Specificity of Latin Civilization According to Feliks Koneczny
Discussion
Pawel Skrzydlewski:
"According to Koneczny, of all existing civilizations only Latin civilization is free from emanationist influences, and thereby only in it can politics and the state truly serve man. Latin civilization owes its existence to the culture-creating and educational activity of the Catholic Church. It is a civilization based not only on creationism, but also on personalism (it understands man as the subject and at the same time as the end-goal of social actions, and the good of man here is the measure and criterion of actions). It takes into account the nature of man, whose end is the universal development of the human person, and so this end also contains freedom, for without freedom there is no personal development. Personalism emphasizes man’s individual responsibility, while in civilizations without personalism the collective is preferred. Latin civilization’s affirmation of the human person can be exemplified by the fact that no one except the concrete man can have responsibility for the realization and achievement of the end-purpose of his life.
Personalism requires that the structures of group life should respect man. These structures include the state, which appears for man as a being less perfect than man, for it does not possess a subjective character of being. Only Latin civilization fully respects human health and life, both at the individual and public levels. The way Latin civilization operates is based on respect for private property, which ultimately will always remain one of the external foundations of man’s freedom. Latin civilization is the only existing civilization to preserve the dualism of public and private law, whereby the primacy of the nation over the state, of the family over society, and the primacy of man over all the associations that exist for him and for his development are grounded. In such a civilization, politics must always conform with morality, and there is no schizophrenic division into one kind of morality in public life and another kind in private life. Also, there is no room for an omnipotent state or law, for apriorism. There is no centralism, which leads to the mechanization of life and to a monotony that is so opposed to personalism and, by the same token, to freedom. Latin civilization is an a posteriori civilization, open to the experience of reality—proof of which is the existence of science—and on the other hand, it is characterized by historicism, without which a nation would not be created, nor would there be tradition and spiritual wealth. The Church, perceiving man as a person, also caused monogamous marriage and the family based on it to be the foundation of group life; in other civilizations polygamy is dominant, and the clan or family is not in principle indissoluble; by life-long monogamy, the equality of woman and man in dignity is confirmed (an equality that in fact is absent everywhere else), foundations are provided for children to achieve maturity while their parents are still alive, and foundations are provided for the functioning of private property. In
Latin civilization, as opposed to others, there are no a priori factors that would force man’s life to be modeled against his nature and natural inclinations. The only demand that it makes of both the individual and all the human associations is to do good and not to undertake individual, public, and state activities that would be immoral. This is the chief principle of Latin civilization and is unknown in all other civilizations. Latin civilization takes into account existing reality, draws from reality its experiences, and aims to create structures analogous to organisms—ones capable of independent life, guided by their own laws, as opposed to other civilizations that create mechanisms that do not take into account the variety of the manifestations of man’s life or man’s right to direct himself freely, since they strive to subordinate man to themselves. This a posteriori character of Latin civilization is manifested and is possible due to the presence in it of law, fundamentally understood as the order of good and what is right, public law and private law, the source of which is the reading of the moral order of human affairs. In the Catholic Church, Koneczny sees a factor that creates states, although in no measure does it sacralize the state or politics. The state, like the individual, is not free from the obligation to realize the moral good. The independence of the Church from secular authority is in Latin civilization one more thing that gives strength to man, something that flows out of the belief that spiritual life is higher than the biological and material sphere, and from the belief that human life does not end in temporal biological-sensory existence, and it cannot be reduced to it, but it is completed in the Creator of being, Who is the Truth, the Good, and the Beautiful, and at the same time the End Purpose of man’s life."