What Is the West?

AuthorEnache, Bogdan C.
PositionBook review

Despite its brevity--or perhaps precisely because of it--Philippe Nemo's book What Is the West? (translated by Kenneth Gasler [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005]) is an elegant and intriguing combination of a scholarly review of the historical and philosophical foundations of what is usually termed "Western civilization" and a political manifesto for this broad cultural area in the "civilizational geography" of the world today.

The basis of Nemo's reflections, although never explicitly stated as such, is the perception of an unsettling tension between the cosmopolitanism of Western culture and the apparent self-containment of other historical cultural identities. The West not only differs from other cultural spaces, but differs in a way that they do not differ from one another. Western identity has an antinomic character: although its essence is defined by universalistic liberal values, it is nonetheless the result of a particular historical process of cultural genesis. Because of this paradox, the author, an accomplished French historian of ideas, is compelled not only to highlight its uniqueness, but also to inquire into its contemporary political implications. Thus, what begins as an investigation into the history of ideas turns out to be an investigation into geoculture.

The morphogenesis of the West consists, in Nemo's view, of five chronological stages of equal importance. The first is the "Greek miracle"--the emergence of the Greek polls at the end of the eighth century B.C,, an epochal event responsible for generating the idea of a free society ordered by law, reason, and education. The law is then perfected in the Roman cosmopolis and becomes an abstract set of rules concerned with determining and guaranteeing individuals' private property. But in the course of this prosaic process, the subjects of the law become much more than simple members of a tribal group: they become for the first time persons--unique, autonomous, moral agents. The invention of the person, of the irreducible individual ego, Nemo regards as the source of the later Western humanism. The third stage in the building of Western culture is the advent of Christianity, which introduces a new ethic and a new relationship with time. The biblical ethic is one of compassion, which makes everybody responsible for whatever is bad in the world, be it poverty, war, or human suffering. Unlike the ethic of the Ancients, compassion does not settle for striking a...

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