In the article Europe beyond Nihilism, remembering the Nietzschean beyond of Jenseits von Gut und Bose, I started from Nietzsche, who is regarded as the father of Nihilism, and who, at the same time and at his manner, tried to overcome it drawing his inspiration from Greek tragedy. During last century and even now the Nihilism has cast a spectral, gloomy shadow across Europe: two world wars, the atom bomb, the cold war, the recurrence of terrible global fears.
As a ghost it has wandered through Europe and even now it connotes a diffuse, culturally and historically, uneasy feeling overlapping the process of secularization, of rationalization and technicization, provoking the disenchantment and the shattering of the world’s image. At an ideological level it has given rise to the corrosion of faiths, the spreading of relativism and skepticism. The negative thought, the radical critic of the Western tradition, barring the complete destruction of the planet or suicide as the human race, had nevertheless tried to avoid total Nihilism by exits, two examples for all, the Ubermensch of Nietzsche, the self-affirming will, or the Eternal Return and the inner emigration, the poetically dwelling of Heidegger that fosters a turn in the world.But the question is that really neither the Hyperborean Nietzsche nor Heidegger provided a kind of salvation for philosopher or for the ordinary man.
Is it possible then to go beyond the Nihilism? Is it possible to go “Über die Linie”, beyond the line, as E. Junger wrote? According to Heidegger it is not possible from a humanistic point of view, it is possible only after having understood the essence of Nihilism, only when the Nihilism is really complete.
And has Europe totally crossed that line?
As a reply, since 60s of last century we are witnessed the reviving of the question of ethics, the appeal to values as well as natural and secular values such as Dignity, Freedoms, Equality, Solidarity, Citizens'Rights, Justice, now written in the New European Constitution.
Here I would suggest, as a viable pathway in this direction, a sort of overcoming Nihilism as proposed, in his quite distinctive way, by Gadamer about half a century after Heidegger. Contrary to his teacher Heidegger, Gadamer does not arrive at pessimism or nihilism, he keeps looking and finds hints of hope. Though student of Heidegger, he wants to urbanize the Heideggerian philosophical field with an opening, as much as possible, to its universal dimensions. He does neither accept the motto Deutschland über alles, nor the so-called eurocentrism; with his hermeneutics he seems to provide valuable suggestions for doing philosophy in a post-nietzschean, post-modern age.
In the essay “Europa und die Oikoumene” he begins with a Greek term, oikoumene, to point out the inhabited world and affirms that philosophy is something which affects the whole world in as much as it manifests itself through language, especially spoken language, that is the essence of language despite the multiplicity of languages. Speaking is universal, is common to all people. On one hand Gadamer wants to deal with the universal aspect of language and understanding, on the other hand he wants to deal with the particularity and the plurality of languages issuing in plurality of customs, races, religions, as we are reminded by the biblical story of the tower of Babel.
European civilization, since the Greeks, has always been distinguished by philosophy and science, but from the 17th century we live a situation, wherein are on one side a fundamental tradition, on the other the modern sciences. Considering that since the 19th century science and philosophy seem to have divorced each other and continue to walk separately, we could recover the lost unity only on condition that we recognize that the birth of the modern experimental sciences represents a decisive break, the event when the traditional unity of knowledge, in its wider meaning of total knowledge, begins to dissolve. The crucial problem is that science, to which we have to add technique, cannot by itself satisfy the human thirst for the meaning of existence and human action in balance with nature.
Francesco Tampoia
Acquaviva delle Fonti (Italy)
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