The emperor's new clothes 343 very framework of his existence. The word “normal” which he once made use of in a way which now seems to him so imprudent, is emptied of its significance—let us say at least that it is suddenly, as it were, marked by a sign which makes it appear in a new and disturbing light. (Gabriel Marcel, Problematic Man, Herder and Herder, 1967) Marcel is quite aware that there are no concepts or categories that can resolve this crisis: Let us now go back to the questions which the barracks man was asking himself: Who am I? What sense does my life have? It is obvious that one does not resolve these questions by saying to this man (or to myself if I ask them of myself): You are a rational animal An answer of this kind is beside the point. I said earlier that meaninglessness was spreading: that is to say that I, who have a profession, a country, means of existence, etc., cannot help but turn these questions somehow towards myself. Why is this so? Let us reason a contrario, and suppose that I shut myself up prudently, jealously, in that favored category where these questions do not arise. But if I have really managed, by an effort of imagination, to put myself in the place of the barracks man, it is through his eyes that I will be brought to consider the step by which I placed myself once and for all in the category of the privileged, who know who they are, and what they are living for. In other words, by the combined action of imagination and reflection, I have been able to bring about a change which bears not only upon the object, but upon the subject himself, the subject who questions. However, he seems to favor the illusion that these dilemmas are ideological in origin rather than a consequence of a reprograming of the human environment in its sensory modes. The rear-view mirror is the favorite instrument of the philosophical historian: In particular, one can hardly contest the fact that nationalism in its modern, post-revolutionary form is the product of an ideology that developed in the eighteenth century and combined, under conditions very difficult to state precisely, with a pre-romanticism whose origins seem to be found in Rousseau. Abandoned to its own inclination, this ideology led to a kind of cosmopolitanism of reason. The nationalism which issued from the French Revolution