PASCAL BRUCKNER
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there will always be others: the division of races, languages, and beliefs
will always prevent the fulfilling of the dream of perfect communication
and understanding within humanity. Whatever my digestive capacity or
the size of my heart, I will never overcome the distance to one who
draws near, one who is neither as near nor as far as one might believe.
Therefore, except for God or Sirius, there is no global perspective that
can encompass all others, a superior position from which
all
essences of
the North and the South, the East and the West, can be apprehended.
We must abandon the Renaissance's cherished dream of universal man
and settle for the more modest ideal of accomplished man, always partially
realized, always unfinished.
In contrast to this planet-wide tourism that embraces everything but
adopts nothing, cosmopolitanism presumes, as its first condition, a knowl–
edge of one's own national culture. To approach others implies, then, the
possession of a homeland and a memory that must be cultivated (even if
they are made relative). I can only offer hospitality to a stranger ifI have a
certain ground to which I can welcome him. Those who claim to come
from nowhere, dispensing with customs and legacies, are often content
merely to reproduce their worst aspects and are but pawns. In order to
liberate oneself from the past, one must first study it and enter into a dis–
criminating relationship of acceptance and rejection. Yesterday, one's
heritage was straightforward and self-evident; today it is at best a changing
and equivocal injunction for which we must fumble in the dark. We can–
not choose our roots, but, once we have assimilated them, we do choose
to accept or reject these roots and to abandon some in order to adopt
others. We use them as a ground from which we can launch ourselves
elsewhere . What is individualism itself but
the traditional rejection
cif
tradi–
tion,
and thus a history, a depth to plumb?
In general we understand cosmopolitanism in the extended, spatial
sense of the term. Why not also consider it in a temporal sense as a con–
versation with the great dead, creating with them that ideal, mobile
society that is the republic of the spirit? If it is true that we are never at
home in the past and that previous centuries are foreign continents, it is
important that we resuscitate our dead "who are perhaps still living,"
(Dostoevsky) in order to replenish ourselves through contact with them
and to irrigate the mausoleum of culture with new blood. In this sense,
reading, studying, and meditating upon the classics is a source of truth and
authenticity in understanding other traditions. To paraphrase Male–
branche, the relentless interrogation of the past is the piety of the
moderns, because the past is no longer self-evident. Dialogue with the
past liberates us from its weight and from the tyranny of the present, of–
fering us beautiful escapes into spaces in which we can breathe freely.
