ABSTRACT
This book has attempted an exploration of a self-understanding: the self-understanding of those who call themselves, and have called themselves to be, “We, the Europeans”. This exploration of a distinctively European self-understanding has been guided by an effort to identify its fundamental “sources”, its archē. At issue here is the basic formatting of the understanding of the world and the significance of our (human) lives that most profoundly marks a European, and especially “modern” European subjectivity, most radically imprinting itself “somewhere where we are”. The basic claim has been that the modern European self-understanding is fundamentally rooted in a Greco-Biblical anthropology; a quite particular understanding of the meaning of “Man”. Following Derrida, I have tried to show that this anthropology, this archeo-teleo-eschatological conception of Man, is at the root of all European discourse about Europe. This has taken us into a detailed investigation of European texts on Man thus understood, works of philosophical history, as the privileged site for tracking the ongoing development of Europe's self-understanding. We have followed an historical sequence of writings in philosophical history in which we see this self-understanding unfold from eighteenth and nineteenth century optimism, and unravel into twentieth century despair; a sequence in which an Enlightenment promise of peace, freedom and well-being for all humanity falls apart. Emmanuel Levinas, who gave us our first summary introduction to the European archē in his formula “Europe is the Bible and the Greeks”, also provides us with a fitting summary conclusion:
That history of peace, freedom and well-being promised on the basis of a light that a universal knowledge projected onto the world – even unto the religious messages that sought justification for themselves in the truths of knowledge – that history is not recognizable in its millennia of fratricidal struggles, political or bloody, of imperialism, scorn and exploitation of the human being, down to our century of world wars, the genocides of the Holocaust and terrorism; unemployment and continual desperate poverty of the Third World; ruthless doctrines and cruelty of fascism and national socialism, right down to the supreme paradox of the defence of Man and his rights being perverted into Stalinism. Hence the challenge to the centrality of Europe and its culture. A worn-out Europe! (AT, p. 132)
