[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

tends to dissolve the unity of experience which is first put before it, the function ofsecondary reflection is essentially recuperative; it reconquers that unity.” 53It is important to note that second degree reflection does not go against the data of firstdegree reflection, but goes beyond it by refusing to accept the data of first degree reflectionas final. According to Marcel, the level of second degree reflection is the area ofmystery because here we enter into the realm of the personal. In second degree reflection,a person has to ask a question regarding his own existence. We have already seen anexample of second degree reflection in Marcel’s discussion of man’s relationship to hisbody. According to first degree reflection, “the body that I call my body is only one bodyamong others.” We have also already seen that the second degree reflection “does not setout flatly to give the lie to these propositions; it manifests itself rather by a refusal to treatprimary reflection’s separation of this body, considered as just a body, a sample body,some body or other, from the self that I am.” 54 In the same way, if first degree reflectionconsiders existence a problem to be solved, secondary reflection considers it a mystery tobe revealed.Before continuing, it would be worthwhile emphasizing two points about second degreereflection. First of all, it is important to underline that first degree reflection is a legitimateand very useful reasoning. We have to use it; but we cannot use it to treat a “mystery”as a “problem.” Marcel explains:To arrive at this or that determinate result, we properly make use of abstract thought,but there is nothing in the method of abstraction itself that has any note of the absoluteabout it. One might assert indeed, taking one’s stand against that mirage of abstract,absolute truth that has been thrown up by a certain type of intellectualism, that fromthe moment when we seek to transcend abstract thought’s proper limits and to arriveat a global abstraction, we topple over into the gulf of nonsense – of nonsense in thestrict philosophical sense, that is, of words without assignable meaning. There is not,and there cannot be, any global abstraction, any final high terrace to which we canclimb by means of abstract thought, there to rest for ever; for our condition in thisworld does remain, in the last analysis, that of a wanderer, an itinerant being, whocannot come to absolute rest except by a fiction, a fiction which it is the duty ofphilosophic reflection to oppose with its strength.But let us notice also that our itinerant condition is in no sense separable from thegiven circumstances, from which in the case of each of us that condition borrows itsspecial character; we have thus reached a point where we can lay it down that to bein a situation and to be on the move are modes of being that cannot be dissociatedfrom each other; are, in fact, two complementary aspects of our condition. 55First degree reflection, we have seen, “freezes” experiences: it has to do this, in orderto use them. But I cannot “freeze” the experience dealing with my existence, because Iam “on the move.”The second point: it is also important to emphasize that second degree reflection isindeed a reflection and does make use of concepts, but it is embedded in the concrete.Second degree reflection “can only get to work on the processes to which primary reflectionhas itself had recourse; seeking, as it were, to restore a semblance of unity to theelements which primary reflection has first severed. However, even when engaged in this535455Ibid., 1: 83.Ibid., 1: 92-93.Ibid., 1: 133-134.64