“Post-Europe” is an expression that I’ve borrowed from Czech philosopher Jan Patočka (1907-1977). This blog is largely devoted to trying to understand what this idea means and how ideas from Patočka’s work might be useful in helping to make sense of politics today. So I’ll also be commenting on politics and culture, especially on issues relating to “European” politics and the so-called European political sphere. As I put more posts up, I’ll try to give more information about Jan Patočka, his life and his philosophy, as well as my work and the work of others on Patočka and other topics in philosophy .
On the site you will also find info and links about the courses that I am teaching.
A few words on the concept of “post-Europe”:
When Patočka speaks of “post-Europe” what he partially has in mind is the end of European political, economic and military hegemony. This not only applies to the interstate or international relations of geo-politics, but primarily that, in a globalized world, European nation states do not have sovereignty over their own affairs whether economically, socially, militarily, etc. The collapse of European hegemony and its aftermath, the rise to global dominance of the USA and USSR and then of China, a global order of dominance from which Europe, comprised of sovereign “European” nation-states, or even a more contemporary vision of Europe as a transnational political entity, is increasingly excluded, is the effect of the internal conflict of what Patcoka calls the principle of radical surcivilisation. This is essentially a radical idea of instrumental techno-scientific rationality, in which the production of force in various forms, and the efficiency of this production comes to be the dominant principle structuring human relations, and relations between human kind and the planet as a whole.
Here is a quote from Patočka:
“It is clear today […] Europe has come to an end. She controlled the world politically, on the basis of the monopoly of her power, and that power was of a techno-scientific origin. All this was Europe […] And the reality, this enormous power, definitely wrecked itself in the span of thirty years, in two wars after which nothing remained, nothing of her power that had ruled the world. She destroyed herself through her own powers. (Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, p. 9)
and another
“[C]are for the soul transformed itself in such a peculiar way, that it became something pretty much unrecognizable under the weight of something, something that might be deemed a concern or care about dominating the world. That is another, also unique and incomparable history, but one that more than anything else contains the germ of what has taken place before our very own eyes: Europe has disappeared, probably forever.” (Jan Patočka Plato and Europe, p. 89)
The challenge of the idea of post-europe becomes how to think about European culture, politics, power, and also philosophy in this post-European situation. Most importantly the challenge becomes how to resuscitate what Patočka thinks has been lost in the European tradition, what he calls “care for the soul”: “Care for the soul is fundamentally care which follows from the proximity of man to manifesting, to the phenomenon as such, to the manifesting of the world in its whole, that occurs within man, with man” (Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, p. 29).