Europe, a common heritage. 1999. Claude Karnoouh. Whose heritage? Subject and object.
Aber die Thronen, wo? die Tempel, und wo die Gefäße,
Wo mit Nektar gefüllt Göttern zu Lust der Gesang?
Wo, wo leuchten sie denn, die fernhintreffenden Sprüche?
Delphi schlummert und wo tönet das groß Geschick?
Over a century ago, in Der Wanderer und sein Schatten, Nietzsche wrote that the memory of
the original Europe was still alive in "thirty very old books which have
never aged". Since Nietzsche never
gave their titles, he left us to discover them ourselves through our
imagination and our poetic affinities.
However, one thing is certain, the texts in question appeared at the
time when Greece became the wellspring of our world, in the language of the
nascent arts of tragedy and philosophy.
Half a century later, Heidegger took the path of hermeneutics in his quest for the primary meaning of the expressions of Being, revealing how successive commentaries over the centuries had distanced us from the initial questions and, in the end, caused us to confuse all entities that exist (Seiendes, things) with their capacity for being (Sein, being). That confusion was the very reason why the history of metaphysics had become inseparable from that of the forgetting of Being.
Europe, or what constituted Europe when it first came into existence, was confronted with a far-reaching question. Today that question might be put as follows: How do things stand with Europe's original heritage? Asking "How do things stand" does not at all suggest an immutable state of affairs which must be rediscovered, as one seeks to unearth a relic in order to offer it as an object of contemplation and veneration. The "Fall in time" (La chute dans le temps), to cite the title of a book by Cioran, is the irresistible, irrepressible, irremissible motive force of humanity. We have therefore definitively become (the word become here suggests the idea of successive changes) historical beings. The questions which we ask the world and ourselves therefore reflect our contemporary concerns. This is the historicity of the question of Being, which Heidegger reveals in Being and time (Sein und Zeit).
What are we in fact saying when we talk of the historicity of the question of Being? We are noting the fact that Being, whatever names it may have been given, was forgotten as an initial question: namely, why and how it is possible that that should be so and not otherwise, and not how that is. In other words, the name which was given to Being in each instance defined a space-time (a topos) which, with each new formulation, determined the idealities (that is, firstly, the universals and, secondly, the place and the notion of the uncreated from which they originated), while human praxis was incessantly at variance with these overall models based on logical reasoning.
When the Greeks began to pose questions in the realms of philosophy and tragedy they broke free of the primeval era, the age of rituals, of eternal repetition, of the immutable world order that existed as soon as the world emerged from the original chaos, a world where myths spoke the truth through the mere power of their telling. To ask philosophical questions about the world is to open up to the logos as the word of knowledge, the outward expression of the thinking mind in relation to the object which it observes. Slowly, through many different thought processes, a new relationship between humankind and the surrounding world came into being, founded on the certainty of a subject who speaks the truth about a given object - adequatio res intellectum - with the aim of shaping its objective characteristics, so as eventually to appropriate the power to change them.
Gradually, this objectivisation process will seek total mastery of the object, which will hence be subject to "divine" and "natural" laws that need simply be understood firstly in logical terms (Saint Thomas) and secondly according to the principles of mathematics (Descartes) in order, lastly, to bend the object to humankind's absolute will, so that it can be utilised within a political or social system devised for that very purpose (Locke, Hume, Hobbes, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, and later Marx and all his successors, whether of the right or the left).
It is from the angle of this tendency to objectivise - which subsumes the entire history of metaphysics, that is to say the history of the western world - that one should approach the concept of heritage, which has to do with the modern mode of being-in-the-world. Talking about heritage means adopting that mode from the outset, performing an act of knowledge or, to borrow an expression coined by Gianni Vattimo, using knowledge as an endorsement, that is to say to give an a priori definition of the object, its purpose, its use, its value and its implementation. However, in the context of historicity, the relationship with the past, as an object of knowledge, has not always been envisaged in terms of heritage, or even heritage as a thing of value to be preserved. The factual nature of this relationship must therefore be briefly illustrated by citing a few examples.
In the first period of the modern age, that which is usually referred to as the Enlightenment, the past was regarded as the dark ages, a period of barbarism which had to be forgotten and overcome to make room for progress, perceived as the synchronous development of knowledge and morals. In fact, this way of thinking did not at all originate with Cartesian philosophy; it was apparent from the Late Renaissance in Italy.
A perfect example of such reasoning at work is to be found in the way Raphael performed the commission he had received from Pope Julius II to paint frescoes in a chapel - already decorated by Fra Angelico - situated alongside the Sistine Chapel. In doing so, Raphael destroyed his illustrious predecessor's paintings. It is scarcely possible to discern any notion of heritage in this act; the concept of heritage, however, took other forms at the time - the rediscovery of and attempts to preserve the works of ancient Greece and Rome.
The recent past, that of the Middle Ages, was considered of little worth and disregarded in favour of a new perception of the arts of a far more distant past, accepted as the sole standards of beauty, goodness and truth. Our present-day concept has its origin in an unexpressed idea of the heritage being reduced to the works falling within the Renaissance's rereading of Neoplatonism. But rereadings and interpretations are never true to the original; on the contrary, they update it, require it to answer the questions of the present, a typical example being the rereading of the Bible at the time of the Reformation, which, although the declared intent was to go back to the founding texts, never recaptured the spirit, and even less the practices, of the first Christians. In its own time and its own way, including in its strict asceticism and its pietism, the Reformation was a modern movement.
However, for the notion of heritage to
encompass all events, monuments, objects and traces of the past without
distinction, from those coming within the realm of culture with a capital C to
the most humble popular artefacts - both the arts as such and, later, craft and
industry - thinkers must first come to consider whatever happens as a loss, the
loss of something that is complete, that cannot be bettered, engendering a
feeling of nostalgia and sometimes even melancholy, a regret for the past which
the present can never assuage.
It was the Romantic movement which attached absolute worth to the past, the past of the Dark Ages: Herder's work on language and "folk poetry", the fascination with the inventions of the Ossianic legends, the "discovery" of popular culture, the mediaeval novel à la Walter Scott, the preference for the Gothic style, etc, and even the aesthetic canon decreed by Hegel, who considered that the Greek epic poem had reached the peak of aesthetic perfection, never to be surpassed. In these points of view it is possible to discern the first signs of a nostalgic yearning for a world that is lost for ever. It is for this reason that the later forms of certain trends in aesthetic Romanticism regard the modern age as the decline of the western world.
However, from the Enlightenment to the Romantics the metaphysical ideas underlying the concept of time remained unchanged. Whether the slate of the past is wiped clean or all of its identifiable products are preserved, thinking which objectivises the works of the past as objects is governed by historicity and therefore shows the same semantic arrogance as philosophical systems of historical awareness. The selfsame thinking demonstrates the onto-teleology of an eschatological view of time: on one side the future, on the other the past; on one hand the coming Enlightenment, thanks to never-ending progress, on the other the loss of a golden age; in either case time is perceived as a linear progress, in which the present always has its roots in the past, a destiny already shaped from the outset. On one hand, the bright future of the age of reason, of the mind, and an end to all need; on the other, a decline which commenced at the point in time when form and substance, mind and matter were in harmony. No room is left for chance, for the unprecedented, for novelty, in short for freedom with all the agonising possibilities that it offers.
The idea of preserving the past is not new. It dates back to the "cabinets of curiosities" of the Renaissance princes, in which the rediscovered works of ancient Greece and Rome were mingled with artefacts and stuffed animals brought back from the recently discovered Americas. At the same time the modern collection was born: collectors no longer accumulated religious relics and images with miraculous powers, intended as subjects of veneration, prayer and devotion, with the aim of saving their souls, but began to hoard secular works of art, in which an organised trade was already beginning to emerge.
The idea of heritage gained strength as the
first museums were opened to the public, as nation-states began to restore the
monuments which had become national treasures, and as education became more
widespread, that is to say as the peasant masses, who were in the process of
becoming a proletariat, were inculcated with a culture based on images of their
homeland's glorious past. The concept of national heritage is therefore related
to the more general concept of culture in the sense of the German Bildung.
Formerly, each nation-state devised its own programme of cultural education - Bildung - and to that end decided what constituted its heritage (an ideological choice), regarded as its inviolable property for all time, to be imposed on the population, although - in view of the labile nature of political history - it is possible to see that the historical artefacts given preference tended to vary with time. Today, in this age of globalisation, or at least of European integration, Bildung must be restructured so as to emphasise the continent's peace-seeking unity, in line with the belief that unification is a more pacific activity than diversification. In my opinion, this assertion does not tally with human experience, if it is borne in mind, for example, that the most terrible wars are those in which the adversaries share the same metaphysical background, and therefore the same concepts of history and of destiny.
Was it not Ernst Jünger who described the two world wars as two huge civil wars?[2] In any case, as in the past with the nation-state, the modern concept of heritage serves political ends, or rather politico-economic ones.
Yet - and here I am of course expressing an academic's point of view, but it is one which I think should not be ignored - it cannot go unnoticed that teaching of the humanities is gradually being replaced by the notion of heritage and by the planning schemes which reflect the various ways in which it is interpreted. An unprecedented wave of culture is engulfing all the products of the past and present (some people even maintain that everything comes within the realms of culture), to such an extent that it is clear to see that political considerations are losing ground to cultural and, quite obviously, economic ones.
Museums of folk art have, for instance, evolved into ecomuseums; museums of arts and crafts have given way to industrial heritage sites (the very term industrial archaeology shows that the second industrial revolution is well and truly over in western Europe); historic city centres, which were full of life and vernacular objects and buildings, among which the monuments - sometimes in a state of disrepair - stood out like as many metaphysical signatures, have been transformed into pedestrian precincts, the preserve of shop-owners and tourists, where cultural and economic activities coexist in perfect harmony.
Throughout the western world, teaching of the humanities, of ancient, mediaeval or even modern history is increasingly giving way to new disciplines and sub-disciplines dealing with subjects of study peculiar to our time: contemporary history, political science, economics, various specialised branches of sociology or anthropology which have become fashionable, and so on. On the other hand, as the culture of antiquity and the classics is falling into oblivion, an unprecedented number of exhibitions and visits of vestiges of the past are being organised. But is it possible to understand the works of the Renaissance without a good grounding in the culture of antiquity?
Can one comprehend the thought processes underlying Gothic or Baroque art without a sound knowledge of the history of religion, of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation or Judaism and Islam? Is it possible to grasp the meaning of the topography of a mediaeval town without a precise knowledge of the political, social and economic history of the Middle Ages?
Might it not be said that in the field of culture our modern age, which values scientific progress, technical innovation and economic performance above all else, is producing what Adorno described in his Minima Moralia as "intellectual titbits", that is to say "non-knowledge". The Gothic cathedrals - to choose a spectacular example - are indeed there, restored and protected monuments, but can the tens of thousands of tourists who visit them read their architecture and decoration, and therefore perceive the spirit which inhabited these buildings? A cathedral was primarily a place where human beings, with their beliefs, immediately saw the theology of light dear to Abbot Suger embodied in stone and stained glass.
If the believers have now been replaced by
tourists, it is to be feared that the founding spirit of this topos has deserted it. In the end, cathedrals - relics deprived of
their meaning like an icon removed from the walls or the iconostasis of a
church to be hung in a museum - have become aesthetic objects, records of the
past, or even commodities, something intended for consumption which has its
place between the supermarket and the beach.
In this widespread tendency to treat things as aesthetic objects, meaning
is lost on one hand, whereas other meanings are introduced on the other … What
we have here - albeit in a debased form - is a work of interpretation typical
of the historic narrativity procedures of contemporary thought as described by
Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative.[3]
Talking about heritage is, in a way, tantamount to announcing the demise of and putting the seal of death on an era. This brings us back to our initial question: who are we preserving the past for? When the subjects forsake the concepts that give shape and meaning to objects and to places in favour of new ideas, historic narrativity offers readings which are as many interpretations specific to the age that produces them. In this process of effacement, the notion of heritage can be seen to be the cultural manifestation of a certain policy and a certain economy; a policy that aims to reduce differences in a quest for unity,[4] and a tourism-based economy. Tourism is quintessentially synonymous with relaxation, with leisure, in short with carefree consumerism. When gazing at the setting or rising sun from a headland on an Aegean island, who still hears the echo of antiquity, who still has in mind "the wine-red sea" and "the rosy-fingered dawn"?
The
tour operators of course keep telling us that we must not allow ourselves to be
mere sunbathing ignoramuses. But how can
one appreciate what the spiritual life of ancient Delphi was like, when that
once sacred place is invaded by hordes of barbarians in the shape of
tourists? Is not the spirit of the place
ultimately far more present in one of those ancient books referred to by
Nietzsche?
It is a paradox of our post-modern era that, despite the large number of schemes to restore monuments, establish ecomuseums or give a new lease of life to routes and pathways steeped in history, in short despite the many cultural enticements that surround us, we see the past falling ever faster into oblivion. The historian Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out that destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link contemporary human beings to past generations, is one of the most typical and mysterious phenomena of the end of this "short twentieth century"; that most young people today grow up in a sort of permanent present.[5] This observation brings to mind what Heidegger had already revealed with his phenomenology of Technique, that is to say how much the essence of technology is embodied in the permanent present of a form of reasoning based entirely on mathematical calculation and the uses made of it, immediate utilitarianism.
In technological parlance this is what is called efficiency; in economic terms, profit; on a more philosophical note, Gianni Vattimo talks of transhistoricity, which leads on to all the post-structuralist expressions of deconstruction, which are as many learned, and yet brutal, forms of nihilism, highlighting the loss of that state of innocence in which some people were amazed to see things present in their metaphysical signatures.
Ultimately, under the influence of progress reduced to mere technical and scientific innovation, humankind's original historicity, which broke free of the words of the myths to appropriate those of the logos, has mutated into non-historicity, or - if we prefer - not only the forgetting of Being, but also the even more radical stage of the forgetting of the source of this modernity. At a time when political leaders, allied with economic decision-makers, are suggesting that computers should be brought into widespread use within schools, we should bear in mind what George Steiner had to say on the subject: "Computers are far more than practical tools. They initiate and develop non-verbal methods and forms of thinking, of decision-making, and even of aesthetic perception. It is computers which are shaping the new young scholars, who are so very young and who are, in a flexible manner, pre- or anti-literate. Screens are not books; a formal algorithm does not tell the same story as a discursive narrative."[6]
This merely confirms the nihilist foundation
(transmutation) of modern-day values, which Nietzsche had already noted more
than a hundred years ago. At the heart
of such a world-view there is scant room for recollection of our origins and
the meanings - "the illegitimacy of the intelligible"[7]
- which they held for those who shaped them.[8]
The fact that the documents submitted to us
by the Council of Europe include a section on heritage and the market says a
great deal about the dichotomy between the cultural intentions of those who
design heritage programmes and the real socio-economic practices with which
they are confronted and which, in the final instance, shape and organise our
world. If, as some thinkers have pointed
out, human memory is fragile, vulnerable and prey to contemporary anguishes, then
it must be accepted that the notion of heritage can never replace the
constraints of a world that has been lost for ever, constraints which we may
glimpse through a long learning process and through meditation, exercising
constant vigilance and showing extreme care (Sorge) for the original questions.
Valéry once wrote that "culture is
what is left when everything has been forgotten". I am afraid that, under the influence of the
new pedagogic methods based on mass communication, the new technology of the
advent of the Internet age, increasingly widespread reliance on virtual reality
and, last but not least, the economic development of tourism (which has
implications for businesses as diverse as hotels, airlines, and the
manufacturers of cameras, camcorders, and various gimmicks and souvenirs) the
cultural heritage will, ultimately, be all that remains when nothing has been
learned.
This text by Claude Karnoouh has been published in french language. in the chapter "La transmission".
[1] "But
the thrones, where? the temples, and where the vessels,
Where the song, filled with
nectar, for the pleasure of the gods?
Where, where then do the sayings
shine out afar?
Delphi
slumbers and where does the great fate resound?", quoted in Martin
Heidegger, Aufenthalte, Vittorio
Klostermann, 1989.
[2] This point of view
is illustrated to perfection in the film "The Thin Red Line", on the
subject of the battle of Guadalcanal. It
shows how the local Melanesians were completely divorced from the fighting between
the Americans and the Japanese. Their
response to the sudden, brutal, violent invasion of the modern world was the
cargo cults.
[3] Paul
Ricoeur, Temps et Récit (Time and
Narrative) (Volumes I, II and III), Seuil, Paris, 1983.
[4] Cf. Claude Karnoouh, Adieu à la différence, Essais sur la modernité tardive, Arcantère,
Paris, 1993.
[5] Eric Hobsbawn, The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, Abacus, London, 1994.
[6] George Steiner,
Real Presences. Is there anything in what we say?, Faber and Faber, London,
1989.
[7] Idem, p. 145.
[8] Proof of this lies
in an article published in Le Figaro
économique on Monday 6 September 1999 under the revealing
title "Young, rich … and high-tech", in which
we learn that "three quarters of the forty richest entrepreneurs
world-wide under the age of forty … chair, and are often the founders of, companies having a direct link with
information technology and the Internet.".
Commentaires
Enregistrer un commentaire