European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

THE ETHICAL DIMENSION IN EUROPEAN IDENTITY 299attributed to the human himself which turns out to be, simultaneously,the place administering and legitimising the praxis and the unexceedableabsolute in which it occurs. Although the temporal space concretion inwhich human life generates group interrelations and social and politicalpraxis, will always enhance such an absolute...I believe that being aware of the different ways of interpreting theprimary-foundational helps us to calibrate what we mean when wecharacterise the socio-theological eclipse of modernity as“secularization”. To my judgement, the second possibility constitutes astrict and simple mundanization (secularization) of the theologicalstructure of salvation, because it places us before a situation of“divinization” of the human, which maintains the universalized tensionof what it views as ‘salvation’, or perhaps better now, as “humantotality”. However, if I have not described it too poorly, “divinization” isnot of what is human in its universality (genitive objective), but ratherconcerns a spatial temporal concrete collectivity and the salvation anddestiny of those individuals defined in its womb; in this case, morethan being before an emancipation of rationality, we are before somekind of “idolatric return.”With this brief ex-cursus I point to a great area of discussion, whichI take for granted. From my viewpoint, its centre of gravity and itselucidation must be situated in an anthropological perspective, whichdoes not polarise individual and social human dimensions but rathermakes an effort to explain them from a standpoint of co-belonging. Iaim at distancing myself from any dialectic of “state”/”nation” basingmy approach on the formal frame of modernity, this is, referring to themodern potentiality of the concepts that serve us as guide 4 .4I believe that existing theorizations about this dialectic do not sufficiently delve intothis human “duality”, but they rather precipitately approach it as a litigation ofpractical-political alternatives. I do not know profounder positions, at the same time asrealistic as the ones X. Zubiri developed about structural duality in mankind. As a reality(a), as an animal of realities, or person (b), as a reality in the genetic phylum (c), man isindividual. Due to this version of phyletic character, man cohabits and makes society.Cf. X. Zubiri. Sobre el hombre. Madrid, Alianza, 1986.In any case, I would like to insist on the fact that the explanation for the nationalisticdrift is, in my opinion, better inscribed in the hinge of the implantation of modernity, asa position which far from consisting of a strict secularization of a premodern theologicalscheme, develops an idolatric investment of itself, as I have just suggested. The idol is atype of symbol and the symbol is a totalizing concept. But this totalization of the idol isruled from and by the most concrete and determining feeling; it is always experiential,at hand. In our issue: land, blood, language.It is evident, historically speaking, that the problem’s genesis lies in the secularizingprocesses entailed in the international war in which Europe is immersed, shaken by the