My philosophy

I. How the Question Arose: System, Extraction, and the Temptation of Mastery

Before encountering the works of Gabriel Marcel, I would sift through my modest collection of philosophical or theological books in half-slidden and collapsing stacks scattered around my room. I would take maxims, whole essays, or even simple references to other authors, and mine them like gems from marginalia and footnotes; then I would discard the excess materials in their own separate book piles, where they would lay for months, shamefully exposed as ultimately empty words to use as mere means and not as insights into the reflections of a fellow traveler along the way. I was on a quest for the philosopher’s philosopher.

This procedure was disciplined in one sense. It was also morally revealing in the way I treated authors as instruments and thought as material. Marcel helped me see why that habit carried an internal contradiction. I was seeking wisdom through a method that protected me from being changed by what I read. I was pursuing what I thought was something like, “the one true thing we all must know,” and the pursuit itself became a substitute for the transformation I claimed to desire.

Like Madame Mathilde Loisel in Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace, I pursued a panacea for a despairing self-image only to discover that I sacrificed too much in pursuit of it. Should I ever unearth my elusive treasure, its exalted status would have crumbled to ash the moment I acknowledged my profound misjudgment of its actual importance. There was no one true thing we all must know.

Gabriel Marcel has a line about “true questions” that sharpens the point. True questions do not primarily aim at solving an enigma; they indicate a direction in which one must move. Once I saw that, I recognized that prolonged fixation on a supposedly prophetic system often signals that I am no longer asking after truth—because I’m no longer moving.

This shift is essential to the argument that follows. As well will learn, Marcel’s “secondary reflection” is not an aesthetic preference; it’s a constraint on what counts as philosophical honesty when the subject matter is human existence. These are high stakes.

II. Ortega and Marias: Life, Biography, and the Structure of Hope

The philosopher, Ortega y Gasset provides an anthropological foundation that supports Marcel’s account of reflection. Ortega’s claim that the self is inseparable from circumstance makes explicit what Marcel presupposes. Reflection begins within a life that is already underway. Thought is an activity within life, not a platform above it.

This claim is ontological, not merely methodological. There is no standpoint outside life from which meaning could be secured. A philosophy that attempts such a standpoint does not become more rigorous. It becomes less faithful to the conditions under which understanding actually occurs. For Ortega, reason belongs within life, and life is not a detachable object. It is the reality in which one must act, judge, and endure.

Julian Marias extends Ortega by emphasizing biography and futurity. A human life is not a series of states. It is a project lived forward. This gives hope a structural role. Hope is not an optional emotion added to reflection. It is a condition without which a life collapses into mere sequence and ceases to be intelligible as a whole. Despair therefore is not only psychological. It is a breakdown in the continuity that makes personal existence coherent.

This matters for the theme of suffering. Suffering cannot be interpreted once and for all at a single moment, because its meaning unfolds longitudinally within a life and across time. Any philosophical approach that treats suffering as a closed problem invites distortion by forcing what is lived forward into what can be contained in an explanation.

I’m influenced by my Lutheran tradition to look skeptically at the grand edifices of abstractions that philosophers have built over centuries Babel-like spires that would emerge above the clouds of ignorance in which the rest of humanity is doomed to grope and scrape their way through otherwise meaningless suffering. I don’t believe anyone can attain that God’s-eye view above the clouds; instead, our vision is limited by the reach of our imaginations. This appears to be the inherent humility of the historical, human condition.

Yet in the way we share our reflections on the mysteries of life with others in our writing, our arts, and so forth, not least among these mysteries being suffering itself we possess a gift as co-sufferers who find themselves wandering in the fog together. There are fraternal bonds in this, whether or not they are seen; insofar as wisdom is some kind of guide to life with others, suffering is an essential way to it.

The Christian Apostle Paul writes that “we also glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” This stepwise movement from suffering toward hope is revealed as we walk the narrow way, reflecting upon what we experience and learning to love those who walk alongside us.

Given the unpredictable nature of our suffering, however, this movement toward hope is not something that can be neatly systematized or assembled for an intentional escapist transcendence on demand. Christian philosophers must wager on hope for a lasting meaning, and they will not have real hope if it is a mere product of their imaginations, no matter how towering their intellects may be. Wisdom is learned not despite suffering, not by having transcended suffering, but in and through it.

The criterion of orientation employed here stands at the intersection of two closely related insights. From Ortega comes the claim that philosophy is answerable to life because there is no extra-vital standpoint from which reflection could legitimately detach itself. From Marias comes the clarification that human existence is biographical, future-directed, and personal, such that reflection falters when it cannot sustain a life as something lived forward rather than merely explained in retrospect.

For this reason, reflection that terminates in explanation alone cannot suffice. Clarity may increase, and yet orientation may fail. A life may be rendered intelligible in fragments and still remain impossible to live forward as a whole. Where philosophy cannot accompany a person through time where it cannot remain answerable to futurity, responsibility, and suffering it ceases to function as wisdom.

III. Marcel: Primary and Secondary Reflection, Problem and Mystery

Marcel’s distinction between primary and secondary reflection clarifies why certain philosophical questions cannot be answered by technique without losing their object. Primary reflection is powerful. It isolates, analyzes, and resolves. It is indispensable for many tasks. Its limitation appears when it dissolves the unity of experience and then mistakes the rearranged fragments for the whole.

Secondary reflection, by contrast, is recuperative. It returns to the unity of experience that analysis breaks apart. It is not anti-rational. It is rationality recollected into life. It attempts to understand realities whose meaning depends on involvement rather than detachment.

The core of Marcel’s contribution to my way of thinking is the distinction between first-order and second-order reflections as I encountered it in The Mystery of Being. First-order reflections concern abstracted concepts, theories, and intellectual systems. Second-order reflection is a grappling with the mysteries of existence itself, anchored in the experience of being a subject in a particular historical situation. It is participation in a mystery from which we cannot extricate ourselves without losing sight of it.

This inability to remove ourselves for a more objective view becomes especially crucial when we consider suffering. Marcel insists that genuine questions do not primarily aim at solving an enigma. They indicate a direction in which one must move. When reflection ceases to move, it ceases to be honest.

Marcel sharpens this distinction through his account of problems and mysteries. A problem is something I encounter as an object that can be laid before me, reduced, and addressed by an appropriate technique. A mystery is something in which I am involved, such that the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and its initial validity.

The mysterious is not the unknowable. The unknowable is a limiting case of the problematic. Mystery, by contrast, is an essentially positive act of mind. It is the recognition that certain realities demand participation and fidelity rather than reduction. In this sphere, understanding cannot be achieved without exposure.

This distinction explains why the “problem of evil” so often feels inadequate. Treated as a problem, evil becomes something to be resolved by balancing premises. What evil presses upon us, however, is a demand for orientation. One must ask how one is to remain a person in its presence, and how one is to remain answerable to others while clarity is withheld.

Marcel cautions that it is always possible logically and psychologically to degrade a mystery into a problem. This degradation proceeds by treating what implicates us as though it concerned only others. Evil becomes something one has heard talked about rather than something in which one participates. This is not intellectual rigor. It is evasion.

Secondary reflection is the mode of thought that resists this evasion. It does not offer escape. It returns us to involvement. Because reflection remains linked, “as bone is linked with bone,” to lived personal experience, philosophical understanding cannot detach itself from the conditions that call it forth.

Reflection, for Marcel, is not exercised on things that are not worth the trouble of reflecting about. The philosopher contemplates realities that matter, realities that wound, bind, and demand fidelity. Where primary reflection dissolves unity, secondary reflection attempts to reconquer it.

This distinction is not an aesthetic preference. It is a constraint on philosophical honesty when the subject matter is human existence. To treat mysteries as problems is to choose techniques we can manage over realities that can manage us. Where philosophy adopts that posture, clarity increases while wisdom recedes.

IV. Reflection, Exposure, and the Theological Horizon

What first forced these questions upon me was not an abstract concern with evil, but a growing unease with how easily philosophy speaks about pain without remaining exposed to it. When reflection proceeds as though it could stand outside the conditions it describes, explanation becomes distance. This is not only a moral failure. It is an epistemic one. Distortion occurs because abstraction removes precisely those relational and temporal features that make understanding possible.

At this point the theological horizon I inhabit becomes unavoidable. This essay is written within a Christian horizon shaped by my Lutheran tradition. That tradition has taught me to distrust philosophical ambition when it seeks a view from above the conditions of human life. Human understanding is bounded by time, finitude, and moral formation. I do not take this boundedness to be a defect that philosophy can overcome. I take it to be a condition philosophy must acknowledge if it is to remain faithful.

To reflect historically on human life is to confront a record marked by rupture and endurance. Memory preserves achievement, but it also preserves judgment, failure, and repair. If meaning is to endure, it cannot be secured by coherence alone. It must be borne. Reflection that refuses exposure to suffering may achieve elegance, but it loses contact with the realities that demand wisdom.

This is why the problem of evil so often feels philosophically unsatisfying. Treated as a problem, evil becomes something to be solved by balancing premises. Yet evil presses upon us as something to be lived through. It demands orientation rather than explanation. It asks how one is to remain a person in its presence, and how one is to remain answerable to others while clarity is withheld.

Marcel cautions that it is always possible to degrade a mystery into a problem. This degradation is not merely intellectual. It involves a refusal of participation. Evil is reduced to something one has heard talked about rather than something in which one is implicated. Such reduction is a form of evasion, even when it appears rigorous.

Within the Lutheran horizon that shapes my thinking, conscience plays a decisive role here. Conscience accuses. It does not console. Philosophical systems that promise reconciliation by explanation alone attempt to quiet conscience without addressing what conscience exposes. In this sense, abstraction can become a shelter rather than a means of truth.

Paul’s sequence in Romans therefore exerts real pressure on the argument of this essay. “Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” This movement is not a theoretical construction. It emerges as we reflect on what we undergo and learn to remain answerable to those who walk alongside us. Perseverance is not inferred. It is endured. Character is not deduced. It is formed. Hope is not manufactured. It is received.

Secondary reflection names this kind of return. It does not offer escape. It returns us to involvement. Because the conditions that call reflection forth are unpredictable, hope cannot be assembled for intentional transcendence on demand. If philosophy is to wager on hope for lasting meaning, that hope cannot be a product of imagination, no matter how powerful the intellect that sustains it.

Human beings are capable of generating compelling atmospheres and visions. None of these, by themselves, guarantees meaning that can bear the weight of suffering. Where philosophy mistakes atmosphere for orientation, it substitutes consolation for truthfulness. Reflection that remains honest must stay exposed to what wounds it.

For this reason, philosophy reaches its limit not in incoherence but in fidelity. It must remain answerable to life as it is lived, to history as it is borne, and to suffering as it is endured. Where reflection withdraws from these conditions, it forfeits its claim to wisdom.

V. Schopenhauer: Diagnosis Without Orientation, and Ortega’s Objection

Arthur Schopenhauer offers a severe description of suffering. His value here lies in diagnosis rather than authority. He argues that suffering is structurally bound to willing, desire, and temporality. Satisfaction is provisional. Striving renews itself. Loss remains recurrent. This diagnosis has explanatory power. It clarifies why historical progress and moral improvement, even when real, do not eradicate suffering. It also clarifies why art, ritual, and disciplined practices can soothe. They suspend striving and quiet the pressures of self-assertion.

Schopenhauer therefore helps explain why forms of religious or aesthetic “fullness” can feel persuasive. They can provide genuine relief. This relief is real. It is also limited. Diagnostic adequacy does not confer orientational authority. Schopenhauer’s account can explain how consolation works while leaving unanswered how a life can remain intelligible as a whole.

Here Ortega’s critique becomes decisive. Ortega insists that life is futurity and decision. A philosophy that culminates in resignation misconstrues the structure of lived life, because it proposes a stance that cannot carry personal existence forward. Marias adds that biography requires openness. A human being cannot be reduced to a mechanism of desire without abolishing the personal dimension in which hope, love, and responsibility occur.

For these reasons, Schopenhauer is retained as a negative interlocutor. He closes off false hopes and clarifies why consolation can soothe without reconciling. He cannot supply the orientation that suffering demands, because his framework cannot sustain biography, futurity, and hope as integral to personal existence.

At this point, a clarification of philosophical architecture is required. The argument advanced in this essay does not proceed by accumulating positive foundations until hope emerges as a conclusion. It proceeds by delimitation. The thinkers engaged thus far: Marcel, Ortega, Marias, Steiner, and Collingwood, do not establish hope by discovering it within the structure of empirical reality or historical process. Rather, they show that reflection collapses when it attempts to secure orientation from within the resources of description alone.

Schopenhauer enters the argument at precisely this architectonic juncture. His account is granted maximal descriptive authority over immanent reality: will, striving, dissatisfaction, and provisional relief exhaust what can be perceived, diagnosed, or explained without appeal to faith. In this sense, Schopenhauer is not a foil but a boundary condition.

He demonstrates that suffering can be rendered fully intelligible without becoming reconcilable, and that consolation can be real without providing orientation. This is decisive. If empirical reality does not exceed Schopenhauer’s diagnosis, then hope cannot arise as a philosophical inference or a natural disclosure. It must function instead as a condition of fidelity one that sustains biography, responsibility, and historical reflection even when perception yields only recurrence and loss.

Schopenhauer is thus architectonic by negation. He closes off illegitimate sources of hope and forces philosophy to reckon honestly with the limits of what the world can bear.

VI. Love as the Paradigm of Secondary Reflection

Marcel treats love as the clearest case of a reality that cannot be reduced without distortion. Love affirms the other in irreplaceable being. It binds persons across time and integrates experiences into a meaningful unity that analysis tends to fragment. Love therefore stands as a primary focus of secondary reflection, because it discloses most clearly the limits of objectification.

This insight forced a reconsideration of my earlier conception of philosophy. I once understood philosophy primarily as a synthesis of abstractions driven by conscience toward an emergent whole, motivated by a love of wisdom. Marcel helped me see what was missing. Conscience and synthesis are not false, but they are insufficient. Love is not a motive appended to an intellectual project. It is a mode of participation irreducible to technique.

Love clarifies why certain forms of understanding collapse when treated as problems. To analyze love successfully is to lose it. Traits, mechanisms, and explanations can be isolated, but what is isolated no longer bears the weight of the relation itself. Love is known only through fidelity, presence, and endurance across time. Where these are absent, explanation multiplies and understanding recedes.

This has direct implications for suffering. Marcel insists that suffering cannot be confronted in isolation. It calls for communion. It calls for a shared response that exceeds an individual’s capacity to endure. To suffer is already to be implicated in others, whether acknowledged or not. Reflection that remains faithful to suffering must therefore remain open to the communal dimension of existence.

Secondary reflection becomes public here. It moves outward through testimony, art, and shared memory. The philosopher does not escape solitude by producing explanations, but by remaining answerable to others through the forms in which meaning is preserved and offered. In this sense, love is not merely an object of reflection. It is the condition under which reflection remains human.

This also clarifies why philosophy cannot remain morally neutral. Love exposes the inadequacy of detachment as an epistemic posture. To refuse involvement is not to achieve rigor; it is to choose a form of blindness. Where love is excluded, reflection becomes procedural. Where love is present, reflection becomes exposed.

Marcel’s insistence that love resists reduction does not license sentimentality. It establishes a constraint. If love is real, then some dimensions of reality are accessible only through participation and fidelity. Philosophy that denies this forfeits its claim to wisdom, because it refuses the very mode of knowing that discloses what matters most.

At this point the communal implications become unavoidable. If love binds persons across time, then suffering and meaning cannot be confined to private interiority. They enter history. They demand preservation. They call for witnesses. Secondary reflection thus presses outward toward art, language, and historical remembrance as the means by which fidelity is sustained beyond individual lives.

VII. Steiner: Meaning, Responsibility, and the Wager

George Steiner clarifies what secondary reflection presupposes whenever it continues at all. Interpretation, art, and language require trust. This trust is not a belief added after the fact. It is enacted whenever reflection occurs. One relies on it in rereading a text, preserving a story, or speaking to another person with the expectation of being understood.

Steiner’s insight is not psychological but philosophical. Without an initial act of trust, the human world history, language, art, religion cannot even begin. To refuse this trust is not to achieve rigor. It is to undermine the very conditions that make understanding possible. Skepticism, when absolutized, becomes a slow suicide of meaning.

This clarifies why art cannot be decorative in the context of this essay. To write, to compose, or to preserve a work is to wager on others. It is to wager that meaning is not merely private consolation but something that can endure beyond the conditions of its production. Art is one of the ways suffering is woven into shared history without being reduced. It is secondary reflection made public.

Steiner insists that genuine encounters with meaning place demands upon us. They do not terminate in commentary. They call for response. Reflection that remains content with interpretation alone risks becoming another form of distance, another way of remaining untouched.

This insistence intersects with the earlier concern about philosophical extraction. Where interpretation becomes professionalized detachment, trust is refused. Meaning is treated as a projection rather than as something that addresses us. In such cases, explanation proliferates while responsibility recedes.

Steiner’s wager goes further. He suggests that meaningfulness itself rests upon a wager on transcendence. I accept the pressure of this claim while clarifying its status in Marcel’s terms. Many wager without knowing they have wagered. Coming to see one’s wager as a wager is itself an act of secondary reflection.

At minimum, reflection cannot proceed honestly without acknowledging that it relies upon trust. Language presupposes it. Memory depends on it. Transmission enacts it. To preserve what has been suffered and thought is to refuse the claim that time is empty and that endurance is meaningless.

This is why history matters even before it is methodologically clarified. Reflection unfolds through time because it presumes that time can bear meaning. The preservation of texts, the transmission of art, and the recounting of lives are acts of confidence. To remember is to wager that what has been endured is not finally wasted.

Steiner therefore names what secondary reflection risks whenever it continues. It risks responsibility. It risks exposure. It risks faithfulness to meaning that cannot be guaranteed in advance. This risk is not an optional supplement to philosophy. It is the condition under which philosophy remains possible once explanation has reached its limits.

VIII. Collingwood: History as Reenactment and Moral Exposure

R. G. Collingwood provides the historical method appropriate to secondary reflection. History is not the accumulation of facts. It is the reenactment of past thought in a present mind. What is known historically is action, and action is intelligible only as deed and intention together. To understand a historical event is therefore to re-think the thought that animated it, under the constraint of evidence and context.

This account resists the temptation to treat history as an external spectacle. Scissors-and-paste history preserves the outside of events while losing the inside. It multiplies data while evacuating meaning. Collingwood’s insistence on reenactment restores the unity that abstraction dissolves. Historical understanding is always from within, because thought belongs to life and cannot be detached from it without distortion.

Reenactment is not projection. It is disciplined imagination governed by evidence. It does not dissolve difference between past and present, but it establishes intelligibility by recognizing that thought is historically situated and therefore recoverable through reflective participation. The historian does not escape subjectivity by denying it. Subjectivity becomes the condition under which understanding occurs.

This makes historical knowledge morally exposing. To reenact the thought of another is to place oneself under judgment. One cannot ask what kind of people others were without being drawn into the question of what kind of person one is becoming. Historical reflection therefore implicates the historian. It is never morally neutral.

This implication matters for suffering. History preserves not only achievement but failure, judgment, endurance, and repair. To remember is to refuse the claim that what has been endured is meaningless. Reflection that remains faithful to suffering must therefore be historical, because suffering unfolds over time and acquires meaning longitudinally rather than instantaneously.

Collingwood clarifies why historical understanding remains incomplete without being arbitrary. Each act of reenactment occurs from a particular position and is altered by new awareness. The limits of historical knowledge are not defects to be overcome by a final system. They are conditions of participation. Understanding remains open because life remains open.

Here the wager named earlier becomes concrete. Historical reflection continues only because one trusts that understanding matters, even when adequacy is unattainable. To reenact past thought is to wager that what human beings have done and suffered is intelligible enough to orient judgment and responsibility.

In this sense, history is not ancillary to philosophy. It is the medium in which secondary reflection unfolds. Reflection remains answerable to the past because the past continues to address the present. Where history is reduced to explanation without reenactment, responsibility dissolves. Where reenactment occurs, reflection remains exposed.

Collingwood thus completes the architectural sequence of the essay. Secondary reflection requires participation. Participation requires trust. Trust requires a wager on meaning. History gives this wager form by binding memory, judgment, and responsibility together across time.

Conclusion: A Revised Definition of Philosophy

The argument can now be stated without remainder.

Philosophy concerns realities that implicate the thinker and cannot be treated as objects without distortion. Reflection adequate to such realities must remain participatory, historically situated, and personally answerable. Reflection continues only under the assumption that meaning is not arbitrary, and that human life remains intelligible even when clarity is incomplete. This assumption is not derived from explanation. It is presupposed whenever reflection persists rather than collapses into resignation or cynicism.

What has emerged through engagement with Marcel, Ortega, Marias, Steiner, and Collingwood is not a system but a constraint. Philosophy fails when it imagines that its task is to secure a view from above the conditions of human life. It fails when it treats suffering as a problem to be resolved rather than as a demand for orientation. It fails when explanation becomes distance, when abstraction substitutes for fidelity, or when coherence is mistaken for wisdom.

Marcel’s distinction between primary and secondary reflection has clarified why this failure recurs. Primary reflection is powerful and indispensable, but it dissolves the unity of experience and cannot recover it on its own. Secondary reflection is recuperative. It returns thought to involvement. It concerns mysteries rather than problems, realities in which the thinker is already implicated and from which no neutral standpoint can be secured. Love stands as the clearest paradigm of such a reality. Love cannot be reduced without loss. It binds persons across time, integrates experience into meaningful unity, and discloses the limits of objectification. If love is a primary focus of secondary reflection, then philosophy ordered toward wisdom cannot remain loveless without falsifying its own aim.

Ortega and Marias have secured the anthropological ground of this claim. Thought belongs within life rather than above it. A human life is biographical and future-directed. Hope is not an optional affect appended to reflection; it is a condition without which a life ceases to be intelligible as something lived forward rather than merely explained in retrospect. Suffering therefore cannot be interpreted once and for all at a single moment. Its meaning unfolds longitudinally, within a life and across time. Any philosophy that attempts to close this unfolding prematurely invites distortion.

Schopenhauer has served as a necessary boundary condition. His diagnosis of suffering grants maximal explanatory authority to immanent reality. He shows why striving renews itself, why satisfaction is provisional, and why consolation can soothe without reconciling. But diagnostic adequacy does not confer orientational authority. A philosophy that culminates in resignation misconstrues the structure of lived life, because it cannot sustain biography, futurity, and responsibility. Schopenhauer therefore closes off illegitimate sources of hope and forces philosophy to reckon honestly with what the world, taken on its own terms, can bear.

Steiner has clarified what secondary reflection presupposes whenever it continues. Interpretation, art, language, and history all enact a wager on meaning. This wager is not an optional belief added to reflection; it is performed whenever one rereads a text, preserves a story, or addresses another person with the expectation of being understood. To remember is to refuse the claim that what has been endured is meaningless. Many wager without knowing they have wagered. Coming to see one’s wager as a wager is itself an act of secondary reflection.

Collingwood has given this wager its historical method. History is not the accumulation of facts but the reenactment of past thought in a present mind. What is known historically is action, and action is intelligible only as deed and intention together. Reenactment is participation under constraint, not projection. It exposes the historian morally, because understanding another’s reasons places one’s own under judgment. Historical knowledge remains incomplete not because it is defective, but because participation is its condition. The historian continues because understanding matters, and because reflection remains answerable to something real even when adequacy is out of reach.

Taken together, these claims require a revision of my earlier conception of philosophy. Philosophy is not the construction of a synthetic system of abstractions assembled by intellectual ingenuity. Primary reflection remains necessary, but wisdom does not reside in the arrangement of abstractions. Wisdom grows through return through sustained attentiveness, historical participation, and the willingness to remain answerable to what resists mastery.

Within the Lutheran horizon that shapes this essay, this yields a more explicit formulation. Philosophy reaches its limit in fidelity to what exceeds its competence, and this limit is not incoherence. It is honesty. Wisdom is to fear, love, and trust God through suffering. Philosophy is the synthesis of historical reflections undertaken for the love of wisdom.

This account offers no final map. It offers a way of proceeding. It asks for patience toward what remains unresolved, and it treats that patience not as a failure of reason but as a form of responsibility. It ends, fittingly, with counsel that is itself a requirement of secondary reflection: to live with the questions until one can live into what an answer would demand.