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xchrom

(108,903 posts) Wed Jan 25, 2012, 02:35 PM Jan 2012

A philosopher's question: What is Europe?

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/sociedad/philosopher/s/question/What/is/Europe/elpepusoc/20120119elpepusoc_6/Tes

Many philosophical and political thinkers claim that at the moment Europe is undergoing a profound spiritual crisis of orientation. Like many others, Werner Weidenfels sees the origin of the current crisis in the fact that Europe is not capable of "giving a convincing answer to the question of its own identity and its values". What is Europe, then? Paul Valéry once said: "Europe is a peninsula of Asia". In fact, there is no clear natural border between Asia and its Western subcontinent. Since antiquity there have been attempts by geographers to divide Europe off from Asia using, variously, the Ural Mountains, the Don River or, later, the Wolga River as borders. All of these attempts must be seen as acts of desperation. Thus, the only guarantor of European identity as a product of history is - as Ortega y Gasset pointed out - nothing but our common European culture. Yet the cultural landscape would seem to be much like the geographical one: Together with an immense diversity of landscapes, we find a great diversity of cultural manifestations. If one only considers the great number of languages that are spoken in Europe today, the idea that there is such a thing as a common European identity - the notion that one could even form a more or less consistent concept of "Europe" -seems illusionary, even presumptuous.

But is not the very assumption that we can adequately conceptualize reality and grasp it through ideas in itself typical of Europe and its intellectual history? Is not the very belief in the reality of reason and the rational structure of reality - which is deeply ingrained in occidental self-awareness - the element itself that constitutes the European identity? Indeed, numerous thinkers from Hegel to Husserl to Ortega have been convinced of this and regarded Europe and its history as a philosophical project. Above this, the close connection between European rationality and European humanism may be of special importance for today's Europe. Already the stoics of ancient Greece believed that man could be distinguished from other living beings by his privileged access to the rationality which inhabits the world; a belief which lead to the recognition of the uniqueness and dignity of every human person, and thus to a first form of Humanism with a cosmopolitan bend: Man - be he the citizen of a polis or a barbarian - deserves to be respected, because every single person participates by virtue of his own ability to think and to judge in the one universal reason, the so-called "logos" which is the common ground of humanity and nature. The ancient belief in the uniqueness of each individual person was greatly strengthened in the course of European history by the Judeo-Christian belief that man was made in God's image. Since, from this perspective, each human individual is, to quote Ranke, "equal to God", each human person has inalienable rights with regard to his fellow men and over and against each sort of organization. In the words of the theologian Wolfgang Huber: "The highest value is human dignity anchored in the fact that the human being was created by God.... This gives rise both to the idea that no-one should be denied the right to have rights and to an approach to human rights that links freedom and equality".

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A philosopher's question: What is Europe? (Original Post) xchrom Jan 2012 OP

The concept of "Europe" is very recent, in historical terms Scootaloo Jan 2012 #1

Scootaloo

(25,699 posts)

1. The concept of "Europe" is very recent, in historical terms

Reply to xchrom (Original post)

Wed Jan 25, 2012, 03:37 PM

Jan 2012

And ties strongly into the invention of our modern distinctions of "race" - in fact is somewhat dependent on that notion. Russia, which occupies exactly none of the European peninsula of Eurasia is considered "European" while Turkey - which does occupy territory on peninsular Europe - is not generally considered "European." Even though Turks have ruled more of Europe far longer than Russia has, and have had a much larger impact on the rest of Europe's history and culture.

This story starts back in the early 16th century, when the Americas were really getting dug into by Europeans, and the slave trade from Africa was really starting. The conquerers and slavers needed some method of excuse for what they were doing; up to this point the Americans and Africans were seen as being every bit as human as someone from France, even if their culture and religion were "questionable." The treatment of both peoples led to some definite ethical dissonance as a result. So the notion of race - "We're white, they're not" suddenly became important, and with it came a heap of excuses that made not-whites "less human." and so the slavers and conquerers became justified in their actions.

As a result of this Europe came to be "where the white people live" - but there was a rub; prior to this, the unifying factor had been religion; "Christendom." Of course, this notion only applied to the "proper" christians; most of eastern Europe was excluded, seeing as how they were Orthodox or Muslim at the time. When the Protestant revolt hit, it muddied things up even further, and resulted in race becoming the defining factor of Europe, for the most part .

This "victory" (if you want to call it such) led to the idea of Europe needing its own continent; after all, "we" cannot be a part of "them." The trouble is, like I initially mentioned, at the time Russia was "European" in Racial but not geographic terms, and the ottoman empire was the opposite way. So came the artificial borders - the Ural mountains, the Volga, etc. The notion of Europe as a continent, bolstered by old ideas of racial supremacy, has led to a LOT of weirdness and problems; I personally doubt that Hitler would have had the ambitions he did, without either notion existing. If Germany were just Germany and France were just France, and neither were part of a "greater whole," well...? Who knows.

There is no "common European culture" - unless one counts a common history rooted in Roman Catholicism. And even that is shaky and awkward, given the fact that Orthodoxy ruled most of Eastern Europe, and chunks of Eastern Europe, Iberia, and southern Italy owe as much, if not more of their culture to Islam than to the christian churches. And then you throw in Protestantism, and the whole "we're rooted in this common history" thing falls apart. If you try to wrap Europe up in a common culture derived from Rome or Greece, then you're going to extend "Europe" into Northern Africa and all through the Middle East, as well - in fact it may be more appropriate to say it's extending these regions into Europe, since Europe garnered this history largely from a reintroduction from the middle east and Africa.

There is no cultural, linguistic, geographic, or religious backing for the notion of "Europe" - it is simply a figment conjured to differentiate the conquerors from the conquered, being needlessly and ineffectually maintained by the conquerer's descendants simply because it's what they were brought up with.

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