embodied subject is indivisibly involved; existence is felt rather than rationally thought, and it is the massive and dense assurance of existence that qualifies its indisputability. Ricoeur describes it in Marcelian terms as the "absolute presence" and the "nonproblematic" (GMP 479/61). More importantly, this sensuous presence of the world to an incarnate person is what first allows an "object" to be present to a spectator. Ricoeur indicates that it is a return to an indubitable foundation, "not in the sense of something resisting doubt or subsisting after doubt, but in the sense of a presence precluding doubt; what is indubitably given to me is the confused and global experience of the world as existing" (GMP 477/59). Existence, as opposed to objectivity, has also a different sort of certainty. This observation is helpful for understanding the distinction between "truth" () and "veracity" () which Ricoeur uses-without much explanation-to criticize both Descartes and the analytic philosophers in Oneself as Another (OA 22/34, 72/91). In the case of Descartes, the first "truth" of the cogito is contrasted with the "veracity" of God. In commenting on the analytic approach, he contrasts the "truth" of description with the "veracity" of attestation. I would suggest that "truth" is understood in terms of validity; it is that which resists doubt or subsists after doubt-doubt that presupposes the distance of a spectator. "Veracity" refers to the evidence that is based on a preceding relation of participation in which the subject has always been involved; it is something to be recognized rather than to be proved.
With regard to the position of the subject, Ricoeur notices that what Marcel defends is the primacy of being over knowledge to the effect that knowledge is enveloped by being and is in some way within being (GMP 480/62). When the modern self-affirming cogito sets itself up as the guarantee of objectivity, the meaning of the subject is greatly impoverished. It is also from this perspective that Husserl falls under Marcel's critique of the cogito (ibid). While Marcel is concerned with justifying human existence, Husserl, like the modern philosophers, strives to found scientific knowledge (GMP 481/63). The "I" resulting from the reduction is a thinking I, situated at the opposite pole of a thinkable object. Unlike Kant, the thinking I born of reduction is an individual and retains all features of singularity in accordance with the temporal flux; on the other hand, the subject also bears the mark of universality since it has the role of providing the final justification of knowledge. Nevertheless, the universal validity of knowledge cannot be guaranteed by the singular cogito alone, therefore, Husserl needs a philosophy of the alter ego in order to complete his philosophy of the ego. A community of subjects that share the same perceived world is what Husserl seeks to establish in order to ground the universality of science. This is what we find in the famous fifth Cartesian Meditation. For Ricoeur, the solipsistic starting point of the whole project presents an intractable difficulty which resembles that of "the squaring of a circle" (GMP 65/483). I shall not go into the details of Ricoeur's analysis of Husserl's arguments but just want to make one point: according to Ricoeur, the problem of solipsism is the summary of all other discordance between Marcel and Husserl and it is a basic difference that arises from the initial gestures of the two philosophers. His point is that "if one does not start from the undeniable presence of the other, one will never overtake this presence" (GMP 65/483).
But what does it mean to recognize the presence of the other? With this question Ricoeur turns to Marcel's theory of intersubjectivity. In the encounter with other people, Marcel speaks of "recognition". It is not a mode of knowledge through object, but what arises in the experiences of love and fidelity which presuppose one's dynamic openness to other people. The one whom I love is a "you" (toi) and not a "him/her" (lui). The third person vocabulary is the means of objectification, the beginning of reducing the other into some sort of information amenable to characterization. Further, Marcel rejects any derivation of the other from the certainty of the cogito. For him, the other is already present in the "first surging forth of existence"; the you is there in the initial situation from which any philosophical reflection begins. Thus, "the first ontological position is neither I existing nor you existing but the co-esse-the being-with-that engenders us simultaneously" (GMP 484/66). That is to say, in the affirmation of my existence, the existence of you is co-affirmed. The you is "not only before me, he is also within me-or, rather, these categories are transcended, they have no longer any meaning" (GMP 484/66; Marcel, "Ontological Mystery", 38). This is precisely what Marcel means by mystery, and that is why the co-esse is "the nonproblematic par excellence" (GMP 485/66).
How is Mystery to be Recognized?
At the end of his account of the two thinkers' approaches to phenomenology, Ricoeur admits that although it may give an impression that he is more sympathetic to Marcel than to Husserl, Marcel's approach does not leave him without any question. And this eventually leads him to reconsider the work of Husserl. But let us first look at Ricoeur's criticism of Marcel. In the foregoing comparison, his emphasis has always been on the intellectualistic distinction of subject and object. Husserl's way of reduction favours such a distinction and the spectator's perspective that follows, whereas Marcel's insistence on starting with a situation forbids both: existence and co-esse are non-problematizable. The movement from problem to mystery requires a "complete reversal of the question" (GMP 485/66). This is also where Ricoeur's criticism comes in:
The fundamental difficulty that has continually beset Marcel's existential ontology concerns the status of its own statements. In this regard a simple, non-dialectical opposition between mystery and problem could not be established without immediately destroying the philosophical enterprise as such, threatened with a shift to a philosophico-religious fideism...If the ontological affirmation were in no way an intellectual act, then it could not be elevated to philosophical discourse (GMP 498/70).
Here Ricoeur suggests a kind of dialectical relation between mystery and problem. How this dialectical relation is to be conceived is precisely my concern. But before we can go to that point, we should first understand better the question raised by Ricoeur. Just as the intellectualists have to face the questions posed to them by the existentialists, the reverse is also unavoidable. The strictly anti-epistemological approach of Marcel will finally leads to the question of its own truth. In fact, Ricoeur asks the intellectualists' questions already in his earliest book Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers (78) in 1947: how would Marcel respond "to the criticism of subjectivism in the experiences of existence and to that of fideism in the experiences of transcendence"? The first question is not asked any more in "Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology", probably because Marcel himself addressed the question of universality later in The Mystery of Being which was originally delivered as the Gifford Lectures in 1949. With regard to the charge of fideism, Ricoeur's point is that if the recognition of transcendence is not an intellectual act, it can hardly be handled by philosophical discourse. In order to avoid all sorts of fatal duality, Marcel takes the confused and global situation of existence as the point of departure. The basic insight that being is uncharacterizable protects mystery from turning into problem. However, this manoeuvre of overcoming oppositions institutes by itself a new opposition, namely the opposition between problem and mystery. Difficulties now arise not so much with undue distinctions as with insufficient distinctions which may lead to the question of how misunderstandings of being can be avoided.
Indeed if being is the uncharacterizable, "the unqualified par excellence", how is it possible that it is not also the pure indeterminate (Being and Having 36)? In Marcel's work this difficulty assumes a specific form; the global affirmation of existence can, indeed, be indistinctly that of my embodiment, that of the universe taken in a global and undivided way, and that of God called the Supreme You. Although Marcel has not ignored this difficulty, he attributes it to the affirmation of being in general in neo-Thomism (ibid 27-40). But could this not be turned around? What distinguishes the immanence of thought to being from the immanence to the whole of the world's existence, which is, as in Heidegger, the horizon of every determined object? Marcel admits: "The uneasiness I feel on these subjects is partly due to my old difficulty in seeing the relation between being and existing" (ibid 37). And indeed the same philosophy of the uncharacterizable holds for "my body", for "you", and for "God". Existence is what revealed by feeling as well as by fidelity and by the recourse to being as opposed to despair (GMP 489/71).
The critical comments made by Ricoeur here appear already in Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers, and the connection of these comments with the themes in Oneself as Another is not to be taken lightly (Cf. GMKJ 355). The comments here include an ontological question and an epistemological question; the two are closely bound up with each other. The ontological question is the relation between being and existence which is the source of Marcel's difficulties; the epistemological question is about the implementation of "secondary reflection" which, according to Ricoeur, is the proper Marcelian solution to the problem of fideism. In "Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology" Ricoeur treats only the epistemological question and it occupies the rest of the article after the passage quoted above. With regard to the ontological question of being and existence, he does not write anything further. The following account of Ricoeur's view on these two questions is reconstructed from different works of his.
The Ontological Question: Existence and Being
Let us look at the ontological question first. According to Ricoeur's reading, the difference between existence and being is the difference between the human condition and transcendence; the latter leads finally to God. They are the two foci of Marcel's thought (GMKJ 32, 218, 265). Existence designates our human condition in the world which is embodied, free and dialoguing with others. But existence is not being; it is not transcendence. Existence comes about only by virtue of being, and this is how the idea of participation comes in. It is only in the case of authentic existence-one which recognizes the fullness of transcendence-that existence is indistinguishable from being (Cf. Marcel, Mystery of Being, 2:31). Once this distinction is made, the idea that the same uncharacterizable covers both existence and being in an undifferentiated way is not without difficulty. In an interview with Marcel, Ricoeur brings up this question and makes a further clarification of the terms. He notices that in Marcel's thought, existence and being easily overlap one another, but they can be distinguished in terms of the different preoccupations of Marcel. The question of existence is raised in relation to that of objectivity; it is the zone where doubt is no longer possible. The question of being is raised from the perspective of ontological exigence which, according to Marcel, bears us towards a fullness that resists functional and abstract determinations.6
In Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers Ricoeur attempts to trace the source of Marcel's difficulty. He begins with an examination of the first part of Being and Having where Marcel explains why he accepts the neo-Thomistic affirmation of being in general (GMKJ 352-358; Being and Having 27-40). Ricoeur indicates that the whole struggle of Marcel starts with his determination to break with idealism. He has now a deep conviction that we are linked to being and not just to ideas. Upon reading Garrigou-Lagrange's book on God, he agrees with the author that the affirmation of being in general explains the structure of thought in our relation to being. The neo-Thomistic view that we affirm being in general every time when we affirm any particular thing shows the immanence of thought to being; it is in this light that a necessary relation can be conceived between existence and being, between the individual and transcendence. After a reflection on the principle of identity, Marcel is further convinced that this formal affirmation is not just a kind of "rule of the game" which thought must observe in order to function. Rather, it states the fact that thought is not a relation with itself; it transcends itself in knowing something.
But Ricoeur observes that very soon Marcel comes up with a real difficulty: how can one be sure that this being in general is a positive infinite, an ens realissimum which would be the height of the determined and not the pure indeterminate, the apeiron of the ancients, of which one can hardly say it is such or such? It is only in the first case that the principle of identity can assure us of the ontological meaning mentioned above. Ricoeur draws attention to the hesitations of Marcel in Being and Having and to fact that in spite of certain rectifications, the problem is not completely solved. All the other formulations do not exceed the vague knowledge of the self-transcendence of thought. It is difficult to tell whether being in general is a pure indeterminate or an ens realissimum which possesses all reality. Even if it can be shown to be the latter, question still remains as to whether it transcends the world as a whole or not. This is probably the point of Ricoeur when he asks for the difference between the immanence of thought to being and the immanence of thought to the "world" understood in the Heideggerian sense. Ricoeur ascribes the difficulty of Marcel concerning this distinction to the "purely logical path" inherent in the Thomistic affirmation of being (GMKJ 355). Marcel does try other way out, such as the distinction between thinking (penser) and thinking of (penser ), and it is finally incorporated into Marcel's notion of "fidelity" which is introduced in Being and Having precisely after his reflections on the Thomistic understanding of being in general. The notion of fidelity, according to Ricoeur, represents Marcel's true reaction to the difficulties met by a reflection that is based on the form of thought alone.
The whole problem arises from the fact that Marcel needs an ontological background against which the existing individual stands, but at the same time he does not want this background to be mutilated by objective and functional categories. This explains the hesitations and tensions in Being and Having between the abstract approach of being in general and the concrete path of fidelity. The question whether there can be a way of understanding the ontological ground so that both of Marcel's conditions can be safeguarded brings us back to the epistemological question.
6.Gabriel Marcel, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond (including conversations between Paul Ricoeur and Gabriel Marcel), trans. Stephen Jolin and Peter McCormick (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 225.
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.
7. Paul Ricoeur, "Renouveau de l'ontologie", Encyclopedie francaise XIX, Philosophie et religion (Paris: Larousse, 1957), 19.16-15.
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.
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.
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
8.Paul Ricoeur, "From Metaphysics to Moral Philosophy", Philosophy Today (Winter 1996): 443-458; "De la metaphysique a la morale", Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale 4 (1993): 455-477.
9."Paul Ricoeur: Reflexions sur la philosophie morale", interview by Monique Canto-Sperber, Magazine litteraire, no. 361 (January 1998): 39.
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.
Conclusion: Towards a Marcelian Reading of Oneself as Another
The foregoing account covers the main views of Ricoeur's on Marcel's philosophy from the early period of his career up till the 80s. The main concern of Ricoeur has always been the way how the original intuitive affirmation of being can be intelligibly retrieved. The dialectic of problem and mystery which is supported by the dialectic of primary reflection and secondary reflection is what he obtains from his critical reading of Marcel's works. This dialectic provides the necessary background for understanding the use of analytic philosophy in Oneself as Another.
In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur sets for himself the aim of a hermeneutics of the self which is characterized by the "indirect manner of positing the self" (OA 17/29). The self understands itself only via certain detours and never directly as in the case of Descartes. The basic methodological detour is "reflection by way of analysis". It is a detour taken by all the studies of the book that belong to what he calls the first order discourse, namely those which have the accent on the phenomenological aspects of the self. But what does it mean by reflection by way of analysis? And why is it necessary? I think an adequate answer can only be found on the basis of the dialectic of mystery and problem. The relation between reflection and analysis as a "constructive confrontation" or a "competition" is not different from the relation between primary reflection and secondary reflection as presented above (OA 17/29).
The work of "analysis" is carried out with the help of analytic philosophy which is precisely the kind of philosophy well known to be committed to the analysis of language and concepts; and even more importantly, it is the method that treats action as thing-like objects which can be observed and characterized from a neutral point of view. The aim of analysis in the hermeneutics of the self, as is indicated in the beginning of the first study, is precisely to "determine" the self according to a "general framework" () based on Strawson's theory of basic particulars-an approach which would be rejected by Marcel as treating existence like a problem (OA 31/43). In Ricoeur's earliest work on Marcel, namely in Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers, language does not receive particular attention; but in the later ones which are analysed above, language is always the issue. I admit that the reconstruction of the dialectic of mystery and problem and the underlying dialectic of primary and secondary reflection are affected by Ricoeur's analytic turn which took place in the early 70s. But the use of the latter cannot be understood without the former. The reason is that Oneself as Another is not a work that just uses analytic philosophy, but rather a critique of the latter. It is exactly by virtue of this critique that the deeper reality of the self can be recognized. In the book, Ricoeur does not juxtapose the interior view with the exterior view, but sets them in a dialectic, so that the being of the self can be reached only when the exterior view is overpassed in a secondary reflection.
With regard to the meaning of "reflection", it has a lot to do with Ricoeur's understanding of what reflection means in Marcel. As mentioned above, reflection designates the reconsideration of the conditions of affirmation-but affirmation of what? In Oneself as Another, it is the affirmation of action and its agent. As his critique of the Cartesian cogito in the "Introduction" shows, Ricoeur is faithful to Marcel's insight about the embodied nature of the self. According to Marcel, reflection is to be performed either on feeling or on action.10 While Marcel reflects more on feeling, Ricoeur puts the emphasis on action, and the self is reflexively implied in its action. I think this decision on the part of Ricoeur is not without reason, since feeling is less amenable to objective analysis. Furthermore, a reflection on action may also include that of feeling but not the other way round, as there can be feeling without action but rarely action without feeling. The theme of action may do a better job than that of feeling in providing a dynamic philosophy of being which Marcel himself favours. In what sense is the reflection in Oneself as Another a recourse to the conditions of affirmation of action and person? A brief overview of how Ricoeur introduces the task of the first two groups of studies may illustrate.
The whole inquiry of the self has the question "who?" as the guiding thread; but the identification of someone starts with the identification of something in general, be it a person or an object. The Strawsonian concept of basic particular is introduced in the first subset (study 1 and 2) as that without which "nothing at all can be identified" (OA 31/43). Ricoeur refers explicitly to Kant, the critical philosopher, for the necessity of this step: "What we are going to undertake is indeed a sort of transcendental deduction of the notion of person, by showing that if we did not have available to us the schema of thought that defines this notion, we could not engage in the empirical description that we make in this regard in ordinary conversation and in the human sciences" (OA 31/43). Therefore, the conceptual framework of basic particulars has a "transcendental status"; it prescribes the condition of possibility of any statement about an individual. In the second subset of studies (study 3 and 4) the theme is theory of action. Ricoeur speaks of a conceptual schema that consists of notions like circumstance, intentions, motives, deliberations, voluntary or involuntary motions etc. which form a "network" of intersignifying terms. This conceptual network of action "shares the same transcendental status as the conceptual framework of basic particulars...the entire network serves to determine what 'count as' an action" (OA 58/75). That means one cannot make sense of an action without referring to this conceptual framework of action. Therefore, reflection is first of all the reflection on these conceptual frameworks which are the conditions of any knowledge of the person and its action. These two examples do not only show what reflection means in Oneself as Another, but also illustrate what is called primary reflection, given the fact that they presuppose the subject-object relation. The conceptual frameworks are taken as that by means of which the person and its action can be grasped objectively. In this connection, the question "who?" is the question of secondary reflection; it keeps challenging the different analytic approaches of person and action, exposing their incoherence [YHW2]and the difficulties they create. Oneself as Another demonstrates how the self is recuperated through a critique of the analytic tradition and in the process enriched by its linguistic resources.
10."C'est ainsi que le role de la reflexion-qu'elle s'exerce sur le sentir ou sur l'agir-consiste non point a morceler, a demembrer..." Gabriel Marcel, Journal metaphysique (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1927), 324.