L’Europe, l’esprit et la science : Husserl, Valéry et les paradoxes de l’européanisation

This article examines the proximity of the conceptions of Europe defended by Edmund Husserl and Paul Valéry during the interwar period, their common diagnosis of a European crisis and their attempt to give a non-geographical definition of Europe, based on the notion of spirit. It is shown that, behind the common use of the term and lexicon of spirit, the two authors actually put forward two different paradigms to account for Europe’s cultural specificity (a dynamic paradigm in Valéry and a teleological paradigm in Husserl), and that this duality is reflected in the way they understand European modernity, the significance of science, and finally the idea of a Europeanization of the world. In so doing, the article enters into a critical discussion with those readings that have noted the proximity of the two authors only to see in them the same spiritualism, suspected of perpetuating the Eurocentric prejudice.