The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Europe

Darian Meacham, Nicolas de Warren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317414520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Understood historically, culturally, politically, geographically, or philosophically, the idea of Europe and notion of European identity conjure up as much controversy as consensus. The mapping of the relation between ideas of Europe and their philosophical articulation and contestation has never benefitted from clear boundaries, and if it is to retain its relevance to the challenges now facing the world, it must become an evolving conceptual landscape of critical reflection.

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Europe provides an outstanding reference work for the exploration of Europe in its manifold conceptions, narratives, institutions, and values. Comprising twenty-seven chapters by a group of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into three parts:

• 
  
  

• Europe of the philosophers
• Concepts and controversies
• Debates and horizons.

Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, politics, and European studies, the Handbook will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as sociology, religion, and European history and history of ideas.

Part 1

Europe of the philosophers

1

Europe and philosophy

Roberto Esposito

1. A philosophical continent?

What sense is there, in this dramatic moment for the destiny of the European Union, in summoning philosophy? How can its secular language interpret contemporary dynamics, which seem to go beyond the limits of reason? The first answer I would give to this question is that, in the face of events that go beyond economic choices and institutional arrangements and involve a real existential decision – that of Europe as a political subject – thought cannot but be challenged. But does an even more intrinsic answer concern the philosophical character of Europe itself?

How can we define a “philosophical” continent? I am not only talking about the fact that what we are used to calling “philosophy” for more than two thousand years was born and developed primarily in Europe, but also that Europe itself has formed itself through a necessary relationship with the dimension of (philosophical) thinking. To grasp this idea, one must begin with the balance between the two continents in their significance in world history. But this spatial contiguity with Asia, rather than leading to assimilation into its world, has been an element of distinction, even contrast, that has been decisive for Europe’s self-awareness. If we want to delimit the moment of its genesis, we must locate it with the wars of Greek city-states against the Persian Empire. As Hegel argued, in this confrontation the West became for the first time more than just a cardinal point, opening a story that is still far from over. It is precisely this conflict – not only between military powers, but also between opposing political and cultural forms – that has determined a first layer of meaning for what we have meant for centuries with the name “Europe”. At its origin, and constituent of it, is the conscious demand for a form of political life – that of the Greek Poleis – which differs fundamentally from all other existing regimes. The fact that this conflict, which it is not arbitrary to define as “philosophical”, has its own specific political significance reflects the original correspondence between the formation of the polis and the birth of philosophy. One in front of the other and one in the other.

Since its emergence, European life has been inextricably linked to the vicissitudes of politics and the work of thought. As the latter reflects from the outset a tendency to objectify itself in institutional forms, politics separates itself from naked violence, referring to assumptions of a rational nature. Although they never overlap, logos and politics, always remaining in tension, develop along lines that are more than one point of contact. Europe was marked by this contact from the beginning in a form that would condition its entire subsequent history. Not determined by natural borders, European civilisation develops its own profile on the basis of freely assumed rational assumptions. Naturally, its concrete history sometimes develops in contradiction with these same principles – according to contingent needs, material interests, and instincts of domination that often neglect them, to the point of reversing them into their opposite, without ever abandoning a problematic relationship with them, even at the time of the deepest crises; even when the logos appeared overwhelmed by destructive powers. On the contrary, it seems that it is precisely in these difficult times that Europe is returning to the constitutive force of thought, restoring the thread of communication with philosophy that characterised its origin. This happened in all the great crises that the continent has experienced: during the turbulent period before the fall of the Roman Empire, for example, when Augustine of Hippo laid the foundations for a new spiritual civilisation. In the age of religious wars, when Descartes and Hobbes founded the principles of modern science and politics. At the turn of the French revolution, interpreted by Kant and Hegel as an event with philosophical effects intended to change the history of the world. Finally, in the twenty years between the two wars, when Europe was in danger of being overwhelmed by the metaphysical confrontation between totalitarianism and democracy, which was only to end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. If all this is true, why not imagine, and even in the current situation – where once again Europe risks being caught up in division and insignificance – that philosophy could indicate, if not a solution, then at least a new way of seeing things, and even a direction to follow?

2. Europe’s first attempts at seeing Europe from outside

We have thus far discussed the dialectic between philosophy and politics which is constitutive not only of the idea of Europe, but of its historical existence even as determinate reality of the planet. It is the spatial dimension that has brought philosophy and politics together, objectifying philosophy in concrete political systems. Europe sees itself as a given space in the world and, at the same time, as a point of view on it. Since the wars with the Persian Empire, rather than defending an already defined space, it has created and redefined each time what Europe will be, advancing the line that separates it from Asia. Alexander and then Rome greatly enlarged this space, breaking previous borders and projecting a “Europe” beyond them. After the break-up of Christian unity between Catholics and Protestants, an order is created between modern states, creating a situation of balance in which each of them can exercise its power independently of the others. The exercise of political force on its own territory, the particularity of the legal order and the right to print money are the prerogatives of what Jean Bodin (1986) in Six Books of the Commonwealth (Les six livres de la république, first published in 1576) defined as “sovereignty”. It is based on the two-way relationship between politics and space, in which one is the concrete expression of the other. To manifest itself, power needs a territorial framework that makes it effective and circumscribed. Each European territory in turn belongs to a state that legitimately governs it, independently of the others. Since then, Europe has considered itself a vast space made up of smaller spaces, which are very different from a linguistic, cultural, and institutional point of view. A multiple unity, therefore, and thus fundamentally different from Asian regimes, as defined by Machiavelli and Montesquieu, alluding to the heterogeneity of its political regimes. This constitutes one more relationship linking it, in its very material constitution, to philosophy, to the indissoluble relationship between identity and difference. As Hegel and Heidegger argue from different angles, not only is identity and difference not opposed, but each is unthinkable outside its relationship with the other.

Europe lives on the diversity of its internal spaces, as long as they do not become rigid in their separation or mutual opposition. But, for it to become fully aware of its place in the world, it must compete with external spaces. I am not only thinking about the old Asian continent, from which it has separated, but about the new American continent which became opened up to the European gaze and domination. It is then, by crossing the ocean, that Europe begins to perceive the world as a sphere and itself as part of an infinitely larger whole. For the first time, Europe began to face its own “outside”. The very fact of defining it as “clean” expresses, with the awareness of its own identity, the appropriate violence of a conception that will condition the European consciousness for four centuries. Naturally, philosophers such as Las Casas and Montaigne recognised the illegitimacy of European expansion and opened a fundamental reflection on the limits of what is thought to be the only existing civilisation. With such philosophers, the European perspective acquired a self-critical dimension that radically challenges its hegemonic claim to the rest of the world. In the Persian Letters (1721), for the first time, Montesquieu tries to look at Europe from the outside. But already in Giordano Bruno’s thought, the Eurocentric perspective had broken into an infinite number of points of view, just as the worlds of an unlimited universe appear infinite. After Galileo and Copernicus, no one can deny the spherical nature of the earth anymore. And on the surface of a sphere, it is not possible to fix a central point to which all others are subordinate.

The Enlightenment introduces an even more radical element into this perspective. In authors such as Voltaire and Rousseau, although different from each other, reason enters into an increasingly decisive relationship with power. Once again, and increasingly, philosophy shows its constitutive function in the formation of modern Europe. Kant’s thinking is at the top of this trend. In his essay, “What Is Enlightenment” (1996 [1784]), Kant proposes a re-reading of the evolution of modern Europe in the light of a reason that tends to spread even outside its space. The fact that, as Kant claims, violence committed in one corner of the world negatively affects the entire surface of the earth means that the artificially designed boundaries of politics should be subject to superior judgement, based on non-negotiable values. The right of asylum and cosmopolitan law of all those living in the world reflect this new and radical awareness in Kant’s policy making. With it, the sphericity of the earth acquires a connotation never before recognised. This means not only that no single point can claim to organise the rest of the planet to its advantage, but also that every human being must be able to move everywhere without losing their rights. That the earth is a sphere means that human beings can meet and coexist without oppressing each other, according to the regime that Kant himself defines as “republican”. Certainly, it can be argued – as Hegel will – that these Kantian writings, starting from the one on perpetual peace, are shaped in an utopian vein, in a world still dominated by the power of individual states, but we cannot fail to recognise in Kant a universalist breath that invests the great questions of our time with an intelligence that seems numb today.

3. State and territory

What is at stake in the opposition between Kant and Hegel is a highly topical issue – the relationship between the state order and the global horizon. We must not lose sight of the historical terms of the problem and overwhelm it with our contemporary perspective. Compared to Kant’s cosmopolitan project, Hegel’s view – which places the state order at the top of the spirit’s life – is much more in tune with a historical era characterised by the birth and unbridled development of the idea of a nation. Without this, the state would have appeared as a pure formal body, a bureaucratic shell, devoid of the historical substance necessary to unite a people around the same goal. In this sense, Hegel can affirm that the state is the most complete form of modern history, understood as the institutional objectification of living thought. But the political order that appears at its peak during this period soon began to show its first cracks. The turning point was the transition from the idea of a nation, spread by the French Revolution, to that of nationalism and then imperialism, intended to lead Europe towards totalitarianism and war, as Stephan Zweig, soon to be exiled, warned in his 1932 “appeal to Europeans”.

It is significant that the moment of the greatest territorial expansion of the European powers coincides with the general crisis of Europe, which was soon overcome, and crushed, by Russia and America, as Tocqueville had intuited at an early stage, and as it was reconstructed by the German jurist, both brilliant and ambiguous, Carl Schmitt, in the Nomos of the Earth (2006 [1950]). But is Europe’s loss of influence attributable to the category of sovereignty? Or does it depend, on the contrary, on its weakening? To this question, which is at the heart of a broad debate between historians, philosophers, and lawyers, it is necessary to provide a balanced answer. From an historical point of view, the idea of sovereignty has had an undeniable importance in modern history, not only in Europe. Without sovereign states, modern Europe would not have been able to resist the dissolving forces that have invested it. Nation-states contained within their borders conflicts of a social, ethnic and religious nature that would otherwise have destroyed European civilisation. After all, even today, the state remains by far the most widespread political organisation in the world, both outside and inside Europe. This does not prevent the fact that, from a given moment, marked by the collapse of the Soviet empire, it is no longer sufficient to govern the socio-cultural dynamics that have profoundly transformed the now globalised planet.

These dynamics have brought about a profound transformation of life worlds, which can no longer be managed within the borders of nation-states, precisely because they are beyond them in every respect. Already, the financial economy and information technology are in themselves exempt from territorial limitations, as are major environmental problems. On the one hand, there is the exponential growth in migration flows and, on the other hand, the explosion of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. It is clear that none of these phenomena can be confined within restricted organisms. It is no coincidence that the powers that dominate the world from a political, military, and financial point of view are indeed states, but states with a continental dimension, such as the United States, Russia, and China. In this situation, Europe’s only hope of survival in the face of the tide that is likely to submerge it is that of its political integration.

The reasons for the difficulties encountered in such integration are well known. The choice, which became necessary in the 1950s, to limit integration into the economic sphere proved to be dramatically wrong. To think that political unity would follow the economy and then lead to the creation of the single currency was doubly illusory. First of all, because the economy, like the market, is global and not continental in scope; second, because it will have resulted, as we have seen during these years of crisis, in the non-reconnection of European states on the basis of their respective interests. But an even greater difficulty, because implicit in this very political logic, lies in the absence of a E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Europe: myths, mappings, and meaning
• Part 1 Europe of the philosophers
• Part 2 Concepts and controversies
• Part 3 Debates and horizons
• Index