[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

attempt at unification, the reflective process would in reality still remain at the primarystage, since it would remain a prisoner in the hands of the very oppositions which it,itself, had in the first instance postulated, instead of calling the ultimate validity of theseoppositions into question.” 56 Therefore, second degree reflection does not represent aflight into a kind of irrationalism or mysticism. 57 Second degree reflection makes use ofconcepts, but these concepts are expressions of concrete experience and are not formulatedas abstract solution strategies to problems. Problems are indeed problematic preciselybecause they arose from and remain within the “spirit of abstraction.”According to Marcel, existence should be seen in this way, because life is a mystery,not a problem. But what does it mean, in the concrete? It means that men have the taskof going beyond the problematic. And it means, at the same time, “a return to the immediacyof lived experience, though on a higher level.” 58 Therefore, if first degreereflection can partially be identified with the phenomenological method, second degreereflection can also be seen, in this light, as an attempt to develop second degree reflectionitself. Nevertheless, “Marcel never identified phenomenology with his second reflection,which is essentially a metaphysical or ontological approach.” 59Second degree reflection is indeed a return to the immediacy of lived experience ona higher level; but it is also an ontological approach, because the concepts used in the firstdegree reflection are still there in the second degree reflection, but they are transformed.They are not weakened; on the contrary, they are more concrete. From the instant inwhich first degree reflection applied to the real, to the instant in which I look back reflectingon that reflection, time has passed; and time has, paradoxically, made the conceptmore concrete, exactly as it has revealed its substantial fiction and fallibility. 60 In otherwords, time has produced an overturning of concept, eliminating its abstractness andrecovering its concreteness.Time and UniversalityThe conceptual space granted to second degree reflection is therefore a borderland,between the thoughts which practice solely and exclusively first degree reflection andignore the essence of man as a “being on the move,” an existent who lives in time, andthose nihilistic thoughts which, even if they recognize the Geworfenheit, in one way oranother, turn out in identifying the most authentic dimension of time in the future. ForMarcel, the dimension of plan (Entwurf) must not be rejected; nevertheless, favoring thefuture always implies the risk that the plan “devours,” so to say, the existence which itshould address. In this case, the plan becomes the “postponement of existence to later”:56Ibid., 1: 93.57Evidence of the fact that Marcel never renounced the use of reason and of concepts is this: “heconsidered the very term ‘intuition’ too dangerous and too loaded to call his metaphysical reflection‘reflective intuition,’ as he once contemplated doing.” Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 460.Nevertheless, the “reflective intuition” does not overlap, at a deeper sight, with the “second degreereflection.”58Ibid., 460.59Ibid.60A confirmation of this interpretation, based on the centrality of the notion of time in the dynamicof second-degree reflection, can be found in the first part of Being and Having, and particularly in the notedated March 6, 1929. In this regard, see also John V. Vigorito, “On Time in the Philosophy of Marcel,”in Schilpp and Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, 391-420. About the notion of time, broadlyconceived, see the recent and illuminating work of Ugo Perone, Il presente possibile (Napoli: Guida,2005).65