Eastern
Europe - always Copernican
By Tomasz Gil –
www.venedi.com
The conventional
Anglo-American view of Europe
as the continent beyond the
British Isles comprises the
larger land units of France,
Germany, Italy, adds a few
other places like Scandinavia,
or Benelux, or Switzerland,
but has hardly any concept of
the political, geographical
structure or history of the
lands of Eastern Europe that
do not belong to Russia
proper. There are reasons for
that. For example Poland,
which around year 1600 was a
major Eastern European power,
imploded as a political entity
in the 1700s. During the last
200 years much of Europe's
Eastern lands was either under
German and Austrian political
influence or under Russian or
Ottoman domination.
Because of its confused
identity Eastern Europe's
contributions to general
European heritage are
forgotten or misattributed. It
is fair to say that Poland is
a country with strong Catholic
core and an unflinching
allegiance to the Roman
Church. But it is hardly ever
noticed that Poland, or the
lands nearby, is also a
country of Copernicus and Kant
- thinkers who have made
pivotal contributions to the
history of Western thought
deeply influencing our present
way of thinking. Copernicus
lived and worked in present
day northern Poland and his
theory set in motion the
development of modern science
resulting in the intellectual
upheaval of the Enlightenment.
The latter movement's results
were harnessed by Immanuel
Kant, who worked and died on
Königsberg in 1804 - just
about 200 years ago, just
about 100 km from the labs of
Copernicus. Kant's
contributions unquestionably
changed our civilization and
ushered us into the age of
modern philosophy. In the same
city of Königsberg in 1930 a
young Viennese mathematician,
Kurt Gödel, announced his
fundamental incompleteness
theorem that demonstrates the
limitations of mathematics. We
are still absorbing the full
import of the thought of Kant
and Gödel. A Polish
mathematician, Stefan Banach,
who died in 1945, laid the
foundation of a whole new
field of mathematics, was
active in Lvov (also Lviv or
Lemberg) through the horrific
upheavals of WWII. His student
- Stan Ulam - went to the US
in 1939 and gave important
contributions in nuclear
physics.
Seminal thinkers in the domain
of economics are of East
European provenience, and have
had a major impact on the
Anglo-American civilization -
clearly visible in the last
20-30 years. Friedrich von
Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, of
Vienna and Lemberg (Lviv),
have promoted the
free-enterprise capitalism.
Hayek published his best known
book - "Road to Serfdom" - in
England during World War II -
when the support for market
solutions was flagging and
socialism was seen as the way
of the future. The thought of
Hayek and Mises ultimately
found champions among Western
political leaders such as
Reagan and Thatcher. Liberal
capitalism was reinvigorated
by an intellectual injection
from Eastern Europe.
There are others - Freud,
Husserl, Dostoyevski. The
Euroamerican civilization
quite often receives a strong
corrective shock from the side
of Eastern Europe. Quite often
the West does not notice
wherefrom the correction
comes. |
