Europe’s Double Origin: “The Greek” and “the Roman” in Hannah Arendt’s Phenomenological Genealogy of Europe

Abstract

In our paper we treat the Arendtian genealogy of Europe against its Heideggerian backdrop and also with regard to several key phenomenological commentaries, especially these of Reiner Schürmann, Jacques Taminiaux and Eliane Escoubas. Arendt often plays Greek against Roman politics insisting that the political is founded upon a unique type of experience, which is not that of truth, but of freedom perceived not as a means for political ends, but as being intrinsically political, which is for her a unique Roman achievement. What would such a discourse on Europe’s founding narratives, which are no doubt not only Greek and Roman, but also Christian and Enlightenment-based, have to contribute to the on-going European crisis? The phenomenological discourse on the origins of Europe shouldn’t be perceived as the reductive endeavor to identify a unique, unchanged, and ultimately exclusive principle determining the common European identity in terms of identity and difference or authenticity and inauthenticity, but in the terms of what Marc Crépon claims about Europe being the product of a dream, that is, the product of an infinitely renewable self-differentiation.

Keywords

• Europe
• Hannah Arendt
• Reiner Schürmann
• Greek politics
• Roman law