The Soul of Europe: Two different ways of thinking Germany’s debt to Greek culture

At least from Romanticism onwards, German culture has been haunted by the feeling of a debt to Hellenic culture, a debt that is multifaceted and certainly not limited to philosophy; as if the primordial soul of Europe– Greece– should transmigrate into the new body of authentic contemporary Europe: Germany. In this chapter, I intend to investigate the ambiguity of this relationship, which in the twentieth century reached a perverse apex in a current of race-thinking that defines itself as ‘philosophical anthropology’, ‘Nazi and European’. On the one hand, it celebrates ancient Greece as the ‘Authentic Soul of Europe’, the place of origins and at the same time the climax of Western culture. On the other, while it conceives of Germany as the true heir of that Greek soul, it presents the German soil as its (the Greek soul’s) ultimate fulfilment, thus closing the horizon of debt. Thus Nazi philosophical anthropology ‘settles’ its debt to Greek thought, and particularly to Platonic theories, in a paroxysmal manner; that is, by referring to the virtue of a ‘soul of the German Volk’ that is more Greek then the Greek soul itself. As an example of an opposing stand– although not without ambiguities itself– I will refer to the works of Jan Patočka, who best represents the train of thought of some dissident thinkers of the East at the time. Although convinced that the supreme expression of contemporary European culture resided in German philosophy, Patočka opened the path towards a different idea of Europe, according to which not only Germany but the whole of Europe will never be concerned only about its own soul, community and destiny, because it has been and will always be ‘in a constitutive debt relationship’ with the ‘Greek beginning’. Through a comparison between these different ‘conceptual figures’ of soul, the radical divergence between two ways of thinking Europe will emerge.