ABSTRACT
This case, which we are going to make use of in the field of dogma as a natural analogue for an explication other than that of the logical explication of propositions, must however be examined from a different angle. The lover knows of his love: this knowledge of himself forms an essential element in the very love itself. The knowledge is infinitely richer, simpler and denser than any body of propositions about the love could be. Yet this love never lacks a
‘states’ at least to himself something about his love. And so it is not a matter of indifference to the love itself whether or not the lover continues to reflect upon it; this self-reflexion is not the subsequent description of a reality which remains in no way altered by the description. In this progressive self-achievement, in which love comprehends itself more and more, in which it goes on to state something ‘about’ itself and comprehends its own nature more clearly, the love itself becomes ordered; it has an increasing understanding of what must properly be the foundation of its own activity, mirrors its own nature with increasing clarity, approaches its own goal, with an increasingly clear awareness, what it always has been. Reflexion upon oneself (when it is accurate) in propositions (i.e. in pensees which the lover produces about his love) is thus a part of the progressive realization of love itself; it is not just a parallel phenomenon, without importance for the thing itself. The progress of love is a living growth out of the original (the originally conscious) love and out of just what that love has itself become through a reflexive experience of itself. It lives at every moment from its original source and from that reflexive experience which has immediately preceded any given moment. Original, non-propositional, unreflexive yet conscious possession of a reality on the one hand, and relexive (propositional), articulated consciousness of this original consciousness on the other – these are not competing opposites but reciprocally interacting factors of a single experience necessarily unfolding in historical succession. Root and shoot are not the same thing; but each lives by the other. Reflexive consciousness always has its roots in a prior conscious entering into possession of the reality itself. But just this original consciousness possesses itself later in a new way, such that its life is now the accomplishment of that personal act of reflexive apprehension by which it has enriched itself. Reflexive consciousness would inevitably wither if its life were not rooted in the simpler basic consciousness, or if it were to reproduce this in every particular. The simple basic consciousness would become blind if, because it is richer and fuller, it refused to allow itself to grow out into a reflexive consciousness involving ‘pensees’ and ‘propositions’.
