Rodolphe Gasche - Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept

Although this examination has repeatedly broached the question of why the name Europe should continue to designate a kind of universality and a conception of world that, decidedly, are no longer Eurocentric (nor therefore anti-Eurocentric), and that in all their aspects and ramifications barely resemble the conception of universality (or universality point) with which Europe has commonly been associated, I wish to return to this question one more time. For many, universality is a European invention. It is a philosophical and, for some, an ideological construct that intends to justify and embellish its historical pretensions with respect to the non-European world. Universality is generally considered to amount to Europes historical and cultural imposition on the rest of the world and to imply an overriding and denying of all singularities. As a consequence, the rapidly dwindling influence of Europe within a globalized world, and the so-called postcolonial provincialization of Europe, in no way affects the validity and pertinence of this classical philosophical concept. And its potentialities are invoked by Husserl when the project of universality is shown to imply not only the demand for thought to be all-embracing, and seek to account for everything that is, but also that it rationally justify any claims that are madethat is, to publicly, and in a verifiable manner, render account. Universality as an exigency of thought has, from its start in Greece and Europe, implied critical self-justification, and hence a responsibility to all others. This is the very reason why in this book the concept of universality has been shown to be predicated on singularity as distinct from particularity. Undoubtedly, the demand to transcend all customary beliefs and the exigency of radical self-criticism that goes along with the concept of universality is experienced as a foreign imposition on all particular opinions and entrenched positions that (whatever the particular reasons may be) consider themselves beyond the necessity to explain themselves to others. The demands inscribed in the idea of universality are exacting demands, but they are not demands that would only be limited to non-Europeans. As I have also shown, this very exogeneity of the universal is, independently of its intrinsic link to singularity, something that offers the possibility for becoming binding to everyone in the first place. Nonetheless, it is also true that the development that the concept of universality undergoes in the hands of Heidegger, Patoka, and especially Derrida, drawing as it does on the untapped resources of the classical, and in particular, Husserlian conception of universality, has led to a conception of universality and world in which the role of the other and the foreign is so determinant that, admittedly, it is hard to see what such a conception still might have to do with Europe.

Because the conception of universality that has emerged from our discussion is one that is not discriminatory of singularities but is, rather, itself predicated on singularityhence a true openness to othersresistance to associating this conception with Europe is to be expected since that name, today, smacks of parochialism. In light of Europes accelerating disappearance as a world power, such designation will be held in suspicion for many reasons, reasons that are too obvious to require spelling out here. Let me therefore only say that if the connection between such a universality and Europe is contested, it may first of all be because of what one understands, or rather misunderstands, by Europe. If Europe is taken to refer to a geographical entity, or to the however-ill-determined economic, cultural, and political identity of present-day Europe, one would be hard-pressed to discover any traces in it of the radical openness to the other advocated by the new conception of universality and world. But if universality and Europe are intrinsically linked, then this can only be the case if Europe is not understood as a geographical entity but, in Husserls words, as a spiritual figure, in short, as a philosophical concept or conception itself. Furthermore, if it seems problematic to relate a newly enlightened conception of universality to something called Europe, it may also be because of a lack of clarity regarding the relation of the philosophical concept of Europe to Europe as a particular part of the worldsomething that is more generally reflected in the relation between universality and singularity.