La via romana e la possibilita` di un‘ identita` culturale aperta

italian

2022

volume 16, issue 1

anthropology   antropologia   cultural identity   Europa   Europe   identita culturale   romanita   Romanity

Univerza v Ljubljani, Filozofska fakulteta
(Obvezni izvod spletne publikacije)

It is certainly not easy to distinguish Latin cultural inheritance from Roman imperi-alism, as in this case it is a kind of cultural expansionism - nevertheless, the French philosopher Rémi Brague has tried, without disregarding historical reality, to define eccentricity, i.e. drawing one‘s identity from an external source, as its central trait. Starting from the concept that culture is an acquired element, something secondary, culture itself in this sense, which arises from one‘s own otherness with respect to the other, acquires an extremely important role. This attitude is referred to as the ‚Roman way‘ and is considered by the author as a specific formula defining the evolution of all European culture. Its external sources are Greekness, which European culture inher-ited from Roman paganism, and the Jewish religious tradition in which Christianity is rooted. It seems that this formula has been realised in the real context on the basis of two assumptions: the first is - beyond the inevitable dynamic transformations - a minimum enduring core; the second is an anthropological reality that represents an element of transcendence with respect to individual cultural realities, to which they all belong. The latter concept, which was emphasised a few decades ago by Leszek Kołakowski, poses an interesting challenge to the scientist paradigms of current soci-ology and opens up new aspects to the discussion on imperialism.

04.10.2023