Unesco's first Philosophical Encounters were held last year at Paris on the theme of “What Do We Not Know?” and they were a great success. Diogenes published some of the papers by participants in its No. 169. A second meeting was held from March 27-30, 1996, devoted to a question as simple and difficult as that of the first: “Who Are We?” Once again this journal will not be able to publish all contributions, but is fortunate enough to present at least some of them to its readers.

In what sort of situation might someone ask the question “who are we?” It seems most appropriate in the mouth of someone trying to shape her audience into a more coherent community. It is the sort of rhetorical question a party leader might ask at a party rally. In such situations, it means something like “what unifying ideal can we find to make us less like a mob and more like an army, less like people thrown together by accident and more like people who have united to accomplish a task?”

Let us begin with Richard Rorty's question: how can we speak of “us,” how to invoke a universal and abstract “we”, when the people of the earth are separated from each other by so many inequalities and injustices? This is a crucial question, and one that it is a direct descendant of pragmatic inquiry. The essential aim of this kind of analysis, Dewey said, was less to “reach ultimate reality” than to “clarify human ideas in relation to the epoch's social conflicts.”

The question thus formulated is inscribed in the purest philosophical tradition: it actualizes the scope of wonder, that Greek sentiment that awakens not before the extraordinary, but precisely before the most ordinary and obvious, before the fact of being there; wonder that is particular to the first thinkers of the dawn of the West and from which philosophy and science are born.

Who are we? Never have so many of us asked this question, nor so few been able to answer it. What is happening to us? Already we miss those who are not asking the question along with us.

We all were sure of ourselves in our respective groups - some aggressive, others tolerant - but sure of being these ones and not those ones as we crossed paths with others or with us, in business and in war, and who were always ready to tell us which of all of them we were.

There is no shortage of analyses, even of mutually exclusive ones, concerning the identities of the East Germans. Social scientists as well as journalists find enticing the phenomenon of a society that is in the midst of a transformation; a society that experiences the (national) unification between a part of society that is revolutionary with another part that is geographically separate and non-revolutionary while undergoing a process of social blending. This examination is accompanied by constant exhortations from the politicians - who, as if appealing to themselves, have the task of representing German unity in nationally conceived institutions - to surmount the mental trenches that have arisen. This article tries to discuss some aspects of the processes of identification that are either unfolding in East Germany or are failing to materialize. In this connection we are concerned with interpretations of social and political transformations on the part of the individual, but also with the “impositions of the Western paradigm,” both of which generate norms of behavior and language through which the East Germans must find their own language when describing their situation.

Since the time of the Renaissance, it has been believed in the West that Greco-Roman Civilization developed solely between Athens, Rome and Paris. In so doing, we forget the detour that Greek culture took into Muslim culture over a period of several centuries, and the influence of this culture on Muslim philosophy and science. This assumption also fails to take note of Muslim influence on Europe, in which Andalusia and Sicily acted as intermediaries. In order accurately to trace the spread of knowledge from Greece we must follow a path leading from Athens to Baghdad and Cordoba before reaching Paris. If we omit this historical reality, we underestimate the role played by Eastern Christians and Jews in the transmission of Greek knowledge to Islam, and from Islam to the West.

The human animal feels fear: the ancient tranquil hordes, inhabitants of infinite plains where time stood still, have dissolved into a swarming, formless mass rushing into the future as if into the void: without a plan, without a leader, without roots; perhaps the only thing that guides it is the vague feeling of being a body whose limbs can not survive if separated.

On my first visit to England, nearly twenty years ago, I experienced a poignant moment of realization, understanding finally why Europeans called Japan a “Far Eastern country,” for it was then that I first saw a Europe-centered world map: Japan really was a small fringe of islands off at the far right edge of the map, in the “Far Eastern” region, from a European point of view.