Whither Europe?

From Heidegger and Derrida to François Jullien, philosophy in Europe today agrees that Europe itself is moribund and being replaced with something to come. American self-loving optimists have understood this since Emerson and Thoreau: their Orientalism is secretly about their own culture, a worldly and less mindful Rome to Europe's Athens. Where people talk of some holy or lovely spirit and place their bets. Is it true? Should I believe it? Are Plato and Aristotle dead or just ready for the new supplement - like a scholastic dinner with some Lao Tze for dessert? Speaking for myself, I can read the Greeks with interest; I come from a culture that believes in nothing but getting things done - work as business and like a sport, generic excellence for its own sake. Even language is a game, and Wittgenstein's students are pleased to prefer pyramiding with the right building blocks instead of just purchasing at the window the named thing.

The old world collapsed with the first world war. I don't know if my country, America, is collapsing or not, or if I wish it would or wouldn't. Message me if you do; like everyone else's, my info portal is always on; we won't age and die, we'll just move off the Go board or be turned off when it's time. If China's system replaces ours, it will not, whatever François Jullien wants to believe, be through philosophy but business and governance, another Rome like America was and is. Like Martin Eden, I'm never bored because I'm always curious, and because I knew boredom so well. And that's why: the beauty and ugliness of it, richness and poverty of it.

Postscript: It wasn't all a master's tale of ideas and origins fit for ruling plebs glued to a screen of images with a transcendent discourse. There was also that little affair of an idea called democracy. And Antigone, Prometheus and the others who did not have so much as a sexy management style, even; they merely knew how to say no. And to what; it wasn't a food or intoxicant.