If there was an "old European" culture, what is "new European" culture? What is Modernity? This is a moot question that I can hardly hope to deal with properly here.14 A safe way to take one's bearings is to remind us of two obvious, rock-bottom points. They are geographic and historical in nature: 1) as for geography, be Modernity what it may, it certainly took place in Europe and spread thence all over the world; 2) as for history, regardless of where we draw the dividing-line between Modernity and what came before, the modern name for this period being "Middle Ages", we certainly are after this watershed.

Two consequences can be drawn therefrom: 1) we Europeans or our forebears somehow bear the responsibility for whatever unpleasantness happened in the whole world as a consequence of Modernity; 2) we can't possibly go backwards and simply escape Modernity. The way out that we will have to look for will lead us through modernity itself.

As for the content of our new culture, modern Europe has got rid of any outer reference point. It has learnt to avert its glance from the heavens. We can call this process by the names of secularization, desacralisation, etc.15

Moreover, modern Europe has been taught by Bacon or, in his wake, by Descartes to look down at nature - nay, to look down on it, as a mere thing without any sacred aura, as a field to be subdued, as a pantry of sorts that should cater to our needs.16

Finally, modern Europe has been trained to consider that other cultures can't possibly be our models. Nostalgia for less developed societies and their allegedly unspoiled mores are hardly more than a toy for aesthetes who would hate to live in such societies. As for ancient Greece or Rome, philology does not look at the works it studies as endowed with any special value. On the contrary, almost the first step for a student in "Classics" nowadays consists in debunking the very idea of "classical" education.

Now, we still don't know whether a culture can really give up any reference to external credenda et miranda and survive all the same. Leading thinkers of Modernity were still aware of the risk and emphasized more and more consciously the idea that truth must be an essai, an experiment, a Versuch, from Montaigne to Nietzsche, including John Stuart Mill's "experiments of living".17 We have been for some centuries conducting an experiment, or laying a wager. Now, nothing warrants that the experiment will be successful short of traces of a naïve trust in something like Providence.

Nietzsche is among the few, or perhaps he is the only one, to have considered the possibility of an irretrievable failure and to have honestly acknowledged it. In a passage that remained unpublished, he has his Zarathustra say, "We are making an experiment (Versuch) with Truth! Perhaps mankind will thereby founder! Never mind, go ahead (wohlan)!"18 This is quite a brash formula. We might sober up and ask: What if, in fact, the experiment yields a negative result? What if mankind invents contrivances and/or adopts modes of behaviour that endanger its own survival in the long run? The trouble is that, if the experiment does fail, so that mankind in its entirety walks the plank, who will have another try?