European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

296 EUROPEAN IDENTITY. INDIVIDUAL, GROUP AND SOCIETYThe interesting aspect of this new perception is, according to myjudgement:On the one hand, the fact that the register of the rupture becomespart of the merits of sovereign Reason, the only possible and necessaryjudge of the cultural system (art, science, religion, praxis, and all socialinstitutions); but at the end of the day, judge of itself only, since thatsystem of culture i s—only is— its own expression; in other words, thecollection of “facts of reason” Kant talks about. But that means:On the other hand, that this rupture encourages a new dimensionof time, which now shows its true substance of human time, as timefor rational work; time that now appears as a door towards the future.Reason, in its own making, is self-care, disposition development,realization of the goals that it administers and which concern it.It is now, when reason is being lived as foreseeing its time (the timeof human life itself), when past histories lost with their multiple opaqueprotagonists in a time that depressed everything human into insignificance(although that insignificance was led by divine design); it is now—I repeat— that those histories wish to be understood under a unifyinghorizon. When human life is understood projectively, life situates itselfbefore time as a realm that it possesses. Life being envisaged accordingto this sense of time, will the present not inevitably remain stricken byfear and condemned to inquietude?This insecurity that surrounds the audacious enterprise evidentlycalls for continence when it comes to giving any precipitated, tootriumphal or univocal interpretation of the anthropocentric turn thatwe are sketching. The secularised idea of “human realization” has theface of the dream of reason-freedom. This brings us to our nextquestion: to what extent are the gods of modernity really powerful andcapable of fulfilling humanity? Before I concentrate on this issue I willmake a brief reflection.Backdrop: Christianity and Secularization 3The idea of plenitude or institutionalised plenitude of man wasobviously alive in the religious-theological perspective. It is for this3I point to a very involving and ambitious subject that I would not know how todevelop with success —but which somehow directs this presentation. I stop for amoment on these concepts to simply warn that what Europeans call “modernity” isinscribed —to use Zubiri’s words— within the “Christian horizon.” This said, I wouldlike to raise the question of whether we should revise the way we comprehend the