Europe: Space, Spirit, Style

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Europe: Space, Spirit, StyleThorsten Botz-BornsteinPublished online: 02 Jul 2010.

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The European Legacy, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 179–187, 2003

Europe: Space, Spirit, Style

�� THORSTEN BOTZ-BORNSTEIN ��

ABSTRACT Firstly, politicians tend to define Europe in terms of space. Scientific connotations of space, however,

make such procedures less suitable for cultural expression. Since Europe is obviously constituted also by various

concrete elements, it cannot be located in a purely abstract sphere. Secondly, Heidegger argues that mortals should

first have to “put up” with the space they are living in before developing a “technological” relationship with this

space. What is lacking in Heidegger’s place is the—typically European—element of multiculture. Thirdly,

Nietzsche recognized the crisis of eurocentrist culture in his time, all too apparent in the bourgeois German

Bildung. Nietzsche suggests however, when thinking of the future of Germany, no “regionalism” which makes

him different from Heidegger. Further on, the article demonstrates that as much as Heidegger is moving from spirit

to Gemut, Nietzsche moves in the opposite direction, which is from spirit to style.

EUROPE: SPACE OR REGION?

Politicians tend to define Europe in terms of space: geographical space, economi-

cal space, and also cultural space. The scientific connotation that “space” has in the

Western philosophical tradition seems to make such procedures, however, more suitable

for geographical and economical considerations than for cultural expressions. Everybody

agrees that Europe is a cultural phenomenon, and a description of a “European space”

therefore runs the risk of by-passing the very question “What is Europe?”

Given the importance of a notion like “European space” it will be necessary to

firstly examine the idea of “space” as such, in order to design possible alternatives

concerning the characterization of Europe. In general, the idea of defining space as a

geometrical extension is due to Descartes but also, if not to Plato himself, at least to a

more generalized form of Platonic idealism. This is also important for Europe:

“Europe” or “European” might be an “idea,” but since Europe is obviously also

constituted by various concrete elements, this Europe cannot be located in a purely

abstract sphere. Europe has its “unity only through its multiplicity” as Edgar Morin

said,1 and to any generalized, Platonic concept of Europe we must oppose individual

cultural elements.

Nicolas Bakhtin has thus put forward the idea of Europe as a fundamentally

“Aristotelian” phenomenon whose being needs to be evaluated almost exclusively in

terms of individuality when writing: “Europe was always essentially Aristotelian. Also

it still is, in so far as it remains truly Europe. That is, a type of civilization where the

�•Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales “Centre Japon”, 105 Bd. Raspail, 75006 Paris, France. Email:

[email protected]

ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/03/020179-09 2003 International Society for the Study of European Ideas

DOI: 10.1080/1084877032000098788

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180 �• THORSTEN BOTZ-BORNSTEIN

universal is not asserted at the expense of the particular. A moving variety of creeds and

values, a free coexistence and cooperative of the most opposite ideas—not ‘pure ideas’

(…) but of ideas deeply rooted in life, and faithful to it.”2 The question remains open,

however, by what are the moving “creeds and values” held together? It is obvious that

if one admits nothing other than the classical views commonly characterized as

“Platonism” and “Aristotelianism,” one will remain unable to surmount an essential

difficulty with regard to the question of “What is Europe?” Culture is, as T.S. Eliot said,

“not merely the sum of several activities, but a way of life.”3 There is an alleged

alternative which has also been treated, though in an elusive way, by Plato himself,

which is the idea of the chora. The chora represents a sophisticated complication

introduced into the definition of space whose existence resumes an intellectual

dilemma: if space exists, it must be contained in another space and this space in another

one and so forth. If we accept this idea, space becomes indefinable through any kind

of philosophical abstraction. On the other hand, it can no longer be considered as a

notion defining something concrete either. For lack of any better words, one has thus

agreed to translate chora not as space but as “place.” The chora can thus be opposed

to both Aristotelian particularism and Platonic abstraction: it contains no corporeity,

neither that of concrete elements nor that which could be represented by a Cartesian

extensio. Instead of this the chora appears, especially in Plato’s Timaeus, more like a

“soft substance” that can be formed in several manners but which exists “all alone for

itself without being imbedded in a preexisting (empty) space.” In this way the chora is

able to unite individual things or, through a particularly dreamlike character insisted

upon by Plato in the Timaeus, to unite not only those things which are present but even

those which are absent.

In the same way, the “cultural space” of Europe cannot be realistically defined as

a “milieu” uniting different “really existing,” corporeal substances, nor can it be seen

in an idealist, “Kantian” way, as an abstract form holding together that which is

concrete. On the contrary, the chora of Europe eludes any idea of foundation.

“Plurality is only possible after the event,” writes Andrew Benjamin4 because pluralism

would only be thinkable when there is also a unity which precedes it. The chora,

however, is pure event, permanent and self-founding, and only in this way can it exist

as a cultural notion.

THE HEIDEGGERIAN DEFINITION OF THE PLACE (ORT)

Heidegger’s critique of the notion of space makes (though being slightly different

from the one we have described above) use of the chora by also being based on typically

hermeneutic reflections. Heidegger argues, by producing a complex quasi-poetic

reflection, that mortals should first have to “put up” with the space that they are living

in before they can develop a “technological” relationship with this space.5 Heidegger’s

critique of space represents a critique of modern urbanism and architecture which

would, both of them, create “spaces” instead of places. The pun contained in

Heidegger’s sentence becomes, of course, obvious only in German. Heidegger says that

the Being of all mortals would be constituted by the necessity to “put up” or to “come

to terms” “in a dwelling way” (wohnend) with a certain space. The German verb for

“to come to terms with” is—freely translated—“durchstehen” (the verb which is used

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Europe: Space, Spirit, Style �• 181

by Heidegger here) which is almost synonymous with the verb “ausstehen” a verb

which evokes the idea of a “holding out” situation that is a priori not easy to stand, but

which seems nevertheless unavoidable. The philosophical idea behind the use of these

words is the following: the man who wants to experience his real Being is invited not

to avoid but to create difficult experiences because only then will he discover that this

experience, that is the very fact of “holding out,” can also produce a positive benefit:

it produces the experience of Being.

One should explain that the idea of “ausstehen” or “durchstehen” maintains a link

with the hermeneutic circle whose function Heidegger has explained already in Being

and Time:6 also here man is confronted with an apparently absurd phenomenon, absurd

because the circle will never provide the immediate intellectual advance that he usually

hopes to obtain in regard to the objects that he desires to understand. At the same time

the “evil” character of the circle, once it has really been accepted, represents a

“positive” experience. This means that by accepting the apparently absurd procedures

of hermeneutic understanding we become able to experience truths that we otherwise

would simply and lightheartedly have neglected. By coincidence the verb

“durchstehen” (to put up with) works with the prefix “durch” (through). The pun in

Heidegger’s sentence consists in the opposition of “durchstehen” (to “stand” through)

to “durchgehen” (to go through) which appears in the next sentence of the quotation.

We can now look at the two sentences in a free English translation which read like this:

“to say the mortals are, means that they put up with (stand through) in a dwelling way

spaces just by staying with things and places. And because the mortals, according to their

essence, put up with (stand through) spaces, they are also able to go through spaces.”

This means that before humans start to go through (measure, discover, calculate with)

spaces, they should first learn to “stand through” these spaces. The German word

“durchstehen” adopts here a profound undertone because it alludes to the non-founded

situation that is also proper to the hermeneutic circle. Strictly speaking, there is no

reason (no ground) for this “standing” because, like for any experience with the

hermeneutic circle, there is no reason to engage in an absurd enterprise like “standing

through spaces.” In terms of logic it would be better not to stand but to go: to go

straightforward to where one believes one should go. It is, however, the profounder

voice of the hermeneutic philosopher which says that we cannot know what we want

to know; so would it not be better to “hold on?”

The result is “magical” and certainly not disappointing: we do not “stand in” a

place—we are not simply passive—but we “stand through” a place and have a chance

to discover the things that the “goer” usually passes by and that the passive “stander”

never approaches. We note that an efficient hermeneutic criticism is raised here against

the modern concept of space: technical space which is usually established “in terms of

something” (in terms of technology which believes it knows where it is going)

becomes, through a physical though certainly not anti-intellectual immobilization of the

viewer, a place which is “just as it is.”

SPIRIT

We could say that for the same reasons Europe as a cultural phenomenon should

also be defined as a place rather than as a space. However, the definition of a European

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space cannot be provided by this Heideggerian reflection alone. It is, as we will see, not

enough to transform a European space into a European place. The reason for this is

simply that the “place” is a phenomenon which has a mainly “regional” quality which

produces the idea of a closed cultural–geographical entity. In other words, the

aforementioned opposition of Platonism and Aristotelianism also remains rigid after

Heidegger’s reflections: the opening of a place evokes not more than the inverted

concept of an abstract space. This problem is not, at least in regard to his philosophy

of space, surmounted by Heidegger either.

The root of this might be found in one of Heidegger’s general attitudes: his

anti-technological “immobilism” crystallized above is characteristic for him in the sense

that it works, on the one hand, actively against the increasing “de-spiritualization” of

modern spaces but that, on the other hand, it encloses itself within a certain region, a

Gegend, becomes “regional” or, in the worst case even idyllic. In other words, it

constantly runs the risk of ending up as a “rural Utopia” which attempts to violently

wrench, as George Perrec has writen, “the place from the space” in order to create that

which, within the margins of its own regional philosophy, appears to be a “home.”7

Also Heidegger’s place is a region (Gegend) which certainly still does embrace

strong philosophical values but which, at the same time, runs the risk of becoming

abstract just because these values are purely philosophical. In other words, the avoidance

of every impression of everyday urban society can lead to a mere nostalgia for the

non-modern. The philosopher and the poet are “unbourgeois” in so far as they preserve

a deep and strong sense of wonder, and this fact “naturally exposes them to the danger

of losing their foot-hold in the everyday world,” as the German philosopher Joseph

Piper has written.8 Heidegger’s “philosophization” of the modern concept of space

remains, for this very reason inappropriate for modernity. His reflections on the

“region” are supposed to represent an ontology of the concrete and to remain at the

same time abstractly philosophical. It seems, however, that what is missing in this

philosophy are certain “intermediate elements,” elements which would certainly turn

out to be, should we analyse Heidegger here further on this point, those that are

essential to urban life such as the “social” or the “multicultural.”

In other words, what is lacking in Heidegger’s place are the typically “European”

elements: these elements are not those—as some would perhaps like to oppose

here—which are derived from “Europe” as the producer of “technology” but of

Europe as the producer of multicultural social life. In this sense Heidegger’s “place”

needs to be seen as pre-European, as an abstraction though not in the same sense, but

still on the same level as those modern conceptions of space that Heidegger himself

wanted to combat. Jean-Paul Dolle has described the Heideggerian place as an idea

“which combats citizenship, this way of living together in equality of rights, irrespective

of one’s social, tribal, ethnic or religious, origin. It refuses the notion of human genre

and wants to kill it.”9 This statement might be too radical but it shows that the real

challenge of “thinking space” in multicultural and particularly European dimensions is

supposed to transcend exactly these Heideggerian conceptions.

It is certainly not an intellectual failure to suggest as Heidegger has done, that the

“power of the place” could best be extracted from a perspective founded on an

anti-technological “standstill.” At the same time it represents a restriction which

neglects an essential paradox that should be enclosed to every definition of the “place.”

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The “place of Europe” is also urban: this means it is itself inscribed in a movement which

has served from its beginning as a foundation of urban life. This movement is certainly

not that kind of movement which technology considers as its raison d’etre. It is not that

kind of movement which blindly accepts to go wherever it believes it should go because

its (technology’s) sense would flow—in a circular way—out of its own (technological)

conception. This kind of movement is imprisoned in a kind of circle which is simply

absurd; it does not participate in the more sophisticated hermeneutic movement which

invites us to “stand still” for a moment.

The movement, however, which is so essential in a multicultural society like that

of Europe is a movement which “holds out,” in the real sense of the word: a hermeneutic

constellation which, strictly speaking, strives towards nothing but the affirmation of what

it is. In this way it still seems to be linked to the described Heideggarian “immobilism.”

However, a certain opening permits a dynamic component to enter from the side of

concrete, multicultural and social reality. This means that if there is a “truth” about

Europe, this truth can be found neither within the “standstill” nor in the end towards

which a movement is striving but it can be found only in the movement itself. Michel

de Certeau has written very well about the modern multicultural society: “A cultural

pluralism is here the element of the spiritual itinerary which aims already at a unity but

which refuses the attribution of a certain country that will be its own. It demystifies the

hope for a pure ‘beyond’ and affirms an already given truth in the form of the very

movement of its search.”10

In conclusion we can say that though Heidegger fights against a de-spiritualization

of spaces, what seems to be lacking in his “place” is still a “spirit” which is, interestingly,

also the component which the modern conception of “space” is lacking. Spirit, as Josef

Piper said, “is a capacity for relations of such all-embracing power that its field of relations

transcends the frontiers of all and any environment. To talk of ‘environment’ where spirit

is concerned, is a misunderstanding … .”11 “Spirit,” however, cannot be obtained in

isolation: to have spirit means to exist facing the entire universe, it means to relate oneself

to the totality of Being which is the world. Only through an act of confrontation with

a total reality can man obtain a form of inwardness which Piper refers to by using a

Goethian term which overlaps, certainly not by coincidence, partly with the most

essential notion that exists in Heidegger’s philosophy of space: it is a “wohnen” (a

dwelling) though not exactly the Heideggerian type of “dwelling” which has decided

to dwell within a closed region. On the contrary, Goethe’s “dwelling” is not related to

any environment and it is thus, paradoxically, submitted to a total opening just because

it depends upon nothing other than upon itself. We can say that Heidegger’s “wohnen”

transforms itself into a “wohnen in sich selbst,” a “dwelling in oneself”; and it is this

Goethian expression which represents, according to Piper, the very challenge of Europe.

It is the kind of inwardness which manifests strength on the outside only because it has

an unbeatable inner self-reliance; and this should be, according to Piper, “regarded as

the decisive element in personality in the philosophical tradition of Europe.”12

We have seen that a European spirit cannot be found within a European space

because what is excluded from space in general is, as Jean-Marc Ghitti has also said, the

“spirit.” Ghitti believes that any thinking of space would require neither a spatial nor

a local definition but an “atopical” one.13 Heidegger’s place on the other hand is, though

it might have some spirit, too local to be European. It probably remains unresolvable

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if one can find a European conception of place in what George Perrec has suggested

as the alternative of the “rural Utopia” mentioned above: “n’avoir que ses vetements

sur le dos, ne rien garder, vivre a l’hotel et en changer souvent, et changer de ville, et

changer de pays; parler, lire indifferemment quatre ou cinq langues; ne se sentir chez

soi nulle part, mais bien presque partout.”14 It is likely that a European spirit needs to

be looked for between these two extremes.

A EUROPEAN STYLE? NIETZSCHE

Friedrich Nietzsche is a thinker who, as the Indian philosopher Ananda

Coomaraswamy said, “understood the fundamental unity of Europe” and belongs

among “the more profound and large-minded men of his century whose real great

tendency was to prepare the way for that new synthesis and tentatively to anticipate the

European of the future.”15 We have seen that Heidegger has fought against the

de-spiritualization of the world and of Europe, but that his attitude was, finally, lacking

the openness towards the urban, European reality which is constituted by the multi-

culture that should not be ignored by any philosopher. We have seen that the “spirit”

of the Heideggerian environment appears, paradoxically—just because it is too attached

to the concrete—as abstract.

Nietzsche was, from the beginning, unable to fall into this trap. “Spirit? Why

should I care about spirit? Why should I care about knowledge? I’m only interested in

impulses,” he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salome. Nietzsche’s attacks against the meta-

physical tradition are often more radical than Heidegger’s, simply because Nietzsche

questions the sense of philosophy as such. Nietzsche recognized the crisis of contempor-

ary eurocentrist culture which was at his time all too apparent in the bourgeois German

Bildung. His reactions against it were certainly received by his environment with much

more reservation than, for example, were Spengler’s later. While Spengler and Junger

oppose the anti-spiritualist ideals of a military culture to the entire bourgeois Bildung

which they despise, Nietzsche turns out to be not as “anti-spiritualist” as his confession

to Andreas-Salome would suppose. The reason for this is that Nietzsche’s concept of

“impulsion” is not at all naturalist but that it is in itself already cultural! Nietzsche’s

absolute ideal, at the time he was writing the Untimely Considerations II and also later,

is that of style, a style which is neither opposed to spirit nor its synonym. This style,

which is definitely an urban phenomenon, should be understood as a sort of spiritual-

ized nature: this means as a spiritual attitude which has become so self-evident that it

has become like nature.

Whereas Heidegger’s suggestions remain in some way and paradoxically close to

Rousseau’s and the Enlightenment’s regrets of the modem man whom society would

have as “alienated” from nature, Nietzsche suggests that man be alienated even more

so that, finally, can arise a new culture and a new nature. In other words, for Nietzsche

culture needs to become like nature, and this culture will be called style.

In the context of the present article it is interesting to note that Nietzsche acted

within a cultural context which was not so different from the one that we presently find

in Europe. As a German, Nietzsche was confronted with the more or less artificial

creation of a “German” culture, a culture which was in fact a multiculture and which

was, in regard to its self-definition, opposed to the same incertitudes as is the “culture

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of Europe” today. Nietzsche’s Untimely Considerations Part I leave no doubt how much

he considers the notion of style to be a philosophical solution for the cultural definition

of the place called Germany.

Firstly Nietzsche regrets that the “German spirit” by which German culture had

thus far been dominated, would have fallen victim to the space called the “German

Reich.” Also other European elements, especially those which appear in the form of a

badly digested French culture, would be absorbed by Germany as a naive country which

would simply be unable to decide which culture was appropriate for its own place.

(Finally, even as imitators of French culture the Germans would be third class when

compared to the Russians.)

Nietzsche suggests however, when thinking of the future of Germany, no

“regionalism” and this makes him different from Heidegger. Any regionalism would

simply end up as a “stylization” of regions according to what one believes to be “German

culture.” However, stylized environments do always have the artificial taste of the idyllic

and in the worst case they are even gemutlich. The word gemutlich (cosy) remains, in

fact, an essential notion here and it should be treated correspondingly in the present

context. The Gemut is another typically German expression of inwardness16 and it can,

not least because of its link with a certain amount of immobility, appear as strongly

opposed to spirit. In any case it is opposed to style. While the Goethian inwardness of

“dwelling in oneself” represents, as we will see, a cultural self-consciousness that is closer

to style than to the Gemut, Heidegger had decided, as has been well recognized by

Derrida, to move from Geist to Gemut.17 In Of Spirit Derrida writes: “At the horizon

if not in the programme of all this deconstruction (Destruktion) of spirit a task appears

to be assigned whose destiny or further becoming should be followed in Heidegger’s

work: the ‘analytical thematics of the Gemut’.”18

With regard to the difference between Heidegger and Nietzsche we can say that

as much as Heidegger is moving from spirit to Gemut, Nietzsche moves in the other

direction, which is from spirit to style. Style represents, within Nietzsche’s entire cultural

criticism of the Untimely Considerations I–III, the only element that can be positively

distinguished. At the same time it is a style which the country (in this case Germany)

has to find all alone. No philosopher can indicate the intellectual direction in which we

should go, and no historian can provide a historical foundation. For Germany style is

a matter of the present, and to obtain it, one does not even need to be cultured. This

is probably what makes style so different from spirit. Style is not culture but nature, it

is an impulse which can—certainly—be better felt in a state of immobility than in a state

of movement; but this is only so because the impulse itself is not immobility but

movement. In other words, the immobility is relative, because it represents at the same

time a movement. In no case should it be identified with the Heideggerian immobility

which permits man to look for roots within the sphere of the concrete. It will not help

him to find style. Of course, it is not the immobility of the scientist who stops the flow

of things in order to crystallize abstract structures which is needed, either.

The “impulsive” character of Nietzsche’s “style” makes his idea of what could be

a “German space” much more “cosmopolitan” than could ever be for all possible

variations of Heidegger’s regionalism. Nietzsche’s “stilvolle Kultur” is an international

culture already for the simple reason that its style would be valuable not only for

Germany. The “chaotic mixture of styles” which Nietzsche observes with disgust

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almost everywhere in the newly founded Germany, should not be replaced by what

appears to be “German,” or “more German” to some historians or intellectuals. On the

contrary, the “German style” has to create itself all alone. What could be interpreted

in Nietzsche as an apparent anti-intellectualism is only an intellectual component of

what will later become a part of Nietzsche’s “active nihilism.”

This nihilism is “active” because it resumes stylistic impulses in itself and because

it tries to create style and even spirit. This is something which any passive nihilism—

Spengler’s for example—remains unable to produce. If the mature Nietzsche suggests

even India as an example to follow, this is because, in India, things would not have been

“created” or “invented” but “caused.”19

The resemblance between Nietzsche’s Germany and our actual Europe, insofar as

it presents itself as a cultural problem, is striking (American culture has probably taken

over the role that French culture had for Germany at that time). In Germany a mixture

of cultural elements appeared to be unable to produce something like culture which

becomes obvious when Nietzsche writes: “The German piles up around himself forms,

colours, products and curiosities of all times and all zones and produces these modern

fairground colourfulness which German scholars will then have to classify and formulate

as the ‘modern as such’.”20 German culture appears as a “chaos in which participate and

fight against each other all foreign countries and the whole history”;21 it is a “chaotic

accumulation of all styles.”

If the Greeks were better off then only because of an “apollinian” principle by

means of which they were able to organize the stylistic chaos which existed, originally,

also within their cultural space. The advantage of this principle is that it suggests a

movement and a non-movement at the same time. “Apollo’s art ties in the refusal to

interpret nirvana in terms of a goal,” Freny Misty has said.22 The “simplicity” which

antiquity finally attained was nothing other than the “simplicity of style.”23 Already

Burckhardt put forward “The, lofty and profound, fully ripened form of the myth, the

great poetic individualities and the existence of style which represents already in itself

an event of cultural historical dimensions.”24 Finally, what the Greeks did was certainly

as paradoxically circular as is Goethe’s “dwelling in oneself”: the Greeks were able to

“take possession of themselves.”25

When the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman received the Erasmus Prize for

his artistic contribution to European culture he declared, in the official speech that he

gave, that in his opinion European culture would simply not exist. This was perhaps,

as the film critic Vernon Young has written, the “most sovereign discourtesy publicly

committed by any artist in our time”26 because the Erasmus Prize is explicitly awarded

for the “intensification of European spiritual life.” While in 1958 the Austrian people

received this prize for the “determination shown by them in their fight to preserve their

European character and culture,” Bergman declared straightaway that the only reason

for him to produce culture would be his “personal curiosity.” Is this not the best way

for an artist to say that he does not know where he is going and that he only believes

in impulses? What matters, however, is the style with which he follows these impulses.

Bergman seems to have managed, by using this strategy, to escape the regionalism of

a culturally relatively unimportant country and could obtain not only European but also

worldwide significance. Europe itself should follow a similar strategy, first of all in order

to obtain a significance towards itself.

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NOTES

1. Edgar Morin, Penser L’Europe (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 27.2. Nicolas Bakhtin, Lectures and Essays, ed. A.E. Duncan-Jones (University of Birmingham,

1963). Nicolas Bakhtin is the brother of Mikhail Bakhtin.3. T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, with an appendix “The Unity of

European Culture” (London: Faber and Faber, 1947), 41.4. Andrew Benjamin, Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde (London: Routledge, 1991).5. “Die Sterblichen sind, das sagt: wohnend durchstehen sie Raume auf Grund ihres Aufen-

thaltes bei Dingen und Orten. Und weil die Sterblichen ihrem Wesen gcmass Raumedurchstehen, konnen sie Raume durchgehen” (152). Heidegger, “Bauen, wohnen,denken,” in Vortrage und Aufsatze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954).

6. Heidegger, Being and Time, Section 32, 152; Engl: “Building, dwelling, thinking”, in: M.Heidegger, Basic Writings: from Being and Time to the task of thinking (San Francisco: Harper,1993), trans. David Farrell Krell, 195.

7. Georges Perrec, Especes d’espaces (Paris: Denoel Gonthier, 1974), 105. “… s’enraciner,retrouver, ou faconner se racines, arracher a l’espace le lieu qui sera votre, batir, planter,s’approprier, millieetre par millimetre, son ‘chez-soi’: etre tout entier dans son village, sesavoir cevenol, se faire poitevin.”

8. Josef Piper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (London: Faber & Faber, 1947), 132.9. Jean-Paul Dolle, “La cite et les barbares,” in Le Philosophe chez Varchitecte, ed. C. Younes and

M. Mangematin (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 1996), 15.10. Michel de Certeau, La Faiblesse de croire (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 44: “Un pluralisme culturel est

ici l’element de l’itineraire spirituel qui vise deja l’unite mais en interdisant de lui fixer unpays propre, qui demystifie l’espoir d’un pur au-dela mais en affirmant une verite dejadonnee dans te mouvement de la chercher.”

11. Piper, Leisure, 114.12. Ibid., 118.13. Jean-Marc Ghitti, La Parole et le lieu (Paris: Minuit, 1998), 72.14. Perrec, Especes d’espaces.15. Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva (New Delhi: Munshiram, 1982), 158.16. Cf. Helmut Kuhn, Das Sein und das Gute (Munchen: Kosel, 1962): “Alle jene kunstlichen,

der philosophischen Tradition entliehenen Formulierungen (…) uberbrucken nichtwahrhaft den Abgrund zwischen ‘Außen’ und ‘Innen’, zwischen dem Ereignis in der Weltund dem im Gemut Gewussten. Und dies Unvermogen, den Ubergang zu denken undbegrifflich auszudriicken, ist tief bezeichnend” (56, my italics).

17. Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1986), Section 6, 24–5: “Der scheinbare Neuanfang desPhilosophierens enthullt sich als die Pflanzung eines verhangnisvollen Vorurteils, auf dessenGnmde die Folgezeit eine thematische ontologische Analytik des ‘Gemutcs’ am Leitfadender Seinsfrage und zugleich als kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der uberkommenenantiken Ontologie verabsaumte.”

18. J. Derrida, De L’Esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilee, 1987), 41.19. Will to Power 1883–88, p. 31. Cf. Freny Misty, Nietzsche and Buddhism: Prolegomenon to a

Comparative Study (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1981).20. Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1976), 7.21. Ibid., 194.22. Misty, Nietzsche and Buddhism, 170.23. Wir Philologen, Aphorism, 35, in Werke Vol. 1, ed. K. Schlechta (Munchen: Hanser, 1969).24. Jakob Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte GW 5 (Berlin: Rutten-Loening, 1898), 10:

“Die zu voller Hohe und Tiefe gereifte Gestalt des Mythus, grosse dichterische Individual-itaten und das Dasein des Stiles, welcher schon an sich ein kulturgeschichtliches Ereigmsist.”

25. Nietzsche, Untimely Considerations II.26. Vernon Young, Cinema Borealis: Ingmar Bergman and the Swedish Ethos (New York: Avon,

1971).

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Europe: Space, Spirit, Style