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The Metaphysics of Crisis

At the end of World War I, the perception of a serious crisis permeated the entire European philosophical scene and unified it. Despite the diversity of perspectives and tones, authors such as Spengler and Husserl, Ortega and Valéry, Heidegger and Wittgenstein were united in believing that the tie that until then had inextricably bound together Europe and philosophy was now broken. The two no longer reflected each other, as they had for two thousand years. Europe ceased to be the land of philosophy and philosophy was no longer the constitutive language of Europe. Of course, this was not the first time when Europe experienced a critical situation, when its certainties vacillated until crumbling, or when it faced the need for a radical change. As Paul Hazard observed, Europe has always been in crisis one way or another – its particular character is actually the result of a continuous series of crises, coming back to back on each other and, time after time, transforming what had appeared to be an established framework.1 But what changed so thoroughly during the second and third decades of the last century (1919 and 1939 can serve as the opening and closing dates for this phase) was the semantics of the concept. At a certain point, the crisis was no longer viewed as an interruption, as a temporary halt through which the process of European civilization would move in order to arrive at a superior phase of development. Instead, it was seen as the final threshold beyond which lay the risk of going uncontrollably adrift – unless a radical decision was taken (the other meaning of the Greek verb krinein), something equivalent to definitive surgery on a terminally ill patient. It is as if, after acquiring a sociopolitical meaning from the late eighteenth century on, the category of crisis went back to its initial medical sense of a stark alternative between life and death.2 Action must be taken with irrevocable determination, sinking the scalpel into the ailing body of Europe, or the disease will lead to its death. This was the drastic alternative confronting European intellectuals. In their eyes, an entire age was coming to an end, but without anything taking shape on its outer margins.

Naturally, the idea of an interruption in the historical process was not unfamiliar to previous thinkers. Hegel had already envisaged – in his own thought as well as in the times that the latter brought into awareness – a limit point beyond which it would be impossible to proceed. But, instead of putting European philosophy at the risk of extinction, this placed it at the apex of world history – because through estrangement the consequences could be controlled by retracing identity in difference, the proper in the extraneous, and the inside in the outside. The task of European philosophy was to recognize, in the modern split, the problematic form of the unity into which all lived and spent history had converged, fulfilling itself; but to do it without losing its energetic charge – on the contrary, bringing it into effect, realizing it in the present. For Hegel, European philosophy fulfills itself by becoming history. Fulfilment (Vollendung), in this case, does not mean end to development or, even less, regression. Once achieved, fulfillment would be reproduced in every moment of the coming time, in a solid union between past and future. In some respects, the present contains both the past and the future; it assumes them in their productive tension, because it never loses contact with the origin, which it carries inside as its own beginning. It is true that, in this grandiose geography of the spirit, the sun, risen in the East, definitively sets in the West, but without washing out the colors of dawn; instead it casts luminous reflections on the past and on the worlds from which that past comes. The productive force of the present lies precisely in this capacity to include in itself what it has surpassed, and even to include what, from another perspective, it has excluded. Philosophy comes to an end in the eternity of the living present – but only because all the promises contained in its own beginnings have been realized.

It took no more than a few decades for this perspective to become obscured. The Hegelian division between right and left had already created an initial fracture in the system when Kierkegaard on the one hand and Marx on the other restored the concept of “end” to its literal meaning of closure. Instead of denoting the fullness of fulfillment, it now referred to a necessary exhaustion, from which philosophy could only escape by going outside itself – by turning itself into political practice in Marx, into ethical action in Kierkegaard, and into vital energy in Nietzsche. The relationship between philosophy and Europe was abruptly severed, soon to become deeply furrowed. The mediation between spirit and power, leading to European hegemony in Hegel's philosophy, was no longer able to curb the destructive forces that attacked Europe from within, spilling over its symbolic and material borders. The negative lost its dialectical connotation, in order to take on a disintegrative character. What now threatened to come to a halt was the political–theological machine that until then had located the seat of the universal in a particular place – which coincided with European soil – by appropriating all spaces external to it. This was the metaphysical machine that, when still working at full power, had made it possible to declare that “the principle of the European spirit is … self-conscious reason which is confident that for it there can be no insuperable barrier and which therefore takes an interest in everything in order to become present to itself therein.”3

This confidence was suddenly undermined. Now the limit rose up not only on the outer borders; it also made inroads inside the European space, undercutting its claim to cohesion. What appeared to be the whole now found itself to be only a part, squeezed by powers that laid claim to Europe's ancient role as the cornerstone of the world. The centrality of Europe was put into question for the first time from opposite sides of the continent, by Dostoevsky's old Russia and by Tocqueville's new America. The mirror in which Europe saw the world reflected through its own image was shattered, with disruptive consequences to its traditional self-representation. Division, still imprinted with the symbols of totality in Hegel's modernity, now became stark separation. From that moment on, in the eyes of its intellectuals, Europe's withdrawal and the crisis of philosophy intersected in a form that made one the effect of the other. It was then that images of life and development were replaced by symbols of death – terms like “disease,” “death throes,” and “cemeteries” abound in titles of philosophical and literary essays from the 1920s on. What until then had appeared to be the engine of modern civilization – the equivalence between Europe and philosophy – now appeared to be an obstacle to both. In a typical inversion of real relations, the impression prevailed that the crisis of philosophy was causing the crisis of Europe rather than the other way around.

The concept of “nihilism,” created in the early 1800s but only gaining currency with Nietzsche, reflected the terms of the question. Having lost its relationship with the philosophy from which its conscience sprang, Europe no longer had the ability to affirm itself in world history – unless it “decided” on its own, embarking down a path quite different from the one it had followed until then. As Karl Löwith remarked in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, “Europe is a world which at the same time is in decline and is first becoming; between these, though, there is no continuous transition but instead a fateful decision.”4 In the path running from Hegel to Nietzsche, philosophy forces Vollendung to contract into Entscheidung [decision], assuming separation in its immediacy. The Hegelian dialectic between history and reason is broken. Philosophy realizes itself only by negating itself. This dramatic perspective, extending across a mixed coalition of thought, reached a point of maximum condensation at the end of World War I. What until the first decade of the twentieth century had been a growing concern now became the object itself of thought, in a framework that tied the crisis of philosophy and the philosophy of crisis into a single knot. During the same years when Löwith published European Nihilism, Maria Zambrano, in a pronounced dramatization of Hegel's expression, described Europe as “the place where [the] heart of the world is exploding.”5 It was then, between Valéry's piece on the crisis of the mind, Husserl's lectures on the crisis of the European sciences, and Heidegger's texts on the end of philosophy, that a circle was closed; and it corresponded to the one that can very well be defined as the “crisis dispositif.”

Although expressed in different formulations, three steps remain essential: (1) the crisis that afflicts Europe, exposing it to a lethal risk, has a metaphysical status even above its historical–political significance; (2) it takes expression in a forgetfulness of the constitutive identity of Europe, which blocks any possibility of development; (3) the only way to overcome this obstruction is to reappropriate the lost origin, reviving it...