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SECTION:
Pantheistic Religiosity and Philosophy as Unifying Aspects of Cultures
Chair of the section/Suggestions, Abstracts, Contributions to:
Email: Leo Kreutzer (Hannover)
ABSTRACT: If I understand it correctly, the conference theme is directed at the thesis that the 21st century will be characterized by a clash of cultures, a thesis that appears to be lastingly confirmed by the experience of September 11 and the martial consequences that are being drawn from it.
Because of the current upturn in confrontational initiatives, the "West" feels justified in its tendency to understand and represent its system as thoroughly secularized and guided by reason compared to the "rest of the world." Consequently, the role of religious attitudes gains special importance for the question about the unifying and divisive aspects of cultures. With respect to the question of what unites cultures with one another on the level of a religious worldview, the phenomenon of pantheistic religiosity and its secularized form, a pantheistic philosophy, seems to me to belong to the topics that the planned conference should examine.
This theme could be treated in two ways: a pantheistic religiosity
and philosophy can without geographical limitation be investigated
as a unifying element between cultures;
It can, however, especially be discussed as a unifying factor
between Europe and Africa. In the following I offer some explanations
for both possibilities.
With respect to special relationships between Europe and Africa, the unifying aspect of a pantheistic religiosity and philosophy can be thematized on the basis of a reevaluation of the thesis of Léopold Sèdar Senghor concerning a soul relationship between black Africans and Germans. A reevaluation of this thesis would begin with the working hypothesis that Senghor, in a way wrongly oriented by Leo Frobenius, was tracing an affinity between the pantheistic philosophy of authors of Goethe's time and a black African "Animism," which in truth deals with a pantheistic form of religiosity.
A transnational investigation of the unifying aspect of pantheistic religiosity and philosophy can, however, also be expanded beyond the bi-continental constellation Europe-Africa. One could ask, whether, for example, "magic realism" in Latin American literature would not also belong in this connection. One could possibly further ask, would European contact with other continents and their cultures have been able to proceed in the form of ruthless subjugation and colonization, would it not have taken a communicative and empathetic form, if European modernity had not based its rationale on a worldwide, isolating, philosophical materialism? The project of a pantheistic modernity, as authors like Lessing, Herder and Goethe had conceived as a variation of European Enlightenment, would have been able to create a supra-European, religious pantheism based on nature, and its offshoots in terms of weltanschauung would in any case have led to essentially more relaxed contacts, in the sense that it would have been easier for this form of pantheism to find its own way into a modernity, which, as pantheistically inspired, could have been constituted as diversity in unity.
As one can see, a pantheistic religiosity and philosophy can initially hardly be treated otherwise than in its historical intention. But a conference on "The Unifying Aspects of Cultures" should indeed not only examine the currently given and directly doable, it should rather also be interested in historic constellations and unrealized projects. What the chances are for a reevaluation of buried possibilities, is a question that in any case cannot be asked, without first having gained clarity about what exactly has been lost and squandered.
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