[eBook] Creating the European Area of Higher Education

COM(91) 349 final and the Peripheries of European Higher Education Voldemar Tomusk Open Society Institute – Budapest For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia 1. REDEMPTIVE IRONY OF STRATEGIES AND PROCESSES It is unfortunate to a degree that as soon as we begin discussing our human condition in the third millennium since mankind was offered its salvation, and the state of our institutions that structure and guide our existence as social beings in order not to act as beasts or mere social animals, we cannot avoid the word ‘ironic’. For the people of intellectual calling who cannot but try to make sense of what is happening around, in and with us beyond digestion in the broad sense of the term, that is beyond the consuming the resources of the earth, ironic is the word without which nothing can be said any longer. ‘Deliver Us from Irony’ is the title of a recent paper by a young historian discussing the last great post-modern historian Hayden White in his approach of employing epistemological irony against moral irony (Paul 2004). The degree to which our existence has become ironic is truly tragic, though it could be worse. Human existence has become ironic so much that one can but weep. However, there are other ways to explain the situation.