Dialogue: Revisiting Europe, from History to values
“The Radical Enlightment upholds philosphy’s dead angles and shady corners, and extend to all mankind an equitative and antidogmatic judgement.”
Marina Garcés
“Rationalism can help us interpret the world but passion is what connects us to it. […] Creating a reason for hope is the only escape to the rise of an authoritarian regime.”
Philipp Blom
What can we learn from Europe’s history? Can we revisit the legacy of the radical Enlightenment and recover the rupture and challenge from those ideas ? In this dialogue, Marina Garcés and Philipp Blom reflect on the shared past with a direct interpellation to the current moment.
Modern Europe and its cultural imaginary are born with the outbreak of the Enlightenment and the irruption of cosmopolitan values such as peace, freedom, fraternity or the progress of the sciences. While the European narrative framed these values into a modern and emancipatory founding myth, in parallel Europe’s History came through a project of domination that would lead to some of the darkest episodes of humanity such as colonialism or the holocaust.
Today, in a context of enormous uncertainties and global changes, Europe is a concept that blurs amidst the tensions caused by the rise of national-populism and xenophobia, Euroscepticism and neoliberal austerity or also the demographic crisis and the state nationalisms. In this dialogue, the German historian and writer Philipp Blom and the philosopher Marina Garcés think about Europe from history and philosophy to guide the values that must be claimed today. The conversation is moderated by the director of the Centre for Contemporary Studies of the Government of Catalonia, Pere Almeda.