Tag: Galileo Galilei

Is the World Broken?

Gabriel Marcel was a famous 20th century existence-watcher. He kept circling back to conundrums which preoccupied him his entire life.

The first was how to explain the profound difference between a problem and a mystery. He says, for example, that a problem is something that you can surround, but a mystery is something that surrounds you. He also calls into doubt the ideology of scientism (the belief that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality). According to scientism, the story of mankind since the rise of modern science, with people such as Galileo, is the transformation of all mysteries into problems. With the passage of time, those problems would be solved. However, when we look around us at such science-thinkers like Roger Penrose, Neil Turok and Carlo Rovelli, we find that science is becoming more mysterious and the mysteries are increasingly deep, as anyone who follows quantum mechanics can see.

For the second he kept asking, how it is that I both have a body but that I am a body? Think of the phrase “I am somebody” and notice the last word. The physical body cannot be disentangled from personhood.

In 1933, Marcel published the famous play, Le Monde cassé (French: The Broken World). Compare that to the previous article, “Why Is the World So Nightmarish?” discussing Céline’s 1932 Journey to the End of the Night (French: Voyage au bout de la nuit). Both of these works describe a human world which is completely adrift, disoriented and soulless.

As an existential thinker, Marcel always watched humanity and did a soul-audit. He was not particularly attentive to the other dimension of our earthly stay, namely political economy. In order to make up for this semi-absence, we bring in Gustav Stresemann, who gives us the lens for it. Stresemann died within weeks of the Wall Street crash of 1929.

A few days before his death, Stresemann, the leading German statesman of his time, gave a speech at the League of Nations. In this, he gave an update on the German economic situation of the moment. He stated that the numbers were superficially encouraging, but that Germany, under the surface, was “dancing on a volcano.”

The concept of a country or indeed the whole world in these straits is very profound. It tells us that as people like Céline and Marcel warn us, the world is potentially broken at all moments because the people do not even have a concept of self-possession. Furthermore, the cracks underneath the foundation of the world economy indicate a dangerous fragility at all times. In this larger sense, Marcel’s concept of the broken world combined with Stresemann’s dancing on a volcano, allow us to glimpse an instability that current education does not cover.

Education and Ambiguity Awareness: A Polyvalent World

Sleepwalkers and sleepwalking are both destructive and constructive and show us the ambiguity in all phenomena.

The World War I chronicle of Professor Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, from 2012, is described this way:

On the morning of June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek, arrived at Sarajevo railway station, Europe was at peace. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. The conflict that resulted would kill more than fifteen million people, destroy three empires, and permanently alter world history.

The Sleepwalkers reveals in gripping detail how the crisis leading to World War I unfolded. Drawing on fresh sources, it traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts among the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade.

Distinguished historian Christopher Clark examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks.

How did the Balkans—a peripheral region far from Europe’s centers of power and wealth—come to be the center of a drama of such magnitude? How had European nations organized themselves into opposing alliances, and how did these nations manage to carry out foreign policy as a result? Clark reveals a Europe racked by chronic problems—a fractured world of instability and militancy that was, fatefully, saddled with a conspicuously ineffectual set of political leaders. These rulers, who prided themselves on their modernity and rationalism, stumbled through crisis after crisis and finally convinced themselves that war was the only answer.

On the other hand, the great science writer and intellectual Arthur Koestler (died in 1983) in his own book, The Sleepwalkers, (originally, 1959) argues that the revolution in cosmology associated with the names of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, et al depended on visionary thinking, a kind of “sleepwalking.”

Lastly, the classic novel, The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch (died in 1851) condemns sleepwalking as the basis of Europe and Germany’s descent into nightmare.

Important works by Broch are The Sleepwalkers (German: “Die Schlafwandler,” 1932) and The Guiltless (German: “Die Schuldlosen,” 1950). The Sleepwalkers is a trilogy, where Broch takes “the degeneration of values” as his theme. Various generations are depicted as sleepwalking through their times and eras without any ability to “see past” their time, place, era. They were “sleepwalking.” This made them liable to demagogic deceptions and recruitment.

On the other hand, the experience and story of Kekulé (died 1896) and his scientific discoveries prodded by dreams and reveries and sleepwalking give us a story that argues against seeing sleepwalking as always negative:
Kekulé’s dream and “good kinds of sleepwalking.”

Friedrich August Kekulé, later Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz (7 September 1829 – 13 July 1896), was a German organic chemist. From the 1850s until his death, Kekulé was one of the most prominent chemists in Europe, especially in theoretical chemistry. He was the principal founder of the theory of chemical structure.

The new understanding of benzene (C6H6), and hence of all aromatic compounds, proved to be so important for both pure and applied chemistry after 1865 that in 1890 the German Chemical Society organized an elaborate appreciation in Kekulé’s honor, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first benzene paper.

Here Kekulé spoke of the creation of the theory.

He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient symbol known as the ouroboros).

Kekulé’s story of “dreaming up” the structure of benzene (C6H6) gives us another historical example of Arthur Koestler-type “good sleepwalking” ie visionary dreams and reveries that really enhance “objective” concrete scientific analysis and not only art works.

It is educational to see the inner ambiguity of words and phenomena (such as sleepwalking) because this duality and “polyvalence” applies to many cases.