" The sight of a world
grounded in function creates a smothering sadness. It is enough
to evoke the gloomy picture of retired persons, and also in connection
with it, the picture of city dwellers walking by on Sunday afternoons
as if they were retired from life. People who are compelled to
live by their own function and their function only, end up feeling
sick to death, which proves that a more and more inhuman social
order and an inhuman philosophy have imposed an error or a terrible
misinterpretation on defenceless minds.
St. Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Goethe,
Gide, have all known worry and disquiet. A positive disquiet,
one with an intrinsic value, is a state of mind that allows us to pull ourselves from the tightening vise of daily life with
its innumerable worries that in the end obliterate the true realities.
This disquiet is a principle of self-realization beyond the self,
it is a path we have got to climb in order to reach genuine peace
- a peace no dictatorship, no imperialism can ever disturb, for,
speaking most precisely, peace is not of this world. We are even
to think that of this peace the rich and powerful cannot have
the remotest notion. I speak of disquiet, not anguish, because
anguish always tends to shut itself into itself and runs the risk
of giving rise to a sort of sadistic pleasure, which is - or is
not - (with some psychoanalysts) to be considered as expressing
a need for self-punishment. "
Présence de Gabriel Marcel