A New Europe in Search of its Soul

Abstract: Contrary to the conventional wisdom and assumptions of some prominent politicians, diplomats and bureaucrats, the fountainhead of the idea of Europe is not found in Machiavellian considerations of real-politik, nationalism, and “will to power,” but rather in a “will to truth” rooted in the imaginative thinking of various visionaries, mostly philosophers and poets, within the Western wisdom tradition, beginning with Heraclitus in ancient Greece, all the way to our contemporary Derrida. They continue to urge the ancient counsel: “Europa, nosce te ipsum!” and to ask the crucial question: "Quo vadis Europa"?

“As far as I am concerned, any people who have been influenced throughout history  

 by Greece, Rome and Christianity are Europeans.” 

                                                                                  --Paul Valery

“I never feel so European as when I enter a cathedral.”

                                                                                 --Robert Schuman

“Shall we leave the old Europe to journey toward a Europe that does not exist yet?

 Or, shall we journey back, toward the Europe of origins?” 

                                                                                 --Jacques Derrida

In the previous essay we have briefly analyzed Kurt Hold’s survey of the origins of the European cultural identity as traceable to the ancient Greeks, especially Heraclitus and Parmenides. Hold contents that science, democracy, and religion are integral parts of the idea of Europe, what we have come to know as Western civilization, as distinct from other cultures of the world. At its origins science and philosophy were one and the same. The dichotomy between the two occurred much later in the 17th century. The Italian Renaissance was the second beginning which cannot be understood apart from the synthesis of Graeco-Roman culture and Christianity, i.e., Humanism. The break between science and religion occurs later with the Enlightenment. Hold sees religion as a sine qua non for the foundation and the understanding of any civilization. This is a Vichian axiom. Some of the characteristics of Western civilization are: unbounded curiosity and thirst for knowledge, openness to change, to the new and the foreign, to fresh beginnings, in tandem with respect for the traditional and the historical. Part of this idea called the West, is that Man is his own history, as Vico also teaches. This idea is not only universal in principle, but it is global in as much as it includes the American and Australian continents, and indeed, any part of the world affected by it.

One might ask: who are the modern visionary thinkers who have thought about the idea of Europe and have in some way modified it, or contributed to its further development? Contrary to what is often taken for granted, the foundation of this idea, which has haunted Europe’s imagination for millennia, is not to be found within considerations of real-politik: military, economic, political power, so dear to a Machiavelli, a Napoleon or a Mussolini; but rather within the thinking of numerous philosophers and poets. We shall refrain from examining the countless poets and authors such as Dante (already examined in another essay) Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Pasternak, Havel, C.S. Lewis, Said, and we could continue for another two pages. Nevertheless, the approach of this essay is not rationalistic-Cartesian; hence the opening quote is from a poet, Paul Valery, who also had much to say on the subject. Especially noteworthy is his analysis in one of his essays of Hamlet as European man and of the ghosts of Europe.

We shall limit ourselves to a smattering of the most important philosophers who themselves made a serious contribution to the idea of Europe; some of them will be merely mentioned. I am indebted for this list of important modern European philosophers to my friend and colleague Francesco Tampoia who delivered a whole lecture in Spain