European Thought and Culture, 1350-1992

Burdens of Knowing

Michael J. Sauter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000395495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book explores the main currents of European thought between 1350 and 1992, which it approaches in two principal ways: culture as produced by place and the progressive unmooring of thought from previously set religious and philosophical boundaries.

The book reads the period against spatial thought's history (spatial sciences such as geography or Euclidean geometry) to argue that Europe cannot be understood as a continent in intellectual terms or its history organized with respect to traditional spatial-geographic categories. Instead we need to understand European intellectual history in terms of a culture that defined its own place, as opposed to a place that produced a given culture.

It then builds on this idea to argue that Europe's overweening drive to know more about humanity and the cosmos continually breached the boundaries set by venerable religious and philosophical traditions. In this respect, spatial thought foregrounded the human at the unchanging's expense, with European thought slowly becoming unmoored, as it doggedly produced knowledge at wisdom's expense. Michael J. Sauter illustrates this by pursuing historical themes across different chapters, including European thought's exit from the medieval period, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, and war and culture, offering a thorough overview of European thought during this period. The book concludes by explaining how contemporary culture has forgotten what early modern thinkers such as Michel de Montaigne still knew, namely, that too little skepticism toward one's own certainties makes one a danger to others.

Offering a comprehensive introduction to European thought that stretches from the late fourteenth to the late twentieth century, this is the perfect one-volume study for students of European intellectual history.

1
IMAGINING EUROPE

I begin this study of European thought and culture by calling into question the Europeanness of my own narrative. Europe’s creeping domination of our globe, beginning especially in 1492 and running up through 1945, implicates all contemporary readers within the intellectual currents that this book reconstructs. One must be cognizant of this legacy because the manner in which we know things (including our physical world, the human past in general, and European history in particular) has been profoundly influenced by Europe’s rise and diffusion around the globe. Thus, if we wish to think about European intellectual history in fully historical terms, we must recognize that Europeans taught the world to imagine the many spaces and places where humans have lived and continue to live. Put another way, we know the world in an inherently European way, since the intellectual infrastructure that undergirded the original “discovery” of the world perdures—and it is precisely this infrastructure that allows everyone to imagine a globe on which peoples have their “places.”

In this respect, any history of European thought is suffused by two problematic conceits, the notion of a geographic zone that we call Europe, and the idea of the West as a cultural unity. In order to cast light on the problems that emerge from this arrangement, I concentrate on the history of the where that lies beneath Europe before considering the more nebulous notion of a West that hovers above it. The static nature of contemporary Europe’s spatial (i.e., its geographic) underpinnings has lent a deceiving certainty to historical works on European thought whether they be celebratory or critical. Regardless of the given scholar’s attitude toward European civilization’s virtues—or, lack thereof—the resulting histories generally overlook that Europe’s vision of itself as a continent is geographically unwarranted, as there is no good reason to distinguish Europe from Asia. (To separate Africa from both Europe and Asia presents a similar problem to which I return.) Thus, to render problematic Europe as a clear-cut geographic region has the side benefit of illustrating how space has been incorporated into European intellectual history.

I begin, therefore, with an investigation of whether the continent itself exists. Using traditional geographic tools, Europe’s chief settlements are easy to identify on a map or a globe. The French city of Paris, for example, sits at 48.46 degrees, north latitude and 2.20 degrees, east longitude. To the east one finds other great settlements, including the German city of Berlin, which is located at 52.50 degrees, north latitude and 13.40 degrees, east longitude. The rest of the continent’s metropolises, including the English conurbation of London, which lies 1,093 kilometers to the west of Berlin, can all be put into place via modern cartographic methods. (Indeed, the kilometer is a European invention, too.) With some effort, one can locate Europe’s cities, its political borders, and, finally, its peoples on a terrestrial globe or a map.

Our easy familiarity with geographic concepts leads us to overlook a problem: globes, maps, and their underlying space had to be invented. Thus, it is significant that globe reinvention was a European process, as the first examples appeared only in the fifteenth century and only in Western Europe—in Brussels (circa 1444), Rome (1477), and Nuremberg (1492). (The ancient Greeks produced terrestrial globes, too. Nevertheless, the requisite mathematical expertise for producing them disappeared by the year 500 and would not return for a millennium.) I cannot trace globes’ history here, but note two things about the reinvention. First, the three oldest known globes all predated Christopher Columbus’ epochal initial return from the New World, which occurred in March of 1493. Second, all early modern globes were products of a Renaissance-era mathematical culture that prized ancient works, including the greatest of them all, The Elements by Euclid of Alexandria (fl. 300 BC). With books by Euclid and others at hand, fifteenth-century thinkers did something that medieval Europeans proved unable to do; they applied a mathematically regular latitudinal and longitudinal grid to the terrestrial realm. In short, they invented Earth by suspending it inside imagined space.

Before Europe imposed its colonists on the New World, European culture had already devised a method for imagining a “global” whole onto which unseen terrestrial regions could be pasted. This “globalization” is essential for contemporary visions of not only Europe’s geographic place but also of Earth’s other regions. Here, I cite the English poet John Donne (1572–1631), who in 1611 wrote:

On a round ball

A workeman that has copies by, can lay

An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,

And quickly make that, which was nothing, All.¹

Donne put his finger on the anthropological effects of Europe’s way of knowing the globe. Although many people have seen a terrestrial globe, far fewer have actually set eyes upon our whole planet, which means that the terrestrial surface (even in our technologically advanced age) remains largely an intellectual and cultural phenomenon. Put another way, we see all things through a collectively formed vision of an unseen whole, and this vision is “Europe’s” cornerstone.

With respect to the gauzier idea of the West, the issue is more complicated. First, the West cannot be delimited mathematically, since it is not clear where the boundary between West and East lies. Indeed, this boundary’s location has never been clear. It is said, for example, that post-war West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967), believed that Asia began with the river Elbe, which cuts across the middle of contemporary Germany. (A “Western” Rhinelander from Cologne, he was not a fan of “Eastern” Germany. Put bluntly, his jaundiced eye saw no difference between Prussians and Mongols.) Taking into account the ambiguities in Adenauer’s views, two things must be kept in mind. First, the idea of an “open” West that stood opposite a “closed” East preceded global spatial thought by two millennia. (This binary first emerged in ancient Greece.) Second, Europeans borrowed this distinction and applied it to many unseen places and peoples. In effect, an ostensibly objective sense of space has long mixed with localized prejudices.

It is generally overlooked that traditional Occidentalism relates uneasily to the global knowledge base that first formed in the fifteenth century. Consider that “west” is merely a cardinal direction, which means that it possesses a relative value. Beijing, for instance, which lies 8,212 kilometers to the east of Paris, is located culturally in the East. There is, however, no justification for separating the two cities geographically, since they are not divorced by anything as daunting as the Atlantic Ocean, or as imposing as the Alps. Along these lines, consider that the Alps reach over 4,800 meters, while the Urals, which allegedly divide Europe from Asia, reach only 1,800 meters. (And the Urals lie well to both the north and east of the “Eastern” capital of Beijing.) It is, thus, significant that although the Alps separate Italy from the rest of the continent, Italian culture is, like English, French, and German culture (to name just a few), considered to be Western. Meanwhile, everything to the east of the Urals is generally considered to be “Eastern,” even though most of China lies to the south of this range, while the contemporary “Western” state of Russia extends to the Pacific. In a “cardinal” sense (and with Adenauer in mind) we can say that “Asia” begins where European prejudices end.

I pursue the underlying “locational” nature of the problem by imagining an alternative perspective from China’s capital city. Like the populations of all European cities, Beijing’s residents can “look” both to the east and the west. When peering west, they can imagine the cities of Berlin, Paris, and London as lying beneath what is (for them) the setting sun. With respect to the east, however, when gazing into the rising sun, they can “see” the island nation of Japan, which, not coincidentally, has long called itself the Land of the Rising Sun. And beyond that Asian atoll, the Chinese can also “see” the New World, which is, of course, part of the ostensible West. From this perspective, East and West share two boundaries.

In this context, it is significant that Asia is as imagined as Europe. I illustrate this point by considering non-Chinese parts of Asia. The Ottoman Empire once extended from its base in Turkey up to Eastern Europe, around to North Africa, and into parts farther east. In the process of maintaining itself geographically from roughly 1300 and 1900, this power came into conflict with interests in both China and Europe—albeit, much to its cost. Not coincidentally, with reference to both Western and Eastern prejudices, it remains unclear where modern Turkey lies. Is it part of Europe? Or does it lie in Asia? The ambiguity stems, in part, from the brute fact that the Ottoman Empire “lost” to both Asia and Europe, suffering invasion and dismemberment by neighboring powers. The Mongols, for instance, invaded multiple times from the east, between 1250 and 1450, destroying not only different dynasties but also different states. Then, beginning at the seventeenth century’s end and extending through the First World War (1914–1918), Western powers also breached Ottoman borders. As a result of serial defeats, the Ottoman Empire failed to set a “global” spatial agenda. Hence, everything from Turkey to Syria to Saudi Arabia now lies in a nebulous region that the “West” defines as the “Middle East,” which is to say, “not quite Asia.”

Europe, the Middle East, and Asia are mere historical constructions, as opposed to eternal geographic verities. This point leads me back to how the notion of the West relates to the invention of Europe. To articulate the point most generally, if we wish to situate historically the West as a cultural zone, we must examine how an older, relative sense of space came to be mixed with the absolute one that suffuses Europe’s globes and maps. On the whole, if we examine European history in spatial terms, we see that timeworn cultural preconceptions have long been woven into an ostensibly neutral system of geographic knowledge. (One may pursue a similar investigation of the “East.” I must, however, set this issue aside.) Along these lines, it should be clear that all cultures produce their own spatial senses, and, moreover, that they append to them historically specific senses of identity. At least with respect to Europe, both the imagined spaces and the attending selves can be reconstructed in a way that casts light on the European nature of contemporary “global” thought.

Returning to terrestrial globes and their space, I underscore that Europe’s cultivation of a “West” and its invention of itself as a continent are fundamental issues for European intellectual history. On the one hand, we know the Earth in precisely the way that we know it because Europe catalogued its spaces and places. On the other hand, an older Occidentalism has long justified invidious “rankings” by which different regions have been valued, including such “Eastern” regions as China, Ottoman Turkey, and the east bank of the Elbe. I do not hold that either globes or their underlying system of knowing are falsifying or even useless. Maps do not lie, as some scholars have held. Instead, I am suggesting that any contemporary recounting of the past depends profoundly on Europe’s production of a mathematically uniform, global spatial sense that allows both historians and their readers to imagine unseen spaces. No other culture produced and exported such a sense of space, which means that both our global world and its pasts are organized along European lines.

With this backdrop in mind, it becomes significant that in the roughly two millennia prior to the terrestrial globe’s invention, a different sense of space predominated in the West. And it was this space that gave us the mysterious word “Europe.” Within this older regime, geographic knowledge was associated with perceptions of cultural difference. This alliance dates back to the ancient Greeks, who were the first to identify their own postage stamp of soil as a specific cultural zone. Thus, Homer (eighth century BC), Anaximander (610–546 BC), and the aforementioned Herodotus (484–425 BC) all applied the word “Europe” to their own region, although none of them was clear on where the whole was, since this area did not yet exist inside our contemporary knowledge matrix. Indeed, the region could not be honored as a continent in a contemporary sense because “Europe” was actually rooted in Greek culture’s provinciality. Rather than project a globe and locate their culture on it (which they could do, since terrestrial globes existed) most ancient Greeks simply projected otherness onto regions that lay vaguely to their east—i.e., the area that lurked under the sunrise. This conceptual cornerstone for Europe has remained curiously uncorroded by time’s passage. Indeed, it was not until the early eighteenth century, when the great French thinker, the Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) published a work called the Persian Letters that the West’s easy alliance of cultural difference with a sense of superiority was called into question. (I return to Montesquieu in Chapter 21.)

Although we moderns have developed a sophisticated view of culture, in many ways, we still live within the West-East dichotomy that the ancient Greeks constructed on the basis of their provinciality. It will, therefore, be important to consider this history’s foundations. For the ancient Greeks, the Aegean harbored great opportunities and also looming dangers, both of which were crucial to the emerging Greek worldview. The opportunities were manifest in, among other things, a program of colonization, as Greek settlements not only dotted the Archipelago but also reached into what is now Western Turkey. (Significantly, given what I have argued, this region was then called Anatolia, which derives from a Greek word that pertains to “sunrise.”) As a result of this early colonial diffusion, a stubbornly fractious array of communities appeared, with each spending as much energy on arguing with the others as on cultivating a collective identity. This inward-looking provincialism would, however, be reoriented sharply by a powerful rival’s appearance to the east.

It is significant for the history of the West-East distinction that the chief danger to Greece’s insular way of life came from the other side of the Aegean. In the mid-sixth century, the Persian Empire arose in what is modern-day Iran, a region that lay beyond Anatolia—or, beyond the Greek sunrise. Beginning in 499 BC, this aggressive power encroached on a web of Greek-speaking city-states in western Anatolia, with military clashes occurring until a final peace was made in 449 BC. Known as the Persian Wars, this long conflict permanently scarred Greek views of both themselves and their “others.” While defining themselves against foreign encroachment, fifth-century Greeks imagined that West and East were distinguished by inherent cultural differences, chief among which were that the West loved freedom and individuality, while the East embraced despotism and conformity.

We can understand the spatial backdrop to the Western construction of difference by taking note of Greece’s failure to produce analogous “othering” spatial distinctions. For the Greeks, the north was relatively innocuous because up there lived goat-herding Macedonian tribes that had the good sense to speak Greek but that posed no threat until the Macedonian Empire arose under Philip of Macedon (359–336 BC). Although some Greeks watched Philip’s waxing power with alarm (most notably, Demosthenes of Athens [384–322 BC]) the process yielded no projection of ineradicable otherness onto the north, with the primary reason being that Greek cultural practices had migrated there.

The Macedonians did not simply come under classical Greek culture’s influence but actively imported it. Philip, for example, hired the Athenian-schooled philosopher (and Macedonian native) Aristotle (384–322 BC) to tutor his own son and heir, Alexander. Known to history as Alexander the Great (356–3...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: Nosce Te Ipsum
• 1 Imagining Europe
• 2 Ancient thought and the medieval synthesis I
• 3 Ancient thought and the medieval synthesis II
• 4 Borrowed syntheses—medieval Muslim and Jewish thought
• 5 Post-medieval syntheses
• 6 The spatial reformation
• 7 Humanism and the Southern Renaissance
• 8 Humanism and the Northern Renaissance
• 9 The Protestant revolution
• 10 Tolerance and the culture of doubt
• 11 Law, God, and magic
• 12 A new certainty
• 13 The Scientific Revolution I
• 14 The Scientific Revolution II
• 15 Jesuits, Jansenists, and other heretics
• 16 Science as religion
• 17 From nature to state
• 18 “Platos” many and varied
• 19 A world of numbers
• 20 The invention of history
• 21 The power of reason
• 22 Progressive intolerance
• 23 The production of isms
• 24 The Industrial Revolution and its discontents
• 25 Space and race
• 26 From urbanization to urbanity
• 27 Novels, writers, and readers
• 28 Sex, gender, and the critical mind
• 29 Prophecy from the margins
• 30 Situating the social
• 31 The new social science
• 32 The First World War and European culture
• 33 The science of rootlessness
• 34 The vacuum of knowledge
• 35 From the ashes
• Conclusion: good-bye to all that
• Glossary of terms
• Index