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.
(Recall Part 1) 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.
Gadamer, as a master of hermeneutics, refers to a humanism which is integral part of Greek terminology and recovers the term “praxis” (a term for communicative interaction between people who are governed by moral norms, that doesn’t deal with forms of instrumentalism) which means “the mode in which one is”, which is to say, the situation in which we find ourselves, by which we are not in complete control of our lives, but rather are dependent on external circumstances. Which is being at home with self in other, namely subject to the finitude and temporality.Recalling to ancient Greeks he remembers that “the life of Greek society revolves entirely around the concept of friend, philos, which, according to the old Pythagoreanism which permeates Greek thought, means that friends are those who have everything in common. Here we have, in its extreme ideal form, the undeclared assumption which makes it possible a practical and orderly living together among individuals, something akin to the status of a right”. This is the teaching of the Calabrian Pythagoreans that invites us to a kind of consensus by which we can take common decisions which are valid for everybody in their moral, social, political aspects (community’s ethos). So praxis means that each one of us belongs to a society, in our case each European belongs to Europe and is a responsible person, just as each of us belongs to the entire humanity and is responsible for it.
In emphasizing the importance of common agreement and mutual understanding Gadamer allows us to conceive of, and to strive to realize, a society which would be something more than a deconstructed Tower of Babel. Gadamer's dialogical view of understanding (as a communication process) provides the model for a social order based not on coercion or domination (Herrschaft) but on rational persuasion, the kind of tolerant and pluralist social order envisaged by the great rhetoricians and humanists of the past.
Europe has a great treasure which is its diversity, its variety of languages, in having practiced throughout the centuries, after so many difficulties and wars, a tolerance of different cultures and languages among different faiths and confessions. It is not necessary to give to Europe only one language, a language good for the entire continent. Now we merely need to focus on what historically has united all Europeans: the cultural and spiritual unity acquired in the past and which remains a task and a commitment for the future.
Later on Gadamer points out the existential condition of present day, the difficulties of European man and indeed of man anywhere, using the expression “Citizens of two worlds”, the ambiguous situation, also individuated by Kant, of the European man: that of scientific natural experiential sensibility (Kritik der reinen Vernunft), and that of freedom (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft), of the subject which is led by practical reason. Following Kant, Gadamer brings us back, once more, to the Greek concept of praxis, and promotes the so-called practical turn in philosophy.
Thus Gadamer's hermeneutics, paraphrasing G. B. Madison (see The politics of Postmo), appears indeed one which "makes use of the past and of modern achievements"- but in accordance with its own renewed conception of such traditional notions as truth, meaning, and knowledge. Gadamer does not reject the tradition of Western thought en bloc, he is not condemned to dillydallying around on the margins of metaphysics, reduced to theoretical impotence, like as J. Derrida. He recognizes that human understanding can never transcend its limitations, it is always culturally and historically situated, is, indeed, rooted in tradition. And because he realizes that this is not a defect in the make-up of human understanding but the that-without-which there would be no understanding at all, because of this, he is able to appropriate elements within the tradition such as, precisely, the all-important notion of freedom. The whole point of the self-understanding which is the goal of hermeneutics is that of "saving a freedom threatened not only by all rulers but much more by the domination and dependence that issue from everything we think we control". The function of hermeneutical criticism, indeed, is to expose and denouce forms of socio-political organization which oppress and stifle the communicative process-fosterning thereby the development of dialogical communities. As both the theory and the practice of interpretative understanding, hermeneutics, Gadamer concludes, "may help us to gain our freedom in relation to everything that has taken us in unquestioningly." The hermeneutical enterprise is, as Gadamer says, one of "translating the principle of freedom into reality."
On this kind of freedom and praxis, which means also solidarity, an authentic solidarity which allows for conviviality, we can build a future society and a future European “Federal” State.
Francesco Tampoia
Acquaviva delle Fonti (Italy)
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