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.