European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

THE ETHICAL DIMENSION IN EUROPEAN IDENTITY 295about and aired is at the same time identified as Europe. The secondpoint has opened the door for me to reflect upon this issue, with theseconcepts as a starting point.In fact, I believe that their protagonism is not trivial. “State” and“nation” are —as I suggested at the beginning of this presentation—two singular and original categories, decanted and forged by Europe,precisely in an order as conformative of its lifestyles as equally reflexive,critical, explanatory and legitimator of the forms themselves.Consequently, and with regards to social life, those categories denoteEurope not only in its present facticity, as a group of organisedsocieties, but above anything else, they project Europe´s self-comprehensionin those strongly theorized conceptual systems.In other words: such concepts have come to act, in Westernculture, as references which are, in practice, simultaneously explanatoryand dynamising of the ensemble of aspects of social organization: fromeducational, production and Health systems, systems concerned withthe ownership of goods of any kind and with the social application ofjustice, etc. to the institutionalization of private life.Moreover, these categories have been assumed and readjusted inmodern times —we could paradigmatically think of Hegel—; they havealso been critically revised over and over again in the past 20 th century—let us think about Habermas and about the multiple debatesprovoked from his position. In all contexts, they have tried to givesense to human life according to a conformity which somehowtotalises it, seeing it in its conjunction with other human lives, insertingit in a whole.We are indeed before political-philosophical concepts of greatanthropological depth. If we limit “modernity” to the historical periodof the Enlightenment, contemplated by those who lived the FrenchRevolution as the truth of that age, I believe it is not inexact but veryexplanatory to interpret its meaning as a type of anthropocentrism—as sublimated as one wants— crowned with political primacy. Thepath that goes from Kant’s ethical-political writings, passing by Hobbes’Leviathan, to Hegel’s Philosophy of Law is eloquent in this respect.Even if it is true that the Renaissance actually initiates the modernera, distancing itself from the immediate past experienced in the form ofChristianity and gearing itself reflexively towards Greco-Roman antiquityand towards classicism worthy of imitation, it is in the lattermost part ofthe 18 th Century when a renewed historical conscience emerges, whichtouches philosophy and which synthesises modernity in the core of theFrench Revolution, fulfilment of what began in the turn that issymbolised in Descartes.