Translations - Content
- Andrei Marga - What is Europe?
- Andrei Marga - The European man
- Andrei Marga - Between euphoria and epitaph
Andrei Marga What is Europe?
[Translated by THEODORA-EVA STANCEL]
“What is Europe?” it is a recurrent question, for both Europeans and non-Europeans. I would like to briefly respond to it in five theses (that I have unfolded with sufficient details in the volume Andrei Marga, The philosophy of European unification, EFES, Cluj, 2004.
T he first thesis is that Europe has a mythological connotation, a geographical one (the space between the Atlantic and the Ural Mountains, the Arctic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea), a historical connotation ( the participation to the movement that have given the institutional shapes of the continent, from the creation of the polis, passing through the Judeo-Christian tradition, the modern revolution in knowledge, in economy and law, to the defense of the open society), and a cultural connotation ( the cultivation of the trustful attitude that characterizes factual analysis, fallibility, and critical spirit).We must admit that, in conformity to the European union’s view point, begining with the Rome Treaty (1957) , geography and history are indispensable conditions to the European membership, but this is first and foremost an institutional and cultural process. However, the placement within the continental geography and history is not a sufficient reason in order to qualify, today, as a European.
The second thesis, considers the fact that, after a long time of defining Europe in report with ancient and the middle ages Asia, today we can no longer obtain a sufficiently valid concept upon Europe, a precise concept for the sake of analysis, without taking into consideration new milestones, such as the United States of America and modern Asia. It is only on the basis of the extensive approaches of universal history, meaning hither of the consecrated euro-centrism, that we can give a satisfactorily connotation of Europe. Neither Hegel, nor Nietzsche, however crucial the comparisons they had made, remain today or even more closer to us, Coudenhove-Kalergi, are no longer enough.
The third thesis is that Europe cannot be reduced to the technical meaning (participation to political alliances, military blocks, nominal economical organizations, however important these may be), continuing to be tied to cultural ideals. Europe is a reality, but a reality in progress. On the other hand, we are the successors of three major scissions registered in the history of the continent: “the confessional scission”, that advanced from Byzantium to Luther and Calvin” “the political scission”, that outlined itself from Cromwell to the French revolution; “the cognitive scission” that ascended from Newton to Dilthey. Whoever wants to understand Europe must take into consideration the scissions and of course the “ sources” or multiple “legacies” of the European culture, that a good tradition of meditation from Nietzsche, through Andre Philipe (Pour une politique Europeene, 1958/ For a European politics) , to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Europa- verpflichtendes Erbe fur die Christen, 1988) has been convincingly identified. Even more, today we can no longer sufficiently define Europe without considering the “separation from the old Europe”-that Proudhon signaled in dramatic tones, and Baudelaire, Kierkegaard and Dostoievski have apocalyptically presented- and without reacting to the two “attempts to withdraw Europe from “Europeanism”’; the one ventured by nationalist-socialism , that had demanded the abandonment of the humanist and Christian component, that of the rationalist and illuminist one, of the European culture, and that undertaken by communism, which pretended the leaving of the individualist and liberal component, of the critical rationalism promoted by the European culture. Europe’s actual significance has analytical and action-leading capacity, only if it is resulting from a process of learning towards these directions given by the “scissions”, by the “sources” and by the “legacies” of the European culture.
The fourth thesis commences from the observation that, that, which we name “culture” covers more than just philosophical ideas, artistic symbols, scientific theories and ideological programs. Culture signifies all that, of course, although together with their conscription in forms of the social experience of the human life. Thus being the state of affairs, it is time to overpass the multitude of essayistic (more lyrical) approaches of the European culture, which commit the monist reduction to a singular determination (“ intellectual rationalism” or the “economy of profit”, or the “self-sufficient individuality”, or “the free reflection” or other factors). We need a systematic approach that can identify various of Europe’s “sources” or “legacies” and considers several factors that grant its specific character (at least from the 11th century onwards, since we can talk about Europe in today’s relevant acception). From this point of view the Europe that has been assumed after the unification started by the Rome Treaty, can be characterized by: the conditioning of the productive competence by a continuous technical competence, based on modern science; economical behavior characterized by economic rationality and controlled by the productivity principle; the approach of the administration based on the efficiency principle; the culture of the right that promotes the individual as subject and purpose of that very right; sovereignty and general character of the law; the placement of values on the basis of individual freedom and the conceiving of liberty as autonomy; the deriving of the political will from the public debate of problems with a general character, with the prevalence of the arguments in discussion; the continuous communication of intellectual reflexivity, and the problems of the humane living of life- all these together. It may be that on other continents these determinations (the level of scientific development, productivity, democracy etc) are more strongly represented. Still, Europe remains the culture that created them, but the evolution of our continent today, is connected to their affirmation.
The fifth thesis refers to the European tradition. Europe’s history has been for a long time the main stage of unfolding the universal history. After the Second World War and after the adoption of the Rome Treaty (1957) the situation has changed. The new world situation- within which Europe is no longer the main historical stage, but in which Europeans have found the energy, the wisdom and the will to unite-puts to the test that which we currently name “European tradition”. This is no longer sufficient for orientation, even if the well-understood European tradition is a constant thesaurus bringer of advantages. Europe’s new situation demands us to be conscious of this thesaurus, but also of the fact that traditions alone cannot solve the problems of the people. The reflexive use of tradition and the availability towards learning and innovation, remain, as well, indispensable to the recovered Europe.
Andrei Marga - The European man
[Translated by Theodora-Eva Stancel]
One of the most specialized contemporary Italian philosophers-most probable the main philosophical personality that succeeds Norberto Bobbio and Gianni Vattimo’s generations- gave, not long ago, the most documented and persuasive discourse in favor of the regaining of the “European man”. It is about Giovanni Reale, with his book Radici culturali e spirituali dell’Europa. Per una rinascita dell’ “uomo europeo” (Raffaello Cortina Editore, Milano, 2003,188 p.)
The Milanese philosopher starts from a premise found in Max Scheler’s reflections, who wrote (in Vom Ewigen in Menschen, 1920): “Never and nowhere did the legitimate institutions create, all alone, a genuine community.” His diagnosis is that the adoption of the European Constitution will be a big step forward, in the succession of the “establishing” of Europe’s unique currency, but that this step will not bring the wanted results in the law field, as long as a “European man” does not exist. In other words, besides the proliferation of the “European people”, the European Constitution remains a “nome vuoto senza concetto”. “I am convinced, writes Giovanni Reale- that the ‘European unity’ is necessary not just in the juridical, economical and political sense, but mostly in the spiritual sense. A common European house cannot be constructed without rebuilding, not only the idea of Europe, but mostly, the idea of the European man, in conformity with his identity” (p.XXVI). Therefore, for the constructors of the European Constitution, it is brought forth, in the first instance, the problem of “the construction of the self”/ “costruire il costruttore e la cosa piu difficile da fare, ma anche, oggi, la piu urgente”(p.XXVIII). The author of the book Radici culturali e spirituali dell’Europa takes in his support the conception of the Constitution from the systems of some philosophers , such as Habermas, as “historical project, that each generation begins, once again, to take forward”, and also diagnoses, such as the one of Hermann Broch (1918), according to which “the Man who used to be in other times God’s image, the mirror of universal value who’s bearer he was, is no longer as such”, as also, Husserl and Patocka’s warnings regarding the need for reflexivity as condition of a life worthy of humans.
The thesis that Giovanni Reale brings in the foregrounds of contemporary debates is that we as well as the European community, we need a cultural awakening, eminamently spiritual in nature. “Therefore, the ‘European house’ cannot be properly built, if it is not constructed in the very heart of the ‘European man’. In other words, the ‘European house’ cannot exist if the one who will inhabit it is not, and does not feel European.”(p .XXVI)
In order to show what it means the concept of “European man”, the author of the book Radici culturali e spirituali dell’Europa seeks to clarify “how was Europe born and constituted and to help the ‘European man’ ‘to know himself’ and in consequence, to ‘be reborn’”. He captures within the arch of a reconstructive analysis the major steps towards the articulation of the European self-consciousness and then, those of its blurring. “Particularly, Giovanni Reale confesses, I tried to adequately point out not only the main cultural and spiritual fundaments that gave birth to ‘the idea of Europe’, but also the motives that determined the ‘oblivion’ of fundaments”( p.XXVII). According to the philosopher’s belief, the effects of “the great scientific-technical revolution of the modern and contemporary age”, have not only denoted Europe, but following the line of collateral effects, “have contributed in various ways to the confinement of modern people within the platonic ‘cave’ (p.XVII).
Giovanni Reale puts to value, in the service of a personal idea, almost all the significant research consecrated by Europeans to Europe during the last decades: from Nietzsche, Husserl (Die Krisi…,1936) and Heidegger (Europa und die deutsche Philoophie, 1936), passing through Hans Georg Gadamer, Edgar Morin, Jan Patocka, to Manfred Riedel, Jurgen Habermas, Remi Brague, Maria Zambrano. Radici culturali e spirituali dell’Europa is one of the most cultivated and profound books about Europe that were published in the new century. The obvious retort is addressed to neo liberal approaches (such as those represented by Ralf Dahrendorf, who in 1997 anticipated a “European spring” caused by the adoption of the Euro), that he considered “reductive” (p.26) as the European evolution derives from the simple monetary change.
Against this pragmatism denuded of principles, Giovanni Reale does not hesitate to invoke the author of The Republic, with the idea of “the state as projection of the citizen’s soul” and of “justice and injustice that lie in man’s heart” and talk about “the actuality of Plato’s message” (p.29). He lets himself visibly influenced by another of Ernst Junger’s metaphor(after he had offered Heidegger the metaphor of the “society of total mobilization”), the one according to which “ l’uomo non deve dimenticare che le immagini che ora lo terrorizzano sono la proiezione della sua interita”(p.30-31). Giovanni Reale rebuilds the European conscience’s evolutionary steps from the point of view of Plato’s realization.
Let’s stop, as briefly as possible, over these steps that actually contain another identification of Europe’s “roots” during these last decades.
Giovanni Reale places the beginning of Europe, following Husserl’s footsteps, in the theoretic mentality of the ancient Greek, more exactly, in their replacement of the “culture of orality” by the mythical obedience, and that of the “culture of the image”, of magical origin, by “rational concepts”. The “Cultural revolution” within which Socrates played an overwhelming role, made possible the “platonic theory of ideas”, that the author of the book Radici culturali e spirituali dell’Europa names “ ‘Magna Carta’ della metafisica occidentale”(p.45), that brings “un nuovo livello di razionalita” (p.48). Science, actually science shaped by geometry (after the Egyptians perfected the arithmetic connected to practical activities of agricultures and fruit growing), astronomy, medicine created by the Greeks, Aristotle’s reflections about knowledge as determination of particular realities by help of general concepts, and the platonic theory of man’s “salvation” through the raise to the “general”, forms, as Heidegger has shown in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) a major beginning of philosophy and of Europe. Christianity came on the path of the Greeks’ passage from cosmocentrism to anthropocentrism and brought the understanding of man as “person”. “Completado e perfenzionando il pensiero veterotestamentario, il messagio cristiano capovolge in maniera radicale la visione greca” (p.81). The Greeks remained, in the end, inclusively in the anthropocentric tendencies of Socratics, to cosmocentric visions, but it was the merit of the Church’s Fathers, and especially of Grigore of Nazianz, that the man’s representation as the “image of God” was rendered valuable.
The Christian philosophers and theologians from Capadochia have formulated and imposed in an exemplary way the idea of the man as being that contains in himself, in his very ephemeral (sua picolezza), an extraordinary grandeur” (p.84). Augustine and Thomas D’Aquinas gave “the paradigmatic formulation of man’s absolute value” inside a metaphysics based on “the love of your neighbor (Christian agape) and on the belnging to “the body of Christ” within the Church (p.88-89). Then, “individualism”, “totalitarianism”, “collectivism”, “humanism” occupied the scene, while blurring the representation of man as “person”. Nietzsche would react to this new situation, and Michel Foucault, in the sixties, would indicate the end of the era that’s signaled by the famous philosopher of the “crisis of reason”.
Giovanni Reale is one of the most competent philosophical advocates of the return, today, to the Christian approach to man and society. After John Dewey attracted attention over the democratic indispensability of a religious vision over the human destiny, (The Ethics of Democracy 1898), Ernst W. Bockenforde has shown that the procedural democracy cannot generate the cultural resources necessary for its maintenance ( Der Staat als Vorgang der Sakularisierung, 1967), and Habermas and Ratzinger argued (in 2004) in favor of the putting in motion of new cultural resources, come from Europe’s Judeo-Christian tradition, the argumentation from Radici culturali e spirituali dell’Europa is refreshening. “The only possible therapy is the one based on the retrieval of the sense and value of man as person. Europe was built on this concept, and its rebirth can only start from it” (p.95). Christianity remains the most capable approach to support this rebirth, here, the man having the ability to “regain the personal reality’s sense of complexity and value, as a “person”, a value that transcends the value of any other reality” (p.97). For Europe, a genuine deliverer is the “person” that lets himself be motivated by incomparably more profound ideals than the actual conformism.
Giovanni Reale saw with sagacity, the origins of social conformism in the ambiguities of the “scientific-technical revolution” and its “perverse” effects: “scientism as ideology” (such as Steven Weinberg’s thesis on the “solitude of science”), the sliding of the modern era’s “humanism” into the “inhuman” (as Henri de Labac said “an exclusivist humanism is an inhuman humanism”, in La Dramma de l’humanisme) , the undermining of the global nature of the work together with its indefinite multiplication, “the technological contraction of language”, the reduction of “wisdom” to “information”, as effect of the “informational bomb” (p.122), “the impoverishment of the spiritual life” on the background of the expansion of the Internet, the manipulation of the “public opinion”( p.127), the “oblivion” of uninterested contemplation (p.130). Together these stand only as epochal technological successes, but denote, in the same time, “Europe’s tiredness” (p.132), that finds symptoms in spreading of the “metaphysics of uncertainty” ( of the “uncertainty of certainty”, as Peter Wust says), against which it must be made a large “anamnesis”. “ The occident finds its unity in this hereditariness, in Christianity and the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome and Israel, through which passing through two thousand years of Christianity, we reach our origins” (p.144).
Thus, Europe’s rich hereditary anamnesis is the path towards its rebirth.
Andrei Marga - Between euphoria and epitaph
[Translated by THEODORA- EVA STANCEL]
In the United States of America it is developing an evaluation of the changes that occur in Europe, which deserves attention, not only because it represents an external point of view (therefore less tainted by the subjectivity of experience) but also because of the high qualification of the authors. In the nineties for example, Stanley Hoffman pointed out with lucidity and precise knowledge, that which cannot be achieved on the old continent. Not long ago, George Weigle, in his The Cube and the Cathedral. Europe, America and Politics without God, reconsidered the crisis of direction in the new Europe. A few months before, Walter Laquer, launched one of the most provocative books ever written about Europe: The last days of Europe. Epitaph for an old continent ( St. Martin’ds Press, New York, 2007, 244 p).The book’s thesis is disturbing : after a period of “delusion”- that unclear state of tendency mixture, in which it is hoped that things will eventually develop forward, even if there are difficulties- Europe entered the decline. However this does not mean, „collapse”. „Even though the decline of Europe is now irreversible, there is no reason for it to become a collapse”.( p.226) „Decline” does not mean anything else but gradual attenuation and the disappearance of the characteristics that have particularized Europe during its long classical and modern history.
It is worth mentioning that The last days of Europe it is due to one of the most specialized historians of the present period. Previously, Walter Laqueur gave, among others, Europe since Hitler (1970), A History of Zionism (1972), The age of terrorism (1987), Fascism: Past, Present, Future (1996), The changing face of anti-Semitism(2006), volumes that not only had changed historiography, but they also shaped contemporary consciousness. With his new volume he reacts, simultaneously to the European euphoria, and to the euphoric historiography. Mark Leonard, for example, impressed by the unification and the extension that Europe achieved, had published Why Europe will run the 21st century (2005), in which he stated that the century we had entered belonged to Europe, and Tony Judt, in his extended monographic work Post War (2005), has asserted that the century would still belong to our continent. On the other hand Jean-Claude Chesnais drew the attention (already, in his book of La transition demografique) towards the fact that the authorities, including the international ones, give in to a superficial optimism when they ignore the demographic side of contemporary evolutions. Walter Laquer reacts to the evolutions that credit Europe’s future by signaling its very decline.
However, which are the facts on which is based his diagnosis? Walter Laquer, invokes, with undeniable quantity indicators a decisive change: the European’s demographic decline in Europe (p.23), in absolute and relative terms( even during periods of growth the native Europeans accumulate less than other global populations). This decline- with large civilization consequences- it is closely tied to the decline of the family cell (which is, as effect of relativism in progress, considered to be “out fashioned”), which is conditioned, in turn, by the change of the woman’s role in society (p.24). For the first time in history, the population over sixty years old outruns the up to twenty-five years old one. The demographic decline is sustained in its destabilizing consequences for Europe, by the new phenomenon of “the refusal of cultural integration”. Formerly, immigrants used to be integrated into the communities in which they entered, by sharing their culture, institutions and rules. The Jewish Diaspora offers the best experiences, in which it is the immigrants that come to edifyingly represent their country of adoption’s culture. At the other pole, against all odds, the new generations of youths from Islamic families from the Occident no longer integrate, but rebel against their adoptive country (p.41). The personalities that used to come from the assimilated Jews, such as the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Attaturk, are now, from the very beginning suspected by the new generations. It is telling the fact that an influential author such as Tariq Ramadan (with his To be a European Muslim, 1999, or Western Muslim and the future of Islam, 2003), urges the migration of Arabic origin to live in harmony with the native people but to maintain their specificity (p.98). Considering things from another angle, terrorist groups as organizational grounds prefer European countries; Europe continues to proceed “naively” and “in the fight against terrorism, the European governments receive little support from the part of the Muslim communities” (p.103). Over all, one may say that the multicultural formula reduced to the simple coexistence of diverse cultures, begins to be provoked to change by the very problems of European security.
Walter Laquer doesn’t find factors strong enough to diminish Europe’s cultural-demographic problem. On the contrary, he finds supplementary clues, of other nature, of “Europe’s irreversible decline”. A good example is the fundamental incertitude considering the future of European unification (p.108), which is resulted, not necessarily from the insufficient economic development, as it is usually believed (p.115), but from deeper causes and has as clues, among others, the incapacity to elaborate the common external affairs and defense policy. Considering this state of affairs, Walter Laquer states that Europe is governed today by “ a wishful thinking” rather than a lucid thinking (p.121). On the other hand, the progressive downfall of the “welfare state” occurs in Europe under the conditions of resistance to indispensable reforms. The project of such a state, depends, otherwise, on an economic capacity that remains difficultly to attain, as also on the international competition, within which Europe is no longer the first player (p.134). In this Circumstances, the demographic decline and the incapacity of immigration’s cultural integration, appear once more in their utter gravity.
Researches, such as that of Walter Laquer have the merit of drawing attention, with irrefutable arguments, upon the problems that have been too little put to debate. The demographic and cultural integration problems are among these. Even though we cannot derive from the existence of a problem, its insolubility ( in fact, there are numerous cases of successful cultural integration, that must be taken into consideration!), and the epitaph appears to be premature (Europe has found some other times the resources to rebuild itself!), these very problems make the euphoria to be unrealistic. Between the dominant euphoria and the epitaph in the horizon, it must therefore, be first and foremost found a lucid approach. However, a lucid approach is no longer possible without visions.