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nessthereby losing sight of the very question Marcel had in mind, namely, the relationship between the lived body and the body-object. This is an instance of what Marcel describes, in another context, as something "which transcends any relationship properly so called, a superrelationship which it is not in my power to transform into a sort of ideal object, which I might mentally manipulate as one manipulates a formula." 11 As the awkward term "superrelationship" suggests, the reason this sense of inextricable relatedness is so important to Marcel is precisely because it offers our best clue to the underlying mystery, the nature of the whole. But it is a very peculiar sort of clue, whose implications are chastening; for if the mystery of my own incarnation is something that constantly eludes my grasp, surely the same must be true a fortiori for the mystery of being. And yet, on reflection, that is as it should be. For the whole, after all, is not an object which we can hold at arm's length to scrutinize and dissect. It is the reality within which we are constantly included, with which we are constantly involved. We are all prone to a sort of sluggishness of thought which would unreflectively assume that reality at large is ''nothing more" than the sum of its analyzable parts. But if Marcel is correct, that is not true even of our own reality as incarnate beings, and so it is certainly not adequate as a way of addressing the mystery of being. ''I cannot postulate an absolute totality, a complete and final whole, without putting myself, to some extent surreptitiously, that is, in a disguised fashion, in the place of the whole ...."12 Similarly, we tend to think that the ambiguities of experience need to be ironed out before we can see things as they really are; but Marcel suggests that those ambiguities which arise from our own involvement are to be taken, in their very opacity, as the surest guides to the real. Ricoeur, who follows Marcel in linking the notion of mystery to the question of the whole, derives thereby an important lesson for the encounter with reductionism. In briefest terms, it is the recognition that, truly to overcome reductionism, one cannot content oneself with simply opposing it. That is to say, it is not enough to assert, contra the reductionist, the element or aspect which the reductionist has neglected. For in advocating the part that has been neglected, we are still advocating a part, and thus we ourselves are well on the way toward fostering a reductionism of another sort. Simply to hold out for "freedom," for example, without making the effort to set forth an integrated viewpoint within which freedom may find its legiti-

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