Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) - Softcover

Gasché, Rodolphe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804760616 ISBN 13: 9780804760614

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

What exactly does "Europe" mean for philosophy today? Putting aside both Eurocentrism and anti-Eurocentrism, Gasché returns to the old name "Europe" to examine it as a concept or idea in the work of four philosophers from the phenomenological tradition: Husserl, Heidegger, Patocka, and Derrida. Beginning with Husserl, the idea of Europe became central to such issues as rationality, universality, openness to the other, and responsibility. Europe, or The Infinite Task tracks the changes these issues have undergone in phenomenology in order to investigate "Europe's" continuing potential for critical and enlightened resistance in a world that is progressively becoming dominated by the mono-perspectivism of global market economics. Rather than giving up on the idea of Europe as an anachronism, Gasché aims to show that it still has philosophical legs.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rodolphe Gasché is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His most recent books are Views and Interviews: On "Deconstruction" in America (2007), and The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy (Stanford, 2007).

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EUROPE, OR THE INFINITE TASK

A Study of a Philosophical ConceptBy Rodolphe Gasch

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6061-4

Contents

Acknowledgments................................................ixAbbreviations..................................................xiIntroduction...................................................11 Infinite Tasks...............................................212 Universality and Spatial Form................................443 Universality in the Making...................................644 Singular Essence.............................................955 The Strangeness of Beginnings................................1246 The Originary World of Tragedy...............................1447 Care of the Soul.............................................2118 The Genealogy of "Europe-Responsibility".....................2379 European Memories............................................26510 "This Little Thing That Is Europe"..........................28711 De-closing the Horizon......................................303Epilogue.......................................................339Notes..........................................................349Bibliography...................................................397Index..........................................................409

Chapter One

1 Infinite Tasks

In his unfinished work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl construes the sciences as the defining essence of Europe. They are intrinsically linked to what in the Vienna lecture is called "the phenomenon 'Europe,'" "the concept of Europe," and, in The Crisis, the "absolute idea" of Europe (C, 299, 16). Doubtless, the unquestionable success of the exact, or natural sciences, as well as that of the formal discipline of mathematics, since the Renaissance, has been the reason for Europe's scientific and technological superiority; it is one of the major reasons for the subsequent phenomenon of the Europeanization of almost all of the rest of the world. But the sciences, as Husserl understands them, are also tied to an all-inclusive sense of what is. Thus, the idea of Europe, to the extent that it is wed to that of the sciences, coincides with the very idea of universality itself. For Husserl, however, universality is not predicated on a factual domination of the world by Europe nor upon the factual status of the sciences from the Renaissance to the present. Despite the intricate concatenation of the sciences, universality, and "Europe," found in The Crisis, European scientific and technological success is, for Husserl, in no way an index of the sciences' nor of Europe's universality implicated by extension. One could go as far as to say that, according to Husserl, the undeniable superiority of the idea and praxis of scientific cognition of the world is the clear indication of instrumental reason's interestedness, of its remaining tied up with one particular historical, cultural, national, and so on, mind-set, and thus with one anthropological type and its particular tradition. In fact, one could argue that Husserl's point in The Crisis is that the European success is the effect of precisely not meeting the challenge that science, as a universal and rational undertaking, presents. Predicated on universalist pretensions that are at the service of determinate interests, the sciences forfeit the very universality that they promise. The spiraling technism of the method of inquiry, its complete formalization in modern times, is for Husserl an unmistakable sign that the sciences are not seeking to achieve knowledge of the one world-the total horizon of the world-which all humans as humans share and that is presupposed by the very notion of universality. In fact, the crisis of the sciences, diagnosed by Husserl, is due precisely to the mathematization and formalization of the sciences: those qualities that have made them so successful. Indeed, according to Husserl, the positivist sciences have lost all relationship to the whole-the life-world-within which they would be meaningful. The crisis in question is the result of the scientific surreptitious substitution of the mathematized objective world of nature for the one world, the true world. Stated differently, the crisis on which Husserl elaborates is one that results from the abandonment by the successful sciences, and the concomitant technologization of knowledge, of an all-embracing science, or philosophy, one that would be not only all-encompassing, and universal, but whose methodology would rest on universal principles. In short, the crisis of the European sciences is rooted in the abandonment of the idea of science itself. The ensuing result of this abandonment is what Husserl terms "an existential catastrophe of the European human being," for indeed, "once science does no longer fulfill its ultimate meaning as science, the European human being does no longer fulfill his ultimate meaning, that is to say, as European human being."

In what sense, then, can the sciences still be said to represent the foundation of "Europe"? To answer this question, we must first clarify what the title "Europe" refers to. In the lecture from 1935 entitled "Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity"-the Vienna lecture-Husserl emphasizes that the designation "Europe" is not to be "understood geographically, as on a map, as if thereby the group of people who live together in this territory would define European humanity" (C, 273). "Europe" is not to be defined in natural, nor even conventional, terms whatever their kind or shade. Instead, "Europe" is said to be of the order of a "supranationality of a completely new sort" (ITLITL, 289), that is, of the order of a "spiritual shape [geistige Gestalt]." As a spiritual shape, Husserl holds, "Europe" is the name for "the unity of a spiritual life, activity, creation, with all its ends, interests, cares, and endeavors, with its products of purposeful activity, institutions, organizations" (ITLITL, 273). Rather than a geographical entity, or an entity identified in terms of race, Europe is a practical objective-a life project-an immanently practical project, one that embraces all aspects of life. What structures this project animated by "a spirit of free critique and norm-giving aimed at infinite tasks" (ITLITL, 289), is the spiritual end by which life is to be shaped here. If the sciences are instrumental to the spiritual life project called "Europe," it is only to the extent that they define the idea that animates this life project. As Husserl suggests at the beginning of The Crisis, what "Europe" stands for is the project of reshaping humankind in light of "the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity" (ITLITL, 6), in other words, questions that concern humanity's, and not geographical Europe's, self-understanding. "Europe," then, is the project of a reshaping of the relations among individuals, groups, and nations, in light of what it means to be human rather than in terms of membership in an ethnia, with its particular customs and traditions. Now, if the sciences are constitutive of "Europe" as a spiritual shape, it is because they are not simply contemplative and disinterested enterprises. Episteme, as a posture or state of mind (that is, as a form of hexis) regarding the things it relates to, is practical not only because it is in possession of concrete knowledge about these things that can be taught...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804760616
• ISBN 13: 9780804760614
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 412
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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