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: 978-0-8047-6060-7

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 and learned, thus requiring experience and time, but also because such knowledge comes with certain requirements, or ideal injunctions, whose realization, by contrast, demands to be enacted in full at every moment. The sciences, according to their idea, are linked from the outset-that is, from their emergence in Greece and their subsequent transformation in the Renaissance-to an eminently practical project of enabling humanity to understand and reshape itself, in other words, to constitute itself as humanity. Even though factically the sciences emerge in Greece, they are immediately geared toward what is universal, and the concerns of humankind as a whole. Husserl submits that with the emergence of universal philosophy, Greek humanity became “the first breakthrough to what is essential to humanity as such, its entelechy” (ITLITL, 15). In spite of their origin in a specific region of the world, the sciences are not a contingent affair but, in Husserl’s words, the expression of “humanity struggling to understand itself” (ITLITL, 14). Consequently, if the European sciences are suffering a crisis, it is precisely because they have cut themselves loose from this specific task that defines, both theoretically and practically, the sciences’ initial meaning. Let me point out, right away, that this reference to a task defining the sciences entails that what they are to achieve does not consist of placing an easily and comfortably available knowledge at one’s disposal, one that would simply have to be applied. Now, only insofar as the sciences are involved in fostering the emergence of humanity itself-of humanity conscious of itself as humanity-can they be said to be the driving force of the idea of Europe-its origin and telos. This, however, means that the various sciences be not merely fact-minded but that they understand themselves as deriving their relational meaning, or truth, from their foundation in an all-embracing science, or philosophy, concerned with what is universal.

As the agents of universality, the sciences animate the spiritual shape of Europe. They constitute the idea of Europe, and endow Europe with a “remarkable [merkwrdige] teleology, inborn, as it were, only in our Europe” (C, 273). The idea of the universal, which guides Europe as a spiritual shape (as well as the equally spiritual history of that shape), is not merely remarkable because it would set Europe apart from other parts of the world. This telos is remarkable primarily because it is, as the German merkwrdig suggests, a very peculiar, strange, or odd telos. Without a full grasp of what is profoundly odd about the very idea of universality, and hence about the title “Europe,” it is impossible, I hold, to do justice to precisely how Husserl understands these terms, and what the presuppositions and implications are of speaking of Europe as an absolute idea. Without taking stock of the strangeness of this idea-one strange enough as to be even at odds with Europe as a geographical and ethnical entity-the very charge that universality is Eurocentric is, at best, a symptom, to use Husserlian language, of “lazy reason” (C, 16). In the following discussion of the idea of Europe, I will seek to highlight this strangeness.

Part 2 of The Crisis of European Sciences is mainly concerned with the resurgence of the idea and ideal of a universal science during the Renaissance and with the subsequent abandonment of that ideal (vital to humanity) by the objective sciences, which has caused the contemporary crisis. What the Renaissance rediscovers, and then loses again, is the Greek idea of a rational and universal science. That Greek idea, however, is not a conception that had always been familiar to the ancient Greeks. Rather, this idea is the unfamiliar itself. As Husserl observes in the Vienna lecture, this idea is “intimately involved with the outbreak or irruption [Aufbruch und Einbruch] of philosophy and its branches, the sciences, in the ancient Greek spirit” (C, 273) and inaugurates a breakthrough (Durchbruch) of a new human epoch. As the expressions, “outbreak,” “irruption,” and “breakthrough,” suggest, this idea (violently) bursts into existence, as it were; it intrudes on and disturbs previous ways of thinking and acting. To use an expression coined by Eugen Fink to describe the structure of philosophical wonder, an “Entsetzung”-a shocking dis-placement, or uprooting from the human being’s prepossession by the world, his or her familiarity with it and sense of security within it-accompanies the irruption of the idea in question. Only something bewilderingly strange can produce such effects. Indeed, rather than providing security, “the great and genuine ethos which constitutes philosophy-great and genuine philosophy,” that is, Greek philosophy, in particular, rather than providing “security,” comes with the most unsettling exigencies. Husserl characterizes not only “the originary demand given through the intention of philosophy, as containing in the evident conditions of possibility of philosophy’s fulfillment, a categorical imperative,” but he also describes the aspiration to a life according to higher values “as the search to reach out for something that in the end is contrary [zuwider] [to the ego], a way of life and aspiring that brings it into conflict with itself.” If ancient Greece enjoys a unique position with respect to the rest of the world, it is exclusively because of this irruption of philosophy as the alienating demand to live according to universal ideas and because Greece espoused this strange demand and shaped its institutions accordingly. Described as the idea of an all-encompassing science, the breakthrough of philosophy in ancient Greece might not strike us immediately as a particularly odd event. Since the claim to be all-encompassing is frequently viewed not only as illusory but also as arrogant, the emergence of this idea is rather felt to be that of a preposterous claim; consequently, what this idea demanded of Greece itself-the demand to rise above itself as a particular people-is obfuscated. In any case, before it can be shown that the idea that irrupts in ancient Greece is precisely the idea of an all-encompassing science, that is, of the universal task to theoretically and practically realize such a science, one must underscore a number of the features of this idea of a universal and rational science that not only reveal its strangeness but that also clarify how one is to understand the all-encompassing nature of the science in question.

Reflecting on the idea immanent to Europe (or, what is the same, the teleology that animates it), Husserl writes in the Vienna lecture that this idea “makes itself known [die sich vom Gesichtspunkt der universalen Menschheit berhaupt kenntlich macht], from the standpoint of universal mankind as such, as the breakthrough and the developmental beginning of a new human epoch-the epoch of mankind which now seeks to live, and only can live, in the free shaping of its existence, its historical life, through ideas of reason, through infinite tasks” (ITLITL, 274). The idea of philosophy that irrupts into the world of the ancient Greeks-who, it should be noted, not only were of heterogeneous origins but whose early philosophers were, moreover, foreigners, or exiles-is the idea of a science that answers for itself before “universal mankind,” in other words, no longer in terms particular to the cultural, traditionalist, and religious idioms of the various ethnicities that made up Greece. This idea of philosophy is not merely one of tasks (Aufgaben, literally, assignments) depending on a programmatic and normative knowledge that merely needs to be applied but of infinite tasks-a concept that Husserl probably borrowed from the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen, who has systematically highlighted the importance of the concept of “task” in Kant-and concerns tasks that devolve from ideas that, because infinite, constitute universal tasks. Even before we speak of the content of this new conception, it is important to realize that the very way the idea of philosophy comes into being runs against all established ethnic, cultural, and traditionalist views or norms. Indeed, Husserl’s reference to the standpoint from which the idea of philosophy makes itself known implies that philosophy does not impose itself as just another self-evident, culturally specific product. Rather, from the outset it justifies itself in terms that call on everyone, regardless of customary ways of thinking. What makes this idea so odd is that it answers for itself and does so with a view toward principles and rules that can be followed and reconstructed by everyone on condition that particular modes of thinking are bracketed. The self-presentation from the standpoint of universal humankind shows this idea to be one of humankind itself. Indeed, the breakthrough that takes place in early Greece is the irruption into consciousness of the very concept of humanity itself as a concept transcending all particular humanities. Whether or not the Greek notion of universality was still tinged by Greekness, a norm-and with it, a task-arose that constitutes a demand that remains, I contend, universally valid. Furthermore, by justifying itself in terms that appeal to everyone, rather than to the constituents of one’s home world, the idea of philosophy is introduced as bearing from the outset on the human being’s life. It is the request that everyone shape his or her life freely-free from all traditionalist conceptions-by not acting or advancing anything that cannot be accounted for in terms transparent to all. This is a very demanding demand, one that goes against the grain of all habitual ways of thinking, because in order to secure an opening to the other, and hence be answerable to the other, it requires not only thoroughly coherent but also “uniform” thinking and acting by yielding to universally recognizable principles. Indeed, this demand, which the Greeks called logon didonai, is the demand to be self-responsible and to assume this responsibility by accounting for one’s claims and actions rather than having recourse to inveterate beliefs and ingrained habits of thinking. With this demand emerges the possibility of a new type of history, the history of a life shaped through ideas and reason, in short, a history of humankind itself. Now, since humankind can itself become a reality only when human beings shape their lives according to reason, that is, by becoming self-responsible, the emergence of philosophy and its demand is that of a task. Rather than furnishing the human beings with the sense of a common essence always already given in advance, the idea of philosophy coincides with the unsettling demand to ceaselessly account for oneself and to secure thus something that merits being called “universally human.” Even though Husserl considers every human being to be an animal rationale, hence, capable of reason, this defining trait of what is human is not only primarily a teleological project, that is, something still to be accomplished, but it also consists in nothing but the critical ability to transcend given identities. Such transcending alone is what constitutes the human. Considering what philosophy demands of the human being, the kind of life for which it holds out the prospect is a life of “infinite tasks.” Rather than approximating a positive state, the suspension of the limitation caused by particularities is the goal of this infinite task. Indeed, the very act of suspending all traditionalisms is the way of reason, and it coincides with the accomplishment of the idea of humanity. If this idea, then, is what constitutes, and immanently unifies, “Europe,” it is an idea that breaks open Europe’s self-immanence toward a transcendence, toward the other, and what is other than Europe. It is, therefore, no doubt, a quite unsettling idea, one that disturbs the very homeliness of any world, including the world of the Europeans.

(Continues…)

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