Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian ...

MIHÁLY SZILÁGYI-GÁLargue that philosophical arguments cannot be otherwise than havinga normative cultural character, not only in inspiration, but also in theirultimate direction. This step creates a link between the ontological elementsof the overall conception. An extension of this central assertion isthat one cannot be familiar with meanings offered by the cultural contextunless one organically belongs to it, through his identity. Regarding therelationship between the philosophical reasoning and the cultural identityof the philosopher, this line of argument implicitly assumes that graspingthe meaning of philosophical arguments is always more than justunderstanding their statements. This surplus in someone’s capability tograsp the meanings derived from his or her identity.As the above reconstruction illustrates, such an organicist vision oftogetherness was based on a pre-political conceptualization of the nationalcommunity. A direct implication of this conceptualization is that in thecontext of an autochthonist understanding of philosophy and reasoning ingeneral, any methodology of conceptual detachment appears as nationalblasphemy, because being detached equals being alien to the nationalcommunity. In this context, the “objectivity” of research and of reasoningin general acquires negative connotations, because in order to debate andquestion, one must keep the necessary distance of the observer. Then, theobserver is inevitably an outsider, exactly because he has a critical stance.The one who raises questions concerning the axioms of this alleged“national consensus” manifests his profound lack of loyalty to the normativityof his or her own cultural membership. What makes this positionfundamentally different from an average cultural relativism is that it doesnot claim comprehension to be culturally specific, but it asserts that theculturally specific way of comprehension is mandatory for anyone whodefines himself as a member of a given culture. By establishing normativecriteria regarding the way one should think in order to manifest his or heridentity, this kind of reasoning became not only a possible philosophicalstance, but also one that ultimately rejected philosophy as an open-endedintellectual exercise.NOTES1See Martin Blinkhorn, “Introduction” to Martin Blinkhorn, ed., Fascists andConservatives: The Radical Right and the Establishment in Twentieth-CenturyEurope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 1-14.90