Reconceptualizing Eastern Europe: Toward a Common Ethos

• Authors: Przemysław Bursztyka

Abstracts

EN

The aim of this essay is a philosophical reconstruction of the category of Eastern Europe (as topographical and ethical, and only by implication a geographical one). This will proceed in three steps. First, deconstruction of the category in question by exposing its colonialist and post-colonialist origins. Second, projection of a new cultural geography of Eastern Europe. The main criteria of which are: 1) belonging to the European community of values, 2) being directly and permanently exposed to a paradoxical cultural formation, neither European nor Asian, which poses a constant threat to all neighboring states and nations – Russia. In the third step, Eastern Europe is presented as a specifically determined way of living, experiencing, and self-understanding, localized in particular space(s); that is, a particular ethos rooted in a concrete topos/topoi. This ethos has been driven by the ideals of freedom, equality, cultural diversity, and the sovereignty of the people; and actualized in a kind of cultural flexibility, hybridity, and polyphony. However, this ethos has never been something given. It has been gradually developing throughout its dramatic history, and this was not only a history of those sublime ideals (and their partial actualization), but also of their real and brutal negation. That is why this ethos is grounded in a constantly renewed activity of self-questioning and self-searching, in a persistently recurrent will of self-determination; and that is also why Eastern Europe cannot be enclosed in a single narrative, but it expresses itself through different and often competing stories.

Keywords

EN

Eastern Europe; cultural geography; cultural formation; colonialism; ethos; topos; cultural diversity; eidos

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Warszawski
• Journal: Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 67-102

Dates

published

2023

Contributors

author

Przemysław Bursztyka

• Faculty of Philosophy, University of Warsaw

• https://orcid.org/000000034978198X

References

• “The First Constitution of Ukraine (5 April 1710),” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, https://www.husj.harvard.edu/articles/the-first-constitution-of-ukraine-5-april-1710. Accessed 12th October 2023.
• Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: The Noonday Press, 1991.
• Bardach, Juliusz, Bogusław Leśnodorski, and Michał Pietrzak. Historia ustroju i prawa polskiego. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Prawnicze PWN, 1998.
• Berdyaev, Nicolas. The Russian Idea. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948.
• Besançon, Alain. Święta Ruś. Translated into Polish by Łukasz Maślanka. Warszawa: Teologia Polityczna 2015.
• Butterwick, Richard. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1733-1795): Light and Flame. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020.
• Bursztyka, Przemysław, Eli Karmer, Marcin Rychter, and Randall Auxier eds. Philosophy of Culture as Theory, Method, and Way of Life: Contemporary Reflections and Applications. Leiden: Brill, 2022.
• Chirot, Daniel, ed. The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages Until the Early Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
• Dostoyevsky, Fedor. Pushkin Speech, https://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/DstF.Puw.lct.htm#DstF.Puw.lct. Accessed 5th October 2023.
• Gniazdowski, Andrzej. “State at War: The Phenomenology of the Russian World by Max Scheler and Kurt Stavenhagen.” Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 6, no. 4 (2022): 107-22. https://doi.org/10.14394/eidos.jpc.2022.0038.
• Grant, Steven A. “’Obshchina’ and ‘mir’.” Slavic Review 35, no. 4 (1976): 636-51.
• Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, Anna. “I Rzeczpospolita: historia pewnej idei.” Przegląd Polityczny 115/116 (2012): 79-81.
• Halecki, Oskar. Borderlands of Western Civilization: A History of East Central Europe, [1952], Simon Publications, 2000.
• Halecki, Oskar. “The Historical Role of Central-Eastern Europe.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 232, no. 1 (1944). https://doi.org/10.1177/000271624423200103.
• Hartog, Francois. “Rosja nie jest i nigdy nie była częścią Europy.” Wszystko co najważniejsze, 8 July 2022. https://wszystkoconajwazniejsze.pl/prof-francois-hartog-rosja-nie-jest-i-nigdy-nie-byla-czescia-europy/ Accessed 3rd October 2023.
• von Haxthausen, August. Studies on the Interior of Russia. [1847]. Translated by E.L.M. Schmidt, edited by Frederick Starr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
• Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited and translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Wykłady z filozofii dziejów, vol. II. Translated into Polish by Janusz Grabowski and Adam Landman. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1958.
• Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000.
• Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations and The Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1996.
• Husserl, Edmund. Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man (“The Vienna Lecture”), archive.org. Accessed 2nd October 2023.
• Ihnatowicz, Ireneusz, Antoni Mączak, Benedykt Zientara, and Janusz Żarnowski. Społeczeństwo polskie od X do XX wieku. Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, 1996.
• Kallas, Marian. Historia ustroju Polski X – XX w. 4th revised edition. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2001.
• Kidd, Ian Gray, ed. Posidonius: The commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Kłoczowski, Jerzy. Europa: chrześcijańskie korzenie. Warszawa: Stentor 2004.
• Kłoczowski, Jerzy. Dzieje chrześcijaństwa polskiego. Warszawa: Świat Książki, 2000.
• Kłoczowski, Jerzy. Młodsza Europa: Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia w kręgu cywilizacji chrześcijańskiej średniowiecza. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1998.
• Kołakowski, Leszek. The Presence of Myth. Translated by Adam Czerniawski. Chicago and London: The Chicago University Press, 1989.
• Kołakowski, Leszek. “Szukanie barbarzyńcy: złudzenia uniwersalizmu kulturalnego.” In Czy diabeł może być zbawiony i 27 innych kazań, 11-24. London: Aneks, 1982.
• Kopczyński, Michał, and Wojciech Tygielski. Pod wspólnym niebem. Narody dawnej Rzeczypospolitej. Warszawa: Bellona, 2010.
• Kundera, Milan. “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” Translated from French by Edmund White. The New York Review of Books, April 26, 1984: 33-38.
• Leszczyński, Adam. Ludowa historia Polski. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo WAB, 2020.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.
• Longworth, Philip. The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism. 2nd edition [1st edition was published in 1992]. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.
• Masłowski, Michał. Mity i symbole polityczne Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej. Warszawa: Studium Europy Wschodniej, 2020.
• de Miechow, Mathias. Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis Asiana et Europiana et de contentis in eis, www.polona.pl. Accessed 25 September 2023.
• Miłosz, Czesław. Rodzinna Europa. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001.
• Naumann, Friedrich. Mitteleuropa. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1915.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” In Writings from the Early Notebooks, edited by Raymond Guess and Alexander Nehamas, translated by Ladislaus Löb, 253-264. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Okopień, Krzysztof. “Tezy o ontologii kultury.” In Co to jest filozofia kultury? edited by Zofia Rosińska and Joanna Michalik, 89-105. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2006.
• Partsch, Joseph Franz Maria. Central Europe, New York: 1903.
• Plokhy, Serhii. The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, (e-book) New York: Basic Books, 2015.
• Plokhy, Serhii. The Russo-Ukrainian War. Allen Lane, 2023.
• Pomerantsev, Peter. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. New York: Public Affairs, 2014.
• Putnam, Robert D., Robert Leonardi, and Raffaella Y. Nanetti. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
• Raikhert, Kostiantyn. “The Logics of Sense and the Russian-Ukrainian War.” Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 6, no. 4 (2022): 96-106. https://doi.org/10.14394/eidos.jpc.2022.003
• Riabchuk, Mykola. “Calling a Spade a Spade: How to Unwrap a Genocidal Essence from the Kremlin Anti-Ukrainian Rhetoric.” Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 6, no. 4 (2022): 8-20. https://doi.org/10.14394/eidos.jpc.2022.0031.
• Roller, Duane W. Eratosthenes’ Geography. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010.
• Rosińska, Zofia. “Wstęp.” In Co to jest filozofia kultury? edited by Zofia Rosińska and Joanna Michalik, 7-11. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2006.
• Rosińska, Zofia. “W poszukiwaniu europejskości.” In Symbole Europy: Integracja jako proces psychologiczny i kulturowy, edited by Alina Motycka and Krzysztof Maurin, 105-14. Warszawa: ENETEIA Wydawnictwo Psychologii i Kultury, 2004.
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Considerations on the Government of Poland and on its Proposed Reformation. https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125482/5016_Rousseau_Considerations_on_the_Government_of_Poland.pdf. Accessed 2nd November 2023.
• Rzewuski, Paweł. Monarchia mixta czyli poszukiwanie suwerena: Studium koncepcji władzy w I Rzeczypospolitej 1505-1609. Warszawa: Fundacja Augusta Hrabiego Cieszkowskiego, 2022.
• Snyder, Timothy. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015.
• Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
• Snyder, Timothy. Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569-1999. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003.
• Stróżewski, Władysław. “Racjonalizm i metaracjonalizm.” In Istnienie i sens, 396-422. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1994.
• Sushytska, Julia. “What Is Eastern Europe?” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 15, no. 3 (2010): 53-65. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2010.536010.
• Szűcs, Jenő. The Three Historical Regions of Europe: An Outline, Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Science, 1983.
• Tazbir, Janusz. Państwo bez stosów: Szkice z dziejów tolerancji w Polsce XVI-XVII wieku. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Iskry, 2013.
• Tazbir, Janusz. “Tolerancja religijna w Rzeczypospolitej XVI-XVII stulecia.” Biblioteka Teologii Fundamentalnej, 3 (2008): 119-32.
• Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1974.
• Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.
• Wójcik, Zbigniew. Historia powszechna wiek XVI-XVII. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1996.
• Zientara, Benedykt. Historia powszechna średniowiecza. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo “TRIO,” 1994.

Identifiers

DOI

10.14394/eidos.jpc.2023.0024

Biblioteka Nauki

22446440