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Achim Geisenhanslüke, Universität Frankfurt a.M
The Uncanny world. Freud and cosmopolitanism (Die unheimliche Welt. Freud und der Kosmopolitismus)
The traumatic experience of the Great War 1914-1918 had a strong impact on Freud’s conception of psychoanalysis. One of the basic ideas of cosmopolitanism, the conviction that the earth represents home for the human being, turns into it’s opposite: For Freud, the world becomes uncanny. His studies on mourning (Trauer und Melancholie 1917), the uncanny (Das Unheimliche 1918) and on a realm beyond pleasure (Jenseits des Lustprinzips 1920) are the proof of a pessimistic turn of Freud’s political and anthropological thinking I would like to present in detail to show the impact of the war on Freud as well as the impact of Freud on the idea of cosmopolitanism after the war
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Alessandro Pinzani, Federal University of Santa Catarina
Aus Gedanken die Tat. Meinecke, Mann and the German 1918 Catastrophe
The defeat of 1918 represented a trauma for the German national conscience. In this paper, I will discuss the positions of some conservative intellectuals who either had foreseen the catastrophe or tried – from different perspectives – to understand its causes. I will focus on Friedrich Meinecke and Thomas Mann, although I will refer also to other authors like Meinecke’s student Franz Rosenzweig. While Mann gives voice to a nationalist view that opposes German Geist and French raison (a view that he later abandoned), Meinecke and Rosenzweig gives voice to the Bildungbürgertum of Wilhelmine Germany, i.e. to a moderately nationalist, highly educated bourgeoisie that was worried because of the common people’s alleged lack of patriotism and that, at the same time, mistrusted the Realpolitik pursued by successive German governments. A central role in the paper will be played by Meinecke’s book Cosmopolitanism and Nation State, whose first edition was published in 1907 and that represents a relevant contribution to the debate concerning the lack of national Geist and its causes, but also to the debate about the definition of cosmopolitanism as both a political and spiritual attitude.
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Benjamin Pinhas, Groupe Weimar
Un historien démocrate à l’âge de l’historisme : le cosmopolitisme de Veit Valentin (1885-1947)
On se propose d’examiner dans cette communication la conception du cosmopolitisme que développa l’historien démocrate Veit Valentin. Reconnu comme l’un des plus grands spécialistes de la révolution allemande de 1848/49 ainsi que de l’histoire de la ville libre de Francfort-sur-le-Main, Veit Valentin s’engagea également sur le plan politique en faveur de la Société des nations pendant la République de Weimar. La réflexion sur les moyens de garantir une paix durable au lendemain de la catastrophe de la Première Guerre mondiale et dans le contexte des immenses frustrations suscitées par le Traité de Versailles le conduisit à rédiger un ouvrage entièrement consacré à la genèse intellectuelle et philosophique de l’idée de « société des nations » dans la pensée allemande 1. Ce livre d’histoire des idées politiques fut publié pour le compte de la Ligue allemande pour la Société des nations (Deutsche Liga für den Völkerbund). Veit Valentin poursuivra sa réflexion sur la question du cosmopolitisme jusque pendant ses années d’exil après l’avènement du régime national-socialiste, comme le prouve son article de 1944 dans lequel il s’interroge sur les conditions dans lesquelles pourrait être réalisée l’idée d’une citoyenneté mondiale (« A new world citizenship »).
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Daniel Meyer, IMAGER (Institut des mondes anglophone, germanique et roman), Université Paris-Est Créteil
Le cosmopolitisme apocalyptique de Martin Heidegger durant les années 1930
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Gérard Raulet: Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris.
Max Scheler et l’idée d’un cosmopolitisme non moral
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Gualtiero Lorini, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano
The Historical Teleology of Infinite Goals of Reason”: Husserl’s Idea of Europa in the Middle of the Crisis.
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Jens Hacke, Universität Greifswald
Moritz Julius Bonn’s quest for liberal peace. A liberal conception of international politics after World War I
Moritz Julius Bonn was one of the most articulate and respected German liberals of his times, but his work is still left to be rediscovered. By the end of World War I Bonn’s priorities were economic recovery and European reconciliation, as a means of securing future peace. With regard to the Paris Peace Treatises sins and guilt, revenge and ressentiment—in his mind, these were not political categories. Bonn was all the more disappointed to see that the “Wilsonian moment” passed and the Allied victors forgot their great principles “much more quickly than we learn them.” In 1920, Bonn issued an emphatic call for Germany to “parliamentarize” its foreign policy and to seek international cooperation, not only for obvious moral reasons but also in view of rational necessities. In succinct terms, Bonn called for an end to the violent “politics of domination,” to be replaced by a “politics of negotiation” guided by interests. This was in line with the liberal tradition that considered the development of “commerce” and global markets to be the best means of securing international peace. Bonn’s analysis of international politics was guided by the realization that the age of imperialism would irrevocably come to an end, not only because space to expand was lacking but also because sooner or later the self-determination propagated by the Europeans would have to be granted the peoples that were still subjected to European repression. In the mid-1920s, Bonn advanced the argument that an age of “counter-colonization” would occur, and he upheld this standpoint even as the Axis powers Italy, Germany, and Japan, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the hand, began their expansion. He identified the most important causes of counter-colonization in Europe’s loss of its former hegemonic position, in a “revolution of the debtor countries against the creditor peoples” and in the resistance against European capitalism, with Bolshevism profiting from its dynamics, by fraternizing with “Islam, if it appears advantageous”, or by entering into alliances with national forces that were actually foreign to communist doctrine. Bonn recognized, in the imperialist ambitions of the new, aggressive powers, ideologies that aimed for homogeneity and left behind formerly effective capitalist concepts of colonization. Many of Bonn’s ideas and theses can claim new and actual significance in today’s world, therefore I would like to reexamine his conception of a post-colonial but liberal world order, which he developed during the interwar-era.
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Nadia Mazouz, Philipps-Universität Marburg
Kosmopolitismus: Varianten im Verhältnis zwischen Moral, Recht und Politik - Exemplifiziert an Kant, Kelsen und Habermas
Nuno Miguel Proença, NOVA University of Lisbon
Freud and the uneasiness in the identities​
Olivier Agard, Université Paris-Sorbonne
Max Scheler’s idea of Europe
This paper aims to analyze the emergence and development of an idea of Europe in Max Scheler’s writings. Curiously, this central dimension of his work has finally been relatively little studied. Several points will hold our attention. In the first place, the interest will be focused on the relationship of this idea to the context of war: then it is at the heart of the first world conflict that Scheler sketches the first idea of Europe, and makes it a major stake of his philosophy , emphasizing the importance of a Franco-German convergence. This European project is in an apparent paradox linked to a radical critique of the liberal cosmopolitan project. According to Scheler, the war shows its powerlessness and limits. At the same time, Scheler criticizes nationalism in its imperial phase and rejects Eurocentrism. A second point which deserves an analysis is the relation between the thought of Europe and the thought of democracy: Europe is part of an attempt (politically quite ambiguous) to rethink democracy taking into account the sociological and cultural mutations that undermine the foundations of liberal individualism, to which Scheler has an ambivalent relationship. A final point that will be analyzed is the role played by French references in this idea of Europe and the impact of this idea in France, especially in personalist circles.
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Paulo Jesus, Centre of Philosophy, University of Lisbon
Apocalypse et Cosmopoïesis dans la Krisis de Husserl.
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Pedro Alves, Centre of Philosophy, University of Lisbon
The Common World and the World for All. A Reappraisal of Husserl’s theses from a Cosmopolitan Stance
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Soraya Nour-Sckell, Centre of Philosophy, University of Lisbon and NOVA University Lisbon
Hans Kelsen: the "fiction of representation" and International Law
In his 1925 essay, The Problem of Parliamentarism, Kelsen qualifies as “fiction of representation” the idea that people would be correctly represented by Parliament and could express itself only through its intermediation. This “fiction” would legitimate Parliament through the principle of popular sovereignty or political freedom. Freedom means political self-determination, that is, the social order must be constructed by everyone who belongs to it. But people, says Kelsen, do not construct social order; they merely elect some individuals considered to be the representatives of the people, taken as a collective hypostasis, as in the theory of social contract. Parliament is based on the majority principle and the social order is constituted by the majority. But a majority supposes a minority. Thus, only one who belongs to the majority is free and self-determined. The minority is in contradiction to the social order. Even if I belong to the majority, I am not completely free, because I cannot change my mind. If I do so, I have to find another majority that I can join in order to become free again. The majority principle does not allow all different interests to be presented in Parliament or all opinions and counter-opinions to develop. Actually, Parliament makes freedom possible only if all political groups are represented if minorities are protected and if common decisions consider the interests of everybody. Kelsen conceives then how Parliament could be completed by instruments of direct participation, such as referendums and popular legislative initiative - the only alternative to the dominant discourse on the supposed “crisis” and “agony” of the parliamentary system. In the years to follow, however, history took a different direction. Kelsen, seeing as to limited the chances of controlling the sovereignty of the state through domestic law, devotes himself above all to the study of international law: he will now seek in a law external to the State the means to adequately curb its sovereignty always so fierce. But how this International Law could be democratic? In which representation - or "fiction of representation" - could it legitimate itself?
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Tamara Caraus, Centre of Philosophy, University of Lisbon
Thinking Europe, Disguising Cosmopolitanism? The place of Edmund Husserl’s approach of the crisis of Europe in critical archaeology of cosmopolitanism
This paper aims at contributing towards a critical archaeology of cosmopolitan thinking by examining how cosmopolitan idea is interwoven with the idea of Europe, humanity and universality in two texts by Edmund Husserl: The Vienna Lecture (1935), entitled “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity”, and The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936). The first part of the presentation will examine the meaning of multiple crises addressed by Husserl: “crisis of science”, “crisis of Europe”, “crisis of humanity”, and the dissolution of the ideal of universal philosophy which is, for Husserl, the cause of all crises: “the whole way of thinking shares the responsibility for the European sickness” (Crisis, p. 270). Therefore, for Husserl to find solutions for multiple crises means firstly to rescue philosophy. The second part of the presentation will briefly examine Husserl’s ways of recovering philosophy and universal reason, mainly by mapping the origins of philosophy, the shape of “spiritual Europe” and the ‘spectacle of Europeanization of all other civilisations’ and by postulating a ‘faith in reason’, a teleology of Europe and a task for philosophers as ‘functionaries of mankind’. The third part of the presentation will argue that the solutions to the crises advanced by Husserl resonate directly with theories of cosmopolitanism, as follow: i.) the teleology of reason and the ‘entelechy of Europe’ restate the Kantian idea of the universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose; ii.) the willingness to ‘believe in reason’ and the ‘heroism’ of reason instantiate the moral demandingness and inevitable ‘metamorphosis’(Beck)/self-transformation necessary for a cosmopolitan stance; iii.) the declaration of the European philosophers as ‘functionaries of humankind’ express the main claim of cosmopolitanism ‘from above’ that postulates different agents as the avant-garde of cosmopolitanism. The concluding remarks will resume how in the interwar period in general, and in Husserl work in particular, the idea of Europe stands for the idea of cosmopolitanism with (and beyond) all its Eurocentrism.
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Tristan Coignard, Université Bordeaux Montaigne.
La paix par le droit est-elle affaire d’éducation ? Théodore Ruyssen, Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster et la transmission des normes du cosmopolitisme juridique/Is Peace through Law a Matter of Education? Théodore Ruyssen, Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster and the Transmission of Norms in the Field of Legal Cosmopolitanism
After the First World War, the philosopher and jurist Théodore Ruyssen set the redefinition of norms that structure the international community in the continuity of Kant and considered cosmopolitan law as a basis for institutions whose purpose is conflict resolution (see his article "Les origines kantiennes de la SDN" published in 1924). This maximalist interpretation of the legacy of the Enlightenment led him to focus on education so that peace could be achieved through law. This explains why he referred to Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster and his sketch of what will eventually lead to Friedenspädagogik. These references should be reassessed in the context of French-German rapprochement and in relation to the critical questioning of the Enlightenment and especially of perfectibility. Is the emergence of a legal cosmopolitanism linked with an educational project or is it based exclusively on international institutions that are supposed to eventually impose new norms on individuals?
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Vladimir Safatle, University of São Paulo
Freud, Schoenberg et l'image d'une communauté sans identité. La récuperation de Moïse comme réponse au fascisme.
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