Experience and reflection of Gabriel Marcel

The foregoing analysis reveals a tension in Marcel’s thought, one that he was aware of and with which he often struggled. The tension emerges when one considers that the philosophical discussion of the problem of evil is valuable not only because it addresses a conceptual problem that is of great concern to human beings but also because it may help the individual in a small way to cope with the experience of evil. If one believed that one had a satisfactory philosophical answer to the problem of evil, then the experience of evil could take on a larger significance within that rationale, making it easier to handle. Indeed, it might be argued, Marcel himself did something similar in his own philosophical work in that he provided a philosophical argument for a return to concrete experience.

The same tension was also present in the work of several other existentialist philosophers, including Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as those thinkers struggled to articulate philosophically the exact relationship between experience and reflection. It is a basic claim of philosophers in the existentialist tradition that experience is not just temporally prior to reflection but also ontologically prior to reflection. This means that the realm of reflection is secondary to the realm of experience and must be understood in terms of it, rather than the other way around (see Existentialism: Ontic structure of human existence). That claim then raises the question of how to think objectively about the realm of experience from the point of view of reflection, which is a derived reality only. Existential philosophy is fascinating in its general approach to this difficulty, and Marcel developed one of the most effective ways of responding to it.

Marcel appealed in several places to the example of fidelity to illustrate the key point. Human beings have a fundamental understanding of fidelity not through conceptual analysis but through experience. Indeed, the meaning of fidelity is very difficult to state in conceptual terms, and it is especially difficult to state necessary and sufficient conditions for fidelity. In typical phenomenological fashion, Marcel approached the problem of definition in a concrete way. One might imagine, for example, that fidelity—or faithfulness to a person—requires that the person to whom one is faithful be alive, but Marcel thought it possible to be faithful in certain cases to a person who is deceased. After several failed attempts to capture its nature in conceptual terms, it becomes clear that fidelity is an experience that is hard to define, but it is easy to recognize when one is in the presence of fidelity. Fidelity is an experience that involves the questioner, and, as such, it belongs to the realm of mystery.

Marcel, however, did not believe that the realm of mystery is unknowable or that it is a mystical realm. Such a position would invite charges of irrationalism and would subordinate reason and objective truth to personal subjectivity. Mysteries are found at the level of being—the level at which experience is unified, the level at which the distinction between concept and object breaks down. In this realm, reflection on experience and experience itself cannot be separated without distorting the experience in question.

Thinking about the realm of mystery prompted Marcel to introduce the concept of secondary reflection, which he contrasted with primary reflection, a distinction that also parallels the distinction between problem and mystery. In The Mystery of Being, Marcel noted:

Roughly, we can say that where primary reflection tends to dissolve the unity of experience which is first put before it, the function of secondary reflection is essentially recuperative; it reconquers that unity.

It is difficult to provide a philosophical account of secondary reflection because it is fundamentally nonconceptual; it is also a movement that helps one to recover those experiences which have been the subject of conceptual analysis but whose meaning has proved elusive because the questioner is removed at the level of primary reflection. Secondary reflection, therefore, can be said to have two aspects. The first is critical reflection on the nature of reflection itself, which reveals that everyday reflective thinking, including in philosophy, theology, and science, does not provide an adequate description of the nature of the self or of key human experiences (faith, fidelity, hope, and love). Such critical reflection also shows the failure of modern epistemology—including the generation of the problem of skepticism—because it begins from the wrong starting point, an artificial split between the self and the world. The second aspect of secondary reflection involves a process of recovery, or what Marcel called, in The Philosophy of Existentialism, an assurance of the realm of mystery.

Throughout Marcel’s work there is an attempt to reveal objective structures of human existence by means of the process of secondary reflection, a process that helps individuals to appreciate and recover defining human experiences. He believed that such experiences are expressive of the depth of human nature but that they are often lost in the modern world. Secondary reflection is a way of helping the individual to recover something of those experiences, so its dual aspect as a critique and as a recovery is important. It also allows some rational, objective access to the realm of personal experience. Marcel insisted that such profound experiences are objective—i.e., the same for all human beings—and so there is no possibility of a relativism or subjectivism about experience. Nor is he trying to denigrate primary reflection—the realm of objective knowledge—but wishes to show its proper role in human life and that it is important not to overstate its value.