Page 155 - Contribution To Phenomenology

148 ALGIS MICKUNAS

a temporary significance and, from a broader and more complex cultural
outlook, are abnormal.^
Even if these sociological evaluations are true, they fail to account for
the phenomena of the emerging quests for national identity. Are they
the results of unique ethnic groups, and if so what are the claims of
such groups to their identity? If it is their specific culture, then one has
to show what constitutes cultural identity. The claims of Eastern
Europeans reacting to the breakdown of the Soviet Empire point out
that much of Eastern Europe belongs to the Western culture of
Enlightenment in contrast to the Russian Byzantine autocracy that
extended into the world-salvific fervor of communist domination. Here
one would pit the difference between the modern Western Enlighten-
ment with its democracy against cultural dogmatic autocracy. Yet how
does one square this with the claims of Westerners that Soviet com-
munism was a conjunction of Western political and scientific Enlighten-
ments? Given this context, the uniqueness of Eastern European culture
is not yet evident. Furthermore, if the quest for national identity arises
under the conditions of one ethnic group's domination of another's land
and culture, then nationalism would be equal to a group's ethnic
self-identity. This presumes an ethnic purity that leads not only to the
problems of philological and archaeological tracing of the original culture,
but, given the typical mixture of peoples in a given region, to a myth of
an original ethnic stock. This problem was apparent in the German effort
to trace the pure Aryan race, which was constantly brought up short by
scholars such as Eric Voegelin.
In the face of these concerns, this essay proposes to tackle the issues
in terms of some broader morphologies of awareness and their symbolic
designs, specifically as they relate to the constitution of the process
designated as modernization. This requires a brief survey of some
researchers who have raised questions of ethnicity and national identity
within the contexts of symbolic systems and their possibilities either to
accept and enhance or to reject and retard recent Western processes of
modernization. Care must be taken not to impose on cultural phenomena
some univocal symbolic design drawn from another culture. In this sense,
claims by various researchers will not be regarded as final, but will be
interrogated with respect to their own limitations. Thus, the Western

^ Anthony Smith, Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York
University Press, 1979).