Locating Europe

A Figure, a Concept, an Idea?

Rodolphe Gasché

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253054869
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Is the idea of Europe outdated? The concept of European unity, the animating spirit of the European Union, seems increasingly fragile in the face of far-right populist movements. In Locating Europe, Rodolphe Gasché attempts to answer the question of how to think about Europe. Is it a figure, a concept, or an idea? Is there anything still compelling and urgent about the idea of Europe?

By looking at phenomenologist and postphenomenological thinkers in the second half of the 20th century, Gasché reveals that Europe is more than just one geographical and cultural entity. The idea of Europe is based on common foundations: a distinctive conception of reason, of self-criticism, of responsibility, freedom, equality, human rights, and democracy, and it is these foundations that are under threat.

In Locating Europe: A Figure, a Concept, an Idea? Gasché engages the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Jaspers, Karl Löwith, and others, focuses on the most significant philosophical representations of Europe, and explores the potential, and especially the limits, of the notion of Europe.

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ARCHIPELAGO

IN CONTRAST TO EDMUND HUSSERL’S REFERENCE IN THE Vienna lecture from 1935 to Europe as a concept and, indirectly, as an idea—that is, as characterized by one unifying distinguishing trait, project, or telos—the notion of Europe as a figure suggests a plurality of individual patterns through which Europe became historically effective.¹ The belief that there are distinctly European figures not only suggests that what is proper to Europe is displayed or laid out in an array of distinct figures but also that Europe’s essence may be intimately linked to the order of the figural (and hence, perhaps, to be less unified, as a concept or idea of Europe would have it). If the essence of Europe is made up of a plurality of figures, could it be that what is proper to Europe has an intricate relation to the figural? In any case, the recourse of figures to speak of what is European implies that Europe is only properly what it is by differentiating and spreading itself out in the manifold of these figures. One may even consider the possibility that Europe is such literal Selbstauslegung—that is, first and foremost, the spatial and temporal display of itself by way of a variety of figures—that it makes Europe what it is to begin with. Europe is, possibly, nothing other than a group, chain, or constellation of figures, all clearly distinct from one another, that only enters into a constellation when these figures are drawn into relations and thus made to interconnect. To speak of what is European in terms of figures would thus seem to clash with its formulation as a concept or idea. But when it comes to defining Europe or what is European, can one cast the difference between concept and idea, on the one hand, and figures, on the other, in terms of the One and the manifold? Indeed, I would like to consider the possibility that, in the precise case of what is European, it may not be possible to neatly hold apart the conceptual and the figural. While it may be impossible to elaborate on the figures of Europe without an anticipation of sorts of what Europe means, the unifying concept of Europe may harbor such structural features that necessarily give rise to a manifold of figures. Conversely, the unity of the concept may depend on such ways by which Europe’s distinct figures are made to relate, that prevent this concept from ever having the unity of the One. This problematic relation of concept and idea, on the one hand, and figures, on the other, will guide the following investigation of one particular figure of Europe: a figure that is, perhaps, the mother of all its figures; one, moreover, that in itself is already inherently manifold.

Before taking up this figure itself, I wish to discuss briefly the concept, or rather idea of Europe, not in the context of Husserl’s philosophy but in that of Italian writer and essayist Alberto Savinio’s reflections on Europe. In Sorte dell’Europa, a collection of essays written between 1943 and 1944, Savinio contends that in order to create a unified Europe from the separate nations that at that moment made up Europe, Europe must free itself from a Ptolemaic—that is, theocratic and hence imperialist—conception of the world and enter the Copernican, or democratic age. Any attempt to unify Europe by imitating the Roman Empire, in other words, by centering it around one power or one person, is Ptolemaic in nature. Savinio opposes such a unification on the basis of an idea. He writes, “Only an idea can ‘make’ Europe. Idea: this ‘human thing’ par excellence.”² The idea of Europe is thus not a Ptolemaic, theocratic, and imperialist unification principle. Although one, this idea is not centralizing but democratic. It is not a principle of subordination and subsequent totalization. Nor is it an abstract principle whose relevance would have little or no relation to the concrete European realities. Rather, it is the “‘human thing’ par excellence,” Savinio claims. He thus characterizes ideas in general as follows: “Ideas must be easy to handle, and be portable. They must have the ‘practical forms’ that the Greeks gave to their temples, objects, and forms of spirit. The ideas themselves must have handles, or handholds.”³ Equipped with handles, the idea of Europe is a unifying principle that, unlike an abstract concept, lets itself be handled by everyone. It is a unifying principle on a horizontal rather than vertical plane.⁴ What then does this idea imply? How can it be a unifying principle without being totalitarian? In order to answer these questions, I turn to the entry “Europe” in Savinio’s Nuovo Enciclopedia, whose entries were written between 1941 and 1948. Here one reads that “Lo spirito europeo odia il grumo.” In English, “The European spirit hates that which is lumped together.” As Savinio explains, “The European intellect [intelligenza] has a very singular function. It divides and separates.”⁵ Its natural aim is the disintegration of everything coagulated, agglutinated, of “all social lumps,” and of all “totalitarian tumors,” which are anti-European by definition.⁶ What unifies Europe and constitutes it as an idea is this constant breaking up of all possible grumes, clots, clods, and lumps. “According to the Copernican conception, union is an error; it is a resistance to the natural order, and an obstacle to the perpetual course of life and its unlimited mutations.”⁷ In contrast to the Ptolemaic mind-set, “the European intellect divides the union, and polytheizes [politeizza] God,” the ultimate unifying power in the Ptolemaic conception of the world.⁸ As a result of this opposition to unification on the basis of a totalizing principle, the idea constitutive of Europe cannot be a form or an instance of the One. Savinio writes “that no idea can be put into the center of all that exists, and be considered the truest, the most beautiful, the best. Such is the ‘democracy’ of the ideas.”⁹ This idea of Europe—the principle of disintegration of anything coagulated rather than a totalizing principle—is Greek in origin, Savinio contends. “The most pure Europeanism is to be found in pre-Socratic Greece: the most European condition of Europe.”¹⁰ The names that Savinio invokes in this context are Thales, Heraclitus, and Empedocles.

Any disaggregation of lumps requires their dissolution, liquefaction, and fluidization. Is it not remarkable that, according to the first school of Western philosophy, the school of Miletus, water is held to be the substance that subtends all things and from which everything originates. What is decisive about this answer to what underlies all things and all change is, as Jeanne Hersch has observed, “the direction, the orientation toward something liquid, something fluid, that can transform itself into all things without disappearing.”¹¹ Of the many philosophers who, like Thales, conceived of water as the medium in which things lose their fixity, I mention Immanuel Kant, who writes in Critique of the Power of Judgment: “The fluid is, to all appearances, older than the solid.”¹² But above all I would like to evoke Hegel and his geophilosophical reflections on the Mediterranean Sea in The Philosophy of History. As the heart of the old world, the Mediterranean is said to be “the uniting element, and the centre of World-History,” the “forum, where all came together.”¹³ The Mediterranean has enjoyed this privileged role solely thanks to the very liquidity of its substance. As Hegel writes, “Only through the fact of being a sea, has the Mediterranean become a centre.”¹⁴ Some of his reflections on “the principle of the sea” are of particular interest here.¹⁵ The sea, he writes, “gives us the idea of the indefinite, the unlimited, and infinite; and in feeling his own infinite in that Infinite, man is stimulated and emboldened to stretch beyond the limited.”¹⁶ The sea—in Greek, pélagos—as the watery expanse confronts us with the apeiron and hence invites us to overcome all dependence on the land, the soil, and the clod. By venturing out onto this treacherous surface of water—onto an element that is all the more dangerous as it is “yielding”—not only the limitations of the land, and all dependence on it, are overcome but also what had been fixed comes into movement and turns fluid. As Hegel remarks, “The activity to which the sea invites, is a quite peculiar one: thence arises the fact that the coast-lands almost always separate themselves from the states of the interior although they are connected with these by a river.”¹⁷ In the old world, the Mediterranean is thus the element that links the three parts of the world. Such linkage implies that they separate from the fixed soil on which they were located. Greece, “the focus of light in History”; Jerusalem, the “centre of Judaism and of Christianity”; and Mecca and Medina, the “cradle [Ursitz] of the Mussulman faith” enter here into relations thus loosening the dependence on their Ursitz.¹⁸ By way of the waters they become detached from their terrestrial anchorage. They turn into so many interconnected islands, as it were, in or around the liquefying expanse. One of these “islands” is the group of islands of the Aegean Sea—the archipelago. With this I have reached the singular European figure that I wish to discuss.

In the preface to the German translation of his book L’Arcipelago, Massimo Cacciari asks, “Does Europe still remember the originary [arché] sea, the sea of the many islands related in ‘astral-friendship’ (Nietzsche)? Or more precisely, can Europe still be Mediterrean, can its thinking still be a thinking at midday?” To accomplish such Mediterraneity, the European—and, according to Cacciari, the German spirit, in particular—must recover the ability of “thinking itself in relation again, in harmony with the archipelago.”¹⁹ Repeatedly Cacciari refers to the archipelago as a figure of Europe, however, as the translation of the Greek term—“the originary [arché] sea”—intimates it is also an originary figure, comparable to what Hans Blumenberg calls an absolute metaphor. Considering the fundamental nature of this figure, Cacciari asks the radical question, “Did the archipelago ever exist? Or does it belong to a beginning more fundamental and more originary than even the first words of the European destiny?”²⁰ Possibly older than the first words of European destiny, the archipelago may be indicative of a beginning of Europe anterior to all historical and linguistic articulations of its destiny, anterior also to figures of speech and figures of thought, image, and concept. Not only that, the archipelago being a beginning older than even the first words of European destiny may refer to a beginning of Europe that is specifically European precisely in that it is not European—a beginning that, from the outset, sets Europe in relation to the non-European. In any case, from the start, Europe has, as Cacciari has shown in Geo-Filosofia dell’Europa, a “destinal relation to the fluid.”²¹ Linked to a shift of power from land to sea, the European character is in every respect determined by a relation to what is different from it that is mediated by the sea. But rather than the factual realization of the figure of the archipelago—the “islands related in astral-friendship”—Europe, during its history, may have excelled only in the hubris associated with the thalassocracy. According to Cacciari, it follows from this that “the idea of the archipelago is not one of a return to origins, but rather that of a ‘new beginning’ or also of a counter-stroke against the history and the destiny of Europe.” Consequently, the question arises, “Could Europe (still) be an archipelago? Or, rather, is this its very impossibility? . . . Could it be that in the face of Europe’s experience, after it has made land and sea pervii, it must come to a halt before this question, aporos—or that the antic sea-archipelago only e...