Part 2 of a two-part series. In Part 1, I introduced Gabriel Marcel's concept of disponibilité — an openness to the beloved as they are — balanced by creative fidelity, the ongoing renewal of that openness. It is a beautiful framework, but it has a blind spot.

When Grace Is Not Enough: Ricœur and Attestation

Marcel writes from within situations of mutual goodwill. He is thinking of the beloved who ages, the friend who fails us once, the child who does not become what we imagined. He is not thinking carefully enough about the beloved whose limitations do not merely coexist with us but operate against us: the partner whose unresolved wounds fill every room, the parent whose emotional absence quietly rewrites a child's sense of self. In these situations, disponibilité risks becoming a philosophical warrant for remaining in harm's way. Creative fidelity, taken alone, can too easily become fidelity to one's own erasure.

Paul Ricœur, in Oneself as Another, insists on a symmetry Marcel underweights. The self is not only the one who opens, gives, and endures — the self is also a who, an irreplaceable locus of meaning and moral........

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