The Pãltinis Diary: A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture 9789633865415

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THE PALTINI§ DIARY

Central European Library of Ideas

edited by

Sorin Antohi

THE PÄLTINIS DIARY A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture

GABRIEL LIICEANU

' C»E» U P R E S S *

Central European University Press

First published in Romanian as "Jurnalul de la Paltini§" by Cartea Romanesca, Bucharest, 1983 English edition published in 2000 by Central European University Press Nador utca 15 H-1051 Budapest Hungary 400 West 59 th Street New York, NY 10019 USA Translated by James Christian Brown ©1991 and 1996 by Gabriel Liiceanu English translation copyright © by James Christian Brown 1999 Distributed in the United Kingdom and Western Europe by Plymbridge Distributors Ltd., Estover Road, Plymouth, PL6 7PZ, United Kingdom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher.

ISBN 963-9116-88-2 Cloth ISBN 963 9116-89-0 Paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book is available upon request

Printed in Hungary by Akaprint

Contents Commuting to Castalia: Noica's 'School', Culture and Power in Communist Romania by Sorin Antohi By way of preface Paltini§ Diary

vii xxv 1

Clarification 21st to 24th March 1977 2nd to 12th October 1977 12 th to 19th November 1978 11th to 28th December 1978 17th to 25th February 1979 27th September to 5th October 1979 21 st to 26th January 1980 23rd to 25th March 1980 19th to 22nd November 1980 October to December 1980 19th to 25th January 1981 7th to 11th May 1981 July 1981

3 5 15 29 41 55 73 89 103 113 131 143 171 189

Postscript

207

Addendum to a biography

209

Glossary

221

Commuting to Castalia: Noica's 'School', Culture and Power in Communist Romania* Sorin Antohi In the early fall of 1983, a book was published in Romania that was to change that country's conversations about culture, politics, and meaningful life for a whole decade or longer. That book,Jurnalul de la Paltini§. Un modelpaideic in cultura umanista (The Paltini§ Diary. A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture), became an instant bestseller, a coveted item in the underground barter economy, an icon of high culture, a cult Bildungsroman, an object of heated—if frequently oblique, aesopic—debates in the mutually contaminated public and private spheres of Ceaugescu's Romania. In hindsight, this unlikely product of the (quite literally) Byzantine interactions between high culture and political power was even more amazing: despite its obvious "antipolitical" (Gyorgy Konrad) claims and stakes, it was a published book, not a satnizdat, for all its instant and lasting public impact, and its prompt "unmasking" by the national Communist media, it was not withdrawn from bookstores and libraries, but was instead granted a sequel in 1987, Epistolar (Epistolary), a collection of letters exchanged by the protagonists of the original publication and other major cultural figures of the time, including a politically ambigu* This text was written while I was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford—a Castalian institution itself. I am grateful for the financial support provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Volkswagen Stiftung.

viii ous, o p p o r t u n i s t i c scholar and p u b l i c intellectual w h o

allegedly

w a s r e s p o n s i b l e f o r m a k i n g the w h o l e enterprise s o m e w h a t palatable to the official censors by k e e p i n g the m o r e sensitive submissions out o f the mix. A s those living u n d e r u n d e m o c r a t i c regimes k n o w v e r y w e l l , it takes a real intellectual to m o v e f r o m blunt censorship to subtle f o r m s o f manipulative recuperation and suppression, a k i n d o f safety valve that a l l o w s s o m e moderately dissident o p i n i o n s to b e e x p r e s s e d , precisely in o r d e r to m o r e effectively p u r g e radically dissident v i e w s . Thus, the Diary

and its sequel re-

m a i n to this day an e p i t o m e of the sophisticated symbolic conflicts and

trade-offs that characterized

the

final years

of

Romanian

C o m m u n i s m , as w e l l as a p r e c i o u s lens t h r o u g h w h i c h o n e can l o o k at the cultural, existential, political, and ideological discourses and

practices

of

that e p o c h ,

and

understand

how

they

were

shaped, e x p e r i e n c e d , represented, interpreted. 1

1 Both Jumalul and Epistolar were published by Editura Cartea Româneascâ, Bucharest. The Party censor was a comrade Velescu, working for the infamous Council of Socialist Culture and Education, the organization responsible for the coordination of propaganda and censorship after 1974, when censorship was officially abolished in Romania. For an excellent comprehensive treatment of censorship in Romania, see the relevant entry (by Adrian Marino) in Derek Jones (ed.), Censorship: An International Encyclopedia, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000. The mediator between censorship and the editor of the Epistolar was the literary scholar and philosopher Ion Ianoçi, one of the country's rare Marxists. Ianoçi had taught many of the protagonists, and had a piece of his own included in the collection, in which he was speaking of a certain ideological option, meaning Marxism. Liiceanu, answering Ianoçi's letter in the same collection, put the word option between inverted commas, thus suggesting that the option was not genuine, but rather forced or opportunistic. At the time of the volume's publication, these mere inverted commas were a sign of dissent for competent or initiated readers. The best analysis of the "Noica School" in English was provided by Katherine Verdery, in her seminal National Identity Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceatifescu's Romania, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 256-301; while Verdery's perspective, influenced by Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of symbolic goods, does not pretend to be dealing with the actual philosophical and cultural contents of the debates around Noica, the whole chapter provides a unique insight into the phenomenon. On the substance of Noica's philosophy, see Claude Karnouh, L'Invention du peuple. Chroniques de Roumanie, Paris: Arcantère, 1990, especially pp. 221-253; the whole book is indispensable for an interpretation of Romanian identity and its crises related to the protracted onset of modernity. The reception of Jurnalul is a research topic in itself. Verdery's chapter, as well as her chapter in the same book, "Romanian Protochronism" (pp. 167-214), provide essential information. More is to be found in Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine's indispensable book, Filozofie $i nationalism. Paradoxul Noica, Bucharest: Humanitas, 1998, especially pp. 38-40. Jurnalul was recently published in French, as Le Journal de Paltinis. Récit d'une formation spirituelle et philosophique, Paris: La Découverte, 1999. The book was saluted by many French periodicals, including La Croix (June

ix After the fall of Communism, the author of the Diary, philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu, added to the 1983 text those fragments that even benevolent censors decided (quite arbitrarily in some cases) to eliminate, and a 1990 preface with important information on the book, its author, its context of origin, most of its heroes, and its intended and eventual meanings. Consequently, I will concentrate in the following pages on an alternative interpretation, and on providing supplementary information that may enable an international audience to relate to this troubling book. Readers not acquainted with the history of Communism may also find useful some of my remarks. However, as I want to keep my introduction within reasonable limits, I will refrain from further exploration of the various aspects I sometimes barely mention. When a book encapsulates the substance of a whole culture, no introduction can possibly do it justice.

Out of This World: Culture and Power In Das Glasperlenspiel, a splendid novel first published in Switzerland in 1943, finally bringing its author the Nobel Prize for literature (1946), German writer Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), inspired by Goethe's fantasy of a "pedagogical province" as described in the second part of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, imagined Castalia, a federation of elite schools separated from the "sound and fury" of history, specializing in the nurturing of idealistic high culture.2 Castalia, which took its name from the Parnassian spring sacred to 12, 1999), and Télérama (May 26, 1999); it was reviewed by, among others, Frédéric Martel (Esprit, May 1999), and the brilliant intellectual historian and specialist of Eastern Europe, Alain Besançon (Commentaire, Vol. 22, No. 87, Fall 1999). Besançon's perceptive review is entitled "Traité de recomposition" (Treatise on Recomposition), in an allusion to E. M. Cioran's title, Précis de décomposition (Handbook of Decomposition). Besançon writes that, contrary to what we know from such pessimistic authors as Aleksandr Zinoviev, the Communist mutation of the human species has failed\Jumalul tells us a story of resistance to Communism's anthropological counterrevolution, and we see how human nature is quickly recovering after the system's collapse. I think Jurnalul shows that both Zinoviev and Besançon are right: while the masses were transformed by Communism, educated elites strived to preserve their humanity, and sometimes succeeded. 2 Hesse's novel has been translated twice into English. I recommend the second translation, by Richard and Clara Winston: The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi), New York, Chicago, San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969. Theodore Ziolkowski has contributed a very good foreword.

X

the Muses, was symbolized by the "glass bead game", an arcane lingua sacra, a mental game that synthesized in an esoteric way the highest spiritual achievements of humanity. Hesse does not offer too many technical details of the glass bead game, leaving it to us to figure out how this ars combinatoria or mathesis universalis was practiced, and how it was a creative process (close to poetry, philosophy, and religious meditation) rather than an essentially sterile, self-referential pastime (like chess). Beyond this mysterious core, the whole narrative is perfectly clear, at least for the educated. The book is a reflection, complicated with the fascinating hints of a roman à clef (some characters are inspired by Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, Jakob Burkhardt), on culture and power, history and its "boycott", intellectuals and their social responsibility. Curiously enough, although it was written and published during World War II, Das Glasperlenspiel has virtually no reference to such things as totalitarianism or authoritarianism, atrocities and genocide, technology and war. In this intriguing lack of an open preoccupation with his own immediate historical context, Hesse differs markedly from his friend Thomas Mann (1875-1955), whose great novels, especially Doctor Faustus (1947), which resembles Das Glasperlenspiel in many structural aspects and by its similar reaction to the mid-twentieth-century Zeitgeist, display a spectateur engagé (Raymond Aron) approach to current events. In German literature, Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) comes closest to Hesse's interpretation and figuration of history, first and foremost through the former's vision of the anarch, a superior individual who escapes from history into the amniotic and amnesic forest, thus choosing solitude instead of society, vita contemplativa instead of vita activa. This lofty refusal of history, already present in Jünger's 1949 novel, Heliopolis. Rückblick auf eine Stadt, is further elaborated on in his 1977 dystopia, Eumeswil. While the anarchist depends on power even when he opposes it (precisely because of this) and remains a social being (zoon politikon) even when he is a member of an antisocial conspiracy, the anarch is absolutely free and entirely powerless. In Michel Foucault's terms, the anarch is the only human being that does not exist within the microphysics of power; moreover, I would add, it is the only human being that does not reproduce the metaphysics of power. For Hesse's narrator and his heroes, history as we know it is situated in a dim and relatively distant past, referred to as the "Age of Feuilleton", the "transition", an epoch of confusion, violence, and spiritual decay, best characterized by its fascination with

xi (Hegelian) philosophy of history and "feuilletonism". Nevertheless, Hesse's Castalia is not exactly posthistorical, nor is the Castalian human prototype a Hegelian last man, relapsed into animality, although he seems to have lost one fundamental human traitmemory.3 Castalia is not a homogeneous, isolated territory, in the Utopian tradition: it exists as a network of elite communities, not unlike some monasteries or universities, either secluded or located in (small) towns. However, Castalia's spatial regime is one of extraterritoriality, reminiscent of the Catholic Church's claim that it is not of this world, and is thus beyond the reach as well as outside the jurisdiction of temporal power. On the other hand, the church's divine mandate being universal salvation, this extraterritorial institution has a right to oversee and intervene at will in our sublunar life. This ambivalent positioning of the church, and this model of "pastoral power" (Michel Foucault) remained the most frequent patterns of the relationship between culture and power, between secular intellectuals and the political system.4 As in most Utopias, an exchange between Castalian institutions and their surroundings persists: since all Castalians are celibate men and since they do not have any alternative form of perpetuating their ascetic community (immortality, regeneration, cloning, etc.), lay children are recruited on the basis of their intellectual and artistic performance by thoroughly combing the schools of the real world. Also, some children of the worldly elite come to Castalia only for their training, resuming active lives upon graduation and eventually functioning as mediators between the two realms. Finally, under exceptional circumstances, some Castalians leave the "pedagogical province" for good. The main character of the novel, Joseph Knecht, does just that after having reached spiritual self-realization and the highest offices. That Joseph Knecht's voluntary return to the world is an act of superior courage and a matter of lucid choice undoubtedly 3 Hesse speaks of Castalians as of people fallen "into a kind of oblivion", having a "loss of memory" (p. 353); in general, the "majority of the inhabitants of Castalia live in a state of political innocence and naïveté such as had been quite common among the professors of earlier ages" (p. 193). This is close to the Hegelian-Kojèvian vision of the End of History, most recently popularized by Francis Fukuyama. Thus, animality is a posthuman, posthistorical condition defined by the meaningless, memoryless repetition of the déjà vu. 4 On pastoral power in an Eastern European context, see Zygmunt Bauman, "Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and Change", East European Politics and Societies, 1: 2, 1987, pp. 162-186. On extraterritoriality in the Romanian context, see my article, "Une politique abstraite et littéraire: l'intelligentsia et la démocratie. Le cas roumain", La Revue Tocqueville (The Tocqueville Review), XVIII, 1,1997, pp. 99-106.

xii conveys the message of Das Glasperlenspiel: vita contemplativa is not necessarily more valuable, more dignified, or more true to the deeper meaning of human existence than vita activa. More dramatically, Knecht's almost immediate death upon his return to active life, mitigated by his finding a promising disciple, suggests that it is actually impossible to reconcile the two polar categorical imperatives even for the most gifted (the electi, as Castalians are sometimes called, with a hint to the province's mystical and monastic paradigm). Knecht's death also symbolizes the tragic separation of two equally valid, "authentic" and valuable universes that should be fully integrated, not contrasted.

A Romanian Castalia Education is found, implicitly or explicitly, at the core of most political programs and Utopian blueprints, as the making of the good (or perfect) society requires first of all an anthropological revolution. From Plato's Republic to current plans to build or rebuild open societies, from Ancient Greekpaideia to the idealistic German Bildung and the mission statements of contemporary educational projects, the school and the city, education and power are inseparable. In Romania, where the first modern university was established as late as I860, comprehensive plans to educate the nation have always been a fixture of intellectual discourse, going frequently against the grain of existing educational institutions, philosophies, and systems. The "short twentieth century" (Eric Hobsbawm) abounds in such ambitious ethnopedagogical visions, ranging from the more pragmatic amendments to Romania's late-nineteenthcentury school reforms initiated by the mathematician and minister of education Spiru Haret (1851-1912), the Romanian Jules Ferry, to the attempts at the radical transformation of national education by the Right (between the wars) and the Left (19481989). After 1989, pre-Communist educational theories and projects were resuscitated by those who envisioned post-Communism as a reenactment of the interwar "golden age". Nevertheless, with the exception of a few passéiste adjustments such as the reintroduction of religious education, the dynamics of the school system largely followed its pre-1989 course, with pressures resulting from increasing international interference, especially with "pastoral" funding and accrediting agencies including the World Bank and the European Union.

xiii What is both appealing and disturbing about the most sophisticated ethnopedagogical projects is their attempt to build a completely new school where an entirely new human being would emerge, be it the oxymoronic old new man of the Right (for whom innovation meant the perfect restoration of the nation's past) or the new man of the Left (shaped by and for the Communist future). Despite vast differences between Romania's twentiethcentury school systems and educational doctrines, one similarity is striking: many elite intellectuals share an anti-institutional hubris, privileging small-scale, even one-to-one, formats as a solution for the challenging task of disseminating knowledge, in other words, for what Pierre Bourdieu and others have designated as "reproduction". Such alternative solutions have been proposed both at times when the national system of education was functioning quite successfully and under the harsh conditions of state Communism, when organizing an underground mechanism for the transmission of culture was perfectly justified as a means of rescuing valuable humanistic traditions of learning and free inquiry, although it amounted to high treason. Self-taught intellectuals were a rather eccentric and rare species in interwar Romania, although access to education was not universal, as the relatively widespread and fair system of state and private fellowships was counterbalanced by restrictive policies culminating in the numerus clausus or exclusion provisions aimed mainly at the Jewish minority.5 Conversely, being self-taught in Communist Romania was virtually inevitable for those who were seeking knowledge that was not distorted or repressed by the Party-state. After 1989, with a few exceptions, high-caliber, opinion-shaping intellectuals have not developed a sustained interest in mainstream institutions of education, irrespective of whether they were active as university professors (once political restrictions of access to these jobs were abolished) or worked in the media and publishing. Careers as educationalists or education managers are typically pursued by low-status academics: ethnopedagogical projects seem to have lost their prestige and momentum. Even political demagogues barely address such issues. Under Communism, most interwar personalities who had developed programs of national education were crushed. Some died in the Romanian Gulag, some got out of it unable to resume their seri5 See Irina I.ivezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995.

xiv ous work, others emigrated or practiced various forms of ketman. Educationalists have recovered very slowly and with great difficulty from the institutionalization of Stalinist pedagogy, with A. S. Makarenko (1888-1939) as its central figure.6 Most notably, Onisifor Ghibu (1883-1972), one of the architects of Greater Romania's education system, lived long enough to keep writing memoranda to the Communist leaders (including to Stalin himself), in the totally unrealistic hope of winning them over for his ideas. Constantin Noica (1909-1987), the main character in Gabriel Liiceanu's Diary, represents an other type of reaction to the Sovietization of Romanian education and culture: the underground reproduction of high culture, the so-called resistance through culture. Noica's coming of age in the 1930s took place under the influence of the philosopher, professor, and right-wing charismatic leader Nae Ionescu (1890-1940), in a peer-group, "Criterion", that included such luminaries as the philosopher of religions and author Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), philosopher E. M. Cioran (1911-1995), philosopher and undersecretary of state Mircea Vulcanescu (1904-1952), dramatist Eugene Ionesco (1909-1994), philosopher and economist Petre Jufea (1901-1991), and others.7 6

Much has been written on the duplicity of intellectuals under totalitarian regimes and even under softer regimes. Czeslaw Milosz's classic, The Captive Mind (1953), put forward the crucial notion of ketman, originally encountered in Islamic cultures by Gobineau, and defined by Milosz as a complex technique by which, while ostensibly sticking to the official rhetoric, intellectuals under Communism were subverting it nonetheless, through "a game played in defense of one's thought and feelings". Thus, intellectuals were (or at least thought they were) preserving their inner spiritual freedom even when articulating (mimicking) the discourse of power. See the round table moderated by Robert Faggen on The Captive Mind, with contributions from Andrzej Walicki, Irena Grudzinska-Gross, Adam Michnik, Edith Kurzweil, Partisan Review, 1, 1999, pp. 49-69. Walicki perceptively observes that the only missing ketman from The Captive Mind is Milosz's own: the Hegelian, or historiosophical, ketman. It may have been a "tactical" omission. On dissimulation under Communism, see Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992 (the chapters on "Political Culture", "Neotraditionalism", "The Leninist Legacy"). For the specific case of ketman in Romania, see Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity in Ceau$escu's Romania, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998, especially pp. 13-16, 3541, 116-118. On intellectuals under Communism, see Gyorgy Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979. 7 "Criterion" was a short-lived and heterogeneous intellectual group that also published a journal with the same name (only four issues were actually printed, between October 1934 and February 1935, w h e n the group dissolved). The "Criterion" lectures, started in 1932, addressed issues as diverse as Lenin, jazz and American culture, Chaplin, modern art, Gandhi, Asia seen from Europe, Proust,

XV

The Young Generation, as it was usually referred to, was the first to reach maturity soon after World War I, and shared the idea that once the political and national project of Greater Romania had been realized, Romanians ought to concentrate on the development of culture, and on the fulfillment of their nation's historical destiny, understood in the German tradition of Schicksal. All this was calling for the promotion of the new national community to the condition of a Kultumation, more technically of a Kulturstaat. High culture, education, society, and the state were to be fused together in an unprecedented organic entity, true to the essence of the nation—"Romanianness". Debates on what exactly Romanians' national character or national specificity (specifictil nafionat) looked like constituted the hegemonic discourse of the country's interwar public life, dominated by attempts at "discovering" the "authentic" collective self by means of speculative thought combining philosophy, theology, mysticism, and poetry on one hand, and an "objective" psychological, ethnographic, historical reconstruction based on fieldwork, hard data, and scientific methodology on the other. More often than not, these exercises in symbolic geography, ethnopsychology, and what I call ethnic ontology proved to be inseparable, while their ideological and political instrumentalizations, seldom resisted and often initiated by intellectuals themselves, made violent history.8 Departing from an already established tradition of emulating Western models to the point of systematic imitation, such autochthonist trends were imitating the Gide, Picasso, and Stravinsky. Whereas most members were to embrace, however briefly, the ideals of the far-right organization the Iron Guard, the group included left-wing authors such as playwright and novelist Mihail Sebastian who was Jewish (but equally fascinated by Nae Ionescu). Intellectual-ideological groups have played an important role in Romania's cultural and political life at least since "Junimea" (The Youth), established in 1863, that dominated the nation's public life (from literary criticism and aesthetics to politics) through the turn of the century. The best analysis of "Junimea" as pressure group is in Sorin Alexandrescu, "Junimea: discours politique et discours culturel", in loan Petru Culianu (ed.), Libra. Festschrift voor W. Noomen, Groningen, 1983; now in Sorin Alexandrescu, Privind tnapoi, modernitatea, Bucharest: Univers, 1999. 8 For an overview of these debates, see Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism. The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1991; for an abundantly documented survey, see Zigu Ornea, Anii 30. Extrema dreapta romaneasca, Bucharest: Editura Fundafiei Culturale Romane, 1995. Ethnic ontology is the term I use to describe the discourse that indigenizes basic categories such as time and space, usually considered universal. The invention (by poets, philosophers, ethnographers, etc.) of an essentialist "national specificity" is the vertical radical equivalent of symbolic geography, a horizontal spatialization of national identity.

xvi idealized collective past, positing it as an ahistorical (and, to lucid observers, anachronistic) icon, and e n d o w i n g it w i t h an imagined divine foundation. 9 T h e older generations w e r e advocating similar ethnonational ideas, ranging f r o m the nationalist and populist vision propagated by the historian, publicist, and politician Nicolae Iorga

(1871-

1940) or the ascetic and meritocratic m o d e l of historian Vasile Parvan ( 1 8 8 2 - 1 9 2 7 ) to proposals that w e r e closer to the f e r v o r of the Y o u n g Generation b y virtue of their similar claim f o r "authenticity", including those formulated by the philosopher, publicist, and politician N i c h i f o r Crainic ( 1 8 8 9 - 1 9 7 2 ) , g e o g r a p h e r Simion Mehedin^i ( 1 8 6 9 - 1 9 6 2 ) , p h i l o s o p h e r Constantin Rádulescu-Motru ( 1 8 6 8 - 1 9 5 7 ) , and others. W h i l e these preoccupations w i t h the education of the nation w e r e quite p o p u l a r in interwar Europe, East and West, the Romanian e x p e r i e n c e w a s most immediately related to the spirit of Fichte's Reden

an die deutsche

Nation

of 1807-1808, w h i c h in

turn had f o l l o w e d Pestalozzi's ideas of Volksbildung seau's educational and political program, h a d e c h o e d w i s h f u l representation of G e r m a n y as a "pedagogical

and RousGoethe's province",

and had b e e n materialized in Prussia u n d e r the ministership of W i l helm v o n Humboldt. 1 0 Ironically, Fichte's

Nationalerziehungsplan

9 Imitation and authenticity are central topics in non-Western cultures. Using the Autochthonists vs. Westernizers paradigm, I suggest that both camps end up imitating something. Westernizers imitate the West one way or the other, oscillating between serene imitation and what René Girard calls "mimetic competition". Autochthonists engage in something I consider a quasi-mystical self-imitation, for which I would suggest the term imitatio nationis (to capture the mystical dimension). In Romania, while the "Junimea" group had mixed feelings about imitation, sometimes rejecting it as a source of inauthentic "forms without substance" (forme fárá fond, to use "Junimea" leader Titu Maiorescu's proverbial phrase), others advocated systematic imitation, invoking the laws of imitation formulated by French sociologist Jean-Gabriel (de) Tarde (1883-1904); foremost among the advocates of imitation was the literary and cultural critic E. Lovinescu (1881-1943), who was asking for "integral imitation" as a way of synchronizing Romania's development with that of the West. For a good introduction to this topic, see Kenneth Jowitt (ed.), Social Change in Romania, 18601940: A Debate on Development in a European Nation, Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1978. 10 See H. J. Hahn, German Thought and Culture. From the Holy Roman Empire to the Present Day, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995. Chapter 5, "Germany's 'pedagogical province'" (pp. 107-138) is the best didactic introduction to this complex matter. Ironically, one of Fichte's ideas (also inspired by Pestalozzi and Rousseau) was to establish "educational colonies" (Erziehungskolonieri). Unlike Pestalozzi, who emphasized the role of the family, Fichte suggested the traditional Utopian solution by which the family is replaced by the state. A. S. Makarenko took precisely this step, founding his Communist education system

xvii was formulated after Napoleon's victory over Austria and Prussia, while interwar Romania's similar projects followed a victory— although a fortuitous and mitigated victory preceded by the trauma of a devastating war that had pushed the Romanian army and the state to the extreme. One could argue that it is the memory of that trauma, added to the muted insecurity inspired by a fantasy realized (Greater Romania itself) and characterized by a heroic and victorious rhetoric, that fueled interwar Romanian nationalism. Be it as it may, the impulse to create a Kulturstaat was the same in post-Napoleonic Germany and post-World War I Romania; also, the attempt to replace post-Enlightenment Western European cultural and educational models with Utopian classical ones was salient in both cases, everything else being different. Early in his long career, Constantin Noica dreamt of an ideal school. Maybe due to a reaction to the surrounding mass education talk, definitely consistent with his distancing himself from politics after his earlier infatuation with right-wing ideology and his cult of Nae Ionescu, Noica spoke in his 1944 Jurnalul filosofic (Philosophical Diary) of a school at the outskirts of a city, reuniting a handful of young people escaping from the "tyranny of the teacher". No one would teach, no one would do homework, no contents, advice, or teachings would be conveyed; rather, spiritual experience would be shared, and the main objective would be to acknowledge that everything can be encompassed, subsumed by culture. 11 on the model of the (penitentiary) colony. Not surprisingly, Makarenko's "total institution" (Erving Goffman) educational paradigm was to become the official pedagogical doctrine of Stalinism (with the exception of Stalin's late years), and was to be exported everywhere state Communism was installed. 11 Constantin Noica, Jurnal filosofic, Bucharest: Editura Publicom, 1944; my references are to pp. 7-8, 88. The book was reissued after 1990 by Editura Humanitas. In a dialogue with Dan Petrescu that was originally included in the manuscript of the Epistolar, but was censored, we have noted this pedagogical continuity in Noica's thought; the dialogue, very critical of Noica for his (half?) willing manipulation by national Communism, was nevertheless appreciated by the philosopher in a private letter. Published originally abroad ("Noica, 'Denker in dürftiger Zeit'", Agora, Philadelphia, 2: 2, July 1989, pp. 36-73), the dialogue is now in my Civitas imaginalis. Istorie utopie in cultura romana, Bucharest: Litera, 1994; second edition, Ia?i: Polirom, 1999. The remarkable fact that Noica was thinking of an alternative philosophical school in 1944, when Romania was a democracy with credible universities (despite the devastations of war) indicates the author's genuine rejection of institutional education. Young philosopher and religious studies scholar Cristian Bádilifá, one of those emulating after 1990 the "Paltinij" model, sees Noica's "School" as a contemporary equivalent (only better, as it avoids past mistakes, from time immemorial to Kant and Heidegger) of ancient formative groups such as Socrates', Aristotle's, or Plotinus' schools; Badilifa's

xviii Ironically, Noica's project was only realized under Communism, and in fact against the background of the mini-cultural revolution started by Ceaujescu in 1971 (following an informative trip to China and North Korea) with the quasi-Maoist "July theses", and relaunched in the summer of 1982 with the equally infamous "Mangalia theses". The historical context of the extraordinary experience described by The Paltini§ Diary, however much it was dismissed by the protagonists and by many of their admirers, remains relevant today, as it was relevant in 1983 when the book was first published. Quite recently, literary scholar and cultural critic §tefan Borbely remembered the general shock wave sent by the Diary among Romania's cultural circles, which regarded it as an unprecedented "sign", "public message", or "political gesture", irrespective of the author's intention, but maybe not entirely without the tacit consent of the Communist establishment. The Diary, Borbely argues, unleashed in Romania a "canonical battle" within the national high culture, which replaced the supremacy of the literary canon as expression of cultural excellence with the philosophical canon, considerably more marginal under Communism.12 hagiographic presentation of the matter enhances Liiceanu's transfiguration of the Paltinij experience into a timeless scenario, which cannot be tainted by politics or political interpretation. See Cristian Badilifa, "Ganduri despre §coala de la Paltinij", Aldine, supplement of Romania libera, December 12, 1998, pp. I—III. The idea of salvation through culture is obviously a secular soteriology. In The Glass Bead Game, Father Jacobus, an erudite Christian monk, thinks at first that Castalia's inner circle, the Castalian Order, was a "blasphemous imitation" of Christian orders (p. 164). Badili(a believes Noica and his disciples were left alone by the Party precisely because they were not Christian, and were emulating "pagan" models. It is true that an earlier intellectual group around the Bucharest-based monastery Antim that was seeking salvation through Orthodox Christian faith in the early era of Romanian Stalinism was ruthlessly repressed. But the key to the Party's intriguing leniency towards Noica and his group is elsewhere, as I will show later. A less dithyrambic presentation of Noica's pedagogical ideas and practices can be found in Ion Dur, Noica, intre dandysm §i mitul $colii, Bucharest: Editura Eminescu, 1994. 1 2 §tefan Borbely, "Jurnalul de la Paltinij", Echinox, 30: 1 0 - 1 1 - 1 2 , 1998, p. 19. To date, this is the best introduction to the political-cultural-ideological significance of the Diary. Borbely also considers what he calls the "mechanism of restrictive solidarization" that constituted the Noica "School" as a close circle, and was used by the protagonists after 1989 to enlarge the group by the careful admission of new figures. After 1989, numerous frustrated lesser authors mentioned this perceived exclusionary feature of the "School" and of its post-Noica reproduction, comparing it to the logic of a pressure group or mafia, capable of promoting even mediocre authors. This interpretation of the most spectacular recent phenomenon in the circulation of Romanian cultural elites (comparable to the dynamics and strategies of groups such as "Junimea" or "Criterion") is motivated by an understandable complex of rejection. Still, Borbely's point is well taken.

xix In my opinion, the change brought about by the publication of this book was more momentous, as it marked the point of no return in the endemic debate on the relationship between culture and the powers-that-be. Since the 1960s, Romanian writes and literary critics had been promoting the self-serving doctrine of the "autonomy of the aesthetic", meaning in everyday language that the Party was not competent to judge culture. Culture meant primarily literature and the arts, as philosophy had been almost completely suppressed, with the exception of technical works in the history of philosophy, in logic, and later on in the philosophy of science. When, after the 1965 coming to power of Ceaugescu, national communism was introduced, the "autonomy of the aesthetic" became suddenly obsolete: national history (as revisited by Party historians) was making a resounding comeback after its Stalinist demise in the name of proletarian internationalism. Consequently, although poetry and literary criticism remained the prestigious discursive locus of ahistorical, apolitical images and values, the cultural mainstream was taking a turn towards the glorification of the nation, an exercise that seemed to the intelligentsia a lot more attractive than the dogmatic litany of class struggle. This change of content could not be separated from a change of form: the novel and the short story were reinvigorated by this canonical revolution. A symbiotic cooperation between some authors and the Party apparatus emerged, culminating in the almost cult works of Marin Preda (1922-1980), Nicolae Breban (b. 1934), and Constantin Joiu (b. 1923), mosdy novels dealing with the "obsessive decade", a code name for Romanian Stalinism. Such novels were printed in mass editions, but were surrounded by an aura of subversion (the notion of dissidence was not current until the late 1970s), as they were carefully unveiling silenced episodes and characters of recent history, from the 1940s and the 1950s, either absent from textbooks and reference works, or falsified by Party authors. Theater plays and movies, sometimes written by notorious collabos, were further disseminating these shrewd forms of distancing from the past, a home-grown parody of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. Undoubtedly, it was a huge propaganda operation, orchestrated by the Party, benefiting those authors who participated in it (with or without scruples and second thoughts, it does not really matter), and intoxicating a public opinion devoid of easily accessible sources of information. As (implicitly) compared to the Romanian Stalinism depicted by the literature of the "obsessive decade", the Ceau^escu regime seemed to be a thriving democracy. Or at least was adding a human touch to the cruel face of Communism.

XX

Such national communist tactics culminated in the cultural ideology of protochronism, which after 1974 virtually replaced Marxism-Leninism as the official doctrine of Romanian Communism. Protochronism is the synthesis of several endemic discourses in Romanian culture and politics, ranging from the Transylvanian Romanians' Latinist essentialism of the 1700s to the Risorgimentostyled nationalism of the 1840s, to the metaphysical aesthetics of history of the 1860s (a critique of the imitation of the West, advocated by cultural critic and politician Titu Maiorescu (1840-1917) and the "Junimea" group), to the ethnic ontology of the interwar period. 13 What started almost innocently as yet another erudite comparative literature and art history research agenda, developed into a fully fledged autochthonist ideology that was turning a counterfactual argument into a vulgate. Protochronism claimed an absolute Romanian priority in just about everything, from the theory of relativity to psychoanalysis, from cybernetics to aesthetics, from literature to engineering. According to an immediately adopted line, Romanians were the first to invent, discover, initiate, or imagine most things human. It was a cathartic experience in a culture historically saturated by self-stigmatization: it seemed a great way to reconcile the present with the past, to blend nationalism and Communism by way of their lowest common denominator, anti-Western ressentiment.14 At its most vulgar and vehement, Protochronism (Romanian coinage based on Greek words, meaning literally "the first in time") was first formulated as a cultural ideology by an erudite literary scholar, Edgar Papu, in a series of articles and books started in 1974. See Verdery, National Ideology, pp. 152-204. Claiming that Romanians anticipated some elements of the Renaissance (Papu's original "finding") may boil down to matters of taste, interpretation of sources, and choice. When the occasional, largely imaginary priority is transformed into a dogma, protochronism is born. For those who, rather than smiling at such claims, take them seriously, protochronism becomes a vehicle of anti-Western sentiment, and supports isolationistic autochthonism. It seems that Eliade encouraged Papu in his research along these lines. Certainly, Romanian expatriate Iosif Constantin Dragan, former Iron Guard member turned multimillionaire in post-World War II Italy, embraced protochronism, and sponsored and contributed to some of its most virulent (or, for the skeptics, ridiculous) "scholarly" illustrations. Dragan, despite his infamous Iron Guard past, was a close friend of Ceaujescu, and arranged for the publication of the latter's "works" in the West, with respectable publishers. The intellectual and political history of protochronism is worth studying for everyone interested in the national communist synthesis. 14 The discourse of what I call, following a suggestion by Erving Goffman, ethnic stigma, is central to most non-Western cultures, and is a negative elite self-identity disseminated socially and reaching mass proportions. In Russian culture, Chaadayev is the best documented relevant case. Jewish self-hatred is another, in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century German-speaking areas. See my chapter on Cio-

xxi protochronism openly blamed the West for robbing Romania of its greatest intellectual and artistic achievements, and for mounting a vicious plot against everything Romanian. Sure enough, the lowest expressions of protochronism, while used as a ketman to gain prestige and institutional resources, did not convince anyone. The whole discourse lacked a hard core, an articulate theory of Romanianness that could both revamp the national vulgate and the high-cultural canon. This is, I believe, where Constantin Noica's work came to play a central function. Noica's prewar philosophizing on Romanianness, a combination of Heideggerianism and radical autochthonism, had been rather popular, but had not reached the depth and elegance of Mircea Vulcânescu's ground-breaking "Dimensiunea româneascâ a existenfei" (The Romanian Dimension of Existence), part of a larger metaphysics of the Romanian nation. 15 It was from the mid1960s onwards, after Noica's years spent in prison and assigned residence, and during the birth of national communism, that Noica's own system was completed and publicized, starting with short articles for cultural journals, continuing with a series of book-length essays, and culminating in the positive construction of a treatise on ontology and, in its dark counterpart, a series of antiWestern diatribes. 16 Unlike most priests of the emerging official protochronist cult, Noica could not be easily dismissed by Romanian Westernizers for at least two reasons. Firstly, Noica was acran and ethnic stigma in my Imaginaire culturel et réalité politique dans la Roumanie moderne. Le stigmate et l'utopie, translated into French by Claude Karnoouh and Mona Antohi, Paris, Montréal: L'Harmattan, 1999. 15 Alongside poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga (1895-1961), Mircea Vulcânescu is the creator of an ontology of the national. Vulcânescu's death in a Communist prison prevented him from completing his project, of which only several texts published in the 1930s and 1940s remain. Noica acknowledged on several occasions his intellectual indebtedness to Vulcânescu, as he had expressed his admiration for Blaga when the latter's ethnic ontology was published in the 1930s. A comprehensive study of these three metaphysical definitions of Romanian ethnicity is still needed. 16 Noica's ethnic ontology, Devenirea întrufiinfâ (Bucharest: Editura Çtiinǧificâ Enciclopedicâ, 1981, 2 volumes) is the last in a series of books including most significantly Sentimentul românesc al fiintei (The Romanian Sentiment of Being), Bucharest: Editura Eminescu, 1978. Noica's anti-Western texts were published in German as De Dignitate Europae (Bucharest: Kriterion Verlag, 1988), and in Romanian as Modelul cultural european (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1993). The embarrassing "Scrisoare càtre un intelectual din Occident" (Letter to a Western Intellectual) was published in the cultural journal Viata Româneascâ (J u 'y 1987) at Noica's insistence, as an editor was trying to postpone the manuscript indefinitely in order to spare Noica this regrettable addition to his record. Noica's anti-Western texts are also an expression of his antimodernist (or neotraditionalist) stance.

xxii knowledged as a cultural classic, a victim of Communist repression, a living link to the country's interwar heyday and to the expatriate national glories such as Eliade, Cioran, and Ionesco; secondly, to expand on one of Borbely's remarks in his article, Noica had moved the canonical debate from the terrain of literature (which he expressly despised, much to the indignance of the top literati) and the "autonomy of the aesthetic" to the elusive realms of philosophy, where most contemporary cultural figures could not follow, as they lacked philosophical training. To put it bluntly, Noica was now pleading for the "autonomy of the high-cultural", or even more radically for the "autonomy of the philosophical". And, not surprisingly, as long as this new claim was not harming the regime (the contrary was true, I believe), this philosophy of the national blossomed, allowing in the process for the marginal blossoming of other philosophical endeavors, including several excellent projects such as the translation and publication of Plato's complete works, and the first Romanian translations of Heidegger and others.

The Central Dilemma As Liiceanu's superb book memorably shows, Noica's "School" was an extraordinary intellectual episode in the history of Communist Romania. Under Nwica's guidance, a handful of young and talented thinkers managed to grow against all the odds, revering, emulating, and ultimately "betraying" their master. The latter attitude was a fertile symbolic parricide that began with the "philosophical disobedience" already visible in the Diary and culminated in former Noica disciple Andrei Ple§u's civil disobedience prior to 1989, and in the post-1989 civic activism in which all the other co-disciples engaged. A central dilemma, however, remains. Why was Noica urging his disciples to produce high culture pereat mundus, ignoring the social, ideological, and political context? In other words, is it true that high culture, or the (self-delusional) "resistance through culture", should take precedence over the moral obligation of opposing tyranny?17

1 7 In her book, Filozofie $i nationalism, Laignel-Lovastine contrasts Noica and Jan Patocka ( 1 9 0 7 - 1 9 7 7 ) , the Czech philosopher. While Noica and Patocka shared a deep interest in phenomenology and both trained disciples informally, they couldn't

xxiii Systematically, Noica himself and his followers have tried to suggest that Noica's biography was irrelevant, and only his spiritual activity mattered. Thus, they all hoped they could disregard the increasingly frequent voices that were accusing Noica of either collaborating with the Communists, or of having been a supporter of the Iron Guard. Or of both. Like two of his interwar peers who had escaped to the West, Eliade and Cioran, Noica had an embarrassing youthful political allegiance to account for. Eliade died without ever clearly expressing regret for his Iron Guard sympathies, while Cioran formulated on several occasions vague apologies and included an admiring collective portrait of the Jews in one of his books. Noica thought he could simply suppress any biographical references, as he had two opposite political camps to distance from. 18 All three of them—Eliade, Cioran, and Noica—represent in Romanian culture ultimate expressions of excellence, the first two being also regarded as proof that Romania's interwar culture (and, by extension, Romanian culture as a whole) was able to reach the ultimate levels of depth, sophistication, and creativity. The "wounded sensibility of small cultures" (Cioran) was thus vindicated in the case of Romania, and a cure for ethnic stigmata was consequently found. To start a political trial of the same figures seemed to many Romanians unfair and indeed unjust, a conspiracy of lesser enemies, envious of those personalities' achievements and ready to take revenge for historical traumas such as the Holocaust. On a few occasions, when the opening of such political files had elements of bitter frustration, opportunism, and cruel ingratitude, it was relatively easy to claim that everything was a carbon copy of Heidegger's political scandal, if not a cheap parody thereof. Nevertheless, when confronted with the principle that intellectuals are responsible for their political ideas and actions, the most ardent admirers of Noica run short of convenient dismissals. Political errors do not necessarily take away Noica's intellectual quality and charisma, although they raise disturbing questions about his morality, and about his dream of educating a nation, an elite, or just one disciple. be more different: PatoCka joined the dissident Charter 77 movement (reluctantly: he thought it was not radical enough...). 18 For an introduction to this thorny topic, see Vladimir Tismaneanu and Dan Pavel, "Romania's Mystical Revolutionaries: The Generation of Angst and Adventure Revisited", East European Politics and Societies, 8:3, 1994, pp. 402-438; see also Vladimir Tismaneanu, "Romania's Mystical Revolutionaries", in Edith Kurzweil, A Partisan Century: Political Writings from Partisan Review, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, pp. 383-392.

xxiv And, as Noica's political ideas are intertwined with most of his work, they should be discussed together. Once more, ideas and ideologies, culture and power, biography and existence prove to be inseparable. The Paltini§ Diary urges its reader to pause and meditate on such matters, captured by Liiceanu in an almost timeless, although not ahistorical, narrative.

By Way of Preface What does it mean to be a European of the Post-War East?*

"The pride of one who is born into a small culture is always wounded." These are the opening words of a well-known book written by Emil Cioran in pre-war Romania, a few years before he settled permanendy in France. But if this is so, in what condition can we expect to find the pride of one who has been born into a small culture in the post-war East? Humiliated in all the fundamental determining conditions of his life, will he not try to show the others, those from the West, that in spite of all that has happened he has remained a person like them, that is to say essentially a European? This is his greatest aspiration, the capital which no one can steal from him, even after they have taken everything else. An intellectual coming from the post-war East who has to address a forum of western cultures brings with him not just the customary wounded pride of small cultures, but also that deeper and more essential pride that, at the other end of a history which had proposed to transform him into another species of man (the "new man"), he has remained a European. "Look at me," this intellectual is saying to you. "I can write, and on occasion even speak, in three or four modern languages; I learnt Latin and Greek on my own, in order to have access to the ancient philosophical texts in the original. I can discuss Homer, Plato, Saint Augustine, Shakespeare and Goethe with you; or equally Flaubert, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Yourcenar and Umberto Eco. I can talk about Derrida too." This intellectual from the East will tell you how for him the culture of Europe was not, as it was for you, the normal rhythm of the mind's breathing, but rather a sort of stolen oxygen, assimilated and stored clandestinely. It was one way of surviving in a world * Lecture delivered at the second session of the European College of Cultural Co-operation, Luxembourg, 4 - 7 September 1990.

xxvi asphyxiated by lies, ideology and vulgarity. His relationship with the spirit of Europe is one of a tenderness such as can only be generated by the awareness of how much he owes to it. But, on the other hand, he will ask of this same Europe, which abandoned him for 45 years and is now rediscovering him with a sort of perplexed goodwill, that it recognize his right, not to a belated indulgence, but to the assistance which he needs in order to heal the deteriorated minds and souls of those in his country who were not fortunate enough to be able to resist through culture. This privilege of resisting through culture makes sense, in a way, of the whole drama of the countries of the East. At the same time it also helps to explain what is happening now in these countries, or at least what is happening in Romania. Paradoxically, totalitarian societies are de-politicized societies par excellence. Politics, that is to say the activity through which you participate in the destiny of a group of people and take decisions concerning it, is, in a totalitarian society, the monopoly of a tiny minority (sometimes of one individual), and is limited to the expression of decrees. The rest of the population are infantilized: they are told what to think, what to say and what to do. In this closed world, in which the mind above all is under threat, culture becomes a means of transgression, and so, by this very fact, takes on a political significance. It is not only an alternative view of the world, but also a barely perceptible resistance to total isolation, rupture, discontinuity and absorption in the mass. It is the memory of destroyed values, and the possibility of their future reconstruction. When all means of participating in the destiny of the community are suppressed, culture remains a way of continuing to participate from the shadows and of preparing for a regeneration. It is thus in the highest degree subversive. I am telling you all this as one who has lived in the midst of this experience. And it is about this lived experience that I intend to speak now, in the belief that in this way we can be truer to the purpose of our meeting than if I were to present an impersonal report on the current situation of Romanian philosophy. I graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy (Marxist, of course) of the University of Bucharest in 1965. The bibliography for our lectures and seminars consisted mainly of fragments from the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, with some references back to their sources, the French materialists, Feuerbach, and even occasionally Hegel. The fundamental works of philosophy were deposited in a "special archive," to which students could only have access with a special

xxvii authorization. In five years of university study, students never once cast their eyes on a text by Plato. One student who was caught in the hostel reading Kant was expelled from the faculty. Secondary philosophical literature was limited to the available translations of Soviet philosophers, especially from the periodical Voprosi Filozofii. Reference to "bourgeois philosophy," a category into which was bundled just about every philosopher from Plato to Schelling, along with all contemporary western philosophy, could only be made in a spirit of fault-finding, and, of course, only from secondary sources. You can imagine what sort of mental and cultural horizons a graduate of such a faculty might have. He was trained to manipulate "wooden language" to perfection, to become a propagandist, a party functionary. It was in 1967, two years after graduating from the faculty, that I met Constantin Noica. He was a contemporary and friend of Eugene Ionesco, Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran, but, unlike them, he had decided to remain in Romania after the war. If he too had gone to settle in France, his name would not now need any more introduction than theirs do. However, he remained in Romania, and was 40 years old when the post-war drama hit his country. The seven or eight books which he had written up till then, and his numerous translations of Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Descartes, Kant and Hegel, were relegated to the secret stacks of the libraries. After ten years of forced domicile in a small provincial town, and six years of imprisonment served out of a sentence of 25 (for having tried to send an interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind for publication in France), the memory of Noica had been wiped clean from the minds of the younger generations. He re-appeared in the public cultural space a short time after his release in 1964, in the period of openness which characterized the first years of Ceaugescu's rule. In 1967, when I met him, he was a researcher at the Center for Logic in Bucharest, and looking for "gifted trainees" to whom he might become, as he had stated when he came out of prison, a "cultural coach." Together with two or three friends, I landed in the circle that he had set up for this purpose, and from that moment I embarked on an adventure of the mind that was to permanendy mark my destiny. We gathered every week at his home, and in the first year he interpreted Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind for us, breathing life into this text, the most difficult in philosophy, with an originality which I have never found in any other commentator. He spoke to us about the instruments of philosophy, and made our future meetings conditional on our acquiring a knowledge of Greek, Latin and German. The following year, on his advice, I enrolled for a second degree, at the Faculty of Classical Lan-

xxviii guages of the University of Bucharest, from which I graduated five years later in 1973- While still in my second year of study I began the translation of a 5th century Aristotelian commentator, David the Armenian, which I published some years later at the Academy publishing house. A friend whose inclination was towards oriental philosophy was encouraged by Noica to study Sanskrit, and for all of us he prepared a program of philosophical reading over several years, which was designed to cover the fundamental works of the ten or so leading names in European philosophy. After a few years we began private seminars based on the dialogues of Plato, with the original text in front of us, and when, in 1974, he initiated the publication of the complete works of Plato in Romanian, we were all included in the team of translators and commentators, working alongside teachers of Greek from the university. In the studies and books which we began to publish—Picturesque and Melancholy by Andrei Ple§u (now Minister of Culture*) in 1977, Sorin Vieru's essays and studies in the philosophy of logic, my own work, The Tragic: a Phenomenology of Limit and Transcendence, published in 1975, and the studies in iconology and the philosophy of art by Victor Stoichifa (now professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland)—there is no trace left of the standardized thinking of Stalinist culture. We had learnt to think and to write for ourselves, and we had become more and more aware that we belonged to the generation that had to pick up the threads of Romanian culture from the pre-war period, from the time before the disaster. Moreover, the books which Constantin Noica had written during his years of forced domicile, in conditions of squalor which can hardly be imagined, and without the hope of ever seeing them published, as well as those written after his release from prison, had begun to appear year by year. They carried with them the resonance of original thinking, and had a unique quality in their style which fascinated an entire generation that was rising to enter cultural life in the 1970s. From the point of view of cultural politics, it was our good fortune that, in his delirium of megalomania, Ceau§escu was determined to replace the thinking of Marx with his own. The result was that the hitherto occupied territory of philosophy became, for a considerable time, relatively free. With the relaxation of Marxist constraints, it was possible for several unconventional original works to be published; there also appeared an impressive number of translations from the works of the pre-Socratics, Plato, Plotinus, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Schelling, Freud, Frege, Carnap and Heidegger. • Currently (1999) Minister of Foreign Affairs. Trans.

xxix In 1975, shortly after his retirement, Constantin Noica moved to an uncomfortable room of eight square metres which he had rented in a chalet in Paltini§, a mountain resort close to Sibiu, 1400 m above sea level, and 330 km from Bucharest. From this moment the most spectacular part of our adventure began. Whenever we had free days, w e hurried, three or four of his pupils, to Paltini§. Here, in the total isolation of the mountains, "4000 feet above mankind" as Noica used to say, in the course of walks that went on for hours, and evenings spent in his little room with its wood-fired stove, there took place the most fascinating discussions that I have ever shared, the most passionate confrontations of ideas, accompanied by the most subde, pointed and friendly observations on our own writings, which each of us submitted to the judgement of the others. Tens of meetings like this took place over a five-year period between 1977 and 1981, and I made a habit of recording them all, at the end of each day. In the vague hope that the pages assembled in this way might be published, I left them with a publisher before leaving for Germany in 1982 to compete for a Humboldt scholarship. They were about 350 in number, and represented the exemplary tale of a becoming in the space of the mind, of a subde act of pedagogy which began with a constraint accepted by both parties and ended in a liberating rebellion. The book was entitled Paltini§ Diary and subtitled^! PaideicModel in Humanist Culture. It appeared in 1983 and proved to be epoch-making for the younger generation of humanist intellectuals. In a world in which material and moral squalor were almost total, in which the isolation of Romania had begun (and there was increasing talk of its "Albanianization"), in which the daily television schedule lasted two hours, one of which was devoted to the president's family, in which the press, the theatre and the cinema were subject to the most terrible censorship, in which the ideal and sense of life had been lost, the Diary at once opened a window in a world which had the compactness of a blind monad. Any hell could become bearable if the paradise of culture was strong enough to withstand it. And the pages of the Diary were evidence that paradise was strong enough to resist, even in Ceau§escu's Romania. They described the road to this paradise as a way of liberation and inner freedom. The nightmare world at once became bearable; it just took a little Latin, a little Greek, a litde German, and the pious reading of the great books of humanity. But culture was not here simply an academic exercise. It was not just a matter of "becoming cultivated," but rather of a transformation at a deep level; it was Bildung, paideia, a birth of the ego, of individuality, of autonomous thinking, plucked from the world of forced and planned imbecilization. What

XXX

the schools and universities could not do, one man had done singlehanded. Beside and beyond the works of Noica himself, the Paltini§ Diary created a legend. (This is not to say that this one experience absorbs the whole horizon of Romanian culture, which, in its various forms of expression—literature, painting, music and cinema—strove by all the means in its power to survive, and always succeeded.) And this legend began to function, to have an impact on life. Each year thousands of young people from every corner of Romania set out for Paltini§ to find, with the aid of the "coach of minds," a solution to live by. There might be ten visitors at a time in his room (he now had one of normal size), and none of them would leave untouched by the meeting. At least they would all realize that it was possible to be "unwashed" at the level of the mind, not just of the body, and that for a human being culture is not a chance ornament but the very medium of his existence, just as water is for fish and air for birds. He had such a persuasive force when he had to plead the cause of the mind and of culture that he was able to co-opt even the Party's leading cultural officials into serving his ends. This was how he succeeded in bringing into being the edition of Plato's works, for example. In the last years of his life (he died in December 1987), Constantin Noica became a veritable national institution (under close Securitate surveillance, of course), with a following of some tens of pupils whom he had trained directly and some thousands more whose minds had been formed through the spirit of his books. The "School of Paltinij," made up of the individuals who figure in the Paltini§ Diary, came in time to figure as a concept in the history of contemporary Romanian culture. (In a recent book on this theme by an American researcher, the chapter on the "School of Paltinij" is the most massive, taking up 60 pages.) The Paltini§ Diary, which described the setting of this paradoxical liberation along the lines of the symbolism of the Symplegades which Mircea Eliade discusses— the escape from hermetically sealed spaces—was printed in an edition of 8,000 copies; Xerox copies sold on the black market soon reached a price of 200 lei, compared with the official retail price of 9 lei. (It is worth mentioning as an anecdote of the times that shortly after its publication, in the winter of 1983, when butter was a rarity in Romania, four packets of butter were being offered for a copy of the Diary) Of course I do not wish to focus attention here on the book as such, still less on the author, but on the experience which is recounted in it, the exceptional character of which attracted such a lively interest. Constantin Noica left behind an impressive body of work of over 10,000 pages, the full publication of which is beginning this year at

xxxi the Humanitas publishing house; he is probably the last great metaphysician of the century, and the last author of a Treatise on Ontology. No less important, however, is his other great work, that of a savior of minds in a time marked by levels of oppression the effects of which cannot be measured or even guessed at. Romania had no movement equivalent to Charter '77 or Solidarity. That such organizations failed to come into existence may be attributed to the effectiveness of the Securitate, or it may be the mark of our own weakness. But the phenomenon and the experience which I have described here seem to be unique in Eastern Europe (although there may have been a somewhat similar phenomenon in Czechoslovakia, associated with the personality of Patocka). The Paltini§ model undoubtedly has both its greatness and its inadequacies. On the one hand, in conditions of a spiritual closure and an isolation such as no other Eastern European country experienced, it prevented the systematic and total liquidation of humanistic culture, starting from the idea that the survival of a country threatened by history can only be achieved in the mind. But on the other hand, precisely for the sake of this idea, the Paltini§ model turned its back on real history, which was considered "mere meteorology" (sometimes it is rainy, sometimes fine, sometimes stormy), and as such unworthy of a deeper investment. For Noica, dialogue with political figures, the representatives of the forces in power—the "scoundrels of history"—was completely nonsensical, and for this reason he considered dissidents to be victims of an illusion, caught in the grip of non-essentials. Thus the being of a civilization was defended, without any immediate threat to those in power. This model created cultural professionals, even virtuosi, but inhibited any activity of direct contestation. No Havel emerged from the school of Noica, and none of his pupils became adviser to a Romanian Walesa. Noica believed only in the Last Judgement of culture, and in the credentials with which one might present oneself before it. He was only interested in "racehorses," not in the "circus horses" who could evolve in the arena of history. After the events of December 1989, however, the bulk of Romania's humanist intellectuals emerged from their studies for the rendezvous that history had prepared for them. Already on 31st December, all the members of the School of Paltinif were to be found, alongside the leading names in Romanian dissent, among the founder members of the Group for Social Dialogue, which was created as a forum for reflection and criticism of society, with the mission of promoting the values of an authentic civil society and giving a prompt warning whenever those in power, whoever they might be,

xxxii showed signs of divergence from this goal. Revista 22, the weekly paper published by the Group for Social Dialogue, became within two or three months of its first appearance the most prestigious democratic publication in the country, establishing an impeccable intellectual standard. It sought to achieve dialogue between different social groups, between these social groups and those in power, and between the majority and minorities. The long road towards ignorance which was cultivated for decades by means of isolation, lies and sophism cannot be wiped out overnight or in a matter of months, although Romanian intellectuals today may be guilty of such a false evaluation of the situation. Shut in for years in the world of their books, they have not realized how deeply the collective spirit is marked by its sickness. What they are experiencing now is the powerlessness of direct speech, the drama of the doctor killed by his patients. Our minds are again prey to the thought that history is being made over our heads. The disturbing question again raises itself: what is to be done? Most of us, caught up in the whirligig of events or adapting to our new role as cultural administrators, have not had time to read a book for the last eight months. And it may be that there is as much guilt in this abandoning of culture as there would have been in closing our eyes and returning to silence. It may be that the road towards the sick souls of people will be just as long as the duration of the sickness and the process of infection. It may be that cultural action and the force of the word can no longer have any effect on them. It may be that it is more important to concentrate on the younger generation and its extraordinary intelligence (which is in the end the Romanians' most precious asset), that it would be more profitable to publish books, to return to libraries, to go back among students. It may be that foreign study scholarships, the schools and institutes which you will open in our country (and let us hope that you will be able to open them), and the teachers who will come to teach in our schools are more important, that this meeting in which I put so much hope is more important. The truth is that after so many centuries of history we still do not know how mind penetrates the world. And it may be that, as far as we are concerned, for the sake of a salvation which we cannot even glimpse today, we should return to the setting of Paltinig, of a Paltinij open this time towards history, thinking about the moment in which we shall be called to the Last Judgement of universal culture. Let us hope that when the God of culture calls us it will be together with the other countries of Europe. G. L.

PÄLTINI§ DIARY 1977-1981

Clarification The pages which follow may be understood as a lay model of the type of seeking which is pursued on the basis of a previous finding. However, for such a seeking and finding to be able to take place, there must be a system of waiting. Waiting determined by nothing, waiting as a simple intentional attitude, made up of a wonder and a confused desire, is in fact the first form of finding. As such, the attitude of waiting is the hypostasis of the adolescent in the face of the world. Adolescence, while not itself a fulfillment, is nevertheless the affective prelude to any future fulfillment. It is the age when the undifferentiated rumor of desires and aspirations pushes towards the peace of a form, towards that alone which can, when it takes shape at a later stage, bring that degree of stability which is the starting point for speaking of a law of one's own, and so of a personality and a destiny. Transposed into the mind, this waiting takes the form of cultural romanticism. In other words, cultural romanticism is the pubescent expression of the mind itself. The awakening of the mind cannot take place except in the space of culture; however, if it is projected onto a certain turbulence of the soul and perceived through the medium of violent and contradictory motions, in which one's predestination is sometimes felt as glory and sometimes as failure, it cannot fail to take a romantic form. This form, in which thoughts cannot yet break away from passions, so as to remain empowered and not blocked by them, is especially fertile and dangerous. However, it is part of the miracle of adolescence that it holds encoded in its waitings, and so in its findings too, the future presence of the one who has, in turn, the capacity inscribed in his destiny to respond to this confused calling, and to liberate it in its own

4 measure. It is in this way that he w h o at a later date—and quite by chance—was called Noica could be found long before the meeting with him took place. When it did take place, it seemed to be a simple recognition, and had that natural quality which a long and careful period of preparation and waiting gives to a meeting. Reading these pages, Noica will have to understand me and forgive me. If I should publish them without seeking his consent, it would be no more than one of those fundamentally dutiful gestures the true character of which is concealed by what at first sight seems to be a lack of temperance. What appears to be the operational wisdom of the moment may be, on the other hand, nothing more than mediocrity belatedly revealed. One can have this certainty of a deeper reason and Tightness at the base of any fertile madness only in conditions of complete purity, that is when the finalities of gestures leave behind the person whose gestures they are and migrate towards a supra-individual domain. The purity of these images is claimed here by virtue of the thought that I and the other characters in the Diary are only the chance agents of exemplary situations, of a process of cultural initiation, that is, of one of the ways in which mind is propagated. In these conditions the figure of Noica himself becomes a chance agent, and anything here which belongs to the realm of episode, anecdote or name—in a word, "indiscretion"—may be excused in the light of the "concrete universal," that is, of the fact that in order to act, mind must be embodied.

21st to 24th March 1977

Monday, 21st March 1977 The planned journey with Noica to Paltini§ has come to pass. We take the 9.45 train to Sibiu. On the way, Noica gives me Steaua, Luceafarul and cuttings from Le Monde to leaf through. On the platform in Bucharest he seemed to become impatient when he could not find any of today's newspapers. I discover him to be much more anchored in realities than he appears to be. He is still preoccupied by the earthquake, which he did not experience in Bucharest. "The capital should be moved to Tirgovijte; it would be exclusively a university and administrative center. The young people would all move up there, and the pensioners, who always get in the way, would stay in Bucharest. The earthquake has broken the backbone of Bucharest. Sometimes in the winter deer get stuck in the snow. The peasants go after them with sticks, strike them across the back and wait for them to die." In the train, smoking in the corridor, we debate the third volume of the Plato edition. Noica insists that I should do the preface to the Euthydemus. "To me, this dialogue doesn't say anything positive. Socrates passes over the issue of the sophisms, which is a Platonic one, without taking it up. Everything is left a prey to dissolution. Socratic thought takes another road, and for once, Plato turns out to be mischievous." All the same, I hope these days to persuade him to write a few pages. He gives me to read his paper on habitats for some congress on urbanism in Paris. The beginning is heavy, taking everything back to the origins in the manner of Heidegger. "What is the house? What gave it birth? Hunger, fear, eros and logos." The second part is a gracious romantic irony in the Noician style, playing with architectural solutions from the perspective of philosophy: "Do not build houses higher than trees." It is a style which has always annoyed specialists.

8 At Sibiu, Relu Cioran, brother of the great embittered master, is waiting on the platform. He is a pleasant man, who speaks little and ponderously, very discreet. ("He is Pylades," Noica told me on the train.) A distinguished man living in the shadow of his own destiny and that of his brother. He is a pensioner; he reads philosophy and goes on excursions. A quaint-looking minibus takes Noica and myself to Paltini§. "Why didn't Andrei Ple§u study philosophy in Germany? He will regret it." In the evening, over a glass of hot tuica with too much pepper, he says that he would like me to pursue the history of philosophy. "Make your book ( P e r a t o l o g y ) a walk through the whole history of philosophy. I felt almost duty-bound to deal with issues of the history of philosophy, because in my generation everyone was avoiding them. How is Something New Possible? is the historical part of my treatment of open concepts and of the problem of intru*]" I ask him to speak about his family. "Gentry of the second rank. My great-grandfather founded the town of Alexandria after the Peace of Adrianople. My grandfather and father extended the estate (3,500 pogons) by leasing other holdings. Everything worked out with us as in the Forsythe Saga. It is the tale of a family of eleven siblings in which everything opens out only to close in again. The name of Noica is near extinction now." Then he tells me how, on his return from Germany in 1939, he addressed a student meeting chaired by P.P. Negulescu on the subject of the tools of philosophy. "I spoke to them just as a more experienced colleague, because I was no more equipped than they were with what I was demanding of them: German, Greek, Latin, mathematics. I had done a year of mathematics with Ion Barbu, and had only recently started Greek." We finish the tuica and go to see the famous Paltini§ room in which he stays in retirement for nine or ten months of the year: room 13 of villa 23- It is a villa in Transylvanian Saxon style set on a hillside to the right of the hotel, completely isolated. Downstairs is the living room, and upstairs * "For a closing which opens, our language has a special word, the preposition intru, for which it is not easy to find an equivalent in the major European languages. But to a speaker of the Romanian language it is hardly necessary to highlight the nuances of intru. At the most, we might remind the reader that, coming from the Latin intro, meaning "inside," our preposition has taken on the additional sense of "in towards," thus providing a good tension, which is of the essence of mind, between being in something (within a horizon, within a system) and at the same time tending towards that thing" Constantin Noica, Sentimental Románese al fiinfei (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1996), page 7. In the present translation, intru is rendered as "in(to)," to distinguish it from the more usual "in" ("in"). Trans.

9 there are three rooms, the smallest of which, a cubby hole of five or six square meters (probably the former servant's room), is Noica's. He tells me it feels like his true home. "I sleep with my head this way." (He points away from the window.) "I write on the bed, leaning on a pillow. I put my books on the little table and on the bed." He likes to give his work craftsman-like foundations, to have the routine habits of an artisan in this craft without tools and apparatus which is philosophy. Choosing my hotel room is a delight. I am his guest, in fact Goethe's guest, he keeps repeating. (He still has 5,000 lei from his Parting from Goethe.) The room with one bed is dark. "Take one with two." I protest: how can my work here be "productive" enough to justify 70 lei for a room. We go upstairs to see it. A wide open view, a balcony. His charm convinces me. "Look, I'll come up here and we'll have coffee together. You can sit here, dream and write." He says it lovingly. There is a tenderness in his manner and I feel happy. The paralyzing respect of past years has gone. Everything suggests a consolidated relationship. Somehow I have become his spoilt child. The only thing that frightens me, and less now than previously, is the thought that I might disappoint his expectations. I am not fully consumed by my work, as he would wish. Am I going to let him down? On how many factors both within me and outside does this depend?

Tuesday, 22 ndMarch 1977 Yesterday, as the bus left the village of Ra§inari, where Cioran's family came from, Noica pointed out the church to me, beside which can be seen the white cross marking the grave of the elder Cioran, the priest, and another, engraved with the year of his birth, prepared for Relu Cioran. "Relu comes here every Sunday, from Sibiu. He says he comes to his parents' graves, but I suspect him of coming to visit his own grave, and of taking a secret delight in being his own solitary mourner. His own name carved on the cross obliges him." I remembered that in the train he had told me about his friendship with Cioran, such as it was. They had been together at the Faculty of Philosophy, but had not got to know each other there, because Cioran had a complex about being provincial, and was reclusive. Attendance at lectures was not compulsory, and their occasions for meeting or for working together at seminars were infrequent. It was only after graduating that they had been

10 brought together, when they received a two-month scholarship to Geneva, donated by Radulescu-Pogoneanu, whose father had been a pupil of Maiorescu. They had shared a room there, and Noica, who at that time had only had a good knowledge of Kant, said that in Cioran he had come face to face with a more comprehensive world of culture. "In Geneva I realized that he knew Calvin, and looked at the city differently, with a cultural eye which was not available to me. He approached philosophy differently from me, dealing with boring 19th century German commentators and with the philosophy of culture. This was the start of his disgust with classical philosophy." Then he told me how Cioran had lived all his life on the edge of society—"He wasn't employed for more than a year or two"—living at first on scholarships, which were extended up to the German occupation, and then on small sums given him by a few Romanians in paid employment (Eliade, for example, in Lisbon) and from other such sources. During the war, it amused him to take the "Siegfrieds" to French cabarets; he found a special pleasure in arranging such a marriage of two contrary worlds. Today we started on the program which is to give a rhythm to my four days here. We meet for breakfast at 8.30, after which Noica goes walking for an hour and a half. He works till 1.30. After lunch he comes up to my room and we have our coffee. Then he rests for half an hour. He works again until 6 o'clock, and from 6 to 7.30 he takes his evening walk. After our evening meal we walk a little more; then we go up to my room, and he talks to me about himself and his world. This evening we got on to the subject of his biography. "I have no biography. I just have books. Graduation at twenty-three, then a year of mathematics and two years as a university librarian. I have lived in deliberate reclusion. I have refused any kind of fulfillment in social life, and I have done so without hypocrisy, with pleasure. At twentyfive I refused assistance from Negulescu; I withdrew to Sinaia and translated eight detective novels for the Herz Press. Of course it was a kind of rebellion. After that I lived on the margins for thirty years; it was a way of life which at the beginning I chose, and then, after 1948, when it was imposed on me, I accepted it as a joy—and I felt the last years in prison equally as a joy. My ten years at the Center for Logic, starting in 1964, were my entry into social life, and were just as much as I needed. Any other fulfillment outside books—a professor's chair, a successful marriage, travel—might have been my perdition. My books are the witness to my sanity, and anything else I might have done, any other fulfillment I might have had would have made me regret not living my life as I have lived it."

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We move on to the biography of his ideas. "I had no teachers; no one confiscated me; no one took me over with his thinking, not Nae Ionescu here, who swung back and forth between logic and theology, not Brunschvicg in France, with whom I could have written my thesis (Sketch for the History...), and not Hartmann nor Heidegger either. My consciousness of the tools was mine alone, and I grew up, in my thinking, just with the ten or twelve greatest figures from the history of philosophy. I entered the history of philosophy by way of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant—the issues in Mathesis came from my contact with them, especially Descartes— and for a long time I was overwhelmed by it. In De Caelo and Diary I was still very timid. What made me rise above the history of philosophy, and made me choose and feel free, happened between 1945 and 1950. Perhaps it had already started before then, in Two Introductions and a Passage to Idealism, but I felt the change decisively after I went back to Plato in the original, and saw that I could 'read' him differently. From this emerged my interpretation of his Lysis. If I have had any success in philosophy, the only place where there is fulfillment without mutilation (but also without any specific content), it is because I was fortunate enough to fail at the points where success mutilates. I was saved from the mutilation of pure lyric—after I had published two poems in Vlastarul, the journal of the Spiru Haret High School, Ion Barbu told me to give up— and from the mutilations of mathematics, music and literature. All these failures I poured into philosophy, where they contributed, we may say, to success. So I had the good fortune of a single vocation, the only one in which you can have fulfillment without mutilation, the sensation of full truth."

Wednesday, 23rdMarch 1977 Today my discussions with Noica began to slip away from the point; I was already feeling tired after the concentrated sessions of the last two days, and I was afraid of the pedantry and artificiality which might descend between us, faced again with a barely disguised routine. At breakfast he told me with affected naivete about his blankcheck project. The community chooses two hundred of its members, aged between thirty and thirty-five, and gives them a blank check for the rest of their lives. Those chosen have already had the time to show that they deserve it. The risks are calculated: 80 percent will prove unworthy of the hope placed in them, and will use the credit

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to buy Jaguars, to play roulette, or for erotic intrigues. Or, going to the other extreme, they will travel second class, take the cheapest rooms in hotels and put the money aside. But the others will succeed. "Who will do the choosing?" I asked him, "and how will they know how to find the best two hundred? Who are to choose the 'five patriarchs' who will do the choosing?"—"They will be pure people, those who are generally acknowledged to be untainted. People like §ora for example. And the two hundred, chosen from all fields of activity, will already be recognized by everyone as deserving." I refrain from sociological hair-splitting, analyzing the mechanisms through which society defends itself against the fulfillment of the ideal. "Think," he continues, "instead of a good match for her son, every mother will want him to have a place among the two hundred. Everyone will want to be considered. It will be a constant stimulus to worthy action. And in time, the number of those with the blank check could be raised a little." In the evening, over a glass of red wine, he scolds me for not keeping a diary. I believe I have not done it for two reasons: firstly out of laziness, and secondly out of fear of the ridiculous, the embarrassment that I would feel in front of the bundle of banalities accumulated over time. In the middle of the day, when I went to take him to lunch, he said that we should see each other more often in Bucharest, since in every good friendship things grow one from another and amplify. Then he read me a note which he had entered yesterday in his diary: "The time is coming when G. will part from me. Am I going to finish everything alone, as I began?" I wonder what a parting in the world of the mind is like. Why do I continually feel the need to read his works systematically and to write a book about them? He had made a note on a slip of paper to talk to me about misunderstanding the thinking of another. "Ralea understood you straight away and wouldn't let you finish your thought; the result was that in the end he did not really understand what you were thinking at all. At other times we are to blame if others fail to understand us. In his Diary Eliade complains that hardly anyone understood La Nuit de SaintJean. It was his own fault." In our work today we reached the sixteenth sophism in the Euthydemus. Noica has finished translating his paper on habitats into French. Tomorrow he is starting the introductory pages to the Euthydemus. I am proud that I managed to "wangle" them out of him.

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Thursday, 24th March 1977 Over our morning tea, with butter and Olanda cream cheese, I ask Noica how he manages to keep so up to date, to catch the pulse of the latest developments, however minor; I want to know where he gets his ability to decode people and situations so fundamentally foreign to the patterns of his generation. "I have that ultimate attention of which Goethe spoke, and the flexibility which is necessary in front of l'autre. A healthy detachment is never the same as distance and contempt."—"How far should submission before the being of another be taken?"—"Not to the point of your own effacement. I remember how Cioran, who was very irritable, once ended a discussion with a friend, §tefan Teodorescu ('Uncle' we all called him), by slapping him across the face. How do you think Uncle reacted? He said, 'You're objective.'" While he is speaking, I recall how he looked yesterday, when I visited him in his cell, with a store of wood and a basin of water on the stove: he was wearing a little beret on his head and had something of the air of a mild-mannered pope. He is far from being the Jesuit that many imagine, judging him by the slight bow with which he greets you and his smooth and sweet tone of voice. He is a highly effective ingénu. Before parting we walk for an hour before lunch, and we meet again at 12.30. He enjoys showing me the surroundings. He points out a road which leads to §anta, "six kilometres from here," the small cluster of timber villas where E.C. wrote On the Heights of Despair in the course of a summer. I ask him why he puts such faith in me. "It is not enough to play an instrument correctly. You have to bring out its undertone. And there is an undertone in philosophy too. I remember when you brought me the first pages of your Nostos, in 1968. There I felt the undertone first of all. Or, let me explain a different way. Until now I used to talk about the line of floating; I used to say to myself that you have to see whether the other person, particularly a young person, is "floating along the right course." Now I have another image: a car. One person has a motor, another has a few parts, a wheel or two. You have the car. Sometimes it may be out of gas, from time to time it may break down a little, but basically you have a car which runs." He has finished translating an extract from his interpretation of the Cratylus into French for Cahiers Roumains. In the afternoon he is going to start writing his "Interpretation" of the Euthydemus. He wants to know what I have written about the dialogue, and to

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resolve any differences. He comes round after lunch for me to read to him. After coffee in my room he asks if he can rest for half an hour. He is slightly embarrassed about this. He explains a method for waking up as soon as you start snoring. "It all depends on keeping your chin as near to your chest as possible, which means your hands under your head. At the first snore, you wake up." Where does he get them from? He has a capacity for redeeming such details by working them into a system. "Afternoon sleep should be like a brief catalepsy," he says. He has fallen asleep. I sit at the table with the Euthydemus pages, my back half turned towards him. I am tempted to look at him, but it feels a little sacrilegious, like an affront to the mind that is caught in an uninhibited reflex. At the same time I would like to know what remains of him when he passes into the anonymity of a biological state; to see what remains of that ultimate elegance with which he tried to go to sleep in another's presence, that excess of consciousness shown in the forethought with which he sought to compensate for the moment of its loss. He is snoring quietly, and I make that my excuse for looking at him. His mouth is half open and his lips flaccid, but even in sleep that extremely fine forehead of his still retains the look of concentration of the mind that Andrei and I have christened, in a spirit of warm reverence, the Old Man.

2nd to 12th October 1977

Sunday, 2nd October 1977 I am back in Paltini§, with Noica and, this time, with Andrei too. The same 9-45 train, the same Relu Cioran in the station at Sibiu with a winter coat and hat for Noica, then the bus trip through Ra§inari to Pairing, with the same explanations and comments along the way, for Andrei's benefit this time—I recall that a few months ago this road was very much in my mind, as I wondered how it would look after Germany. Everything seems to have repeated itself to allow me time to prepare myself for this new encounter with a place which I already feel has become permanently part of me. After supper we go up to Noica's little room to light the fire. I make a mess of it, to his great satisfaction; he takes over, and takes delight in expounding the lesson about "the fire that only lights for its own master." He is wearing his coat and hat; the bed on which he sits is in front of the stove at a distance of one pace so that he can easily reach the stove mouth when he bends down. He builds a square pile of wood over a grate of fir splinters, and as he works he explains every action, as if we were attending an essential demonstration in which nothing must be missed in order to have the key to final success. We all smile, and he smiles as he talks, then starts lighting one piece of paper after another, slipping them under the pile and pushing them about to get the fire "worked up." It is a strange game, in which you have the feeling he is attempting—as in all he does—the salvation of a prosaic action from the realm of the profane and the insignificant: "Do you see? I feel that the stove is made for my hand, and my hand is just right for the stove mouth." We leave the stove heating up, and go on to my room for a cup of tea. Andrei introduces himself briefly, stammering a little, and then asks Noica how he relates to

18

Jesus. "To Jesus of Nazareth, whose footsteps Renan tried to trace, reconstructing his travels only to lose sight of the Christ in the end—not at all. But let me give you an indirect answer. I have been able to get close to Plato, to annex him culturally; I have been able to move him around in the being of his text and interpret him, labeling him as I wanted: I could see him in the Lysis for example, flying in the face of the tradition of commentators who have generally considered that dialogue to be apocryphal, or at least secondary to the Symposium, while I derive the Symposium from the Lysis. I have felt able to impose my label on Augustine, preferring not the Confessions or the City of God, but De Magistro. But the book of Jesus, not the man from Nazareth but Jesus the Christ, is something that I have never dared to annex culturally, and I feel I could never have the right to make it an object of hermeneutics: I can't impose my label on Him."

Monday, 3rd October 1977 A bad day to get started: I am discontented at what I have to work on—some general pages about the symbol, something about which I have read too little, and which seems a foreign theme to me. I should find the point of connection with the peratological, to make a chapter of applied peratology out of the symbol. For the time being I am obliged to give an uninspired account of Cassirer. I slept badly, and, towards morning, I had a very suggestive dream out of which I awoke in an unsettled state. Andrei, dressed in black—in evening dress perhaps?—with a dazzling white scarf (en magicien), was informing me that he was to die; he was upset for our sake, a little taken aback, but at the same time calm and jovial, losing his telluric nature and taking his leave of the world quietly and gracefully. I woke at a quarter to eight: it was a heavy start to the day. In the evening, after supper, we ask Noica, half joking and half seriously, how we should prepare an edition of his works, "when you do," he answers, "you will be like Goethe and Hegel carefully discussing how to edit the works of Hamann." Then he talks about the Logic which he is going to write—the complete statement of his own system—a logic which has its starting point not in the area of the individual and the general, but in that of the element, of determinations. We part for the night.

19 I stay for a long time in Andrei's room, until around midnight. We analyze our relationship, trying to assess the areas of falseness and insecurity which have grown between us. We confess to a mutual antipathy when we first met (three or four years ago perhaps?). It is all therapeutic.

Thursday, 6th October 1977 A full day, with Noica in excellent form, coming round after lunch and again in the evening with two lists of points for discussion. Point 1: the explosive impression which Cretia's Clouds has made on him—a four-language translation project(?!). He is fascinated by the life story of the book, which was begun in 1952, written over ten years, and then left lying for another fifteen. It all seems to him to be the mark of a living and beautiful culture, which has not entered the business of serial creation typical of the West. The discussion moves on to the possibility of breaking out of the cultural borders of Romania, in the manner of the Spanish generation of 1896 who made a spectacular entry into the European circuit. Perhaps our culture too has a God, and why should the great hour of epiphany not strike for us? In the evening we take our tea in Andrei's room. He tells us about the idea behind his book Elements of the Philosophy of Landscape, and reads us some remarkable pages about the naturelandscape disjunction in European civilization. Noica gives him the idea of opening the book towards a future landscape which is no longer that of Earth, and of looking at the role of abstract painting in describing the landscapes of possible worlds. Petru's Clouds sends us towards the idea of an absolute landscape, in relation to which terrestrial nature would just be a particular, and relative, case. "Don't disregard the 20th century: it is a good moment for culture, which looks towards both the past and the present with equal care." Then Noica speaks of the two moments in European history which have seen the creation of new cosmologies: first, Greek philosophy, which eliminated the chaos of mythology; and then the coming of Christianity (still a Greek achievement, it seems to him, through the Pauline-Antiochian contribution). After the chaos of science through which we are living in our time, we need a new agent of cosmological generation: we need another Greek.

20

Friday, 7th October, 1977 The three of us had an unforgettable walk after breakfast, towards Noica's chosen place of retreat (one of how many I wonder?) in the surroundings of Paltini§ (half an hour on foot from the hotel). It is on a gentle slope, fully exposed to the sun, on the right of the road, with an uninterrupted view down into a long valley on the other side of the road. Noica wants to indicate the chosen spot exactly, perimetrically, so w e climb ("I'm not going up steps") some 50 meters up from the road, on long, thick grass which lies trampled in spirals on the ground, white with the frost which is just starting to melt. On our left there is a dense curtain of fir trees, and in front of us the panorama of the valley opens out, leading the eye down along a perfect axis into the sunlight, the strong sunlight of an autumn morning, which strikes us full in the face and leaves us dizzy. It is 9.30. We go back, and on the way w e weigh up projects and take stock of what w e have achieved. I complain that I cannot yet see my next book after The Tragic. "Why should you be obliged to go like a tram, from station to station, as Heidegger said of Hartmann? There have to be periods of glorious regeneration. I love that sign: 'Awaiting delivery of goods.' Around 1956 I began to feel that I had written too much and that I had no more breath; I almost wanted to go to prison. Gabi is now in the phase when only quantity counts, the profound reading of those twelve great names from the history of philosophy." Then he starts to pass hard judgement on V.Z. "How could he waste three or four good years of his youth reading Freud, something he doesn't know any use for, and which deforms you for the rest of your life as well. I suggested he should spend time on the problem of Geist and Seele in German culture: he didn't do it. I suggested Shaftesbury: he didn't read him. He did take great pains over translating Kant, but without reading around the subject. Translating Kant as if it was Agatha Christie just doesn't work." In the evening w e speak about Sergiu Al.-George, and about how Noica handed on to him (in 1948) the whole library of Sanskrit studies which Eliade had left in his care in 1943. W e get into another heated discussion about the culture of East and West, about the openness of the East towards the relativity of the earthly condition compared with the vision of Christianity. ("This earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.")

21

Saturday, 8th October 1977 Petru Crejia has arrived for two days, to take back his manuscript of The Clouds with Noica's verdict. He is driven out of his mind by Bucharest, and I observe that he exists in a permanent state of fury, that he is quarrelling within himself with everyone and everything who gets in his way and seems to be insulting him (the Museum of Romanian Literature, his work on the Eminescu edition, etc.). His air of a neurotically polite robot puts me on edge and is taking me, for two days I think, out of the calm and robust atmosphere which I have felt in Paltini§ until now. I can't stand Petru unless he is in a state of calm and intelligence.

Sunday, 9th October, 1977 A day out. Around midday Relu Cioran arrives from Sibiu, and we all set off for §anta (six kilometres from here) where, in their uncle's villa, the 20 year old Emil Cioran wrote On the Heights of Despair, the book which, along with Ionesco's No and Noica's Mathesis, took the Writers' Prize for first publications in 1934. §anta is a group of half a dozen timber villas; the Cioran house, which was built right against the edge of the forest, no longer exists. We sit down to eat around the trunk of a fallen tree, on the site of the old garden. Noica's mood reminds me of a little blue tit enjoying the warmth of the waning sun of an autumn afternoon. He is a picturesque sight, with his buttonless overcoat and sporty four-cornered English hat. He recites Sighireanu's poetry ("a tantric moment" he insists, provoking the indignation of Andrei, who sees this as a belittling and "vulgarizing" of the Orient), his exchange of epigrams with Pastorel, anecdotes from the cultural world of inter-war Bucharest, etc. When we have finished our food—which he had kept asking for, like a child ("I'm hungry: what else have you got?"), without breaking his flow for more than a moment—he stretches out on the tree trunk, balanced precariously, with his face turned towards the sun and his eyes shut, and carries on talking. He has the look of a mischievous child about him, and laughs like an urchin when he sees that I am scared that he might roll off the trunk. We are all lively and relaxed, and everything seems almost frivolous in comparison with the atmosphere of concentrated culture which Noica usually maintains around himself. At the same time the reflexes of cultural connection

22 are permanent, and even when he tells his "tantric anecdotes" they are given a cultural packaging. "I knew an English novelist," he begins, "who was fascinated by Romanian peasant names. 'Ion and MarieV he would remark, 'How lovely they sound."' Then he recounts how he told the Englishman a "Ion and Marie" anecdote that he had picked up somewhere: Marie goes out one night in the dark, bumps into a cart-shaft, and says, "Is that you, Ion?" I find it strange to see him like this, giggling away and in unstoppable verbal flow, almost as if the autumn sun, the love of friends, and the youth which rises up in him with each fresh anecdote combine to have a "disinhibitory" effect on him. I think of the almost "holy" atmosphere of my first Paltini§ period and tell myself that in the context of Andrei's histrionic spirit and Petru's twosided love for Noica, I am experiencing, without necessarily wishing to, a distancing process which will suppress any tendency towards excessive devotion on my part. Is this a good or a bad thing? I have noted down the exchange of epigrams between Noica and Pastorel Teodoreanu, which took place over a lunch in 1938 or thereabouts. It was all improvised, and was started by Noica with some lines on a slip of paper: Pastorel produced a prompt answer, Noica added another epigram, and Pastorel's reply closed the exchange. To Mr. P. T. There are some general rules around To which exceptions can't be found: Wherever rams and lambs and ewes are, See Pastorel, the pastoral boozer. To Mr. C.N. Noica, my good writer friend, 's track'd me down here in the end; I sought him too with past'ral care, But couldn't spot him anywhere. To Mr. P. T. who uses apostrophes to be

where they have no

The epigram's nice, I confess, But the punctuation is a mess: Poor chap, for one who talks so fine, You splash apostrophes like wine.

business

23 To Mr. C.N. Drinking I learnt on my nurse's knee, Writing from Noica now, I see. Also memorable is the story of Harry Brauner who, when he came out of prison, went back to see the village of Dragu§ again, where he had worked for years as a folklorist. A peasant woman stopped him, gave him a terrified look, and said, "O, it's an awful thing, Master Brauner. Here we were thinking you had died and we've gone and made a lament for you!" So Harry Brauner was able to collect his own lament: Strange news has come, strange news is cried, Behind a fence of thorns you died; A fence of thorns, no bank of flowers A prison cell for your last hours.

Monday, 10th October 1977 I go with Petru to Noica's retreat spot, around 10 o'clock as before, thinking to find the sun at the same angle and the same quality of light. We stay there for half an hour, talking meanderingly around the question of the minimum ambiental conditions for great cultural actions. (Suddenly I recall that yesterday, on the way to §anta, Noica was commenting that he would "give the cultural founders a thorough going over.") We could do with an escape from the sterile turmoil of Bucharest. Petru leaves by car at 1.30 and embraces Noica in that artificially enthusiastic style of his. He promises to give him the Clouds manuscript, fully corrected, by 7th November. Noica will then give the manuscript to Marin Preda for publication at Cartea Romaneasca, before he leaves for England on the 15th. We hope to see it come out in 1978. We are back to the old routine again, and after lunch we go up to my room for coffee. Noica has three points on his list for discussion: why we cannot do without Aristotle; the strand of resentment—^"Aesopism"—in the history of philosophy; and finally the non-philosophy of those who come to philosophy from outside. "I can keep waiting for Andrei, but not for Gabi with his Aristotle. You have to read him seriously, because there is no getting

24 past the problems he raises. All the great thinkers have their starting point here, wherever they were to go on to afterwards. Listen to me telling you this now, who once dreamt of writing on my tombstone: 'Here lies one who did not like Aristotle.'" There follows a splendid historical exploration into the significance of Aristotle for the destiny of the great philosophers from the Renaissance to the present day. On to point number two: the Aesopic philosophy, the philosophy of those who have philosophized out of resentment, the sick and the malformed in the history of philosophy. "Even Aristotle had an ulcer and was of a delicate constitution, and Plato in his old age used to come home crying because of his philosophical mischiefs. But the great Aesopics of philosophy are Malebranche, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Sartre. Jaspers too, or so I think from reading his Autobiography, which is where I got the idea of an Aesopism running through the history of philosophy. "It is also the case of Jaspers that made me think how unfortunate it is for those who arrive at philosophy from a starting point in science. Aristotle is the first example, then Descartes and Leibniz, who today would have pursued physics, mathematics or logic, not philosophy. In our century no scientist has produced major philosophy: Heisenberg is perhaps the typical case. But why should this be so? Because philosophy means mania, madness, and no scientist can have mania. The divorce is only from the one side here, because philosophy can annex any science and can always find something to do with it. But there is only one outside point from which you can arrive at philosophy, and that is theology." Before leaving, he urges us to go walking more. "You can't let time play games with you. You have to keep it on your side, giving it what it needs. Think what a joy it is to lose your teeth, thirty-two enemies of man. You can get rid of your teeth, but you have to keep the body on your side by taking it for a walk regularly. All medicine ends up by recommending walking. I know a vet who used to deal with a sick horse by letting out its rope. Brother-pig, the body, needs his rope let out if you want him to leave you in peace." At supper he announces that he has finished the last chapter of the Maladies, about the three sicknesses of the Romanian mind. Over tea in Andrei's room we return to the project of an Institute of Oriental Studies. I stay with Andrei, and together we plan our reading of the fifteen greatest points in the history of philosophy, over the next

25 year and a half or two years. Jumping over Plato, and stopping at the beginning of the 20th century, we plan a concentrated reading of the pre-Socratics, Aristotle, the post-Aristotelians, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Apart from Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, each will be allocated a month: these three will have two months each. I do not consider the possibility of failure: I think I have passed the phase of empty projects. With the ancients, we shall use Greek terminology. After a year and a half we shall go on to the 20th century and the Orient. Tomorrow we are going to discuss the project with Noica. I consider how much I need to draw on oriental thinking for a methodical unlearning of the specific reflexes of the analytic European intellect, which is always dichotomizing to the point of exasperation. There are two self-corrections within the European tradition: "reason" in Hegel's system, and the recovery of origins in Heidegger's hermeneutics.

Tuesday, 11th October 1977 I have finished my chapter on Cassirer and tomorrow we are leaving Paltini§. In the morning I read over my outline for the other chapter of the paper, "Linguistic Symbol and Artistic Symbol". Then I read Victor Stoichifa's application of psycholinguistics to the paintings of Kandinsky and Mondrian. It is very well done, but the insistence on structuralist methodology is unfortunate, creating a terminological jungle in a field which aspires to be univocal and positive. After lunch, we make plans for our evening of parting and stocktaking in Noica's room. Andrei has the idea of a little vesperal Abschiedsduett, and shows me his party piece: eight verses about the threesome which has come into being in these ten days, a "ballad" on the adventure of the mind which we have experienced in "Paltinig's lofty outpost." I am to read some pages from my diary of these days here, the passage about the fire and the one about the place of retreat. Andrei's poem goes like this: Among the hills of Transylvania, Through the bending firs we climb, To Paltini§'s lofty outpost, In a place outside all time,

26 Where, a pearl in the oyster Of an hour which chanced to be, Mr. Noica treads each morning Steps that will not pass away. Deep in thought, yet ever smiling, Gallant knight with sacred quest, Leaning down, he sees unfearing, Words meet silence in the abyss. From himself he gives us body, We, two godless prentices, While expounding with mild gestures Three and all its mysteries. Bearing speculative burdens Gabriel sits at his right hand, Torn between alternate options Which do not on him depend. While upon his left, well grounded, Though oft his stumbling seems in vain, Andrei ascends the way of mystery, Through the clouds like one insane. As in some old winter ballad Through crisp white snow fresh paths they trace, Caught up each one, caught up together, In the forgetting of their race. Among the hills of Transylvania, Like two bending firs w e climb, Through Paltini§'s lovely valleys, In this place outside all time. After supper w e go as planned up to Noica's little room, where a smell of apple peel and pipe tobacco greets us. We tell him about the surprise w e have prepared, our little "celebration in prose and verse." He takes a seat, lights his pipe, and asks us to go ahead with our reading. I start with the episode of the lighting of the fire on the first evening: as it all happened in exactly the same place ten days ago, I have a strange sensation of having caught hold of time by the tail. Then it is Andrei's turn to read his verses. I sit on the

27 bed, with my back against the wall. Noica is sitting on my left, and, while Andrei is reading, I cast a sideways glance at his face. I want to see him listening. His head is tilted back a little, so that his forehead is on an oblique plane and seems taller than usual, with a fine smooth curve towards the crown of his head, which symmetrically balances the curve of his nose—the nose of a gargoyle it seemed to Pâstorel Teodoreanu when they first met. The line of his mouth is turned inwards, as is usual with men of his age, and his chin juts forward slightly, providing a concave termination to the lower part of his face. He spoke a lot after we had finished our little show, and I can feel that it is going to be difficult to reproduce everything he said. First of all there was the theme of the great cultural boulevards, the way in which he had chosen to live his cultural life, digesting the essential, in contrast to Cioran and Mircea Vulcânescu who had given him complexes all through his youth with their broad reading of secondary authors. "I would be reading Chateaubriand, and Cioran would go on for hours about the work of Chateaubriand's brother-in-law. Once in a French restaurant I sat and listened to them talking all evening about Léon Bloy, of whom I hadn't read a line. I tried to keep up with them, but I couldn't do it. Nowadays I am starting to think that I didn't go wrong in choosing the main boulevards of culture. Cioran ended up writing aphorisms, and Vulcânescu, had he lived, would most likely have done encyclopedic, not speculative work. There is a way of losing yourself in culture without any sense of the hierarchical place of things: it just means that someone else has to put on their diving suit later to rescue you and bring you back to the surface. All the same I have retained some essential things from the great secondary thinkers, and the saying that I would have liked to put above the door of my school, 'You can never know who is the giver and who is the receiver,' comes from Un Mendiant Ingrat by Léon Bloy. "You two have all you need to do good work. You should never complain about history, even when it is inconsiderate and seems to be 'peeing on you' as Hegel said. Every bad thing becomes a good thing in the end: it seems bad not to be honored, not to be sought after, but in the end it means you can get on with your own work in peace, which is a good thing. On the other hand, every good thing becomes a bad thing in the end, whether it is too good a meal, too good a marriage, or a good career. "In your case, it might seem like a bad thing that you did not finish a foundation course in the history of philosophy but it is good that you can do it now, with a healthy lack of innocence which

28 I did not have at eighteen, when I read Kant in a vacuum. In 1928, when I went to Vianu's lectures in aesthetics, I expected him to talk about transcendental aesthetics, the aesthetics of time and space, out of Kant. If anyone anymore on at you because you seem to be plodding and not doing anything spectacular any more, explain that you are no longer driven by vanity but by pride. Your marriages should not be too stressed. If you have beautiful wives it is barbaric to keep them to yourselves all the time. Beauty should be like light, a good which is spread without being divided. If they get on at you, co-opt them into your project: give them translation work to do for example. It all depends on yourselves how well you are settled in life: in history, in the family, in culture."

Wednesday, 12th October 1977 After breakfast, we go up to my room for coffee before leaving. Noica wants to return some books to Andrei, and still has to read a concluding chapter of Evola. "It isn't good to let things pass through your hands without extracting the essentials. If you haven't read a book and you have to give it back, at least flick through it, read the first lines and the conclusion." He has finished Jaspers's Autobiography, and talks about those incurably flat minds like Jaspers, who can write without the slightest shame: "Italy is so beautiful!" "A flat mind will always remain flat, even if you send him to Paradise and let him converse with the Good Lord Himself. Even after a trip to Heaven, he will still be coming out with platitudes. Jaspers is surprised that Heidegger sometimes wouldn't answer his questions, but they were the type of questions that no one could be expected to answer: 'What do you think about God?' and things like that."

12th to 19th November 1978

Sunday, 12th November 1978 "The necessity of maximum concentration"—that was my official pretext for taking this week off to get away to Paltini§. It is the closing period of my "background studies" (Panofsky this year), and, as usual at such times, I have some pages written out of fortuitous encounters with subjects dictated by chance. But the essential reason was to bring my Noica diary up to date. As a supreme form of selfpampering, I have succeeded in persuading myself that it is only here, where the Noician spirit dwells in all its purity and I feel able to capture it, that I can manage to write these lines. I start from the idea that something precious will survive in them, even if it is only in the hurried and unpolished form of notes in a diary. In any case I feel guilty—and all this is a feeble and belated gesture of expiation—that scores of my meetings with Noica, spread over more than ten years, are lost for ever, partly due to my own laziness and partly out of a pathological resistance to the offerings of fortune. But I still have the one excuse that the place of continuity, of little reverences and rituals, is here, and not in Bucharest. Coming back here for the third time, I realize that Paltini§ has become a complete projection of the spirit of Noica. Even the people here—the caretakers, the woman in the grocer's shop, the lads at the chair-lift, the man at reception, the meteorologist, the militiaman, the canteen girlshave acquired a legato manner from him. Their very being seems to hang on his greeting, on the long, slow movement with which he raises his hat, the humility in his smile; that smile with which, high above and unknown to them, he bends down before the precariousness of mind and being, without which there could be neither pathos nor exaltation, nor indeed his own philosophy. But Paltini§ is a projection of the Noician spirit, and not only because of Noica's retreat here, because of the ground he treads on

32 his three daily walks, or because of the Treatise on Being which emerged from that two-by-three-meter room with the basin of water heating on the stove and the lighting of the fire ritualized day after day. This morning, in the unleashed light of an autumn sun which brought out powerful colors in the fir trees and the sky, Noica took me to the little monastery nearby to show me the place he had chosen for his grave. We both remembered how, ten years ago, on a hilltop at Puciosa where we had retired in order for me to learn the Greek alphabet and the first declension, I asked him what he thought about death. "You were disappointed when I answered that I didn't look on it too solemnly. It is amazing how humanity has failed to be reconciled to something that has happened so often. Beyond a certain age there is no sense in insisting on one's existence anymore. And yet three years ago I was sure that with the completion of the Treatise I had said all I had to say; then several more books emerged around it, and now I have the False Treatise on Logic to move on to." (In this way he has of talking about death, and in the way he usually talks about erotic love, I detect the same projection of his fundamentally lymphatic temperament, a characteristic miraculously effaced in his philosophical writing, which seems possessed by a fiery southern spirit.) The discussion proceeds on the same theme, shifting between a solemn and a frivolous tone. "So it's the Paltinij solution, in the case in which my death comes before yours: the Empedocles solution becomes valid if you should go first. But you must have realized that there is always something more for you to do. All the same, think what dramas all this business can cause you as an emigrant. Imagine how much it must cost to get a place in the Pere-Lachaise!" When I arrived yesterday evening, after he had taken me up to room 203 where I also stayed last year, he disclosed to me that he had reached a sort of "delirium" of freedom from the censorship of any authority. "I write about being without caring the least bit what Heidegger would think if he could read my pages. It was quite different thirty-five years ago, when I wrote Two Introductions. Then I made extensive references to his work on Kant and the problem of metaphysics, and I was obsessed with what he would think of my writings. It would be ridiculous nowadays for me to be wondering what Paul Ricoeur thinks of me, wouldn't it? Nothing concerns me anymore except the problem itself, the problem of being, or of hermeneutics or whatever." After lunch I suggest that we should carry on yesterday's discussion of my putative Noica monograph. "Why, my dear chap, this desire to see me buried at all cost? Why can't you let me carry

33 things through to completion? This monograph idea would b e of no benefit to either of us. Why do you not want to understand me by reading all my authors? And consider that you would also have to take into account my strange encounter with mathematics, the stone wall that I have wanted to cross all my life and against which I have hurled myself again and again, perhaps because I saw it as a way of reconstituting what has always seemed to me the ideal hypostasis of the mind, the twofold, Pascalian, model. Certainly as far as Pascal's esprit de géométrie is concerned, I have never had any success." Yesterday evening I brought him ten copies of his Six Maladies of the Contemporary Mind, which has just been published. I ask him what impression the book makes on him, printed as it is. "I looked for a page which I might have forgotten, or which I didn't know as well as the rest, but I couldn't find any. That's the trouble with writing short books. Joking apart, I wonder if my 'maladies' will have any meaning for psychiatrists. Not from a therapeutic point of view of course, because they are maladies of the constitution, creative disorders which make possible the existence of man, history and being itself. At the same time, my todetitis* explains par excellence that hysteria associated with women, the neurosis involving tense clinging, fixation with something individual ('my man,' 'my home,' etc.). Catholitis explains the situation of those w h o c o m e to complain that life has no meaning. And so on."

Monday, 13th November 1978 Over morning tea Alexander Paleologu comes up in our conversation, and Noica cites him as an example of a successful parting of ways. "Twenty-five years ago, when he was older than you are now, I started to feel that he was too much under my 'influence' in Cimpulung. He w a s declaring himself to be my disciple in a way that made me feel uncomfortable, and I remember that one time, when he said he considered me a genius, I felt that excessive praise spoken to one's face turns easily into a reproach. I see him seldom * Each of Noica's six maladies is defined by the lack or refusal of one of the terms of being: individual-determinations-general. They are: "todetitis," the lack of individual reality; "horetitis," the lack of determination; "catholitis," the lack of the general; and "atodetia," "ahoretia," and "acatholia," the refusal of the respective terms. See Constantin Noica, §ase maladii ale spiritului contemporan (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1997). Trans.

34 nowadays, and I am pleased to see how confident he is." I recall, and cannot help quoting, a remark that Paleologu once made to Andrei, that if Noica did not have genius he would be a fool. He takes up the idea with relish, and develops it. "He is right to see me that way. All my life I have had a saving lack of insight, a sort of foolish optimism. It has helped me get through situations which would have crushed me if I had faced them with a fully mobile and alert mind. Perhaps I have always had a 'foolish concentration,' like that of the shepherd who stood watching his sheep graze while a barn was in flames behind his back: when he was asked how he had not seen the barn burning down, he answered that he had been looking at his sheep." My day of work has been unpleasant, being spent chewing over Panofsky's articles about Wolfflin's theory of style and Riegl's Kunstwollen, without getting beyond the insipid manner of a classroom exercise. In the evening I join Noica in his room for a cup of tea. He gives me a letter to read, telling how Eliade has made a complete conquest of Paris this year: the publication of the second volume of his History of Religious Beliefs and Ideas, celebrated with a cocktail reception at Payot; the awarding of the Legion of Honor, the occasion for more cocktails, speeches, and interviews; his Entretiens with Rocquet (JL'epreuve du labyrinthe), showing that everything in his life is coming towards fulfillment. All these worldly indulgences seem to have rather tired him out... I finish the letter, and look around the room with its tapered ceiling; I see the sink with its broken tap, the rough blanket on the bed, with the newspaper that we have spread over it while we take our tea; I see Noica tearing open the paper of Carpati cigarettes and pressing the tobacco into his pipe, his bonnet making him look like some exiled pope, his trousers worn to a shine; I think of the books which he has dutifully written, working away like a stubborn mule, flattered by no one, honored by no awards, on the contrary scorned by Ionesco and others as one who has "sold out." The words of Heraclitus come into my mind about how "there are gods here too," and I am convinced that the gods who have grown up around the door of Noica's room are more beautiful and more true than those gods who were with Eliade as he sipped from the all-too-human cup of vanity. I take and read the postcard Noica has received from his son Razvan ("Brother Raphael"). He is writing from Cape Sounion. I have transcribed the few lines as follows: "Dear Father, I am writing to you with much warmth from the Land you said I should visit—here I am at last. I am heading for Mount Athos, where I hope

35 to stay until the beginning of December, and beg for your Parental Blessing in the certainty that I already have it from this moment..."

Tuesday, 14th November 1978 Curious to find out a little about iconology, Noica asked me yesterday to lend him one of Panofsky's books. I gave him Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique (along with L'abbé Suger)—some 200 pages—and he returned it to me this morning: he must have read it yesterday evening, after we had bid each other goodnight. He has hit so well on the essence of the matter that he proposes that I should iconologize Panofsky himself, meaning to try and find the habitus through which he participates in the 20th century. In the course of our evening chat he tells me that he has modified the opening of his essay "A Poet: the Romanian Language" which is intended to appear as the first chapter in a critical presentation of thirty-five poets. Last night I asked him to read the first paragraphs, which were not very brilliant. They started something like this: "Poetry speaks otherwise about something else..." "While I was reading it to you," he says, "I realized that I wasn't really saying anything. Science also speaks otherwise about something else. I have changed the opening to say that poetry speaks of the preword and moves things outside their limits. I borrowed the term 'pre-word' from §ora, but my conscience is clear, because I have already spoken of 'pre-being.'" I ask him which branch of culture he considers most successful in this country: literature, literary criticism, or history? "History and philology in the 19th century: I say history, because it was a moment of necessary development of historical consciousness, a moment which was extended, after Kogâlniceanu, in the work of Pârvan and Iorga. My generation saw in them the highest level of cultural consciousness. I am less of a believer in poetry, but more in the prose of the inter-war years. Philosophy has remained dominated by 'what was to be.' Literary criticism seems to me in general not to be culturally representative. What do Sainte-Beuve or Gundolf mean alongside the great creators? Càlinescu only seems great to us because of the lack of achievements in other fields."

36

Wednesday, 15 th November 1978 I have finished reading the latest volume of Eliade's short stories, In the Court of Dionysus, which appeared last year in Caietele Inorogului. This brings our discussion at morning coffee back to Eliade. "What amazes me about Eliade is his ability to take the commonplaces of religions so seriously. You see this when you read his literary work. You know how much I like his idea that there is a concentration of the sacred behind any profane reality. Like Hegel's Idea, this gives you a way of looking on all things with compassion, of ennobling and redeeming them. But there is also the disadvantage that, if you see a revelation of the sacred in every trivial detail, you risk disintegrating the sacred itself. You'll see for example how he ends the second volume of his History of Religious Beliefs and Ideas with the story of 'L'autobus qui s'arrête à Éleusis.' A bus on the Athens to Corinth route pulls in at the bus-stop in Eleusis, and an old woman gets on. She has no money for her ticket, so the driver puts her off the bus. The engine won't start. The other passengers decide to pay for her ticket. The old woman gets on again; the engine starts; there is general consternation; the old dear gives them a ticking off, and disappears. The business of the engine that wouldn't start, and so on, is authentic enough: it caused a bit of a stir in 1940, and got into the Athens newspapers. The trouble is that you get the feeling that Eliade picks up that sort of thing and believes in it. Well, it isn't helpful to see a revelation of the sacred in stories like that: you just dilute the sacred. He does the same with dreams. For the ten years that he and Jung were friends they used to keep telling each other their dreams. "On the other hand his short story of Ivan is tremendous. Eliade has always been like that: une boîte à surprises. He would be telling you banalities one day, and the next he would come and knock us all down with an idea which would win everyone back to him. I'm going to write to him about Ivan. He is very attached to his literary work, and I think he hopes that it will somehow be his way of salvation, a compensation for his not having gone in the direction of philosophy. I suspect there is something of a writing demon in him, having seen how he stopped work on Shamanism to write La forêt interdite, which he considers his pièce de résistance. "But I also want to say something else when I write to him. I want to tell him that it has fallen to my lot to put up a struggle for three things in my life: to carry through the publication of Corydaleos—and I failed; for the publication of a facsimile of Eminescu's notebooks— and again I failed; and finally to bring Eliade back to Romania for a

37 while, in connection with my project for an Institute of Oriental Studies (and the revival of the international journal Zalmoxis). I have gone on trying, and there might yet be a chance of achieving this, but now I have changed my mind, and I am going to tell him not to come, just so that my third struggle can end in failure too." We go walking after lunch, and he asks me how Ple§u, Stoichifä and I are getting on with the readings from the history of philosophy that we have been working on together. I tell him that we have reached Plotinus, and am delighted to hear that he would be willing to "travel along" with us. ("You have to read him in his entirety: you will see that he is uneven, and very boring in places.") We plan the meeting for the beginning of December, here in Pältini§. In the evening, after supper, another surprise awaits me. We go up to my room for him to give me the "double-barreled" plan (theology and philosophy) which he has prepared for our reading in the coming year. "In these conditions I'm willing to allow you an extension for Goethe." (We have stopped at volume 3 of the Propyläen edition: only another forty-three volumes to go...) Arriving in my room, he dictates the list, which he has jotted down (I can't imagine how), on a matchbox. It is as follows (following on from Plotinus): in the theological series: the New Testament with the Apocrypha and the Essene writings; Philostratus's Life of Apollonias of Tyana; the Gnostics; Hermes Trismegistus; Augustine (Confessiones, De Trinitate, De Civitate Dei, and De Magistro); Origen; Clement; PseudoDionysius; the three great 4th century fathers: Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Gregory of Nyssa and Saint Basil the Great (the Orthodox liturgy); a history of the Councils; Saint John Climacus, and a cursory look at the Philocalia\ and in the philosophical series: Philo; Pseudo-Longinus; Porphyry; Boethius; then into the Middle Ages with Alcuin; Abelard (including the letters of Abelard and Heloi'se); Anselm (the Proslogion)\ Thomas Aquinas; William of Ockham; Duns Scotus; Eckhart; and Nicholas of Cusa. There are also two works of synthesis to read: Marrou's Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, and Gilson's Philosophy of the Middle Ages.

Thursday, 16th November 1978 At 11 o'clock, Noica goes down to Sibiu, where he is to meet the translator of his Parting from Goethe: I suggest "das Bildernische" rather than "das Plastische" as a heading for the chapter dealing with the category of the visual arts. We walk together for a quarter

38 of an hour. "You and Andrei should not pass judgement on Eliade. He has an open-ended egotism: he knows that we all benefit, indirectly, from his self-fulfillment. In fact it is not really an egotism at all, so much as a naive way of rejoicing in his own successes. You will see this in the Entretiens which I will borrow for you this evening from Relu. He is really very childlike: in his youth he enjoyed being high-brow, and he liked telling people so. You can win him over very easily by praising him, so he often fails to distinguish between people of quality and the rest." I am getting near the end of my Panofsky paper. Has anyone ever kept to the methodological promises he started out with?

Friday, 17th November 1978 Today, after Noica's return from Sibiu, I received the promised book of Eliade's interviews with Claude-Henri Rocquet (L'épreuve du labyrinthe). "Don't be put off by the beginning, where Eliade declares how much he likes his name, and descends to some tasteless nonsense about 'Mircea Eliade' coming from 'myrrh' and 'Helios,' or where he claims—to compete with Jung, I dare say—that his memories go back to a time when he walked on all fours. You will find the rest interesting." We get onto the subject of the History of Religious Beliefs and Ideas, and I ask Noica if, by invoking the idea of archetypes, Eliade has not positioned himself too firmly in the orbit of Jung. "I know he was always bothered by the similarity (as he was by the business about alchemy), and he once wrote to me that he wanted to call them 'paradigms,' which for me means something quite different. I tried to reassure him, however, and told him that his archetypes are clearly placed at the level of ontology, and so are deeper than those of Jung, which are psychological (belonging to the unconscious). In my Treatise on Ontology, I even use the archetype at one point as an illustration of the 'element,' and I emphasize that I mean the archetype in Eliade's sense." Having, broadly speaking, finished my work on Panofsky, I am in a hurry to start on L'épreuve du labyrinthe. I am pleased to discover that "Eliade" was the name adopted by his grandfather (on the model of "Eliade Râdulescu") in place of "Ieremia," which is a byword for laziness in the folklore of personal names. The sequence dealing with his earliest memories does indeed seem to be based closely on Jung's Erinnerungen.

39

Saturday, 18th November 1978 Dr. Mircea Lazarescu from Timi§oara has come to see Noica—an interesting case of a psychiatrist in love with philosophy. I wonder what form this love will finally take.

Sunday, 19th November 1978 Yesterday and today I have been caught up in Eliade's conversations. Having got past the beginning, I am amazed to realize what force his ideas acquire when they are presented in this form, instead of being dispersed and buried in the erudition of his books. All his massive scholarly work, it now becomes evident, is fed by a few ideas of extraordinary scope and depth. I remain with the following: 1) the demonstration of a palaeolithic unity of humanity, on the basis of the religions of the agricultural age; 2) the spiritual mutation which ensues from the passage from hunting to agriculture: the confrontation with plant (as opposed to animal) life gives rise to the integration of humanity in the rhythm of the cosmos, and to the appearance of a consciousness of the unity of life and death, the existential attitude which lies at the roots of the great religions, and which started with the analogy of the birth, growth, death and resurrection of the plant; 3) the contribution of all people (all cultures) to the history of the mind; 4) that the capacity for signifying and symbolizing, specific to human behavior, has its true (initial) root in the religious existential attitude; 5) that the sacred is camouflaged in the profane, just as for Marx and Freud the profane was camouflaged in the sacred: the task is to "decipher the camouflage of the sacred in the desacralized world"; and finally, 6) that culture is in fact a specific condition of man—the political significance of culture lying in its capacity to respond on a different level to a difficult historical moment; the sacred and soteriological value of the book today, when oral teaching and folklore have disappeared; the possibility of surviving through the intermediary of culture (though Noica has experienced all this within himself). In the evening, Noica makes a final visit to my room. I tell him how caught up I am in my reading of Eliade. He is very pleased, and proposes that I should indicate in a letter to Eliade the ideas which have struck me, telling him it is a pity they should remain

40 dispersed or buried in works of erudition. In other words, I am to propose that he write the great postscript to his work. If I do not write the letter in the next two days, I shall probably never write it. I tell him that I have had the sensation, reading the conversations, that I am facing a monster of culture. "Both Eliade and Cioran had their ideas in place before they were thirty. They got off to a better start than I did. I felt that my real beginning was after the age of forty. In any case, I hope I have been able to make you see who the man is, and how great he is. Don't make comparisons between us: our destinies have been different. Think what he would have done, with his projects, if he had stayed here. What could he have done without libraries? I have been content with my classics."

11th to 28th December 1978

Monday, 11th December 1978 I am in Pältini§ again, for four days this time. On Friday I am going back to Bucharest to pick up Andrei Pleju and Victor Stoichifä by car. Then we are going to work with Noica on the Plotinus stage of our history of philosophy program. I also intend to use these days to begin my translation of the Heidegger volume for Univers Press (on the origin of the work of art, the poetry of Hölderlin and other themes), as well as the fourth part of the Plato edition, the Phaedrus. I am beginning the Heidegger with the shorter piece Die Kunst und der Raum. I am happy to be able to look forward to a few months in which I shall be free to work as my heart dictates. And yet, important as it is that Heidegger and Plato should be put into Romanian, I can't help wondering if I have the right to postpone in this way my projected treatise on limit (Peratology) and my applicational and anticipatory work on the symbol (a second regional variety of peratology, as it were, following on from the tragic). But these are mere rhetorical doubts, since my commitments are already settled. (It is interesting that before Vittorio Klostermann would accord the Romanian publisher rights for the Heidegger translation, he asked for information on the Ausbildung of the translator.) For these days I have also taken Eliade's Oceanography, thinking of the forthcoming Univers volume of pre-war Eliade. And finally, for stylistic suggestions, I have taken along Vasi Zamfirescu's translation of Freud (about literature and the analysis of the creative process), which is also due to be published by Univers in 1979.

44

Wednesday, 13th December, 1978 Yesterday and today I have spent twelve miserable hours trying to translate Heidegger's short paper Die Kunst und der Raum. I have the continual sensation that I am working on a text which is untranslatable in principle, struggling in a hedge which sometimes seems to open out only to become all the more entangled again. I am becoming desperate. I am amazed to see how Beaufret and Fedier, the French translators of the text, published by Erker at St. Gallen in a hardback edition on quality paper, have allowed so many clumsy mistakes into print. The error on page 24 is particularly shocking: "Dans le verbe «leeren» (vider) parle le «Lesen» (lire)...," where Lesen is the verbal noun from "to collect," not "to read," which has no sense here. And they resolve the points of maximum difficulty by simple caiques, completely leaving aside the problem of how the text is to be understood. For example their French equivalent for the semantic triangle Raum-RäumenEinräumen is espace-espacement-emplacement, which has an external symmetry, but says practically nothing in the context. This evening I sat from 8 to 12 o'clock with Noica, looking over the German text and my version. Noica thinks that the translation of Heidegger can be resolved in terms of the binary pair which he has been so keen on lately: truth-exactitude. "All you can do is to find correspondences which enable the text as a whole to work. In this case, at least, you have to find an anecdote in which the abstract word can be decoded from start to finish. Every philosopher, I think, and Heidegger I am sure, writes his thoughts with just such an underlying fable in his mind. So you have to aim at a coherent overall rendering; if your choice of term is confirmed by every separate context and the whole thing 'holds together,' then the translation is true, even if it is not exact. Otherwise you can do what the Frenchman does when he uses emplacement for Einräumen, and wash your hands of the matter. What do you resolve, for example, by using inspatiere Qinspacemenf) as your equivalent for Einräumen? I would put clearing of space, and I would imagine here the story of the primitive who comes and settles in a space by 'clearing' it, after he has first cut it out' (räumen) among the bushes. Once it is cleared, the space becomes a place (Ort), that is to say, a place with an organized structure (Ortschaft), which is determined by the relationship between the things which populate it (trees, garden, domestic animals, shelter, threshold, etc.). In any case I am thinking within the limits of the Heideggerian reper-

45 toire, and you cannot go far wrong if you translate that way, even if your translation is not 'exact.'" Although he never ceases to startle me from a philological point of view, I feel that Noica is the only person here in the present time who has the power to dominate a text of Heidegger. You cannot come before Heidegger empty handed. But this means that the hermeneutic process begins with the very act of translation. As I went out to the canteen with Noica at lunchtime, a builder greeted him at the door: "I keep seeing you around here these days. You're the barber at the tourist complex, aren't you?"

Thursday, 14th December 1978 Yesterday evening I left Noica with Freud's text on the interpretation of Goethe's earliest memory, the one about plates being thrown from a window in Poetry and Truth. I expected an explosive reaction, given his opposing passions regarding the protagonists, Goethe and Freud, and I was not disappointed. The error seemed to him twofold: not just that it was a matter of a mere explanation ("it is this and only this") instead of an understanding, but that the explanation was also a bad one, a forced one. I ask him what his own earliest memory is. "It concerns an error in German. I was sitting on the potty, when my governess came and asked me what I was doing. I replied, 'Ich denke mich.'" Wonderful! Noica's earliest memory could hardly fail to be connected with cogito and the language of philosophy.

Saturday, 16th December 1978 We arrive at Paltinig—Andrei Ple§u, Victor Stoichifa and myself—at nine in the evening. We are staying in rooms 11 and 12 of villa 23: that is to say, close to Noica's room, in the Saxon villa on its little plateau at the top of a winding path through the fir trees. Heavily laden with bags, we laugh as we slither along in our hurry to cast eyes on Noica again. The excitement that prefigures this meeting has been building up in the course of our journey. We are greeted at the top of the stairs with a fatherly kiss on the forehead. Then Noica hurries to show us our warm rooms, where he has been keeping the fires going throughout the day; he ad-

46 mits that he has been feeling like a great orchestrator of fires, conducting three stoves all day long. He leaves us to unpack, then, over a glass of Zalau fuica, he announces with playfully ironic seriousness the "trismeron," the program onomastically inspired by the Decameron, which he has made for us for the coming three days. Here it is: Paltini§, 17th-20th December 1978 Trismeron

Sunday

9 - 1 1 a.m. 11 a.m.-1 p.m. 1 - 5 p.m. 5 - 7 p.m. 8 - 9 30 p.m.

Admin. Philosophical bases of art history Dinner, rest, reading Paltini§ meditations Free discussion

i- 11 a . m . - l p . m .

Non-philosophical disciplines bearing on art history (theology, history, literature, science, the scientific-technical revolution) Bucharest meditations 5 - 7 p.m. 8-9.30 p.m. Group projects

Tuesday

- 11 a . m . - l p . m . 5 - 7 p.m. 8 - 1 0 p.m.

Plotinus Presentation of recent work Personal projects. "Five-Year Plans." Future undertakings

Noica retires to read the huge volume of mail that we have brought him from Bucharest, and leaves us alone together, like three big puppies rolling around in the garden of the mind. I am thirty-six years old; the others are thirty. We are no longer all that young, and yet in Noica's presence I feel, as I am sure Andrei and Victor do too, like a big schoolkid, happy to play a little under the guiding eye of the Old Man. Sometimes I am slightly ashamed of this prolonged tutelage, and think to myself that by the time they reached my age the great thinkers had taken flight on their own wings; but at the same time I feel that the moment to break away has not yet come. I tell myself that in the realm of the mind the great gesta come late, that in the old days a young philosopher would spend over ten years as disciple to a master (Plotinus spent eleven years with Ammonius, starting when he was twenty-eight

47 years old), and other such consoling nonsense. What I am really afraid of is my own mediocrity; I try to think that in the outside world we may have a maturity which we do not ourselves perceive, and so on. How will we appear when he is no longer with us, when this slightly ridiculous pampering must come to an end? And what is all this high-pitched vibration of balancing and evaluating, of possibilities and projects, with ambitions and pride confessed and unconfessed? Is there really a need for this here? Is it a form of authenticity? Is it nothing more than a leap into another age and the cultural reliving of a primordial ludic instinct? Or is it, quite seriously, the living out in history of an ontological hypostasis of the mind, the need to take up for oneself the problems of a generation which tried, pathetically, to overcome the isolation which is the lot of small cultures? I do not yet know, but in the company of these friends of mine, and of this trainer of ours in the ways of the mind, everything seems good and festive. In the evening I stay up late with Andrei to compare our selections from Eliade's Fragmentarium for the anthology of 400 or so pages which is to be published by Univers: Mircea Eliade, Studies and Essays (1934-43)-

Sunday, 17th December 1978 So today is ri 7tpoTr| rinepa of the trismeron. We all meet at 11 o'clock to discuss the "philosophical bases of art history." It is fairly easy to see that the theme is a ploy of Noica's to attract Andrei and Victor towards philosophy and "the idea." The problem is therefore: "How can you arrive at philosophy and carry your specialism along with you?" And the starting point is: "How far do you feel you have reached the idea in what you have written up till now?" The discussion is rather heavy going, drawing on the classic attempts to combine art and philosophy, or to transcend the history of art in philosophy, particularly in the philosophy of culture or the history of culture. It emerges that without abandoning one's specialism it is impossible to get past the level of Burckhardt, Dvorak, Warburg and Panofsky—which, for Noica, is a completely unsatisfactory phase. Victor acknowledges that, for him, Pontormo was already an exercise at the limit, and that one more step would have taken him out of his "specialism." No one can say in concrete terms what "a departure towards...together with..." looks like. But probably that is not what counts, so much

48

as the constant insistence, "Aspire towards the idea," which will eventually yield unforeseen fruits. "You must live with great pride, and, with your eyes looking upward, declare aloud beside whom or in whose mould you want to end up. Which of the great cultural models would you like to equal or compete with?" At Victor's mention of Huizinga, Noica shakes his head doubtfully, letting us know for the thousandth time that he does not approve of the pursuit of culture unless it bears the mark of philosophy, in the name of which he accepts or rejects the work of others. There is more evidence of this at the start of the "Paltini§ meditations" in the afternoon. "I don't know what philosophy is, but I can tell you, as I did in my Goethe, what it is not. It is quite clear that you are not doing philosophy when you are incapable of shifting a problem out of its accustomed furrow. I have a wonderful illustration of this way of thinking in a remark made by Eliade in discussion with Jung. It was published in Secolul 20; I'll read you the fragment I have in mind: At 77, Professor Jung has lost none of his extraordinary vitality. He has recently published three new books in close succession, on the symbolism of the aion, on synchronicity, and finally the Answer to Job, which has already caused a considerable stir, particularly among theologians. "This book has always been in my mind," Professor Jung revealed to me one afternoon on the Eranos terrace, "but I have waited 40 years before writing it. I was deeply shaken when, still a child, I read the Book of Job for the first time. I discovered that Yahweh is unjust, and even does wrong. He lets himself be convinced by the devil; he agrees to torment Job at Satan's suggestion. Almighty as he is, Yahweh does not take human suffering into account. And on top of that, traces of the injustice of Yahweh can be found in other Hebrew writings..." And now comes Eliade's reply, which is quite extraordinary, a philosophical reply which has the virtue of taking the problem out of the minor, psychologizing terms in which Jung puts it: "It is possible that it is all a question of language. Perhaps what you term 'injustice' and 'cruelty' in Yahweh are only approximate, imperfect ways of expressing the absolute transcendence of God. Yahweh is 'He who is,' and so above

49 Good and Evil. It is impossible to include, to understand or to formulate him, so it follows that he is at one and the same time 'merciful' and 'unjust': it is a way of saying that no definition can circumscribe him, and no attribute can sum him up." But Jung's continuing insistence on the matter is lamentable, and unphilosophical, because it drags the problem down again to the lower level from which Eliade had lifted it: "I am speaking as a psychologist," the professor continued, "and would emphasize that I am referring to the anthropomorphism of Yahweh, and not his theological reality. As a psychologist, I observe that Yahweh is contradictory, and I also believe that this contradiction can be interpreted psychologically..." "I wanted to demonstrate to you, from this starting point, that unphilosophical thought is unable to make two distinctions: that between soul and mind, and that between intellect and reason; and that in the end it does not have access to the transcendental. Psychology has always dwelt with the misery of the 'soul' and has never had access to the world of the mind. Although Goethe has a philosophical background, he remained at the level of the intellect, and in contrast, Brancu§i, without philosophical instruction, had access to reason. A good part of the history of philosophy stops at the intellect, and is thus unphilosophical. I have always thought this of Aristotle: his philosophy is a philosophy of the intellect and does not have access to reason. Kant, who, historically speaking, is the one who makes the distinction, is criticized by Hegel for remaining, with all his philosophy, at the intellect. "But more than this I wanted to talk to you about the transcendental. You cannot do philosophy without the transcendental, that is to say without taking things to the 'beyond' of the self on which they are grounded. Since Kant, philosophy has no longer been moving towards the transcendent, but has been progressing by regression, retreating within the ever wider horizons of the 'beyond.' Heidegger is the best example today of a good regressive tendency, and it is painful to see how little Bochenski and Stegmuller understand him in this light, when they put him in the company of existentialists like Sartre or Kierkegaard. The passage from a determined fear (Furcht), through Angst, to reach Zeitlichkeit, the horizon of Sein, is a paradigmatic way of 'going backwards.' The fundamental ontology of Heidegger is just such a tran-

50 scendental sounding, which takes into consideration the main directions of modern philosophy since Kant. Freudianism, Marxism, structuralism, and so on, are also in the final analysis expressions of the descent into the self, of this regressive progress. "Now, because I have just read Freud's commentary on a childhood memory of Goethe in Poetry and Truth, and because it makes me furious, I want you to know that an interpretation should never try to fix something with the exactness of an explanation, but simply lift it to where it can be understood. A bad hermeneutics seeks to explain; it goes for the once and for all explanation, opting for exactness at the expense of truth. A good hermeneutics is content to understand, and leaves the thing open to as many interpretations as there are acts of understanding. It is the coherence of the reading that counts; it should be a reading which does not impose categorical limits, but simply proposes. If I read the Suppliants of Aeschylus, for example, interpreting it as the embodiment of an unhealthy, negative variant of becoming-in(to)-becoming (the refusal of femininity as procreation, and so as a good variant of becoming-in(to)-becoming), symbolized by the endless repetition of the action of filling bottomless barrels, then I am proposing an interpretation or understanding, a limitation which does not impose limits. Freud, on the other hand, comes and says, 'This (and only this) is how it is.' When I saw how Vasi Zamfirescu had translated this Freud of his without finding any other use for him, without being able to apply him in the development of his own thought, and when I remembered how he stubbornly refused to take up the problems that I proposed for him, I felt like writing on the typescript: 'This is the sort of text that someone ought to translate who has not immersed himself in Kant, Schiller and Goethe and in the problem of Seele-Geist."' During our hour of free conversation in the evening, Noica reads us a letter from Eliade, dated at the end of November, in which he announces that he has completed the preface for the Romanian edition of his Zalmoxis, and set in motion a project for the study of themes in Romanian ethnography and folklore with a view to their inclusion in a universal history of religions. In conclusion, and with irresponsible frankness, Eliade asks Noica why he doesn't prepare a French edition of his Romanian Sentiment of Being, as if it depended on the latter's will and desire alone.

51

Monday, 18th December, 1978 This morning at 11 o'clock we gather to discuss the "nonphilosophical disciplines bearing on art history"—theology, history, literature and science. First we sort out some details of the "theological series" in the list of readings which Noica put together for us a short time ago. "I believe the 21st century will be a time of the rediscovery of spirituality, after the 19th was one of historicism and ours one of science." Turning to history, Noica asks us if it is possible to deal with history of art without history, since it is clear that there can be no philosophy of history without history. Victor acknowledges that his involvement with history is limited to a certain amount of background documentation around a subject. "With literature, on the other hand," Noica tells us, "things cannot be left like that. With literature you always have to be up to date; it should be like an abundant resource on which you draw whenever you need. The great authors should be reread from time to time; for the rest, I rely on my friends' recommendations, and so end up with a selection which I certainly wouldn't have the time and energy to make for myself. As for science, I am delighted to see how many fundamental concepts there have their origins in the much less neutral domain of humanity, and how they then return, enriched, back to the world of the mind. I have started to keep a note of such words, seeking them out in dictionaries of the various sciences, and I am attracted to the idea of a book of Philosophical Utterances which could be written around these expressions. Paradoxically, a scientific word nowadays often says more than a term from philosophy, where so many concepts have not borne fruit, and the discipline itself threatens to become enclosed in a technical vocabulary, which fails to emit any radiance. How many of Heidegger's concepts, for example, have taken root? None, as far as I can see. Personally the expression from physics 'breaking point' says more to me than the philosophical term 'limit situation.' "In general, however, since we are talking about how to behave in front of a vast body of material, the only way not to be beaten by it is to be always on the offensive, never to be passive and let it get the better of you. At the level of information, culture will swallow you whole if you don't attack it with some ideas. It is like life in old age: you shrivel up if you let yourself live in memories, overwhelmed by the huge wave of all the past life you have lived. The only way to resist ageing is to stand up to life, to impose your initiatives on it all the time."

52

Tuesday, 19th December 1978 This has been our Plotinus day. We have spoken by turns on our chosen themes from the Enneads. I talked about Porphyry's Life of Plotinus, and then about On the Beautiful (I, 6), Victor spoke about Plotinian places in Byzantine art, and Andrei—with remarkable feeling and rigor—about On Good and The One (VI, 9). Lasdy, Noica spoke about On the Daimon (III, 4). "In the Apology, it is not the daimon of Socrates that is spoken of, but rather the nature of the daimon (daimonion), which is usually understood as a supervising and inhibiting authority (don't do such and such a thing'). A second hypostasis of the daimonic in Greek thought, and one which we find also in Goethe, is that presented in the Symposium, in which the daimon is the active force which bridges the gap between people and gods, a being positioned in metaxy, in the 'interval.' In Plotinus, we find a third hypostasis of the daimonic, in the form of an unexpected union. The daimon is now an unusual illustration (different, that is, from the Aristotelian prime mover) of the paradox of obtaining movement from non-movement. The daimon is the inescapable law which presides over the law under which you place yourself by your action and choice, and yet it is this same daimon which works within this latter law and makes it effective. 'We choose our daimon when we choose our life,' says Plotinus. In choosing your life you thus also choose the immediately superior authority under which it is lived. This authority is the daimon. This means that God himself, if you come closer to him, can become your daimon. You never escape the condition of the daimonic, unless you enter the supreme order. It is this third form of the daimonic that I wished to talk to you about, as being associated with the name of Plotinus. "Now I would like to tell you why I have never been able to get very close to his philosophy. I have two objections to raise to it. Firsdy, there is an air of preaching, of exhortation and moral constraint about him which does not go well with the free character of philosophical speculation. Plato, for example, does not impose any obligation on you, in the way that the preacher Xenophon does, so falling outside the bounds of healthy speculation. Plotinus is also erbaulich, 'an edifier and consoler,' and so appears disloyal to ultimate speculation. My second objection, linked to the first, is that he encloses speculation in a structure with a hieratic character. With him everything is anchored in heaven, his horizons are closed, and what he ends up with is a prison of the mind, not an open speculation, such as we find with Plato or Hegel.

53 "Speaking generally, we might say that here, with Plotinus, we are at the end of the line of Greek philosophy, in which the progression is clear: nature as the object of speculation for the pre-Socratics, man for Socrates, and finally God for Plotinus. Plotinus necessarily marks the end of a line: after him philosophy had to enter on a new cycle."

Thursday, 28th December 1978 (Bucharest) Noica has come to Bucharest for three days. I call on him at his home around 11 o'clock. He has brought Langes History of Materialism for me, from Emil Cioran's library in Sibiu. The book is signed and full of underlinings, and I imagine Cioran would be moved to have it in his hands again: it would bring back a fragment of his youth. I return L'épreuve du labyrinthe to Noica, and he asks me how Stoichiçâ reacted to it. I say he thought it was excellent. "Victor reacts too positively to everything! I am beginning to hold his lack of hooliganism against him. At thirty you should be more of a hooligan in culture." "Like Andrei," I suggest. "Yes, like Andrei." I tell him about Andrei's extraordinary vitality, about how on the way back from Pâltiniç he kept singing, recounting horror films, reciting and telling anecdotes for six or seven hours non-stop. I mention some excellent reactions I have heard to his book of maladies. "Yesterday, Alecu Paleologu challenged me to tell him the thinking behind my treatise on being. I became aware of something strange: that what we do is born out of a spirit of contradiction. It is as Hegel said (quoted in Eckermann) when Goethe asked him, 'What, in the end, is your dialectic?' and he replied, 'The spirit of contradiction of man who has risen above nature.' Since such themes are usually approached from the bottom upwards, I felt the need to start from the top in my Maladies, ennobling the malady and making it descend from heaven. Since being is generally sacralized and discussed solemnly, I started my Treatise from the bottom, with the idea of being as something humble and precarious." He gives me a letter from Cioran to read, the one about the "Paraguayan sentiment of being," full of irritation and bitter irony. He gathers that Noica stays in Pâltiniç, 4000 feet above "them," and imagines that breathing the Pâltiniç air for a whole season has induced some sort of delirium in him. The Romanian Sentiment of Being is fine enough, says Cioran, but his advice is that Noica should stick to logic, where he has room to be as delirious as he likes.

17th to 25th February 1979

Saturday, 17th February 1979 Back to Paltini§ for another long planned retreat, with Andrei, who hopes that seven or eight days' isolation will enable him to finish his book on the philosophy of landscape (.Picturesque and Melancholy). I have come with the Phaedrus and a mass of readings from Kierkegaard, out of which I have to produce an article and a minianthology for an issue of Secolul 20 focused on Denmark. Leaving behind us the madness of Bucharest, which harasses us and eats up our time with false problems, we get to Paltini§ by car around 10 p.m., arriving in the middle of a dry storm without snow, trees broken by the wind, and total darkness. Tired from the journey, we turn up at the hotel reception and find no one on duty: the situation begins to appear somewhat dramatic. The place seems devastated and abandoned. Together with Andrei I climb up the hillside to Noica's villa, clinging on to each other with one hand, and holding the other out ahead to avoid bumping into trees. We are vulnerable and ridiculous. Noica has been worried (he has been expecting us since 3 o'clock in the afternoon). He is quick to grasp the situation, and as he decisively puts on his coat and picks up his torch he mutters slowly, as if to force a successful outcome: "Anyway, I have a thousand solutions!" For a moment his lymphatic nature gives way to feverish agitation. We place ourselves in his hands, like a pair of exhausted children. Half an hour later we have two warm rooms in the hotel. The world we have left behind has yielded us up after a short protest: the convulsive passage to the "beyond" is over.

58

Sunday, 18th February

1979

At 12 o'clock we go up to Noica's room. He goes through his recent mail with us, particularly Emil Cioran's letter of 30th January, which marks the end of several months of sulking which had threatened to interrupt what may be the most brilliant series of epistles in our culture. In the present letter there are some comments on the Maladies. ("C'est un excellent ouvrage qui, à mon sens, reflète mieux ta forme d'esprit que le précédent'—that is, The Romanian Sentiment of Being.) Then Noica returns to his role of cultural coach, and enquires as to our intentions for the coming days. Hearing that Andrei has to finish his book, he raises his week's assignment to fifty pages. ("Pippidi complains that he can't write more than seven pages a day, and you just want to write four?") Then he rapidly finds a stimulatory ploy: "I'll come to see you each evening for half an hour, and Andrei can read us what he has written that day and tell us what he is going to write the next day." Among the letters received by Noica which we have looked over today, I am particularly struck by that of a guitarist from Oradea named Florian Chelu. Noica has become a focus of pilgrimage. During my last sojourn in Paltini§, he invited me into his room one day and introduced to me a young man of around twenty-five years of age, tall, thin, with a Christ-like face, deep-set eyes and long, blond hair. There was a slight vibration of the au-delà in his eyes. He had set out for Pâltiniç in hope of meeting Noica, whose books he knew by heart. He read Plato, and perhaps was seeking for the action from outside which could give meaning to the tiny impulses of holiness which had arisen in him. He had taken a cup of tea with Noica, talked for an hour, and gone back to Oradea. Today I have his letter in front of me, with its taste of incense and edificatio, and I am struck by a quotation in it from Symeon the New Theologian. I recognize myself in it, the deliberate and methodical way in which I gave myself up into Noica's hands years ago, which I had felt as a deep need long before I ever knew him, and which, once satisfied, I saw to be a great joy and an explanation and condition of success in the world of the mind, where emancipation, when it comes, is powerful in proportion to the subservience with which one has previously served in the courts of another. Just such a willed acceptance of blindness I have recognized in the quotation in Chelu's letter:

59 Every day you should reveal to your spiritual father all your thoughts, and you should accept what he says to you as from the mouth of God, with complete trust, and report it to no one saying: "Asking the father about such a thing, he said this and this." Nor should you discuss with another whether he spoke well or not, asking yourself: "What should I do to help myself?" For these are words full of faithlessness, and harmful to the soul. Such is often the case with beginners. From this point of view, I do not think I have gone wrong. Out of my unconditional submission, the deliberate suspension of my critical faculties, I have gained German, Greek, readings from the sources, and a certain attitude to culture, none of which I can imagine having if I had come before Noica, aged twenty-five as I was then, with the vanity of a false maturity. And here, I think, lay Andrei's error. Exceptionally gifted as he was, he felt the need to confirm himself through opposition. His meeting with Noica took place in the light of this principle of refusal, of an inclination towards dissolution, which is, to some extent, the mark of any precocious personality. Although he had theorized from early on and in an almost romantic manner, about the necessity for an encounter with the authority of the guru, the spirit of negation which dominates him meant that from the outset he lacked the precondition for a patient discipleship. For this reason, Andrei has not accepted what he has received from Noica "as from the mouth of God," and so he has received less. However, Andrei already had in him that which I have had to receive from elsewhere, or which I must resign myself to never having. Towards evening, Noica climbs up to see us in the hotel. He tells us how, an hour ago, he said goodbye to an engineer who had looked for him in Bucharest and had been directed to Paltini§. (The journey to Paltini§—first the train, then the bus—is an ordeal in itself, similar in its own way to the "ten-hours-of-Greek test" which must be accepted by any young person who wishes to remain in Noica's company. Almost all have given up: it is the principle of cultural selection.) This engineer—a man in his late thirties—had written a paper entitled On the Equity of the Foundation of the World, and he brought it to Noica to ask what he thought of it. He had arrived from Bucharest at a quarter to five, and set off again at 5.30: he expected to be home at two in the morning. The engineer Mr. Z.'s paper is accompanied by a couple of pages addressed to Noica, beginning:

60 Dear Sir, I know your time is precious. I believe you are a thinker with an important role in the great confrontation which is going on in the world between life and death. I too consider myself a modest fighter on the side of life, using the light that I have, such as it is. Every man carries in himself a tendency to return towards the source of his life. For this reason, I hope, sir, that you will have time to give a little attention to these beginner's efforts of my thought, and that you will not refuse me your guidance. I have glanced through the paper: it is a series of mini-dialogues in Socratic style, set in a factory, in which the writer attempts— what a strange sensation!—an anamnestic bringing to the surface of the love hidden in the depths of the human being, in the configuration in which it is found in this setting ("the fact of the presence of love in people, and the connection of this fact with life"). The pages, dilettantish as they are (does that matter?), are very reassuring, all the more so as they are written by someone from outside the realm of culture. For as long as a "producer of material goods" is facing the problem of the meaning of life, the world still has a chance of eternity. ("To think on the significance of love," writes Mr. Z. somewhere, "is to cast light on the laws by which life is preserved and thrives.") Noica next tells us about his little trip to Timigoara the previous week, at the invitation of Dr. Lazarescu. "I addressed a group of ten to fifteen psychiatrists, and tried to use the example of Jaspers to tell them that you cannot arrive at philosophy by a continual progression—psychiatry, psychology, and the next step, philosophy. Philosophy, in its strange madness, requires an overturning, aperiagoge\ it requires a Damascus road experience. It is not sufficient to master a certain level of generality, to have general ideas, in order to do philosophy. Philosophy cannot be done around the edges of a science, as the mere extension of the latter into a higher level of thinking. You cannot do philosophy with psychology: you do it with philosophy, which means as a pre-condition blindness, the Damascus experience which presupposes conversion, a break with the past, the passage into another language, which Hegel defined as the language of reason, as opposed to that of intellect. When you enter the world of philosophy you must change your name: you are no longer called Saul or Cephas, but Paul or Peter. It is not easy indeed to explain what it means to have an organ of philosophy. All you can do is to say that Plato, Hegel and Heidegger certainly have it, and that equally

61 certainly someone like Descartes or Leibniz does not. All my life, I have never ceased to wonder whether or not Aristotle had this organ, and I am inclined to believe that he did not, although I recognize that he raises problems which cannot be passed over. In any case, it is clear that philosophy is very often asked questions in the language of non-philosophy, for example by the court counsellors in Hegel's time, or by that cultivated lady who wanted to know where exactly the Hegelian Mind was anchored in history. And Hegel did wrong when he agreed to reply to a question formulated in the language of non-philosophy, and ended up talking about the Prussian state, when it is in fact clear that in the language of philosophy the question and the answer were both pointless. Eliade does well to avoid falling into the trap of non-philosophical language when he refuses to say, from the heights where the spirit of all religions dwells, what exactly he believes in." This evening, Andrei wanted to read the pages of my diary to date. I was nervous, expecting that he would be judging them from a stylistic point of view. If—and only if— there is something worthwhile here, then it is something beyond "style"; it is the attempt, inadequate as it may be, to suggest a closed, epiphenomenal world, a world which is hard to understand from outside, an existence made up of imponderable events, a sort of exemplary adventure of the spirit, a protreptic and protopaedeutic "epic." After he had read the pages, we continued to talk until 2 o'clock in the morning. It was a difficult, rather directionless discussion, an inventory of our cultural handicaps: an inadequate education at high school, a failure to read basic texts at the right time, a lack of the skills needed for the sort of systematic and mechanical work which is strong enough to stand up to the changing mood of each day. I remember how C. once said that for a generation (but can we speak of such a thing as a generation these days?) to outdo theirs it would have to go as far in its successes as they went in their failures. We think of Cioran and Noica as two theoretical poles, between which, attitudinally speaking, our culture has moved: pessimistic lucidity and optimism irn Trotz. "Don't you think," says Andrei, "that, in the final instance, it is in optimists like Noica that the full splendor of humanity is revealed? They are the great benefactors, the naturally good, who push us or drag us forward." I recall Noica's exhortation, in a letter which he wrote to me in 1967, when we had known each other for six months: "There is so much to be done in this world. Give yourself, Raphael, give yourself!" But Noica's pedagogy could never be summed up in the emotional force of a simple exhortation. Being an extraordinary

62 "coach," he knew how to take us from the point at which he found us, and to propose for us ideals of cultural performance without our being crushed under them, but at the same time without allowing us the illusion that we could attain them by short cuts. Noica thus represents our cultural chance. Through him we have been offered living contact with a very high cultural model, which has spared us from pseudo-confrontations with an ignoble cultural ambience, and has helped us to look on cultural actions from the high level of the model which he himself has configured and indeed achieved.

Monday, 19th February 1979 Yesterday I gave Noica the two books which Victor Stoichiçâ had sent for him. They were relatively recently published works by Foucault: Surveiller et punir (1975) and La volonté du savoir (1976, the first volume of his Histoire de la sexualité). Today he gives me back Histoire de la sexualité. "It's so sad to see how a mind dies! After Les mots et les choses I was expecting Foucault to come up with something wonderful, and here you see that the man is approaching his end without having a problem. It is the same with Sartre, who clearly does not know what he wants, if he can end his life writing a Flaubert. In principle Foucault is following the advice of Dilthey, in turning to the great figures of the second rank, the Dutch for example. But Dilthey never suggested you should remain there, but rather that you should come with them into the great culture of Europe. Foucault, on the other hand, stops there: il y reste. He remains in dusty old documents and with the artificially spectacular. In fact, he only has an issue. Of course sexuality is a problem for us, for all of us, indeed for the whole of nature in the last analysis. Linnaeus himself shows this when he makes their sexuality the starting point for his classification of plants. But it can turn out to be nobody's problem if you don't attack it with an idea. You remain with the history of the problem and with empty intelligence. It is also curious to see once again that the West is beginning to live culturally in marginality, where previously we were accustomed to finding classicality. Even a bit of madness like Fauvism or Surrealism could be incorporated in that classicality. But now I observe that western culture no longer has this force. Déleuze's madnesses, for example, or Foucault's running after detail in a book like Histoire de la sexualité (which is

63 just the first of six volumes he promises), are no more than the proliferation of 'writings' which will remain in marginality."

Tuesday, 20th February 1979 When he came round to meet us for lunch, Noica proposed that we should meet for an hour or so every evening, after supper, to report on our day's work. This way the day becomes less "gelatinous," and takes on a bit of shape and structure. This evening, Noica introduced us to Die geschichtliche Kraft der deutschen Sprache (1949) by Weisberger, a linguist of the Humboldt school. I do not recall anything of much interest (except that the German people did not come into being on the basis of a political or geographical unity, but rather of a unity of language). Then Andrei read us the six pages he had written in the course of the day, about travels in Italy and the ideal landscape. He was excellent as usual. However the problem itself seems to me to have an inescapable theoretical ceiling. Noica suggests that I should have a look (as he has just done) at the recent edition of §aineanu's Romanian Folktales for the peratological problem (the non-existence of limit in space and time; rapid circulation from one "land" to another). Tomorrow I want to look at the chapters on Descensio ad Inferos and aerial ascents. I have forgotten to bring with me, as I intended, Bulgakov's The Master and Margareta. There, the fantastic flight is the means of compensating for the existence of a real universe, graced with insurmountable limits. Margareta passes into the realm of magic, and so transcends her human condition, because it is only by the shamanic way that it is possible to leave behind the system of historical limits. However, what is interesting here is that the transcendence of the human condition starts from an initial need to recover the lost condition of humanity. The peratological beginning is thus subliminal. The leap into the fantastic represents at the same time the transcendence of two sets of limits: historically induced sub-limits, and generic, constitutive limits. The peratological tension is thus double. In §aineanu, Noica was looking for the confirmation of his intuition that the formula "daca nu arfi nu s-arpovesti—if it weren't so, it wouldn't be told" (the initial affirmation that the tale is true) only occurs in Romanian folktales. "At first I imagined that it was just a case of a simple stereotypic formula adopted for the sake of

64 rhyme. Then I felt the need to relate it to the modulations of the verb 'to be' in Romanian, which is not limited to 'it is' or 'it is not,' but also has forms like 'it could be,' 'it was to be' and so on. 'If it weren't so, it wouldn't be told' is a universally negative hypothetical, which can be converted into the universally affirmative: 'All that is told is so.' Now, 'all that is told is so' can only make sense within the space of a logos which modulates on the registers of the Romanian sentiment of being, in which 'is' does not have the indicative force which it has in other languages (which could not accept and indeed have not created the formula 'if it weren't so, it wouldn't be told'), but embraces the full range of flexibility that allows 'to be' to shift from unfulfilled possibility to the suspended reality of 'it is waiting to happen.' So we end up with: All that is told had to be so, was to be so, or could be so one day. "

Wednesday, 21stFebruary

1979

At breakfast this morning I report to Noica the objection which S.P. has raised concerning his naming of the first three maladies ("todetitis", "horetitis" and "catholitis") in his Maladies of the Contemporary Mind. In medicine, the suffix "-itis" is used for an excess in the functioning of an organ, a malfunctioning by exacerbation, while the maladies for which Noica created analogous names in "-itis" involve, on the contrary, the lack of one of the terms of being, a deficiency of the individual, of the determination, or of the general. "On the surface, he seems to be right. But it looks to me like the objection of a positivist, of the physicist in him. In the case of the mind, the void is positive; it is equivalent to an exacerbated presence. Catholitis, for example, is not the lack of the general in general, but the lack of some specific general. When Napoleon sought the general of history, he was still looking in the area of the the general. So cathoh'to is an exacerbation in the region of the general. I must condemn S.P. for seeking exactness at the expense of truth." In the evening, when we retire after supper to take stock of the day's work ("What a pity to leave each day's honey uncollected!"), Noica speaks a lot, picking up the problems raised in the three books which he has introduced today, and telling us his own opinions on these matters. First comes Plato Christianus (1964) by Endre v. Ivanka, about the appropriation and reformulation of Platonism by the Church Fathers. "I have one thing only to reproach

65 the author with: when he presents Plato in the first chapter, he understands him precisely as he was later transformed by the Church Fathers: along the line of chorismos, the firm demarcation between the real and the ideal, which does not exist in Plato, but was introduced to the understanding of Platonism by Aristotle. For Plato himself, his ideas did not exist in the zone of ekei, an 'out there' cut off from the reality of 'here.' Augustine gave a more authentic rendering when he wrote, 'There is in us something deeper than ourselves,' referring to the transcendental, to the opening of the self. We exist within the horizon of the Idea, in the Idea, and each Idea springs up with the appearance of a new individual who exists in it. Plato was not what he was later to become; the vulgarity of speaking of a complete rupture between reality and the heaven of Ideas' derives from the adaptation of Plato to the imperatives of the theology which took over his thinking. At the same time this appropriation of Plato is remarkable, and can be traced through the following stages: Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, hesychasm and palaism. You'll need plenty of books when you come to your theological series of readings. "Now I am going to settle accounts again with Foucault. First I want to talk about Surveiller et Punir, which is even worse than the other, and then I'll go back to the problem in Volonté de savoir. At least eros, which makes up the subject matter of the latter book, remains in a sense a problem of the mind, but the barracks or prison, the history of which Foucault deals with in Surveiller et Punir, is not one of the mind. The book is an emanation of an obsession in which the West is living at present: the obsession with denouncing oppression wherever it is to be found. However, the grandeur with which Marx brings the state into question cannot be compared with the mean and resentful way that Foucault does it, as a form of captatio benevolentiae, keeping in step with the student and tiers état fashion for protest. "I return now to the issue in Volonté de savoir, that of sexuality. I leave to one side the great sense which the problem of eros had in the past, in Plato, Augustine or Pascal. We are dealing here with the problem of eros in the sexual sense: why is it so much discussed nowadays? Because, I say, it is in danger of perishing. Because it has reached a threshold where it can see its death with its own eyes, as can nature, woman, and youth. Consider nature: if we can obtain synthetic chlorophyll, and it seems that we will do so, then, broadly speaking, we can dispense with nature. Then consider woman: procreation threatens soon to be resolved by artifi-

66 cial means, in a test-tube, so woman will be excluded from direct participation in the perpetuation of the species. And youth: once the strong arm and courage of the city, to be treated as a presumed hero, now the raw consciousness and strength of the young man is devalued in the market, and he can only be trained to stand by the machine which has replaced him. Returning to the problem of sex, its solution has always been linked with procreation, and Foucault too makes this connection. What happens nowadays, however, when the problem of sexuality has broken free from procreation? Nowadays it can be abandoned, or given a new evaluation. But because the problem of sexuality, as traditionally understood, sees its death approaching, it is creating difficulties and becomes a matter for discussion. In a sexual contact the end of which is no longer procreation, one person can make use of the other, the companion in pleasure, to take the first step towards the enlarged self. The couple can at any time point us to the high sense of Eros and an opening towards the Idea. Again, sexuality without procreation can at any time be the hormonal reservoir of poetry, and so on. However, Freud, Reich and Foucault are the spokesmen of a crisis in human growth: their solutions involve exactitude (for Freud), or the history of the unexplored problem in ideas (for Foucault). What is clear is that Foucault is not looking at his problem from outside." I presented Kierkegaard's Point de vue explicatif de mon oeuvre, which I finished today. The book was written in 1848, six years before his death, and published posthumously in 1859. It represents the final act of unmasking, the belated justification of his pseudonymous works. Kierkegaard, who considered himself an eminently religious writer, had used the "aesthetic disguise" all his life. To enter into the categories of the aesthetic—of the years of youth, of the sensual and of palpable beauty—is to place yourself at the point where your interlocutor is most likely to be found. This strategic placing in the mental categories of the public is the only one which gives you a chance to be heard, the only one which offers you the opportunity, on the basis of this initial capture of the audience, to advance your point of view in disguise. What you can obtain in this way is not the overturning of a conviction, but the obliging of the other to be attentive. And to make him attentive is to determine him to judge your case, which is a spiritual one, differently from his own. To arouse attention to your problem by a previous act of humility, of bending towards the other, is the essence of Kierkegaard's maieutic (with its Socratic precedents). It is the essence of duplicity, of the mask, of dialectic, of deliberate

67 deceit in the service of the truth. ('"Let us speak aesthetically': the deceit lies in speaking this way just so as to reach the spiritual.") The whole body of Kierkegaard's aesthetic work thus becomes a metaphysics of the incognito. (Socrates is the pagan precedent for the Christly incognito: the theory of the mask confirmed subsequently by the practice of disguising the divine in the human. Andrei reads us the pages he has written with a demonic verve (in baroque-cum-pagan rhetoric) about ideal nature. The geography of Arcadia, around which the idealization of nature took shape, was—paradoxically enough—bare to the point of austerity. However, Andrei argues, in the geographical reality of Arcadia, in this very austerity, we are closer to the essence of nature than in the bucolic and idealized Arcadia of the European landscape tradition. And Dutch landscape painting, which, alone in Europe, did not attempt to "tropicalize" nature, is also alone in being true, to the extent that it did not lose touch with its initial poverty. As we bid each other goodnight, Noica says that it would be good to "Decameron-ize" in this way all our lives, and that he would be ready to take a house together: "In Bradet, for example, first of all because it has a lovely name, then—most importantly— because it is in Transylvania, about 30 km from Bra§ov on the way to Fagara§ (and thus easily accessible), and finally because it spreads over the hillsides. I would be the caretaker of the house, and you would come as often as you could. I make no attempt to hide the fact that, now that I am on the downhill slope, I am the one that is going to feel the need of you, of your freshness, the new ideas you can bring me, the books that you will read. I am starting to close, while you are becoming more open."

Thursday, 22ndFebruary

1979

The day began badly. We were put out of the hotel—to make way for some county propagandists who had come up for a two or three day refresher course—and wasted the whole morning looking for rooms in the villas round about. Then we had to move our things and get settled into the new rooms. In the evening Noica returns to the subject of Ivanka's book, prompted by the observation that I made yesterday evening that in fact Ivanka's "vulgar" way of understanding Plato—separating the Ideas from the real world—is also the most widespread one, and that when Plato is not understood in this way, one vulgarity is

68 commonly replaced by another: his translation into psychological or logical-' realist" terms (according to which the Ideas are logical concepts or psychological abstractions, detached from an analysis of the process of his thought—the profane roots of the "Platonic heaven" and so on). "If you understand Plato in terms of a transcendence of the Ideas, then such a crude interpretation could never explain the resonance of his thinking down through the centuries. But that is not all: such an understanding seems to me an absolute aberration. In Plato, the Ideas are actually values. Now how can you say about courage, for example, in the Laches, that it has a transcendent subsistence? Or take 'friendship': in every friend there is a Philia which each of us proves the truth of, and in the horizon of which we live. Certainly any value of this type is a topos noetos, but I understand it as an ontological reality which I define as Element—as are life, rationality, the logos of languages, the relations of production if you like—in which each of us lives. The Element, with the help of which I also understand the Idea, is the reality which can be distributed without being divided into portions, like a song or a value. Although we all consume friendship, don't we always find it still intact? So Ideas are realities more powerful than us, which have subsistence without consistence. They don't have a shape which can be perceived by the normal methods of analysis. You can't see relations of production, but neither can you say that they don't exist, and equally you cannot say that your reality as an individual is more powerful than life, language or rationality. In other words you are 'in' something which is more powerful than you are, but which demonstrates itself through you, and through every individual case. "How then can we speak so lightly of the objective consistency of the Ideas? When it comes down to it, Plato is asking whether any of us can claim to be the true person, the true friend, and so on. Can I, as approximative being, exist, while the true person does not exist? Is it possible for me not to live in something deeper and truer than myself? The Idea is easily understood by way of Fundamentalontologie\ it is a topos noetos, which is not, however, somewhere else, and which is not covered by the first level of existence. "So you have to tread delicately through Plato: the Ideas are detectable in a being of the second instance, and with a language of the second instance, to which Aristotle did not have access, when he asked stupidly why it was necessary to double realities with Ideas (entia non sunt multiplicanda), letting it be under-

69 stood that Platonism is a useless complication, rather like the man who tried to count a flock of sheep by first counting all the legs and then dividing by four. Ideas are only like this if you understand them to be transcendent, but they cease to be so if you see them as realities which can be distributed without being divided into portions. Apart from Augustine, all the Church Fathers understood Plato wrongly, as the ontologist of separation, which is natural enough in a way. What is not so natural is that Ivanka, in the 20th century, should understand Platonism, which is an open concept, only in the way that it was delimited historically, so that he becomes contaminated in his turn and adopts a reading which is, philosophically speaking, vulgar."

Friday, 23rdFebruary

1979

After breakfast Noica came up to our rooms to select some books for the next few mornings. (He says he prefers to write in the afternoon, because in the morning he feels a curiosity and cultural avidity which incline him to read and to browse.) He chose La Gnose by Leisegang, Norm and Form by Gombrich and Le Bouddhisme (I forget the author's name). During the morning I noted down a few ideas from the second part of Kierkegaard's Point de vue explicatif. I find he anticipates a number of themes from the phenomenology of das Man in Sein und Zeit. First of all there is the proliferation of the mass media (the press) and its effect on the configuration of consciousness: anonymity, impersonality, detachment from responsibility, the hypertrophy of abstraction at the expense of the individual, the shift of interest from the messenger to the message, the reification of consciousness, the apologia of objectivity and of the public character—and all the other elements that have fed a good part of the philosophy of the 20th century. Then there are the biographical roots of the theory of the mask: the exact correspondence between an incurable melancholy and a virtuosity in concealing it; the consciousness of his "mission" of melancholy— the thought that in every generation there are two or three people sacrificed for the sake of the others and destined to discover in their terrible suffering the reality from which the others are to gain: "Thus I understood myself in my melancholy and it was for this role that I saw myself chosen." Kierkegaard is a "spy in the service of the divine." There is the deformation which reflexivity

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brings with it: the lack of access to what is immediate, and thus to the age of childhood and youth, to time experienced in its instantaneity. But in exchange, reflexivity has the advantage of being a propaedeutic in eternity, because the mind which it awakens does not recognize itself in the element of time as being in its own true environment: "My joy increases with every day I get older...for temporality is not and will never be the element of the mind, but rather, in a sense, that of its suffering." It is interesting to see that in European culture the abolition of time is the work of reflexivity, and that the mind is essentially determined as reflexivity. In the afternoon I had a discussion with Andrei about Kierkegaard, and in particular about the relationship between speculation and edification (see his Preface to the Traité du désespoir, which is practically in opposition to Hegel's words: "die Philosophie darf nicht erbaulich werden"). We decided to ask Noica why he considers that philosophy (the speculative) is incompatible with the dimension of the practical, of edification and the therapeutic way. After all, his work has at least the form (the language) of an edification, and for the public it restores some of the old connotation of "wisdom" which philosophy used to have. And are we ourselves not indeed the clearest expression of an edificatio enacted by him? This is therefore the opening question of the evening. "It is not good," replies j\oica, "to set out to edify. In any successful speculation, the ethos emerges on its own, as a secondary effect. You don't need to approach it directly, to moralize or to preach. Ethics will take its revenge if you practice it as empty virtuosity. I have made this mistake three times in my life, and each time there was a price to pay. The first time was at high school. I was seventeen, going out to parties but also reading Schuré and Bergson...Suddenly it seemed to me, on cultural grounds, that I ought to become ascetic, to suppress all forms of worldliness. I went to school with my hair shaved almost to the scalp. I let it be understood that I was practicing a form of virtuosity, with the result that I caught broncho-pneumonia, which was quite a serious thing in those days and laid me up in bed for two months. (It is true that that was how I came to read the six volumes of Ferrero's History of the Roman Empire.) The second time I practiced ethics foolishly, for its own sake, was after graduating from university. I was offered an assistant lectureship under Negulescu, with the possibility of going abroad. But, ever the rebel, I chose to isolate myself for four years in Sinaia. I refused to accept money

71 from my parents and made a living by translating—for the hell of it—eight detective novels for the Hertz Press. However, while I was in Sinaia I went skiing; I dressed carelessly and the snow got in under my clothes. I went down with tuberculosis of the kidneys, and at twenty-five found myself minus one kidney. The third time I made the mistake was when I entered politics, for two months. I felt bound by something I had said in the course of a discussion; I considered that I ought to respect my own words. I made myself impure out of an excessive zeal for purity, by practicing ethics as virtuosity, as a bet, and again I paid the price. I am not going to tell you any more about that chapter in my life. The rest is the business of a biographer. So to return to where w e started, the philosopher is not a doctor, as Nietzsche would have it, or as Buddhism teaches when it tells us that the Law is therapeutic. As far as you are concerned, I consider myself a mere tamer. I am trying to moderate your animality, your spoilt nature, your discontent, and to make you pass from the individual self to the enlarged self. I am edifying you to the extent that I am teaching you that living in the mind means entering into the enlarged self, which means integrating others, even the other, the adversary. The mind is the place where differences of the mere ego are extinguished. You cannot live in culture and remain with the pettiness of the ego. We have to forget ourselves to a certain extent, to discreetly let ourselves go, to dance, as Nietzsche says, and not tread with heavy steps. But I am not giving you a prescription or a dogma. Edification points towards dogma, and gets blocked in giving an answer. But the truth of the spirit, in the rays of which speculation moves, is that every answer points to a question, to a question which is awakened by the answer. Vom Wesen des Grundes\ every foundation points to another, and finally to Schelling's Un-Grund. "Now I want to return, for the third time, to the business of Plato's Ideas. What am I to do if even you can't understand me? I was saying yesterday that the Ideas are outside us, 'beyond.' To which Andrei says, 'Then they are in us!' No, they are not in us. 'So where are they?' you ask. Let me tell you: Plato's Ideas are not anywhere; they are wherever you find them. And wherever you find them, you always find them with something left over." Today I proposed to Noica that he read my Diary. He refused. "Let's stay in the river's flow, my dear chap. Why do you want to send me to the bank?"

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Saturday, 24th February 1979 Noica announced that tomorrow he will write the last lines of his Treatise on Ontology. R.C. will come up from Sibiu and we will all celebrate the event. God, how humbly and silently the deeds of the mind step into the world! Tomorrow Paltini§ will be filled with the bustle of the world, we shall eat our triangles of cheese and drink our tea, and we shall know, in the secret fibre of consciousness, that the highest struggle waged with thought in this corner of the globe is over. Ring out, ye bells!

Sunday, 25th February 1979 Today, between three and a quarter to five, Noica gave us an account of his Treatise on Ontology, and read us the last three pages, those written this very morning, which round off the work of three years—indeed of a lifetime. (During the same period he has also brought forth, as by-products, The Romanian Sentiment, Six Maladies, and his Interpretations of Plato's seven dialogues—that on the Cratylus alone amounting to 130 pages.) It is hard for me to describe what I felt: perhaps I should say "trembling and fear." But all this commotion is not the sign of any exaltation. Rather it is the fear which came with my intuition of the condition of "nonedifying" philosophy, of ultimate speculation. I have an unbearable sensation of condensed and integral initiation, of profane esoterism, of a glory of the mind attended by the God of culture. After the spectacle of this supreme grinding of the mind, a great sadness came over me, I cannot say why. And after Noica had left, as if at a given sign, Andrei and I began to eat. We both ate a lot, keeping silent most of the time.

27th September to 5 th October 1979

Thursday, 27 th September 1979 I have been at Paltini§ for two days now, and I have not yet felt able to start up my diary again. I do not know what exactly is preventing me from recovering the magical atmosphere of earlier days here. I find it hard to start work, and the peratological pages, which I was nervous about starting in Bucharest, come together here with great difficulty. Noica too has seemed rather subdued these days. He has crossed the seventy year barrier, and the discretion with which he faced the event might give any of his contemporaries cause to blush. "I have come in again by the back door; it was only natural that everything should be like this." Yesterday he confided in me that after completing the Treatise, a good time of waiting has begun for him. "I am always expecting the Idea to visit me, and seeing that I have now passed seventy and I still don't have it, I start to quote Creangä's words to myself: 'You know that it has been, when you see that it hasn't come again.'" I brought him some Heideggerian texts for his preface to the volume I am translating for the Univers Press. He has already read Was heiß Denken, and when he came to my room at lunch time he told me that for him Heidegger remains a great success. There is only one thing he cannot forgive him: his paying so much attention to Nietzsche, a moralist, a psychologist, and a philosopher of aphorisms. "And yet every time he gets something more out of him, and saves him. In Was heißt Denken, Nietzsche's word Rache, 'revenge,' is understood by Heidegger as referring to the attitude of consciousness to the past which has escaped from its power. Thus Rache becomes a powerless taking to task, an attitude of 'Just you wait! I'll show you!' addressed by the vindictive consciousness to a past which it cannot shape to its taste. Understood in this way,

76 vindictiveness takes on a higher meaning than it had with the resentful Nietzsche." This evening we began to check the translation of the Letter on "Humanism," which I completed around 1973, while I was riding the wave of gratuitous enthusiasm which kept me going for about two years after my return from Germany. I observe that I lacked the last degree of rigor. Noica is caught up in the Heidegger project—"I thought for a long time he was untranslatable"—and has got Mihai §ora involved too, asking him to check my translation of Die Kunst und der Raum, which we stirred around together last winter. I showed him the photographs that I took then, in front of his villa, and he laughs delightedly at the one of Andrei taking down notes while Noica expounds with an inward-looking and intelligent air. It seems to him that all the irony of our school is here, the irony of a school in which what is taught is knowledge, and not the states of mind which he dreamt of in his Philosophical Diary as being the subject matter for his school of wisdom. Why can't I recover the joy of recounting these Paltini§ days, days made up, after all, of a different substance of time? I am starting off in a bad mood.

Friday, 28th September 1979 This morning I complained to Noica about the blockage that I am passing through. "When you can't continue an idea," he told me, "you ought to climb a hill. You can overcome the inner obstacle by creating an external obstacle for yourself." He reproached me again for not walking, and threatened to come round in the afternoon, around six o'clock, to get me out. He also asked to see the pages I have written up till now, about twenty in number, with the idea that he might be able to help me out of my impasse. Basically the pages I gave him consist of an analysis of the semantic complex per, a justification of "peratology" as the metaphysical aura of this semantic complex; a localization of my theory from The Tragic within the framework of peratology; a redefinition of liberty in relation to postulated limits ("the will to limit": form) and given or imposed limits ("the will to transcend": the problem of landscape and the issue of "beyond"); and, finally, an illustration of the will to limit in terms of the Genesis myth and of sculpture. By six o'clock, when we met and began our tour of Paltini§—"It takes one hour

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and five minutes," he told me—he had read them, and proposed that tomorrow we should discuss my text, as he had made two pages of notes. While we were walking he limited himself to a general commentary, which I would like to record, as it is a model of understanding of the other, of subtle and balanced pedagogy. "In the first place," he said, "you have established the value of the term 'peratology.' Up till now, you might have been accused of whimsicality in using it: why not simply say 'limitology.' But now your semantic analysis demonstrates that it is not just a fantasy, that 'peratology,' as it grows out of the living ground of a language, exists, conceals a major problem and opens towards a system. And I can say without irony—you know exactly what I mean—that this is something which we do not find in Heidegger when he invokes Greek vocabulary. When Heidegger uses a Greek word, he does it essentially to cast light on some problem which he then leaves behind as he moves on. The invocation of a Greek word has almost become a method in itself, which sometimes touches on the ridiculous. In any case, what he obtains with such sudden semantic flashes is an archipelago of isolated problems, while you look set to obtain a continent. The second important thing is that you have succeeded in rising above your first book by integrating it. There was a danger that you might either keep running on the spot around the theme of the tragic, or jump to something which had no connection with it at all. It is hard to make things climb and connect through one idea. Andrei, whose example I am always citing, may write many fine books, but he will be guilty of cultural polytheism. I don't know if and how his Landscape can be taken further, in the circle of a single idea. "I have two objections to raise. Firstly, you enclose peratology in the anthropological domain, when it can in fact be extended into the metaphysical and ontological. You run the risk of being caught out as Heidegger was—to keep the same example—when someone like Weizacker came along and showed him that his fundamental ontology worked in physics. You risk having a biologist, or a physicist or a mathematician coming along and showing you that peratology goes beyond the anthropological. I am not asking you to show exactly how it can be extended, although it would be worth trying for biology at least, but I do ask you not to close the horizon yourself: peratology is ontology, because it covers everything, from the mineral to the organic and finally humanity. "And I have something else to say. It may be that five or six years from now, when your work has taken shape, the content will have an impact on the name itself and you will give up the word

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'peratology' which you cling to at present as a guarantee of the problem. When the problem stands on its own two feet, it will spontaneously eliminate the name. "However, the main thing is that you have found your problem. In philosophy the idea is the road on which you arrive at your meeting with the others. 'Limit' is for you what Aufheben was for Hegel, Bedingen for Schelling, or intra for me. All philosophers say the same thing. But if they say the same thing, why do they keep saying it? Because each one says it differently, so that it becomes something else. It matters which door you enter by."

Saturday, 29th September 1979 At twelve o'clock today, when I came to take Noica out for a walk, he showed me ten closely written pages containing observations by Alexandru Dragomir (a former pupil of Heidegger) on his Treatise, observations which had decided Noica to adopt a new approach in his editing of it. "His objections have helped me immensely, perhaps precisely because he has another way, streng, of conceiving philosophy. The man knows Greek and German philosophy very well, but sometimes his objections are brutal, almost as if he lacked the philosophical organ. But even in these cases, he has forced me to clarify or refine my idea. For example, he laughs at 'the closing which opens,' which I had enjoyed christening philosophically as die sich erschließende Einschließung. 'What's this? Nonsense! If you close a door it stays closed; if you open it it opens!' But I would answer him that it is not quite like that. Once primitive man enters a hut he never leaves it. But the hut opens out: it opens into a village, the village into a city, and the city towards the historical being of mankind. It is a closing which opens." While we are walking, Noica suggests that, for the application of peratology in art, I should have a look at Leonardo's notebooks, and that I should also keep in mind Brancu§i and Blake. I talk about Caspar David Friedrich, the German romantic painter, and explain how I want to use his example to show how art comes to grief when it tries to represent the infinite in the form of the "beyond," in particular the "distant" in landscape painting. "Is it not the case, I wonder," says Noica, "that the transcendent starts to be sought in landscape from the moment that painting loses its religious subject matter? In the religious subject, the transcendent enters the space

79 of the familiar, without ceasing to be transcendent. In any case, it does not need to be sought 'in the distance.' In secular painting, on the other hand, the infinite is only captured in a few extraordinary cases, by van Gogh for example, or in some of Rembrandt's portraits. But consider also in philosophy when the infinite starts to be placed in the 'beyond,' 'out there': it is with Plotinus and his wrong understanding of Plato. He is the first to talk of the transcendent as epekeina—'beyond,' 'out there.'" We speak again about his seventy years and about what he sees ahead of him. "You asked me yesterday why I don't start to take it easy now that I have finished my Treatise. Why I don't go down to the public library in Paltini§, for example, and take out some Gogol to read. Or isn't that how you see things? In any case, I have told you already that you are no good friend of mine if you encourage me to be idle when I should be getting ready for the Last Judgement. At the Last Judgement you have to give an account of what you have done, but it is not a matter of how many books you have written: you have to show what you have written in them. And at the Last Judgement you have to express yourself with complete clarity. That is why I need to write my Logic. In any Logic you give an account of your books for the Last Judgement. Here your thinking on metaphysics, or ontology, has to be written with grace, expressed in a structured way, without padding. I know you don't like logic. I didn't either. But you will see that you will arrive there, and it will be your logic, when you have to write the biography of an idea. But let's talk about you again. Now that I have raised you up a grade, since you have found your own intru, I can scold you too. And it is in the name of the obligations you have towards your idea that I am going to scold you. I have three things to reproach you for: firstly, that you are not relaxed. I have no idea what is to be done about this; maybe this tension is something to do with your genes. The second is that you have no program. If you allow people to phone you at nine in the morning, it means you have no program. You shouldn't speak to anyone until twelve o'clock. And the third reproach is that you do not work sufficiently from the quantitative point of view. Peratology is vast. I am not saying you have to be like Iorga, who got through thirty books a day, but you ought to get at least one book behind you daily."

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Sunday, 30th September

1979

First thing this morning I went to Noica's little room for the notes he had made on my text. "Someone asked me recently," he began, "why, as one who does philosophy, I am proud enough to have thoughts of my own. Why is Plato not enough for me, or Hegel? Let me tell you what I answered him. Most of the time each of us lives by delegation. In society you delegate a president to look after the collective being. Or you delegate Heisenberg to tell you how things stand in physics. But at the same time each of us retains the right at some time in our lives not to live by delegation. For example, you don't relate to your child by delegation. You don't live your personal absolute by delegation. And if you do philosophy, you don't want to do it by delegation. I don't want to delegate Hegel to tell me how things stand in philosophy. If you haven't reached this stage, you can't say that you do philosophy." We go out for a walk. On the way up from Bucharest to Paltini§, I was telling Noica in the car about my "Flore§ti Utopia." Flore§ti is a village about thirty kilometers from Bucharest, on a road that goes off on the right from the highway to Pite§ti. Somewhere in the middle of the village, splendidly isolated behind an enclosing wall, and with its back to the open fields, there is a little palace in post-Brincovenesc style. There is a folk museum there, with some peasant rugs and costumes from the area. Hardly anyone seems to go there, except the odd day-tripper from Bucharest on a Sunday excursion. A splendidly dead place. My dream was of a Romanian Princeton, permanently established there under Noica's direction, and empowered to take a group of ten people every month and to bring them together in a sort of training center of the mind. As we start walking, he recalls my Utopia, and tells me that since 1965 he has yearned for the role of "cultural secretary"—"one who secretes culture." "In any culture there is a need for something between the university and the coffee house. But your project, although it is so simple, and not beyond the bounds of possibility, obviously cannot be put into practice. On another level of ideas, I have been thinking of the question you asked yesterday: 'What does Heidegger propose, beyond "shaking up" the vision of the West?' I think a closer approach to the Vedas and Upanishads would have been good for Heidegger. He has something of the good side of the oriental sage in him, as well as the element of laying waste: a sort of 'come sit by me' (which is what the word Upanishad' means), 'come sit by me and be silent —I like to think of it as upanishad-

81 ing.' But Heidegger maintained that w e need to get to the East via the Greeks, because the Greeks are the door by which the East penetrated into Europe. Well, I'm afraid there is some truth in Beaufret's observation that w e have been studying the Greeks for three hundred years and still the East continues to be closed to us." After supper w e meet for an hour. I tell him that I have begun to peratologize Caspar David Friedrich, but that, at this stage, my peratology is nothing but fumbling in the dark. I feel that things will not get consolidated until I look for my idea in the history of philosophy, document it and attest it historically. That way I will also get a grasp of its systematics. "Then you will have a f e w favorite authors, those who will serve you best. But in that case you will also serve them. When you gather the fruit of a text, you shouldn't squeeze it dry, leaving it behind you, empty of substance. A wellused text is one that you give back to culture as your own. I believe I succeeded in doing this for the first time with Plato's Lysis. Or the folktale Youth without Age. I didn't just take it to myself: I restored it to culture, giving it my own meaning, although I may indeed have exaggerated sometimes, in my eagerness to see my thought everywhere. (Somebody did object, with good reason, that I might be taking things too far in seeing the three maidens as embodiments of the ontological model 'individual-determinationsgeneral ). In any case, when you come to make such a restoration your idea will no longer be in' but 'in(to).'"

Monday, 1st October 1979 I have finished the chapter which deals with the paradigm of sculpture as a specialized symbol of beneficial limit. Sculpture is the least tragic of the arts, because in it limit is celebrated, not contested. The first peratological step is the acceptance of limit in its positive aspect. It is not only the sadness of their boundedness which things experience through limit, but also the satisfaction of their fulfillment. Brancufi's egg is an implosion of joy. Sculpture thus appears as a rejoicing of the finite. During our walk today, I discussed with Noica the relation between peratology and Hegel. "I have found a concrete image for you to illustrate the difference between Hegelianism and peratology. To keep on running and make occasional stops—Hegelianism— is one thing, and to stay in one place and unravel yourself by rhythmic leaps—peratology—is another." Indeed it is true that what

82 predominates with Hegel is the onward rolling of Aufheben, of overcoming. There is a striking imbalance between the obstacle and its overcoming, which does away with the possibility of peratology, in which everything is based on a real experiencing of limit, and not on the crushing of it in three endlessly repeated stages. Hegel never takes finitude seriously (as can be seen from the way he deals with the tragic). Like any other limit, it is seen as feeble and relative in front of the triumphant march of Mind. Hegel does not base anything on limit: with him the problem you face is how to give limit a status and maintain it, not how to transcend it (Aufheben is almost an automaton). In peratology, the problem is how to transcend an insurmountable limit, or in other words, how to give a real status to transcendence. With Hegel, the "peratological refusal" comes from the weakening of anthropology, which needs to find consolation in a "higher truth," one which is, however, no longer of mankind. In peratology, on the other hand, which is eminently anthropological, the urge towards a pure status does not lead to an exit from the system of reference of consciousness. "Peratological migration" is a transcendence of the human condition without the sacrifice of humanity. Peratology is Kierkegaardian, not Hegelian. In the evening, by way of "reply," Noica presented the eight points in which his ontology differs from that of Hegel. I noted them down, and reproduce them here: 1. Hegel begins and considers the problem of the beginning and its risks. Noica sets out on a road from the given world. 2. The beginning ("there is nothing and something has to become") is not provided by being and nothingness, but by void as opening; the beginning should not need a conjunction ("and"). 3. Hegel's Logic goes too much after the general—the specter of being, not being itself—which is its starting point. In contrast, the general is only one term in Noica's metaphysical structure. 4. Hegel has being-essence-concept. With Noica being has the concept in it from the very start, and everything is wrapped up, not unwrapped. 5. Hegel weaves together metaphysics and logic, with the result that he loses sight of logic, and fails to arrive at another logic, other than that of Aristotle or the transcendental logic of Kant, which is in fact not logical but categorial. With Noica, w e arrive at a new logic, which is no longer disguised metaphysics. 6. Hegel uses "becoming" in an improper sense, to mean mere movement. With Noica, becoming is a late and elaborated onto-

83 logical moment. The world does not start with becoming; it arrives at becoming. 7. All that is real is not rational, just as all that is real does not have ideas. There are also uncertainties, failures, approximat : ons. 8. According to the Treatise on Ontology, being as becomingin(to)-being may disappear, as may life, reason or any element. To say "God is dead" makes sense. But God is not actually dead yet.

Tuesday, 2nd October

1979

After lunch w e stop for a vodka at the bar by the ski-lift. "This morning I read a hundred pages of Heidegger, and I have a bit of a headache. I went to bed at one o'clock too, partly on your account, because I wanted to challenge you not to leave your idea as you found it in the street. An idea should be a reflected thought, otherwise it remains a mere thought. And to get you to start modulating it, I am going to challenge you with a list in which I have put, in one column, examples of limit, and in the other, examples of limitation, the sort of limitation (which does or does not limit) that I deal with in my Treatise on Ontology. You will realize how different the limit in your peratology is from my limitation. In the first place, your limit works only on the level of the subjective mind; it is always connected to will, and so belongs to a dynamic order. My limitation belongs to the objective mind and is rather lazy, but I have to add that, since it is ontological, I find it everywhere, from inorganic things to mankind. There is another difference: your limit may be fixed or moving, but it is to be transcended, while with my limitation there is no possibility of transcendence: expansion simply carries the limitation along with it. And finally, limit may be left behind, while limitation always goes with you, even into non-limitation. Let me give you some examples: Bucharest is a limit, Paltini§ a limitation; a circle is a limit, the horizon a limitation; religion ( r e l i g o ) is a limit, belief a limitation; the other ('I'enfer c'est I'autre') is a limit, others a limitation; caste is a limit, class a limitation; the noun is a limit, the verb a limitation; state is a limit, situation a limitation; truth as exactness is a limit, truth with exactness a limitation; to be 'in' is a limit, to be 'in(to)' a limitation; the apartment is a limit, the house a limitation; Don Juan-ism is a limit, true love for a person a limitation. And so on." In the evening, at eight, we discuss Dragomir's observations on Noica's Treatise on Ontology. "I have not exactly rewritten the

84 Treatise because of his observations. But his misunderstandings have made me think that some things are unclear, and I have gone back over it making deletions, reformulating some passages, and taking out the numbering within each thesis, which was more of a burden than a help to the reader. In general, however, I have found his observations very useful. I have only two major complaints. Firstly, he shifts me from the level of ontology to that of logic. He complains that the individual and the general (in my ontological model) are logical terms with which I am operating in ontology. But even in Aristotle the categories all have an ontological substratum; they are attributes of primary substance, even before being predicated. And he doesn't ask Hegel or Heidegger what the individual is, or anything like that. There is a 'culture of asking,' of which Hegel spoke: you can't ask any question in any way. The hardest question is that concerning the beginning, the foundation. But Hegel, in his Logic, begins with the justification of the beginning. It seems to me that I don't even need this justification, since I start very low down, by 'upanishad-ing': I take you by the hand and invite you to ask the tree if it is being. 'Neti,' it replies, 'not I.' And everything you ask answers, 'Neti.' It is from this void of being that I start, which is quite different from Hegel's grandiose das Nichts, the pure nothingness into which being without determinations is converted. You can start naturally from this humble void of being which is in everything." We move on to lighter talk. I speak of an older project of mine, to work with Petru on a Lexicon of Greek Philosophy, which would be put together by gleaning all the texts from the pre-Socratics to Plato, something which has not yet been done anywhere. "Excellent idea! You should do it directly in French and get it published at the Academy. I was just thinking that you are giving up translation too soon, if you say you really want to stop after the Republic. But your Lexicon would be a splendid substitute for the exercise which you get by translating. Not to mention the value of the project itself. Let me talk to Petru. I keep thinking of Andrei, and how easily he gave up Greek. When he first learned German he used to wonder how he could have managed without it up till then: why does he not ask himself the same thing now? He doesn't recognize himself in art history; in Germany he didn't want to do philosophy; he loves the East, but he can go nowhere in that line of study without Sanskrit. He is always going to find himself in metaxy, in the space between. At least Victor finds peace in the specialization he has taken upon himself. Perhaps teaching will be Andrei's salvation."

85 When I came in, Noica had just written to his son Razvan, who is the same age as myself and is a monk in an Orthodox monastery in England. I ask if he does not sometimes miss him, if he does not feel guilty that he did not give him more, or that he deprived him of paternal presence, etc. "I must confess that it was a relief when he left me. Here, in the condition which I have accepted, I could offer him nothing. Moreover, I was not suited to him. He had no vocation for culture, although he has an excellent mind and a terrific gift for languages. As well as Romanian, which he still keeps up, and in which he enjoys reading old texts even nowadays, he speaks English, French, German, Russian and Modern Greek. Their monastery was founded and is subsidized by Cypriots, and most of the other brothers are Greeks. What was decisive for him was his meeting with Father Sophronie, a Russian Orthodox priest, when he was in his first year as a student of Theology in Paris. The monastery was just being set up at the time, and Razvan left the university and went to help with the building work. He ended up remaining there, becoming a monk under the name of Raphael. Sophronie was his spiritual father. Now he is dying, and Razvan is going through a phase of disorientation—so his mother tells me. I am writing to urge him to wander about the world for a year. He knows several trades, and he can get by anywhere, so I want to say this to him: if he goes, and the year in the world is a success, then he will return to the community fulfilled. And if it is not a success, then he will feel all the more the blessing of the community when he returns. I shall urge him to take up theology again too, although I know he does not like organized study. In the monastery he has known an oral teaching, combined with a freedom to choose his preoccupations: in other words, a complete lack of any system. He knows how to repair cars, to plaster walls, and to paint pictures, and he has a very culturally gifted electrician friend with whom he discusses Eastern culture a lot. It is all done gratuitously." I ask him if Razvan knows his books. "I don't think so."

Thursday, 4th October 1979 I am leaving tomorrow, so this evening's dialogue has something of an air of taking stock and reviewing prospects. I read Noica the latest pages I have written, a very free and fanciful interpretation of Friedrich's famous "Chalk Crags on Rügen Island," which I shall probably present in a session of papers at the Institute of Art.

86 "Since we have been talking all this time about your peratology, let me tell you how I see its completion. It will be in three books. The first is the one you have begun now. It is a seeking after the idea, its approximation in the root per, in the Genesis myth, in some work of Friedrich or in Bulgakov's novel. It is natural that you should be seeking in this way at the start, on the surface of culture, diffusely. In the second book you will search the history of philosophy for it, and only in the third will you master it in a systematic way, perhaps, as I suggested, renaming it, just as I renamed my 'open concept' and arrived at 'intru.' "I have noted down some things to say to you about your Lexicon of Greek Philosophy. What strikes me is not just the value of the thing in itself, but the fact that it is so significant for the 20th century. While the 19th century believed in history, the 20th believes in structures. Even when it turns to history, the 20th century treats it 'structurally.' Such a dictionary is not just a simple collection of Greek philosophical terms. It is implicitly a history of philosophy by concepts, a history of philosophical utterance approached structurally, obtained by assembling semantic structures. The history is within each term, while the whole remains dominated by the normal typology of a dictionary. So it is 'history without history,' something typical of the 20th century. In this sense it is not merely a dictionary, it is something much more significant." I had brought him some books of oriental studies from Andrei, which he now gives back to me. "The Golden Flower is a late, eighteenth-century, compilation into which are poured a number of directions of Chinese thinking. 'Thinking' is too strong a word, however, because, just as Jung declares in his preface, it is really psychology. I like to say of the Chinese that they are ein Volk ohne Metaphysik. For Jung, this treatise was essential. In his youth, when he had worked out his theory—the collective unconscious—he first found its confirmation starting from this book: many patients drew him designs resembling the Chinese mandalas which feature, with commentary, in the Golden Flower. "I have also been rereading the preface to Eliade's Shamanism. It is strange to see how he raises to the level of religion any belief or fakiristic practice. You know I was saying that, like Hegel, he looks on all things with compassion. However, in my ontology, not everything that exists also is. Not all that is real is rational. You can look on everything with compassion, but that does not mean validating it, giving it the status of being. You can't elevate precarious beliefs or practices like those of the Turko-Mongols into religion."

87 Noica has brought from Bucharest a briefcase filled with some thirty notebooks on his reading (summaries and notes), which he has accumulated since his youth, and from which he wants to extract what is worth extracting and throw away the rest. I ask him to let me keep them. "They are of no significance except to show you what our generation was reading. I am going to take out the titles of the works. Otherwise they are not worth keeping. Most of the notes are neutral and student-like; others are just extracts made with some paper in mind." I ask him how these arguments sound in the mouth of someone who has pleaded for the facsimile publication of the notebooks of Eminescu in their entirety. "Eminescu has become objective mind," replies Noica.

Friday, 5th October 1979 This afternoon I leave by train. Noica accompanies me as far as Sibiu. We wait for the bus. It is one of those unequivocal Paltini§ mornings, in which the progress of the rising sun enters into conjunction with the rumor of great deeds. And it may be precisely the blurring of these parallel rhythms, the wearying of the mind in the insignificant happenings of each day—without the curving progress of the sun in a sky which is there every time you raise your eyes—that is the key to the misery of Bucharest. Under this irresistibly frank sun, Noica starts to talk to me about the prelude to death, about old age as powerlessness. "I have told myself that if I reach the point when I can no longer truly say, 'Today I can do better than I could do yesterday,' then life is no longer worth living. As for death, I might say that I find myself in a relation of cordial enmity with it. It has avoided me a few times, and I have equally been avoiding the problem of death. Anyway, I believe death is not an issue for us as much as it is for princes who, knowing all the power which this world offers, discover death as the limitation of this power."

21st to 26th January 1980

Monday, 21stJanuary

1980

I have been in Paltinig since yesterday evening, together with Andrei. We have a week ahead of us, in which Andrei has set himself to write thirty pages for a Francesco Guardi album to be published by Meridiane Press, and I plan to translate fifteen pages from the Phaedrtis, for volume IV of the works of Plato. I have brought with me the 67-page typescript of Alexandru Paleologu's newly finished Parting from Noica, which w e are going to give Noica once w e have read it ourselves. I cannot fully understand what lies behind these pages. Paleologu stayed with Noica for five years, sharing his seclusion in Cimpulung. He is ten years younger than Noica, and belonged, in a sense, to the first wave of his disciples. Noica got him to learn German, some Greek and philosophy, and, culturally speaking, placed great hopes in him. Paleologu had promised him that he would set out for Heidelberg sometime and become a student again. In Noica's eyes his good knowledge of French culture, to which he had n o w added German, and his access to philosophy, promised to take him far in another field than Romanian literature. Caught up, first of all, by the idea of "abyssal Caragiale," and later by Sadoveanu and by contemporary criticism and essay, he made a stirring debut at the age of fifty, and rapidly became a reference point in the field of literary criticism: it was inevitable that he should move away from Noica's circle of interests. Having failed to confiscate him permanently for the "idea" and for "great culture," and probably regarding all his activity as a matter of "frivolity," Noica naturally broke off their association. For the one, those years became merely an unfulfilled episode, part of a long didactic scenario pursued in various forms all his life; and for the other, they represented a heavy inheritance which, as it had not resolved itself into a written work, had to be assimilated and put on record ex-

92 ternally, at the level of a public act. Denied in a way by all Paleologu's subsequent cultural activity, and falling outside the visible trajectory of his development, these years could only be recovered at the level of memoiristic writing, or in the form of a piece of criticism directed at the work of Noica. Paleologu has chosen the latter way. Now, after reading his pages, I am inclined to believe, at the risk of being harsh in my thoughts, but also of hitting on the true motivation behind these pages—insignificant as it is in the end—that they did not arise from the purity of the need to "confess"—in the high sense of Augustinian confession which raises to consciousness and projects into eternity the time of an exceptional spiritual experience. Rather they are prompted by the need to put on record the writer's close association with an elevated mind, an association which is declared—by a subjective and frivolous act of transmutation—to be "friendliness" (Noica is always referred to as "my friend," "my great friend," etc.), and by the powerlessness specific to the critical mind which, having no work to set itself against, sets itself against itself, in the absence of original ideas and in the name of common sense, as a bare critical mind. All that is positive here comes down to a matter of laudatory epithets ("the great thinker," etc.), and the remainder is a constant and somewhat chaotic contestation at the level of the surface rendering of an edifice which, in any case, Paleologu does not know in its entirety, not having read the unpublished treatise on ontology. The pages are written with fine gusto, but in an irritatingly colloquial style ("My dear Dinu, I've caught you out here!"—that sort of thing), and have the merit of being—in comparison to the accumulation of circumstance which has already gathered around Noica's writing— the first to comment on Noica, not perhaps at the level of the "Idea" of his work, but at least establishing a cultural discourse from which discussion can begin. Yesterday evening I read Noica some key passages. "I know, broadly, what his objections are, and what bothers me is not the objections as such, nor the fact that he is so familiar with me in public, forgetting that there is always a third party present, the public itself. I know already what I am going to write to him. I am going to write that for me it has been a case of a struggle with gods, of a struggle with the Idea which has accompanied me from Mathesis to the present day, an Idea which sometimes has reached the point of saying, 'Into whose hands have you given me, Lord?' But even if I have been beaten by my Idea in this struggle, the struggle itself cannot be made light of. Indeed it is not finished yet. I don't expect any meaningful comment until after 1990.

93 "I wanted, however, to tell you what has happened to me in the meantime, since I returned from Bucharest. I told you about the lecture on Eminescu which I was to deliver on 15th January in Sibiu. Well, I delivered it, on the theme of his notebooks, of course. I donated to the Astra Library in Sibiu the photocopies of Eminescu's fifteen notebooks which I made three years ago, and which I had given to Relu Cioran to look after. But I donated them with a condition attached: that the library must undertake to have photocopies made from the microfilms of the other notebooks in the Academy Library. And I stipulated that they must be on display to be browsed through, not just brought out on request. In my lecture I said that if we had Eminescu's skull, as our neighbors have Lenin's, there can be no doubt that millions of people would file past to see it. But we do not have Eminescu's skull. What we do have, in the notebooks, is what was inside that skull. And don't you think there are a few thousand people who would be curious to see what was there? Then I said that I gave them one year to transform the microfilms in the Academy Library into photocopies enlarged to the actual size of the notebooks. And if they fail to do this within a year, then I will take the photocopies back from them and take them to Constanta, where Eminescu never went, although he sang as he did about the sea. And among the tens of thousands of young people who go there every summer to heat up their bodies in the sun, there might be a few who would wish to heat up their brains too, looking at Eminescu's notebooks. "After the lecture, a teacher of Romanian came to me and asked me to give her an autograph for the girls at the Gheorghe Lazar High School in Sibiu. As it deals with Eminescu, let me tell you what I wrote. It went like this: 'To the girls of the Gheorghe Lazar High School, Sibiu: "You don't find the whole world in a handsome young man," says our village wisdom. "Oh yes you do," replies the girl. And it is the girl who is right. For sometimes you do find the whole world in a handsome young man, just as we find our whole world in that handsome young man Eminescu.' "I would also like to tell you what I did two weeks ago at the Moisil commemoration in the Spiru Haret lecture theatre of the Mathematics Faculty. I spoke to the mathematicians about Moisil, starting from a few sayings of his. I especially enjoyed commenting on one of these. A doctoral student came to Moisil for advice, and got the answer: 'First you have to do three things: to sleep, then to sleep, and then to sleep again.' 'You will understand how profound that saying is,' I said, 'when you hear a story from the Upanishads. A young man came to a sage and asked him: "Who am I?" "You are

94 who you are when you are awake," replied the wise) man. "Your answer does not satisfy me," said the young man. "Come here after thirty-two years and I will give you another." After thirty-two years the man came back to the sage and asked him: "Who am I?" "You are who you are in sleep with dreams." (You know how much Jung, for example, has enlarged our understanding of the ego, by relating it to the vast and collective ego of humanity, which is manifested in dreams.) Anyway, the man was no more satisfied with the reply this time, so the wise man asked him to come back after another thirty-two years, for another answer. "Who am I?" asked the man again, when thirty-two years had passed. "You are who you are in sleep without dreams," replied the sage. Sleep without dreams is, for the Indians, the universal mind, Atman, in which the individual ego melts or raises itself to its level of supreme fulfillment. The universal mind is for us today the mind of mathematics. You are sons of the night,' I told them, 'and when Moisil urged the young doctoral student to sleep, perhaps he was not just giving him a piece of healthy advice, but thinking that he had to obtain that state of mind from which mathematics can begin.' And I closed with the words: 'Good night, Moisil.'"

Tuesday, 22ndJanuary

1980

Yesterday was a day for settling in (as we have moved to the Cindrel Hotel), for walking and for sleep. That way we got rid of the toxins of Bucharest, and, in a moment of Paltinig enthusiasm, Andrei gave voice to an idea: "How about the three of us (i.e. including Victor) moving up to Sibiu." Once shared, this thought exploded in the mind of Noica, and this evening he read us his letter to Mircea Tomu§, the editor of the journal Transilvania, asking him to go with him to the local powers-that-be to plead for the transformation of Sibiu into a "Romanian Jena". We are amazed spectators at this display of irrepressible vitality, this unquenchable potential for utopianism, building ever more determinedly on the very ground of the last defeat. The Corydaleos edition, the facsimile of Eminescu's notebooks, the Institute of Oriental Studies under the direction of Mircea Eliade—all glorious defeats—and now the transformation of Sibiu into the cultural capital of Romania..."I will tell them that apart from Paris no capital city has ever been the true cultural center of a country. Look at the English, the Germans, or the Americans now with their Princeton. Think how many cul-

95 tural capitals Italy has had." Good Lord, whatever will come out of this madness? Noica's words a few years ago on our walk to §anta come back to me again: "I'd be founding things right left and center!" I have started my translation of the Phaedrus again. I believe there is no joy more severe... This evening was magnificent. Noica waited for us in his room with a list for discussion, and asked us to bring one each evening too. Yesterday I gave him the typescript of the volume I have proposed for publication by Cartea Romaneasca under the title Micrologies. I have gathered here some short papers and more extended studies (prefaces, etc.), from the last thirteen years, and the volume seems to me to be rather uncertain and scattered. So our evening began with the discussion of these pages. "To start with, I would like to propose another title, because your title does not recognize the unity of the volume, a unity which exists, but which you cannot see. You are like Parsifal: you do not know that you know. It is all concerned with the polytropy of European culture and modern man, with their multiple faces. In every study in this book you tackle another facet of the human. First of all you take the helladic model of man, then man and animality, man and game, man and symbol, man and tradition, and finally man between exactness and truth. Then in the second part, you deal with various hypostases of the human, each revealed in a particular thinker. That is why I would propose the title Essays in the Polytropy of Mankind and Culture. You can put under the sign of polytropy the Odyssean man with his many faces, who has become the paradigm of modern man and of the culture of modernity, in comparison with the simplicity of the Achillean man, who is rather the model for Antiquity and for more unitary and unsophisticated primary cultures. And, once it is justified and thought out in this way, your book takes its place in a syllogism—for this is the second thing I intend to talk about—along with The Tragic and The Symbolism of Limit. You both know that in logic, thought is considered at three levels: concept, judgement, reasoning. Well, the same modalities also apply to culture, but here their ascending order is different: judgement, reasoning, concept. The hardest thing, in culture, is to arrive at the concept, and only the work of a few great figures in the history of culture has reached the level of concept. Judgement, on the other hand, is within the reach of anyone. In culture, it is judgement which gives us all that concerns criticism and the critical. Judgement can sometimes reach the highest forms, the level of Calinescu, for example, but judgement it

96 remains. In philosophy, the French moralists, Nietzsche and Cioran all remain at the level of judgement, albeit a grandiose judgement. But the great thing in culture is not to remain at the level of judgement, but to make the leap into synlogismos, sequential, discursive and constructive judgement. In its developed forms, culture is syllogism, reasoning, and in the most developed, it is syllogism raised to the single idea: concept. Heidegger, for example, never reached the level of concept, but what splendid syllogism there is in him! And in telling you all this, I am also thinking of those pages that you brought me by Alecu Paleologu. I am not interested in judgement which remains at the level of judgement, and it is precisely for that reason that I find myself parting from Alecu. He places himself within the horizon of judgement when he talks about me. And he has no right to do this, if only because he was the one person who knew my book about Goethe in its entirety, even the chapter about "Goetheness" (das Goetheturri), in which I showed that Goethe theorized becoming-in(to)-becoming, but, when it came to living, lived becoming-in(to)-being. It was that chapter through which Goethe obtained syllogism, and I parted from him not judging him but saving him culturally, that is to say creating a destiny for him. For any true destiny is a cultural syllogism. But in discussing my book about Goethe, Alecu was not capable of saving it in a syllogism. He is not capable of seeing my destiny, because he himself has remained within the horizon of cultural judgements. And I keep finding the same problem with you. I would like Andrei especially to tell me what his 'syllogism' is. Because his work on landscape may remain merely a splendid judgement, if no further book opens out of it."

Wednesday, 23rdJanuary

1980

This morning Victor arrived, to the delight of us all. "How fine you look together," said Noica, when he met us on our walk before lunch. "May you always stay that way, and may nothing split you apart, because whatever is great starts with the trinity—Greek mathematics and holiness alike." Noica had received a letter from his son, from whom he had heard nothing for a long time. "I was afraid he was passing through a crisis. When I last saw him he confessed to me that sometimes he feels his life is a failure. 'But that is splendid,' I replied. A failure is the point at which you lift yourself up to go further on.' Now he

97 writes that he feels wonderful and, which is most extraordinary, he says that I intrigue him. It is rare that a father intrigues his son, especially when the boy is in the condition of faith. There seemed to be something high here: holy Philosophy intrigues holy Faith!" In the evening, provoked by yesterday's discussion, Andrei reopens the problem of judgement, reasoning and concept. "I am returning to this," he says, "because it concerns me directly. It is about my situation here. I want to start with a few general observations, and then I am going to pass to my own case. "Firstly, which faculties correspond to these three steps? I believe that intellect corresponds to judgement, reason to reasoning (or syllogism), and revelation to concept. But while the passage from intellect to reason is a question of degree, the passage from reason to revelation is made by a rupture of level. In this sense, you may be guilty of not obtaining reasoning, remaining within the horizon of judgement, but you cannot be responsible for the fact that you have not obtained concept. You can only be held responsible at the level of judgement and reasoning. The stage of judgement especially belongs to those who rely on themselves, who have confidence in their own strength and discernment. The stage of concept, on the other hand, belongs to those who let themselves be taken over by an authority above the individual level, by a 'wild beast' as Mr. Noica would say. You affirm judgement, but you let concept pass through you: it affirms you. "Then there are ages, temperaments, professions, periods of judgement, and likewise of concept. Ethicism, aestheticism, and criticism are inevitably linked to judgement. By their very condition, they cannot evolve towards syllogism. Or what about professions? How can an art historian or critic escape from the condition of judgement? Youth is an age of judgement, and, stylistically speaking, France and England are countries of judgement. "As far as my case is concerned, I must confess that I have not been bothered about finding a legato in my work, a syllogism of books. My obsession has been, and still is, to obtain a legato between my work and my own life. Otherwise it seems to me that you risk a monstrosity of success: you can obtain reasoning, or indeed even concept at the level of the work, while on the existential plane you are still below the level of judgement. The problem is not so much 'to think your thought' as to live your thought. In a way this was the 'theme' of my first book. For me the great caesura does not lie between the culture of judgement and that of concept, but between existence and culture. It worries me to see that, regardless of our road and our cultural successes, we are both, myself

98 and Gabriel alike, in a state of pure existential illiteracy. We do not have a good hygiene of the soul, we do not master our instincts well, and our dependence on 'favorable conditions' goes to the point of obsessive mania. I should be struggling with my gluttony, with my excessive volubility, with my histrionics and impulsiveness. This rupture of planes, this disharmony does not exist for you. And it does not exist because in your nature nothing has stood in the way of the experience of concept, or at least nothing has stood decisively in its way. You even confessed to Gabriel once that you do not have a biography, given that your existence is merged with your books. But we have to obtain everything by struggling against ourselves. We have to struggle against our heredity, our metabolism, and so on. With you, all the vital functions are conducive to thought, while with us they inhibit it. We have only one chance: heroism. "So returning to the problem of the syllogism of creation, I admit that I have not obtained it. My thoughts do not form a series among themselves; they do not make up a construction. But as you have seen that is not what matters to me. What matters to me is that they should correctly reflect my problems, my tribulations, and so be the expression of the stage that I find myself at. For there is not only a nothingness of the thought which does not build on itself. There is also a nothingness of the construction which does not express its constructor, or indeed expresses him falsely. So my problem could be summed up like this: I do not understand the obtaining of concept (or even reasoning) at any price." Noica received a letter from Emil Cioran a few days ago. We read it today. What a splendid "syllogism" there is in that despair which embraces both his life and his books in a single gesture! "...je suis fatigué (la fatigue est la spécialité de ma famille!) et de toute façon j'ai perdu le goût de me manifester, de produire. ' Une vieillesse frivole et désespérée; ma jeunesse du moins ne fut pas frivole." I recall another late cry, sent on a postcard to his brother: "À quoi bon avoir quitté Coasta Boacii?" It is the geographical circle of an unhappy conscience, which closes around the surroundings of his native Ràçinari, around the slopes of the Coasta Boacii, roving across the map of Europe and wandering the streets of Paris. This evening, in Noica's room, Andrei is "judged." The three of us sit down on the bed, leaning against the wall. Noica sits on a chair facing us. Each of us takes an orange, we talk about our day, and then the judgement begins.

99 "Let me begin with a logical distinction. I distinguish the universal from the general. The universal is extensive, and concerns all cases, while the general is of the order of the species: while the general refers to all at the same time and has a subsistence without consistence, like language, or objective mind, the universal does not always have the general within itself, so that it does not refer to all at the same time, but rather to each partially and at a determined moment. Death, for example, is a universal: it is for each of us, but not for all at the same time. As I see it, the image of death brandishing a scythe is false. Death should rather be imagined as armed with a dagger. It is Death as portrayed in the folktale Youth without Age, who awaits the hero as his death, and who, experiencing the delay of the other, nearly dies herself. "As with death, I would maintain that wisdom is also for each of us: it is not a reality of the order of the general either. And for this reason it cannot be taught, but only awakened. Consider, for example, the four virtues which Plato enumerates in the Republic: courage (andreia), practical wisdom (sophrosyne), theoretical wisdom (sophia), and the spirit of justice (dikaiosyne). Can courage be taught? On the other hand it can certainly be awakened. Only the East has tried to teach wisdom, by enclosing those w h o aspire towards it in a school. The West, in contrast, tries to awaken it. And it awakens it through culture. Culture, with its discretion and its non-determination, awakens; it does not teach. And now I come to what I have to say to Andrei: with the problem you spoke of yesterday, in the first place, you are in a state of disorder of principle. Andrei wants wisdom to be taught. I once started, with him and with Gabi, on Hegel's Logic. And after a session of Hegel, Andrei said to me, 'I can get nothing out of Hegel either.' Andrei seeks soteria, salvation, obsessively and with grim determination. 'Culture does not resolve things for me,' he says. However, I would remind you of the words of Neagoe: 'He w h o is not stubborn will see God.' But Andrei is stubborn. He wanders in the realm of culture from one house to the next like a trader in garden produce: 'Have you nothing for me? What can you give me so that I can save myself?' So what I see in Andrei is first of all a disorder of questioning and a stubborn determination to ask and to receive directly. "Andrei's second disorder is of a practical nature. It comes out of too much respect for 'brother pig,' for his own ego: 'I, Andrei in my body and soul, want to be saved.' But in the life of the mind there is a danger in determined will. Will is not good if it is the will for something non-determinate, just as for Heidegger there is no fear in relation to something in particular, but rather fear of noth-

100 ing determinate (Angst). What is worrying in Andrei is precisely this worry about his own ego. His will for urgent salvation and his impatience for healing are to blame. And they are to blame because they relate to bad memory, to the sort of memory concerning the individual self with which psychoanalysts work, the memory which heals the person. Psychoanalysis enlarges the domain of memory, while remaining within the boundaries of the ego, and pushing the ego—as they would say in France—towards 'maman, papa, caca.' For the ancients, Mnemosyne, Memory, was the most important of the nine muses. But in contrast to the Memory of the psychoanalysts, the Memory of the ancients reminds you of things which you have never known. Mnemosyne is culture itself, and she heals you precisely because she gives you a good forgetting, the forgetting of the individual ego and the memory of the enlarged self. She alone puts you in order, because she functions soteriologically without soteriology. Culture doesn't drive you into the 'Army of the Lord,' and in its most developed form even Christianity has known how to avoid falling into the temptation of instant techniques of salvation. It has escaped the pride of immediate resolutions and the technicality of the recipe. So I invite Andrei to give up his stubborn impatience: no one can tell him exactly what he needs. The only thing that can save him is the good forgetting of culture, and after that he himself will no longer bother about the problem of healing. And another thing: when you know how to wait for it, it comes even when you haven't noticed it coming. You know the saying: 'It has probably already come, since it hasn't come again.'"

Friday, 25th January 1980 This evening when we arrived at Noica's room he was not there. He arrived shortly afterwards, late because the manager of the canteen had found out from the radio that Noica had been awarded the prize of honor of the Writers' Union. With, "I hear you're a great writer!" he kept him back to eat some gammon and jam. "I am late, my dear chaps, because of 'ephemerchandizing,' as Frunzetti used to say. You don't know about 'ephemerchandizing,' do you? Some time in the early '50s I escaped for a day to Bucharest. In Cimpulung, where I had forced domicile, my standard of living was not that great. About twice a week Lulu Lambrino would come to the gate around five o'clock in the morning and shout, 'Hey guys,

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there's gas at Vi§oi!' We had to grab a canister and go out to get gas. I made a living teaching private lessons at five lei an hour. I taught everything, even long jump. There was a girl who wanted to get into the I.C.F. She couldn't get her take-off right when she jumped. We went down to the river bank and I explained to her, step by step, the mechanics of the long jump. I got two liters of milk for that. So there I was in Bucharest, and I met Frunzetti on the tram. He had recently got a good job. How are you doing?' I asked him. 'How should I be doing? Busy ephemerchandizing.' I'm just the same. Now that I have become a celebrity in Paltini§, I can see that the 'ephemerchandizing' has started. Telling you about Cimpulung reminds me of Alecu Paleologu again. We lived through five years of cultural delirium then, he and myself with Mihai Radulescu. I was thinking today of saying to you that the true man is what remains when the world around has done away with him. Well, that was the situation we were in then. And what remained of me was my book about Goethe. I am going to write to Paleologu, and ask him how he can speak from the outside about that book, when Goethe was what remained of me when everything was doing away with me? When he writes today about my Goethe, he ought to write as a confessor. And I am sorry for his sake that he is not one. "However, I had intended today to speak to you about something else, about the fact that any great philosophy ends up with a platitude. Plato, for example, ends up with the platitude 'truthgoodness-beauty.' Kant ends up with the platitude of the faculties of the life of the soul: 'intelligence-will-sentiments.' Each of these is at the center of one of his Critiques: intelligence in the Critique of Pure Reason; will in the Critique of Practical Reason; and sentiment in the Critique of fudgement. Similarly, Hegel ends up with the platitude 'God-nature-man.' I had to ask myself what platitude I ended up with. And I found it was a terrible one. At the end of my Ontology I speak about 'body-soul-mind.' Body is being in the real version; soul is being in the version of the 'wild beasts,' of the elements; and mind is the version of being as being. I was ashamed of my platitude and tried to justify it. And I did this with the speculative interpretation of an old saying, 'Man is made after the image and likeness of God,' which, on the speculative level, means that being has three engagements—embodiment of the real, animation of the real, and transcendence of the real."

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Saturday, 26th January 1980 "This evening I am going to tell you the story which I have entitled 'Look! Koch!' I was twenty-six years old when I underwent the operation which left me with only one kidney. I remember that during the cystoscopy, Burghele cried out, Look! Koch!' There was delight in his voice, and for a moment I had the feeling that he could actually see Koch in person, making a tactical retreat, with his hands behind his back, down my urethra. I took the news of the operation very solemnly, and Burghele's exclamation, in which I could detect such delight, seemed at the time to be the epitomy of callousness. But I understand it differently nowadays: it is the cry of culture, triumphant for a moment, every time it feels it has grasped a truth. It is the cry of anyone who has gone in search of the Idea, the Idea which always escapes you but which now and then you feel you have got a hold of: 'Look! The Idea!' you cry out then. A few times in my life I have cried out, Look! The Idea!' I said it after finishing How is Something New Possible: 'Look! The Idea!' in the form of 'becoming-in(to)-being.' 'Look! The Idea!' I shouted, and I named it closing which opens.' With Plato it is even clearer. Each of his dialogues is an attempt to grasp the Idea. And in every dialogue Socrates loses it. 'It is as if we were on a quail hunt,' he says in the Euthydemos. But why does the Idea always escape us? Because that is the only way we can be in the condition of wisdom, of seeking, of Tao. If Plato had found the Idea somewhere everything would have frozen. Fluidity, the sense of Tao, of the way, is everything. This 'keeping your nose on the trail' is what culture is all about. In other words, no answer is good if it closes the problem. What matters is always to have the Idea in front of you. If it falls behind you, you have obtained a technique in the name of an Idea. But all that is good in life carries the infinite in itself."

23rd to 25th March 1980

Sunday, 23rd March 1980 I arrived in Paltini§ on Thursday evening, and although the evenings with Noica have followed their usual course since then, I have not managed to record them in my diary until now. I am rather weighed down by the work I have set myself: a page a day of the Oxford Plato (from the last thirty of the Phaedrus) and checking the translation of Hufnagel's worse-than-mediocre book on hermeneutics. With a daily portion to complete, I have not had leisure for diary writing. I shall try to catch up now on the two days which have passed. The first evening I gave Noica a report on the latest events concerning our circles in Bucharest. First of all there are the first pages of his book on Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind. He can't believe that it is going to have a print run of 30,000. It is indeed incredible, when you think that twenty years ago people were beaten and imprisoned for that book. Then I told him how excited we all are about Sorin Dumitrescu's exhibition—entitled, rather unfortunately, "Hypersigns"—which closed a few days ago at the Dalles Gallery. I took Noica to see it three weeks ago. Alecu Paleologu and Andrei were there too, and we were all disappointed to observe that Noica passed through the exhibition as if he were in a fish market. I told him all this, and about the little troubles I have had with an article on the exhibition which I tried to publish in Romania Literara. "It is 'hot philosophy,"' G.I. told me, "which exorcises readers. You have to understand me. Romania Literara is always under observation. After the article in Scinteia expressed reservations about the exhibiton, it would be risking too much. These days a bit of empty logorrhea is more use to me...You'll tell me I'm being a brute, I know, but that is the cultural climate we are operating in. I respect you, but again, please understand me. Look,

106 I'd even go so far as to beg you yourself to help me not to publish you. Beg me, if you can, not to publish your article. If we start to cut it there will be nothing left. I can't get away here with what they can do in a monthly journal where things pass unnoticed...Everything I do is seen. They would read your article through a magnifying glass. Maybe you would like to write something else, about some philosophy book. Why can T. and R.F. do it and you can't? Perhaps that is what you are going to say, and in a way you are right. What else can I say? Please understand me. I'm getting old..." Noica listens to the story with amusement, but he is more interested in knowing why we are so excited about the exhibition. He wonders if Sorin's painting does not err by an excess of intelligence. "They used to say, 7/ est bête comme un peintre,' and perhaps it is a condition of art to remain at the level of the "animality of the mind." I wonder if, caught between its own intelligence and the infusion of intelligence you all bring from outside, Sorin's art is not at risk of being crushed under too much lucidity. I reproach myself that I was not able to see the 'transcendental' in his exhibition. I never make a good contact when I first meet an artist: I responded the second time with Brâncu§i and "Juculescu too. Tell Sorin that if you don't do away with him with what you put in him, in four or five years I might be able to get in tune. In fact I will write a few lines for you to take to him, telling him all this. There is no sense in spoiling the psychic atmosphere. Indeed we are under an obligation to create a good feeling around ourselves: artists need that. As for your text, I understand it is a sort of Témoignages sur..., so it is not one for Romania Literarâ. You would do better to put it beside that of Andrei and Hâulicâ and bring out something separate together. But you still haven't told me the meaning of the excitement that has got into you all over this exhibition." For myself, perhaps my reaction to the exhibition was distorted. Apart from my sheer delight in the artistry, which I do not know how, and do not like, to comment on, I saw it as a splendid opening for ideas. And I do not think Andrei's enthusiasm was far different. It is strange how Noica, despite going along the line of the facilitating of access to ideas by their translation into a world of images, refuses collaboration with the visual arts (with the sole exception of Brâncuçi). It seems to him that whatever falls below the verbal level is bypassed by the mind (and likewise whatever goes beyond the verbal: music). As I had a copy of my article with me, Noica read it the next day. I asked him if he minds the way that gusts of his own philosophy

107 blow through it: the problem of the self, and then the matter of reacting to the "transcendental" as an eminence of the "beyond," of the "enlarged self," etc. "Not at all. Please pardon me if I tell you that I feel that they are there as commonplaces and that I do not have the consistency of a living presence in your article. I am just there as a shadow, and that is fine. But I am delighted to observe something else. You write, you and Andrei, better than we did. At your age our problem was either a whirl of ideas which w e could not master stylistically—the case of Eliade, not to mention Comarnescu—or keeping an excessive rein on our ideas, so that they came to take the form of a few simple affectations—my case. With you there is a splendid domination of thought, a control which binds everything together so well that nothing can budge. Perhaps there is an accumulation of cells from one generation to the next, or perhaps the work of our generation contributed something too." The following evening, Noica was complaining that for several days he has been struggling over the preface to a Lupa§cu anthology which is to come out at Editura Politic! "And yet I have the idea: I am going to show that from Kant onwards everything in philosophy has involved the destruction of the myth of identity, the validation of contradiction as something fertile. Antinomy is the very glory of reason. Kant spoke of four antinomies of reason, and then Hegel came along and said that there are not four but an infinity, and that they are not the weaknesses of reason but rather its very force. In our century, Science has tackled the logical principle of the triplet, but it has not had the courage to tackle that of non-contradiction. Philosophy, on the other hand, has done it, either by integrating the irrational, the unconscious, the intuitive, or, as with Lupagcu, by making identity itself a moment of the polarity. I myself feel that I am in the spirit of the century with my unilateral contradiction. And I would propose that you should consider whether your problem of limit does not lead you towards the same challenge to the status which identity has had for so many centuries in philosophy." We turned to another subject. I told him that before I left for Paltini§ a non-philosophical friend asked me to tell him "what Noica wants," what his philosophy consists of. And I was amazed to discover that I was not able to reproduce a single thought, but rather a sequence of five ideas, between which I could not make connections: the two selves; becoming-in(to)-becoming and becoming-in(to)-being; limitation which limits and limitation which does not limit; being in and being in(to); and finally the ontological model of his recent Treatise. "I find your problem very interesting.

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It is a vital one, I might say, and I am really amazed that I myself haven't thought of it until now. You will understand yet again why I always say that you never know who is giving and who is receiving. Give me till tomorrow to reply, and, in any case, if we don't like the answer perhaps we shall find it, as in the Upanishads, after thirty-two years." Yesterday evening, Noica was waiting for me, eager to pick up the previous day's discussion again. "Yesterday I forced myself to look inward and ask myself if it is possible that I am unable to say what I have been expressing all my life with my 'pentagon' of ideas, or 'hexagon' if I also count unilateral contradiction. Is it all just a bundle of ideas which fail to show the way to their starting point? What have I truly wanted all my life? And now I can answer you. I have wanted what everyone has wanted, and I have done no more than say what we all want, perhaps without knowing. I have wanted to embrace the one who embraces me, to include the inclusiveness which includes me. When you once asked me why I don't pay more regard to death, I really wasn't sure what to say, although basically I knew the answer. Death is only one of the limits, the mutilations, within which each individual is caught. Whether conscious of it or not, we all suffer from being unable to be everything, and death gives us only one cause for this suffering. Such an aspiration towards totality manifests itself as a tendency to envelop your surroundings, to absorb them into yourself: I call it the passage of the external medium into the internal medium. It is the condition of all that is real, but only in man—and even here not all the time—does it really succeed. At the organic level, it takes on the lesser form of 'conquering' the environment, devouring it, of a despotic domination over it. Indeed in every despot there exists this invalidity, this powerlessness to transform the being of the community which includes him in its internal medium, a powerlessness to be, when it comes to the point. There is in despotism the ridiculous frenzy of a bubble of foam which wants to dominate the sea in outward form: the despot does not absorb into himself the community which made him possible, but rather forces his embrace onto it. "The passage of the external medium into the internal medium would appear itself to be the entry into the condition of to be' In the biological order, a first attempt to enter into the condition of 'to be' is hunger, but it is a failed attempt, because the passage of the external medium into the internal medium takes the form of a mere assimilation. And respiration, which Evola glorifies as an Indian means of access to being, still remains at the level of assimila-

109 tion. In the biological order, eros seems to be the only illustration of 'to be,' because in the moment of its supreme realization eros is the blood which you take or give; that is to say, the species itself— the external medium—becomes interiority. Here, as in any success of 'to be,' there is a way of embracing transcendence. For blood, like any internal medium, is much more than its bearer. The internal medium is beyond the bearer; it remains transcendent in his immanence. "This passage, which is a fulfillment in the sphere of 'to be,' is the very miracle of man and of culture. You cannot be a poet without wanting to be poetry itself; you cannot be a philosopher without wanting, like Hegel, to be philosophy itself. There is, everywhere in great culture (and not in the simple desire to make culture, to be in it), a way of obtaining integration, as in the story of my boy Razvan who, when he was little, thought that asking for change meant that you kept your money and the other person came with the small change that was needed for you to have a larger sum. Basically this is what I have wanted. To come with my money, with my idea, and to embrace with it everything that embraces me: nature, community, language, culture itself. I have wanted what we all want: a de-mutilation, an exit from the corner of loneliness in which you feel yourself embraced and limited without being yourself able to embrace and include. And I believe that this transformation of the external medium into the internal medium is the good sense of the infinite, of the infinite in the finite. Why is Jesus Christ called 'Son of Man' and not 'Son of God? Precisely because he made humanity, all of humanity, his internal medium. And divinity is the sense of this totality, which has become the interior dimension. "So this is 'what I have wanted,' and I think those five ideas you shared with your friend were only successive approximations for this desire to be, not to remain mutilated in my loneliness, to embrace more inclusively that which has embraced me. 'Is that all you wanted?' a lady who heard our discussion might ask. 'I'd be better off going to play with my dog.' And I would have to ask her to come back in thirty-two years, to be able to give her another answer."

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Monday, 24th March 1980 Before lunch today we went for a walk together. "Yesterday evening I was thinking of talking to you about the eudaimonia of each of us. If it is not the thirst for success, or the ambition to be an author that drives us to do what we do, then what is it? You have to know success while you are young, so as to get rid of the taste for it quickly and to realize that it is never true success but only a 'gloriole,' something superficial, which comes down to an exclamation of identification—'so that is what you look like!' etc. You quickly realize that people are just interested in your surface, and that sometimes they only produce a ridiculous approximation of you. On one occasion someone told me that he had been terribly impressed by my interpretation of the folktale Harap Alb\ And another time I was imprudent enough to ask an admirer which of my books he had happened to come across: the poor chap began to stammer. When Eliade was young someone said to him, 'Oh, I'm so glad to meet you, Mr. Mircea Eliade Rádulescu!' I must confess that if the 16th Congress of Philosophy were to have my system as its theme it would bore me terribly: I would have to give explanations, to approve or to contradict. So what makes me sit here just as I am sitting now and feel well? What is my eudaimonia? I shall try to give you an answer this evening. "I have just arrived in my Hegel corrections at a part which relates to Sorin Dumitrescu, and I would like you to give it to him to read. It is the chapter about 'The Animality of the Mind and Fraud.' Around a new work, says Hegel, other people gather like flies over fresh milk. And then a whole ballet starts. The artist, on the one hand, hides in his work, identifies with it and declares that it says everything; later, however, he feels he has to explain, to speak out and declare that the work does not say everything, that it does not exhaust his ideal. The critic, on the other hand, comes and places his work over the artist's, declaring that in this way he explains the artist's work. For Hegel, this 'fraud' is the failure of mind embodied in art, a failure which he needs in order to go further on, to religion and philosophy." This evening I feel tired, too tired to recount the story of Noica's eudaimonia, which is born from the step-by-step but rapid elimination of all forms of non-cultural satisfaction: a sort of "I don't like anything else." To be simply possessed by ideas, manipulated by them, etc.

Ill

Tuesday, 25th March 1980 We are leaving tomorrow, Noica for Timi§oara and I for Bucharest. It has been, as always before parting, an evening for taking stock. We are near the end of the fourth volume of Plato. I still have to do commentaries on the Phaedo and the Phaedrus, and Noica has the interpretation of the Phaedrus (where again he thinks he has nothing to say). Finally w e are thinking of extending the translation of the commentary of Hermeias on the Phaedrus (which will also appear in the volume) so as to cover also the second speech of Socrates. I am pleased with the sound of my translation, and pleased that I have aroused Noica—by reading to him from my translation the part about "Socratic delirium," before which his interpretation had stopped ("You can't interpret a delirium!")—to drive his commentary towards completion. Finally I am pleased that young Cornea and Bercea, whom I had thought of for the translation of Hermeias, can be taken into the team and show promise for the future. (I had brought with me a sample of their translation, which w e read together one evening, and Noica was delighted with it.) "If w e consider the problem of a cultural elitism, without which you cannot have any achievement in culture, I think we ought to have an impact on final-year high-school pupils. That is where the seed should be thrown, not at those who have just finished university, and whom you thus lose in their best years. Today two fourthyear theology students from Sibiu came to look for me. One of them is doing a degree paper on the problem of virtue in Plato. He did not have, and indeed had never seen, a text of Plato in Greek. I talked to them first of all about what they had in their hands—or what they might have—if they really came to understand what theology means. 'For one thousand five hundred years,' I told them, 'the culture of Europe was religious culture, and for three hundred years it has been science. Perhaps the 21st century will be one of theology, but it will be a theology understood in terms of a spirituality which will already have assimilated these centuries of scientific culture. Think what an advantage w e have compared with the Indians, w h o arrived at wisdom all at once, and who, having obtained the state of meditation and the technique of entering that state, did not know what content to give it. The mind which does not have behind it this double cultural experience, through which Europe has passed with a vengeance, can only obtain an empty dullness, a somnolence, a stiffening. So the 21st century may be the

112 century of the two Niles which will create a Delta of the mind, and this Delta seems to be your theology, since nowadays scientists themselves are becoming open to a spirituality in terms of which they can even grasp the behavior of the atom. So you see, you have gold in your hands: you are not blocked in the enclosure of the linguist or the chemist, or even the historian. With your theology, you can go towards Byzantine art, towards our old literature, towards philosophy. You can make it into a splendid cultural instrument. But it needs its own instruments too: Greek, Slavonic, philosophy. What would Staniloae or Elian be without Greek?' Then I went over the theory of the three categories of horse with them. 'Horses are of three sorts,' I said. There are draft horses, circus horses, and racehorses. Ninety-nine percent of people remain draft horses. Of the rest, some become circus horses, like Nadia Comaneci or Brigitte Bardot. But as far as I am concerned, I am only interested in racehorses. If you want to be ordained as priests, that is a spiritual matter in which I can have no part to play. But if you want to become racehorses you can come to me again further along your way. However, don't tell me that your failure is the fault of the world you live in. The squalor, if it exists, exists first of all in you, in your inner limits. People have read books by lantern light before now.'"

19th to 22 nd November 1980

Wednesday, 19th November 1980 Yesterday evening I arrived with Andrei in Paltini§, after an exhausting twelve-hour car journey. One problem after another with the engine: somewhere around Dealul Neagru we came near to turning back to Bucharest. Almost every trip to Paltinig seems to have brought its share of adventures and obstacles, in which Andrei is quick to find an initiatory significance: the conspiracy of the real and its uncertainties against any ascensio spiritualis. Paltini§ I found once again like an "other world": it is a unique sensation, of intimacy in the mind, which I have every time I arrive here and start on the road to the penthouse room of villa 23- Noica himself I discover each time by stages, first by the lighted window, buried in the shingle roof, by the apples there, or by the key deliberately left in the door. In his room it is always warm and there is a smell of pipe tobacco. He takes our hands in his, beating the backs of our hands lightly, with something between a gesture of tender reunion and a renewed pact of everlasting friendship. "I can do without a trip to Greece that is always postponed, I can do without Bucharest, but I see I can't do without you. You have come at a good time: Letters on Logic and The Book of the Archei are stagnating at the moment, so I am available to be at your service. I was just thinking that November is the most beautiful month of the year. It is 'pure time,' the only month that man has not polluted with his festivals and insignia. It is a time suspended between seasons, when nothing is beginning or ending, when there is neither the harvest festival, nor the start of the university year, nor any great sacred feast. It is time unmarked in any way, the only month which summons you to live in the indeterminate. So I have found an excuse for my sterility: I read and I wait, like Saint Theresa, for something to happen to

116 me in the seventh month, after praying in vain for six months on end." W e tell him, as usual, what has been happening since w e last met. Andrei recounts the week he spent in Germany, two or three months ago, at some symposium or other. He found it interesting to discover that the Germans themselves are starting no longer to find satisfaction simply in their material well-being. They feel they have descended to the level of a mere annex to the Marshall Plan, which set them on the line of a Wiederaufbau, a reconstruction only on the material plane. Hitler's crime is that he destroyed in the war all the intellectuality of Germany—so one of Andrei's interlocutors confided. "Americanism" has made its home in the place devastated by the catastrophe of war. "What you are telling me is extremely interesting. I am glad to hear that they themselves are starting to realize the precarious situation they are in. In 1948 Adenauer could have asked, Do you want butter or culture?' And I like to think they would have chosen culture. But he only proposed material well-being. Nowadays they have plenty of butter, and they are badly off in terms of culture. And this is happening in a country which started the 19th century as the republic of geniuses. In 1808, two years after the Battle of Jena, when the whole of German culture assembled in Berlin, the rector of the university was von Humboldt, Fichte had the chair of Philosophy, Schleiermacher that of Theology, and von Ihring that of Law. Can you imagine what such a university was like? In the second half of the 19th century, when they no longer had geniuses of such calibre, they continued to amaze Europe, astounding Renan or Taine with their terrific school of historians, linguists and philologists. Nowadays whenever I meet a German intellectual from here w h o wants to go to Germany, I ask him, 'To which Germany do you want to go? To the Germany of butter, or that of culture?' And if he answers that he wants to go to the Germany of culture, I tell him that, paradoxically, he may find it more easily here." Next he asks us about Bucharest, about the plans w e have come with and the books w e have brought with us. For us, Bucharest has continued for a good while now to lie under the sign of the "protochronist" offensive, the cultural symptom of a renewed inferiority complex, which, when it takes on the virulence that it has in the present moment, inevitably leads to the "refusal of Europe" and the exaltation of eastern and autochthonous values. Protochronism moves things from the antinomy, which is sterile for thought, of the relation universal-particular and West-East, and ends up in

117 excesses which deprive culture of the condition of minimal purity which the mind always needs if it is to develop unobstructed. And here something strange is happening. Years ago, when Noica burst into our culture, he came to meet our needs for a moral purity and a universalism of culture. Culture had to be pursued in the name of a tautological ideal; it was a spiritual practice carried out with the thought that there is a "God of culture" and that it draws its strength precisely from an exacerbated consciousness of its immanent logic, from the preservation of the great cultural alphabet of the European and universal mind. It was in the name of this ideal that Noica sent us to the "great texts" and instruments of culture, which were sources in an absolute way, sources for a mind which does not enclose itself in regional frustrations and pride. He represented, for our generation, a guarantee of the mind in its cultural variant, a purificatio spiritualis which had to be maintained and propagated precisely by access to the tried and tested sources of this purification. Being the vessel which waits to be filled, and which, by its presence, can give sense and direction to an effort which otherwise would be wasted and dispersed into nothing, we meant at least as much for Noica as he did for us. "We are," a contemporary of ours said on one occasion, "the wave on whose crest Noica rose ten or fifteen years ago. And in a way we should now feel betrayed by him." Why betrayed? Betrayed because he rushed to give regional embodiment to an effort of cultural universalization (Europeanization) which had never been taken through to its conclusion here, but always just picked up again from the beginning, like something accursed. We were still set in this orbit when we were surprised by what seemed to be an anachronistic return to the spirit of 1848. While we could not find out what was wrong with us except by completing our tour through the bimillenary culture of Europe, Noica started talking about "the Romanian sentiment of being," and "the Romanian mind at the balance of time," and that after he had proposed to any culturally minded youth, through Eminescu or Goethe, a model of universality and meditation in the absolute. Paradoxically, it was precisely he who had chided us for our superficiality and worthlessness, who had generated themes that were available to anyone, and who had objectively placed himself in a situation where he could be invoked by all those who babbled away while playing on an easy string with a well-tested note. This claiming of Noica from two different directions gave rise to a confusion which Noica himself fed, and in which, God knows why, he made himself complicit with an irresponsible ease. For those who come after us, for those who are

118 raising their heads in culture today, this confused situation can only have harmful effects. How many of them will find the thread of authentic culture, which was offered to us in its pure state, in this petty cultural battle in which some invoke Noica from culturalist positions and others from autochthonist positions, while others still, exasperated by both sides alike, fight him and detest him from yet another position? I tell Noica all this. "If there is any point of contact between me and the 'autochthonists,' I would prefer you not to look for it in the ridiculous aspect of the issue. When I turned my attention to Romanianness, it was, I believe, because I was exasperated by Caragiale's scoffing. You can't just scoff at everything. Romanianness is not just a matter of balkanism and parliamentary decadence. There are moments of seriousness which you cannot pass over just because they ended lamentably in the demagogy of their successors. I am not ashamed to say that I liked Paul Anghel's effort to circumscribe, in the episode of 1877, a moment of seriousness." We let the matter drop. I speak about what I am intending to do during my time here. I have brought him, in its final form, the eighty-page translation of Ursprung des Kunstwerkes which I have made, together with Thomas Kleininger, for the Heidegger volume which Univers are going to publish in 1981. In the days to come I want to discuss the problems which are raised by the translation of Heidegger into Romanian. The Letter on "Humanism" is also finished, and is to be published in Secolul 20 in January. In the course of these days I have to prepare a short introductory study of ten to fifteen pages, and I am terribly nervous, as it will be the first meeting between our culture and a sizeable Heideggerian text. I have no idea how to approach the task, and feel an intense need to seek Noica's advice. "I keep wondering," he says, "if you did not hurry things a bit with Heidegger, coming to him before you had a solid grounding in classical German idealism. And I have another reservation where he is concerned. I consider him to be a wastemaker, of the Nietzschian type, the type of those who make you unlearn what you know without teaching you anything. He himself confessed that he had not arrived anywhere. And my next question is this: have you any right to give up the gold that is in Plato—since you want to withdraw from the Plato edition—for the dross that is in Heidegger? There is authentic metal in him too, but there is also a lot of the dross that you find in any wasteland." It is perhaps unfair of him to pass such a judgement, considering, at the very least, that he owes so much to Heidegger. It was from Heidegger that Noica learned to let the language speak and to

119 listen to the philosophy hidden in it; to shift any problem out of the well-worn path in which it is usually encountered; that in philosophy you are ceaselessly on the road to an idea, or in search of this road; that any true answer opens the way to a new question; and that the dignity of philosophy comes from its obligation and power to think Being. This morning, while we were walking, Noica spoke to us about the condition of humanist culture. "In culture, my dear chaps, you have to give evidence of the rank you hold. In culture you are never born with the condition of a prince; you have to win recognition for it. So you are always in the situation of those illegitimate sons of Stephen the Great, who had to demonstrate that they were of princely stuff. But once your royal blood has been recognized, you can't go on behaving any old way. Your behavior must settle at the level of that which you have demonstrated that you are. You have already obtained the condition of princes, and, as such, you must behave in a princely manner in culture. You must honor your rank and give what is expected of you. In fact you have arrived in a situation in which there is only one way you can lose the match: by not playing. But what does it mean to play? It means respecting the imperative of quantity, which is decisive in the humanist disciplines. All those who have achieved something in humanist studies really knew their books. You can't come into culture with just the natural resources of the miad, its animal giftedness." Andrei invokes the Greeks of the 5th and 4th centuries. "Was their thinking weighed down, as ours is, by the whole Alexandrian cultural ballast? What must Plato really have known? His mathematics is at the level of knowledge of an eighth-grade pupil today. For him philosophy had only two centuries of history, not twenty as it has for us. How was it possible to think then without quantity?" "In the end," observes Noica, "it is always a matter of education. What I really want to tell you is that in culture the mind does not behave naturally, but culturally. Those two centuries of philosophy that Plato had behind him did not look then as they do to us now. When you open Diogenes Laertius, you see that there were authors and writings which have not survived into our times, but which then provided the content of an education. The lists of works which have been lost over time are of the order of hundreds. And on the other hand we do not know either what the culture of Egypt meant for a Greek. One passed through Egypt then, as Pythagoras and Plato did, just as today one passes through Oxford, the Sorbonne or Berkeley. When the Arabs came to mean what they did for the culture of Europe, all they did was to culti-

120 vate their minds. You could study under a tree then, as they did, or the Greeks before them; and in the time of the Stoics it was said that even the crows in Athens used to discuss the conditional type of implication." This morning I gave Noica my translation of Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, and in the evening w e meet to discuss the issues raised by the first five pages, which Noica deals with one by one. "I make no secret of the fact that I have chosen to be hard on you. It is the only way to be of any service in the matter of checking a translation. And it has been my special ambition to catch the two of you out, Kleininger and yourself, with at least one error of German." The problem of the translation of Heidegger has its own story, and, since it has meant so much for me, I feel I need to give a brief account of it here. It was in 1 9 7 1 , in Germany, that I was first tempted to translate something by Heidegger, with the idea, I think, that it would be a test for my German. Now I realize how lacking in awareness I was in my project. Not only did I know too little German, but I also knew too little about Heidegger himself to suspect how much could be concealed behind a single word in his writings. So I chose, quite blissfully, the Letter on "Humanism, " a text which brings together all the themes of Heidegger's thought, before and after Kehre, expounded in the purest Heideggerian jargon, and in an attempt at a comprehensive justification of his whole thinking. I fumbled lamentably through it, and the result was a semi-disaster. Six or seven years later my ambition was reawakened, but this time it was in the consciousness that I was not taking on a simple personal exercise, but a confrontation between the possibilities of our language and one of the most fascinating adventures of the philosophical mind. As far as the language of philosophy was concerned, it was an attempt at the absolute. This time I planned a volume of Heidegger's studies on poetry and art, in which the pièce de résistance would be Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. I had already started translating, and would probably eventually have obtained results, however questionable, when I had a meeting which I consider to be one "of destiny" as far as the future of Heidegger in Romanian was concerned: I came to know Thomas Kleininger. Caught in the full throes of "ahoretia," the malady of lack of determination, as he himself liked to think after reading Noica's Six Maladies, Thomas was teaching specialist German at the Petrolium and Gas Institute when I met him, and I remember how delighted he was about his lithographed technical course which had just

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appeared. Otherwise he collaborated with the Univers Press, revising translations, writing reviews and chronicles in German for Cahiers roumains, and doing translations from Romanian into German. At the publishers' request he had checked the translation of Groeben's Psychology of Literature for me, and, working together for two days on that occasion, I had discovered in him an extraordinary discipline and power of work, coupled with a Teutonic intelligence, cold and exact. All these qualities had not yet found the best place to be invested, and he was in the situation which is somewhat rare here (where the opposite is more likely to be the case) of possessing talents and skills while lacking projects. Coming to know him and sensing how effective he could become, I did no more than pass on to him the lesson which I in my turn had learned from Noica. I started (together with Andrei) to do Greek with him, and tempted him with our list of philosophers, which, for him, started at the beginning, with the pre-Socratics, but also with Spinoza, at whom our readings and weekly discussions had by this time arrived. But what attracted me most of all was the idea of working together on Heidegger, a collaboration which I felt was inevitable, after the final correcting of my translation of the Letter on "Humanism." To translate Heidegger required a complex brain, familiar with philosophy and with some Greek, but above all equally proficient in Romanian and German. What was needed was to apply bilingualism. After, working together, we had got the Ursprung behind us, I came to understand that, over and above the union of German and Romanian, we had obtained, through the hermeneutics of the text, an insight into the author's thought such as only the shared concern of two minds well tuned to each other can achieve. Over a period of only a few months we revised the translation of the Ursprung three or four times, and there were pages (like the famous one dealing with Riss and Gestelf) on which we worked for days on end. So what I achieved with Thomas was not just an optimal brain for translating Heidegger, but something more: a sensation of furious work, of an unleashing of the mind, which only the duel of two minds disputing something which does not belong to them can leave you with. But these are things which cannot be told, and our little heroism, won in a battle with no outward glory, must remain our secret, a secret attainable only by those who will descend as we did, taking upon themselves an essential poverty, into a page of Heidegger.

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Thursday, 20th November 1980 "Since I first met him, Gabi has asked me two stupid questions: what I believe about death, and why we really need to write books. I have given him repeated answers to the first, but I want to return to it today. It seems to me incomprehensible that for seven thousand years cultivated humanity has been lamenting in the face of death. How is it that in seven thousand years we have not managed to see death in a good light? The language, which is always wiser than we are, is able to say, 'He has passed on from life,' which is like saying, 'He has brought his life to a pass,' or, 'He is fulfilled.' Any good death is in the form of a fulfillment, of a complete achievement. When you ask what someone believes about death, it sounds as if you were asking about the silence which falls at the end of a symphony. You can't believe anything about it: you can only believe something about the fulfillment that was the symphony. I would award eternity precisely to those who have done nothing in life, and who are sure not to withdraw from it, since they have not yet begun or completed anything. 'It's worth staying alive,' a late friend of mine used to say, 'to be able to read Universul every day.' Everlasting life should be assigned to those mere spectators of the endless show of the world, readers of newspapers and television viewers, as a compensation for not having been able to bring anything to a pass, and so to pass on. "But now, if we admit that death is a true end, and a good one, then a good and true eternity is that in which you can communicate with those far off. To write books means communicating with those far off and becoming their better consciousness. What are the books of humanity if not our better consciousness? What is Eminescu if not the better consciousness of the Romanians? And what more could I wish for than to be the better consciousness of those who come after me, of those far off in time?" This evening Noica read us a Selbstdarstellung, a "self-presentation," setting forth for us his way in the idea from his Mathesis to the Letters on Logic. "I am happy to acknowledge that I have worked all my life—known or unknown—in the search for a scientia universalis that is neither a science of sciences nor a knowledge suspended in the ether of philosophy. The hexagon' I was telling Gabi about a few months ago is not my 'system,' but a structure of understanding (my ontological model) together with its operators, with the instruments for decoding relations on any level—ethical, historical, artistic, philosophical, etc.—which, be-

123 tween them, provide the content of this scientia universalis. So on the one hand, there is the ontological model 'individualdeterminations-general' (I-D-G), which translates the ideal structure of being, and, through its insufficiencies, the precariousness of being, and, on the other, there are polarities which I find operating everywhere and which give this 'science' a functional character: the two selves; becoming-in(to)-becoming and becomingin(to)-being; to be in and to be in(to); limitation which limits and limitation which does not limit; and, in the end, unilateral contradiction. I can run all these over the whole of reality, making it intelligible at the level of a 'science' which is a science of the concrete and of life, and not one of the abstract, such as Descartes obtained with his science of proportions' or Leibniz with his 'universal language,' or such as mathematics and logic seek to obtain nowadays. What is important in this scientia is that I always keep my foot on the individual, that I save it and validate it, in contrast to every other mathesis, which, by aiming for the universal, ends up by devaluing or losing the individual. This individual which my 'science' takes as its starting point, without losing it, is thus neither sacrificed by raising it to the general (the element is not swallowed by the multitude or the part by the whole), but neither is it the romantic individual of the 19th century, which does not even bear within itself the general or its investment. This mathesis universalis, on which I waxed lyrical in my youth, I am finding again now, at the end of my road, articulated and fulfilled, through the ontological model and the five operator-ideas."

Friday, 21st November

1980

Before lunch, Noica called me to chop his firewood, a punishment for my not wanting to go for a walk this morning. He was waiting for me with a young man of about twenty, a student in his first year of Theology and a fresh discovery of his from Sibiu, whom he wanted me to meet as a possible acquisition for the Plato edition. What is decisive for Noica was that the boy has all the necessary language skills in good order: Greek, Latin and a bit of Hebrew, not to mention German, English and French. We leave him and, joined meanwhile by Andrei, head towards the canteen. "I must confess, my dear chaps, that I am starting to assess future scholars by their physiognomy too. You saw: the boy wears glasses, he is lymphatic blond, and seems to have Sitzfleisch. An unsporty body, heavy, or

124 rather dry, is the first guarantee of the intellectual type of ascesis. Physically speaking he can be declared 'good for books.' You see that I have a vocation as a cultural horse-trader. Not to speak of the head start he has with his father being a professor of dogmatics, and so having a most beautiful library right in his own home. He is interested in patristic studies, and I want to catch him for philosophy this way, by sending him to the Platonic and Aristotelian sources of the Fathers. "I am approaching the end of The Origin of the Work of Art. It is a remarkable thing to have done, but I confess that it breaks my heart to think how much time and energy Gabi and his friend have laid on the altar of Heidegger. And I want to ask Gabi a question, brutal as it may sound: Who in the end is Heidegger? What respect can you have for a man w h o undoes everything and w h o finally urges you to read only himself and the pre-Socratics? And another thing: there is something terribly suspect about Heidegger; he can't be told. You know how I like playing with the old saying: 'If it weren't so, it wouldn't be told': since it is told, it is. Every being, and especially the being of a thought, or of a book which has a beginning and an end, bears the epic within itself, tells itself.' Now I come and say, turning things upside down, that if it is not told, then it cannot be. In this sense Heidegger is not. True thought has an unfolding, bears within itself its own ballad, that 'sit down and I'll tell you something.' But with Heidegger everything remains w r a p p e d up, in a circle. Heidegger has no ballad. I heard him speaking on two occasions, once in 1941, and the second time in 1943, w h e n I had the feeling I was listening to the same lecture as two years before. I grant him one thing: he has hermeneutics, and obtains the interpretation of the individual. But all is not in order here either. To do hermeneutics means having access to the form of the individual; each individual bears within itself its own form and this form is its necessity. Schiller said something extraordinary w h e n he said that the necessity of a thing is its form. Heidegger has the intuition of this hidden form which each individual carries with it, but without also having a theory of individual form. In other words, he does not have a logic elaborated as a theory of individual form. And—if you will allow me to praise myself—my hermeneutics is superior to his from this point of view at least: it is based on a logic which belongs to the sciences of hermeneutic type, the sciences of the mind, those sciences, that is, which have not lost sight of the individual and its form. This logic, which validates my hermeneutics, is precisely the theory of individual form, the 'logic of Hermes,' as I have called it, a logic which has not lost

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sight of the concrete, and which for this very reason cannot be taken over by mathematics and machines." I observe Noica's despotic behavior towards Heidegger, whom he encloses within his relationship to the latter's philosophy, when in fact it would be more appropriate to allow everyone the right to meet the thought of another on their own road. For me Kierkegaard is valid in peratology, while for Noica he is to be rejected according to the ontological model I-D-G (as he lacks the intermediate stage of determinations, having only the individual and the general, which, as they are capable of being united only by a leap, offer an unsaturated ontological model, or, on the subjective level, generate drama). In contrast, for Noica, Hegel is valid according to the model—he has G-D-I—while for me he is unusable from a peratological point of view (as for him limit as such has no consistency: all is flux). More and more Noica shows signs of an intransigent blocking within his own thought. What is becoming of the famous "closing which opens"? This evening it is Andrei's turn to report to us on the stage he has reached. "You will each talk to me, Andrei today and Gabi tomorrow, about the book that you have in front of you," Noica said while we were out walking. The book which Andrei is preparing to follow Picturesque and Melancholy is about the artistic type of thought, as distinct from the speculative or scientific type of discursive thought. "The title feels best in German: Das bildnerische Denken. I confess that in all that I have written up till now I have started from direct experience and not from ideas or books. I have always suffered from an inverse Bovarism: I do not try to apply books in life, but on the contrary, an event in life sends me to books. I recall, for example, that when I fell in love for the first time I went to look up the word 'love' in the Larousse. My first book consists for the most part of a later resolution in writing of a number of problems which were first of all on the level of experience: joy, laziness, action, etc. The thought behind the book which you ask me to speak about also arose from an experience, from contact with artists, and from the need to set out in clear terms the problem of my dialogue with them. For dialogue with artists poses a real difficulty: the way in which an idea arises and is formulated by them is completely different from the way of speculative thought. But it would be a mistake to pass over the problem of this type of thinking, declaring it to be chaotic, simply because it breaks the rules of discursive logic. In fact many artists have amazing insights and intuitions, such as cannot be obtained by the way of conventional reason. So from the

126 need to make this dialogue possible I end up seeking a resolution at the cultural level, in writing. Of course I am not setting out to cover the whole history of the problem. I shall choose a number of paradigmatic types, starting from which I hope to obtain a typological characterization of the artistic type of thought. And I am considering dwelling on three moments: Goethe, who is the most useful to me, then Leonardo, and, from our own century, Klee. All of these lead me, willy-nilly, to the problem of inspired knowledge, as a type of knowledge distinct from the discursive variety. I then enter the realm of a knowledge which is realized in act: discovery by doing, not meditating. In the act of making, a mysterious relationship is established with truth itself: here expression takes the place of explanation. "At the present stage, in which I am still merely feeling my way, I have in mind three characteristics of artistic discourse. 1. The cosmogonic as an artistic variation of the ontological. I am speaking here of an ontology which resolves itself in nature, the ontological which philosophy lost sight of after the pre-Socratics, only to find it again with the romantics, with Schelling, Passavant, Goerres, Oken and Carus. 2. The prophetic and oracular character which gives artistic thought a dogmatic feel, and, at the level of expression, the aphoristic. Here I am also thinking of a special sensitivity which the artist tests in the face of the future. It is something which is detectable in every avant-garde movement, with the Russians, for example, like Tatlin, Gabo, Pevsner and Malevich. 3- Finally globalism, the inclination towards the unified whole, establishing relations, bringing things together, and the propensity towards the monumental, the 'overall view,' the generous vision. "Over and above these three characteristics, artistic thought raises in a unique way the problem of how to relate to the material. Artists seem to me to be the most competent thinkers of the material. I do not just mean a technical skill, but a competence which goes as far as the capability of overturning the material, of transcending its precariousness. There is thus in artistic thought an alchemical component, which can be studied by starting at the bottom, from the problem of the studio, of the artist's technical methods, and so on. "As for the last part of the book, I envisage it as a typological relation of artistic thought to speculative thought, and also as an examination of the benefits which contemporary spirituality can obtain from the former: the recovery of the individual person, of purity, of nature and of material. In this way I also make the connection with my previous book. In Picturesque and Melancholy

127 the problem of nature appeared in its negative aspect, while here nature appears in its positive aspect, with its magic." "I shall deal first," begins Noica, "with the artists that you have chosen as paradigmatic for this type of knowledge. Goethe will indeed serve you well for all three of the characteristics which you distinguish in artistic thought. But along the line of globalism you must also deal with pantheism, something to which I shall return when I touch on each of your characteristics separately. As far as Leonardo is concerned, I see in him above all the splendor of the mechanism, something which the sciences have lost sight of: with Leonardo we find a splendor of the mechanism from before the sciences. But I have reservations about Klee. Don't you find van Gogh more interesting? With Klee there is too much experiment, while with van Gogh everything is truth. "Now I want to touch on your three steps: the cosmogonic, the prophetic and globalism. As far as the problem of cosmogony is concerned I have to declare myself innocent with intent. I have deliberately ignored the problem, because it seems to me that it stifles and buries the mind. In cosmogony, the mind is, along with man himself, only one element among many, and once brought down to that level it becomes negligible. Ontology is sufficient for me, as long as it implies the cosmogonic as a particular case. In the artistic field, the prophetic speaks to me much more. "I would like the anchor in the future that the artist possesses to be thrown by visual artists and not by musical natures. You know that my obsession is to rehabilitate the individual, not as something clumsy but as the individual invested with the power of the general. So I leave behind the heavens (the general) to see them reflected in our waters. If musical natures triumph in the end, they will rehabilitate the general, the angelic, in the field of art, and not the human type of the individual. Visual art, in contrast, with its inclination towards the individual, can, and indeed constantly does, counter the obsession with seeking laws, with following only realities of a general order. In fact the greatest thinkers remain in the service of the individual even when they are seeking laws. What was Aristotle trying to grasp with his ten categories, if not the individual, the being of xi, of 'some thing'? Even the mathematicism of the neo-Kantian Cohen ends up by putting Kantianism in the service of experience, of a determined concrete. For him infinitesimal calculus is the way of implanting the infinite in the finite. And nowadays, the sciences of the mind have arrived in the situation of wanting to dominate those of nature, finding again the idiomatic, the individual, the 'fleeting moment.'

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"So now I ask this: do you have an organ, as a visual artist, for the concrete of tomorrow? For music, if it allows us to sense a future, does it by dematerializing. And the body, the individual, is more than just 'brother pig'; it is the helper of the soul, as in that Romanian legend according to which the soul, leaving the body at death, turns and kisses it from head to foot, thanking it for all its help. "Finally I come to globalism. Let me tell you what I think about globalism and pantheism together, still starting from the individual and the idiomatic. I do not believe there is a rupture between epistemology and logic, on the one hand, and hermeneutics on the other. The idiomatic becomes transmissible when you reveal its form. Each thing is found within its form, and perhaps we do not sufficiently appreciate the labors of criticism and hermeneutics which struggle to render this form of the individual transmissible. There is thus also a republic of forms at the bottom, with hermeneutics, just as there is one at the top, with logic. And if you gradually appropriate and take in the forms from which hermeneutics starts out, you obtain, at the extreme, a theory which leaves behind form as individual form and ends up by freeing the general. It is a slow passage from hermeneutics to logic and vice versa, a gradual procession in both directions. Where the mind is concerned, everything is on a road from the bottom to the top and from the top to the bottom, and not just a one-way ladder like Jacob's. "I am saying all this so that you may understand why I am frightened by your third chapter, that on globalism. Globalism destroys this double procession in my vision of angels who descend and become fireflies and people who climb up to become angels. Globalism, which is basically pantheism, loses sight of both descent and ascent: everything is in everything; order is given, not sought; and seeking remains only on the poetic level. "The part is ennobled by the whole, but it cannot rise to the level of the whole. The trouble with pantheism is that it both ennobles and degrades the part. Do you arrive then at the monstrous vision of Goethe, that only the totality of men signifies man? In that case what was the purpose of Jesus? So I am afraid that you may fall into pantheism with your globalism. "However, apart from all that, I am glad that, although you say that you always start out from an experience which belongs to you, you are not preoccupied with yourself anymore in your book; you have escaped the clutches of the little chap inside you. You say that this too is a problem of yours, but this time it is the problem of your wonder, of thaumazein, which is the starting point of any

129 true work. So you have the strength to purify yourself by forgetting yourself. For purification is precisely this: the power to cleanse yourself from the dirt of your own narrow self. And you do it decently, unostentatiously, with an immediate wonder which may lead you to an essential knowledge of European man, or perhaps even of the man of the future."

Saturday,

22nd November

1980

Three days have gone by, and my preface to the Letter on "Humanism" is still not coming together. The whole scenario of the Letter revolves around three terms: Sein, Seindes and Dasein. It's quite a task trying to explain them in terms that can be understood by anyone. Noica suggests that I explain "being," Sein, starting from the twofold meaning which it has in the history of philosophy, and which Heidegger himself mentions, of both "essence" and "existence," showing that Heidegger takes it as "essence," adopting the sense which traditional philosophy has abandoned in favor of that of "existence." Basically what we find in Heidegger is a disguised Platonism, as he no longer seeks ein Wahres, "something true," but rather die Wahrheit, or truth itself, just as Socrates does not ask what a beautiful girl is, but what beauty is. The idea does not satisfy me. I need something more striking, less cold and technical, something simple and clear. Secolul 20 is not a philosophy journal. I am thinking rather along the lines of a stylistic category, of placing Heidegger in the class of giants of modern thought, as one w h o takes u p an extraordinary burden, going against the grain of the whole consecrated tradition of philosophy, and thus marking a major turning point, such as Kierkegaard, Marx or Nietzsche also dreamt of. All of these, including Heidegger, have set out to shift humanity from some long-held habit, either by recovering an origin, or proclaiming a future time. Kierkegaard attacked the habit of institutionalized belief, which had lost the nerve of its New Testament origins; Marx attacked the habit of history lived as a great experience of servitude; Nietzsche that of a pseudo-human species, from which we had to separate ourselves somehow "by active forgetting"; and Heidegger that of pseudothought, as the West had c o m e to think a simulacrum of being in place of being itself, a being which had become an outlet for technique and practice. They all chastized humanity for the situation in which it had arrived, and tried to set it back on a path which it had

130 lost, or had not yet found. There is something titanic, heroic and romantic, but also something Utopian and quixotic, even crazy about all of them. They all stand alone in the face of some twenty centuries of history. And they are the great modern worriers of humankind. Meanwhile Noica has finished reading the translation of the Origin of the Work of Art. During our morning walk he told me that it is a remarkable performance. "Es ist eine Leistung, aber nicht eine Schöpfung. You cannot delay anymore in your performances, however spectacular they may be. You have demonstrated, or demonstrated to yourself at least, that you can walk the tightrope. Now it is time to stop and take up quantity again, continue your readings, and above all write your Symbolism of Limit. We shall talk about that in the evening. I would like to say something else just now. Reading the Origin again, with the problem of the earth, of Erde, and recalling the interview which Heidegger gave in Spiegel, with that passage which Gabi quotes in his introductory study to the Ursprung, about how when he saw images transmitted from the moon Heidegger was terrified, I thought what a sorry state some people can finish up in at the end of a life of thought. If your name is Heidegger or Cioran, you have no business lapsing into groans and laments with the terror of some Sicilian peasant. How can you exclaim, like Cioran, 'A quoi bon avoir quitté Coasta BoaciiF Or how can you be afraid when you see people on the moon? I imagine it was the same when fire was first discovered. Some pessimistic old fellow or other must have risen from his slumber to say, Can't you see the trouble that is lying in wait for us? If that stuff gets into the hand of a child the whole forest could go up in flames, and what'll we do then, eh?' All these catastrophic visions annoy me. To be quite sincere I don't believe at all in the Great Catastrophe, and I have my arguments. Humanity, this great animal, this great collective individual ought to sense if it's standing at the threshold of the end, or indeed experiencing it already. When you drown you have a moment of supreme recollection of your life, an illumination which comes to you in the last moment. If we were really drowning, as so many believe, if it were true that 'only a god can save us now' as Heidegger declared, it is impossible that we should not feel something, that we should not experience the convulsion before the end, that we should not recollect our history. But I can look at it another way too. Let us say that, with the year 2000, we are approaching the threshold of the end. If so, we should still be happy. It's quite something to be the last generation of humanity, isn't it?"

October to December 1980

3rd October 1980 Whenever Petru's case comes to my mind, I always meditate on the unfulfilled destinies in our culture. How many elements contribute to such a lack of fulfillment? Leaving on one side the problem of conditions, of the major external inhibitory factors, and considering only the interior nature of the individual faced with a cultural task—which he assumes and imposes on himself after a fair examination of the trajectories of the culture to which he belongs—two distinct types of failure can be identified. One, which is nonetheless a glorious failure (and not the most common in this part of the world), lies in an exacerbated consciousness of one's own destiny. It appears in the unpleasantly constructive form of the will for the great work, or, in philosophy, the will for system. Among the Germans the typical case is that of Hartmann (see Heidegger's comments on him, on his going from stop to stop like a tram), and in our culture it is that of Blaga, with his artificial monumentality (the work seen as "temple" of the person, construction for the love of construction). In this category—the "glorious" one—of lack of fulfillment, destiny is thought of to an excessive extent as the selfrealization of the ego, with the work becoming an act which is calculated quantitatively in relation to the "fulfillment of life." Blaga's Trilogy of Values, for example, is a tired work, which seems like an exterior realization, a sort of wager with himself carried to its conclusion, while his Trilogy of Knowledge seems to be the only one which conveys the enthusiasm of spontaneous ideas. In the former trilogy the author does not attain the condition of a simple medium through which ideas pass, and his own presence is felt excessively, shifting the accent from the work to its creator. The other form of lack of fulfillment—the one which is standard among us—comes from the absence of a firm sense of one's own

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destiny, that is to say, from the incapacity to think of each cultural gesture as an element in an overall coherence. The vice here is precisely the lack of "construction." Your life becomes a setting for happenings and events. You let yourself be directed from outside, without selecting from what is offered in relation to the unique articulation of your own projects. This loss of oneself in minor and occasional activities (chronicles, short pieces in journals, radio broadcasts, prefaces, translations proposed by others—all these forms of annexation to the "happenings" of the cultural climate) represents the current mode of our lack of fulfillment. I observe with fascination the spectacle of Petru's lifelong waste, the waste of a man who has all the potentialities and all the neuroses that there are in the cultural sphere. Tens of pathways abandoned as soon as they have been tried out, in most cases closed in response to some slight social command or under an uncontrolled impetus. Under conditions of inner strength, the temptation to such a waste would have given rise to a multifaceted activity of Renaissance type. And then there is all the drama which you experience because of such a pulverizing, once you have passed through the first phase of maturity! The tempting pathways multiply, and the effect of chaos increases. You are continually attempting a "decisive stroke" to overturn some consecrated image. This was what happened with his last book. I recall how Petru came to Paltinif two years ago, nervous to the point of neurosis, to listen to Noica's opinion, an opinion which he appreciated highly without feeling the need to take any notice of it, and it is as if I can still see him gather himself together out of the fear of his lack of fulfillment, out of the fog of all his repressed uncertainties and pride, raising himself in front of us and confronting us with this Act of his, this ersatz destiny.

5th October 1980 The "corrupt" condition of the genius occurs in small modern communities (an obsessive theme in Kierkegaard's Journal), that is to say, in a socius which is not in the habit of meeting the out-ofthe-ordinary, except in the form of power and in the more degraded form of the event. In these conditions the out-of-theordinary which is hardest to bear, and is thus repressed, is the genius, as he lacks both the immunity enjoyed by power and the air of normality which tradition has conferred on it.

135 Where there exists a tradition of the genius, as there was in Goethe's Germany, or in some of the Greek cities—"Other peoples have had saints or sages; the Greeks had geniuses," said Nietzsche— the genius b e c o m e s himself the "normal out-of-the-ordinary," w h o is needed by his contemporaries as the mediator between themselves and a superior order. To have the "culture of the genius" means being able to recognize with joy one who is intangibly superior to you, accepting his appearance as an occasion to be raised above yourself, not discontented that someone else has got there first, but rejoicing that, together with him, you may get there too. When this culture of the genius exists, when the genius lives not in martyrdom but in jubilation, like a domesticated god, his contemporaries experience a peaceful self-transcendence. What then can be m o r e elevating, in this strict sense, than to be present in the train of Empedocles or at the dinner imagined by Mann in his Lotte in Weimar, where Goethe talks of the being of a mineral? Marquez has an extraordinary story in which a winged angel (the symbol of the out-of-the-ordinary) falls, during a storm, into a peasant's yard. At first it is adored by the whole village, before becoming an object of curiosity (with the owner of the orchard charging an entry fee), and ending up, void of all content, among the hens in the yard, where in the peasant's mind it belongs on ornithological grounds.

9th October

1980

Every diary tries to cancel out the rather clandestine character of the happenings of life, tending to introduce them into a collective consciousness and memory, with the secret goal of redeeming them from all that is fatally subjective, transient, and, for others, uninteresting. For my relationship with Noica to b e c o m e more than just a happening in life, it is necessary in the first place that it should move forward into the exemplary and objective zone of the mind, and so enter into the privileged space of the relationship between play and spectator. However, the paradox lies in the fact that exemplarity may only be obtained by way of exceptionality, for in the world of the mind every future rule has an exception at its origin. No mystery could ever b e represented if it were consumed within the space of the usual categories of the human: it is precisely the extraordinary which produces in others the need and the urge to imitate it.

136 Secondly, it is necessary that this happening in life, which bears within itself the seeds of exemplarity, should be transformed into a document of the mind, thus becoming something set down and recorded. But for this, it would be enough to have a permanent mental alertness and a simple tenacity—the primordial capacity of any evangelist, of the biographer of Ignatius or of Eckermann, and the one which alone was sufficient to isolate a unique experience and draw it out from the fundamental lack of distinction which presides over the actions of life. Is something more not possible? What is dissatisfying in Eckermann's diary is precisely the fact that the author is no more than a documentarist, a partner without destiny in an adventure on which he can only look decently. He is a character without ambitions, who neither seeks nor finds himself, the mere subject of an admiration which leaves him only the freedom to record. In these pages, in contrast, there is a twofold movement: piety, which is a form of unconditional submission and which shifts the emphasis from yourself to the other, gradually withdrawing and giving way to a seeking which reorients the entire scenario and transforms imitation and admiration into a diversion designed to lead to the installation of a new ego. This pride, which is both pagan and modern, generates a sort of mystery in which the welcoming ego does not yield itself except for the sake of its self-finding. Today my work on Andrei's last book came out. The form in which it was published is the result of accumulated cuts, some accepted by me while others were introduced after I had seen the proofs, and so without my will. I have made a list of the passages suppressed by George Ivajcu, and see in each of his options a fragmentary illustration of what might with time become a free-standing branch of the sociology of culture: the pathology of culture. What role can the editor of a journal play in this cultural morpho-pathology? If he functions coherently in this universe, then by a careful analysis of his interventions we should be able precisely to circumscribe a symptom of the illness or indeed the malady itself. For example, from the sentence: "There followed six years in which the author himself learned to keep silence...," Iva§cu has cut: "in which the author himself learned to keep silence." What phenomenon of cultural pathology does this suppression point to? In the world of the mind, silence can have at least the following significances: 1. Dialogue, as a form of movement of the mind, is an alternation of speech and silence. Not knowing how to keep silence

137 means, in these conditions, holding your mind in one place, maintaining a foolish monologue, revolving within the finite circle of your own mind. It means verbal hemorrhage, logorrhea. 2. Silence is, in another sense, an autodidactic principle, a necessary step in every Bildung or paidee. It is the period of "delivery of goods," of spiritual regeneration, recharging of batteries, and so on. In any cultural biography there must be moments when you do not produce, but only consume culture, when you must keep silence. Failing to keep silence in this case means tautologizing, beating time on the spot, dying from the inability to renew your own substance. 3. Silence can also appear either as a form of recognition of powerlessness in the face of the task of speaking the essential, or as a recognition of the fact that you have nothing essential to say. Heidegger writes: "Before speaking, man must listen again to the voice of Being, at the risk that under the sign of this demanding call he may have little, and seldom anything at all to say. Only in this way is the priceless character of its essence restored to the word, and to man a place to live in the truth of being." So failing to keep silence in this case means remaining on the surface of things, speaking superfluously, introducing inflation into the verbal space. 4. Silence can be a form of dignity of the mind, a form of protest. You go into silence when those around you are speaking too much and unworthily. Failing to keep silence in this case means participating in the spread of the immorality of the word. 5. Finally, "learning to keep silence" may be understood as a behavioral corrective based on negative experience of the effects of speech. Silence thus becomes the expression of acquired wisdom translated into prudence. In conditions of cultural pathology, any polysemic context is preventively suppressed. The "supervising" authority no longer makes the effort to fix the meaning: as soon as the discourse presents the least trace of polysemy it is suppressed, in view of the possibility, however slight, that the only meaning which arises in the reader's mind will be the one which is (however vaguely) "subversive." The whole fantail of meanings is sacrificed in order to prevent the appearance of a single guilty meaning. Whether you have understood or not is no longer an issue. Seeking the intention, and thus pinning down the meaning, has always been an uncertain and risky operation. ("How do we really know that that is what he was thinking?") The cautious, safe, efficient method is to eliminate the source of the ambiguity. For example, in the case above the context of the article makes it clear that the appropriate meaning is number (2), that of a

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silence with didactic properties, of an accumulative and regenerative silence. But for as long as meanings (4) and (5) exist, the polysemic utterance is suppressed in the interests of prevention. In conditions of cultural pathology a good editor thus has to cultivate suspicion in a professional manner. He must be in a permanent state of alarm and see in every author a little devil who is out to trick him at every turn with the aid of words. The ridiculous is thus assimilated; being on the lookout always creates its own phantasms, and this poor invalid begins terribly to resemble those characters who always keep one eye shut—the paradoxical eye of the lookout—in a world of suspects which is generated by their own delirium. The phenomena of the sickening of a culture must be explained principally by the canceling of the relative autonomy which any culture needs in order to be healthy. The pathology of culture is a particular case of heteronomy, a society ends up relating to culture exactly as people in general relate to nature: by interventions which permanently upset its autonomous feedback systems. For any form of existence which functions on an organic model, self-regulation is a supreme principle: outside interventions are fatal. A culture loses its organic quality when it is unable to control its own development on the basis of "natural selection," which here means in the first place the spontaneous recognition of cultural values in their immanence. Just as nature becomes sick when it is no longer able to evacuate rotting material, so in the world of culture pathology is unleashed by external inhibition of the function of elimination or devouring of cultural "waste," of non-value. The culture in question becomes a sort of pestilential organism, in which what is sick and putrid eliminates all that is of authentic value. The inhibition of natural selection penetrates the universe of culture from the moment that it affects the act by which this universe is constituted: "staff selection." It is a sort of congenital illness, which results in a simulacrum of cultural life. When, at a certain point, for example, there was felt to be a need for a purging of the research structure—something which from the point of view of the immanence of values was absolutely necessary—the selection was made, almost without exception, precisely contrary to the principle of immanence, heteronomically. Thus a pathogenic environment is consecrated as the environment of culture. All that emerges from it will bear the marks of the sickness: its journals, and so on, will be sick products. Hence appears a pathology of the cultural industry: the socalled Kulturbetrieb is expected to be profitable in conditions in which its products are undigested and so unsaleable. Criticism, that

139 self-consciousness of any culture, its supreme form of feedback, is infected in its turn by the sickness so that it may be recorded— according to the scenario of this extended metaphor—in the chapter on "illnesses of the nervous system": heading towards schizophrenia, it praises what should be criticized, and vice versa. Of course, this whole picture is stretched to the limit and somewhat "idealized," for if all these cultural sicknesses were to infect us wholly and permanently then evil would take on the crystal purity of the folktale world. But whatever is still life, health or value always institutes itself in struggle, feebly, sometimes haphazardly, at other times by feints and excessive maneuvers or, quite simply, coming to the point of madness—the madness of normality.

10th October 1980 Any book, once born, conceals within itself its own recipe. You can become an author once you have found this out. That is to say you can become a diligent multiplier of your own mental schemas, shifting them, more or less arbitrarily, from one material to another. I was tempted, for example, following this line of exteriority, to follow up The Tragic with a book on the theme of the symbol. I could have amassed books this way like beads on a string, and I could even have lived with the feeling that I was working hard. But it seemed to me more interesting to dig down to the root of a nascent thought and so give a sense of necessity to my interests. The more maniacal this action de puiser—schopfen—becomes, the more purifying and fertile it is. Most authors never descend into the night of an idea. There is always in culture a mystery of the beginning, which is manifested in the fact that any beginning is haphazard. You can start anywhere and indeed that is what you do. However, this freedom of the beginning requires to be canceled through the constraining character of the way you continue. Literary or art historians in fact never continue; they are always beginning, thus in a sense accepting to live as happenings dictate. "Think, when you write, of your ideal reader, or of the person you most respect." Who was Noica thinking of when he fell into the metaphysics of the shepherd and of the "Carpathian arc"? God, it would be perfectly innocent, apart from being so geschmacklos, if it were not for the fact that one can recognize there, as in a distorted reflection, the overheated or cynical minds of the professional whiners. What a strange, and for him compromising, meeting. But

140 for us, Noica must always remain something else: the urge and the science to take a simple and silent step into the light.

17th October 1980 Now that everything has been given its public significance, I am tempted at times to put on record those "tales of white crows" in which I figure as a witness, and sometimes a false hero: grotesque assemblies in which destinies were to be made and unmade, with wild hatreds bursting out from behind gilded smiles, with long executions prepared in the shadows—the whole gathering of professionals of evil, united by the inferior bond of their frustrations and impostures, brought by the twisted wave of life into the dramatic situation of having to choose between an honest humility befitting their lack of schooling and the smashing of everything superior, as a collective and hopeless solution of survival. I am sometimes tempted, that is, to circumscribe this flinging of spit, through the play of hatred and circumstance, on the face of any action which had nothing on its side except the "delicate forces of eternity." But I would be wrong to do so. When Odysseus descends into the Underworld, the shades of the dead crowd around him for the blood that they need in order to come back to life for a moment, to return for a moment to the word. All these bloody speeches are false creations; each shade drinks the blood, speaks, and then goes back to where it came from, to nothingness. Every true diary should be economical with its blood, should be careful not to touch with the mind, by naming them, those who have nothing on their side except the presumptive being of evil. I should dius take care not to drag behind me that sinister human debris which I knew then, and to fear, transfixed by a magical shiver, that its mere invocation could set up, once again, the reign of evil and death. ("While still alive," I.T. used to say of them, "they are dead without knowing it. Only their nails and hair still grow.") On page 222 of De l'inconvénient d'être né, Cioran presents a portrait of Noica: "D. is incapable of assimilating Evil. He recognizes its existence, but cannot incorporate it into his thinking. Even if he went to Hell and back, no one would know it, so high does he remain, in all he says, above anything that can harm him. "You would seek in vain in his ideas for the slightest trace of the trials he has been through. Sometimes he has the reflexes, but they

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are only reflexes, of a wounded man. Opaque in the face of the negative, he does not realize that all that we possess is nothing but a capital of non-being. And yet a good many of his gestures reveal a demonic spirit. Demonic without knowing it. He is a destroyer dulled and sterilized by Good." But seen from closer up, his demonism takes on the form of a cultural fanaticism. Noica believes in culture without leftovers. In other words, he cannot accept that ultimately we are only creating a diversion designed to conceal from us the pathetic situation of finding ourselves alone before the absence of God. Suffering from an excess of health, he ends up being mutilated in reverse. By his very nature, Noica is incapable of thinking of the mind in the tension involved in its insertion into the finite, and of thus bringing it down to the worldly proportions of finite conscious beings. He behaves like one who, in his enthusiasm to keep moving, fails to see that the ground on which he was able to tread has come to an end. Closed to the reality of the precipice, he would not even be surprised by the fall, or, faced by its imminent occurrence, he would somehow be able to produce the sophism necessary to transform falling into an exotic form of walking. Cioran's refusal of thought and the way in which he contests our right to be conscious of the relative and illusory dimension of culture go hand in hand. Noica's authority is real when he sets his culturalism in opposition to the various varieties of the unpolished mind, making culture the supreme form of mental hygiene. But it becomes demonic, tyrannical and negative when it replaces careful lucidity with the calm serenity, troubled by nothing, of a mind which rejoices without having any ultimate motive for doing so.

10th December

1980

There are cultivated and intelligent people who can always find something clever to say on any subject and in any situation. They may be brilliant, charming, refined to a fault, but all this, in their case, is merely the garlanding of a culturally routine mind, which has not achieved a point of view on the world which it is able to apply in a unitary, sovereign and coherent manner to every detail it finds there. Perhaps this is the difference between speculative thought and the "simple" well-bred culture of any refined intellectual. Translation, when it is taken up with humility, as a pathetic entry into silence by submission to the words of another, resembles the labors of heroes in the royal stables.

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"So much nonsense is talked about pride—and Christianity has even made us feel that it is a sin. In fact: he who seeks and obtains from himself something great must feel that he is very far from those who do not do so. This distance is interpreted by others as a 'high opinion of himself,' but he himself only knows it as ceaseless labor, struggle and conquest, day and night: of all this the others know nothing." (Nietzsche)

22nd December 1980 The third day since my operation. I am alone in the ward, and, despite being perforated with tubes, I have a paradoxical sense of wellbeing. I can feel my cultural appetites reviving. I open Heidegger's Vorträge und Aufsätze at random, and land, astonishingly, on the following page from Wer ist Nietzsches Zarathustra?-. "Towards the end of the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra there is a fragment entitled 'The Convalescent' (Der Genesende). The convalescent is Zarathustra. Genesen, 'to heal,' is one and the same word as the Greek veo|iou, voaioq. The meaning is: 'to return to oneself ...The 'convalescent' is the one who recollects himself with a view to returning, returning to his own destiny. The convalescent is on the road towards himself, so that he may say of himself that he is." These lines seem to be "addressed" to me all the more as in them I find again that nostos which, ten years ago, I considered to be a fundamental metaphysical motif, hoping to build around it an entire "metaphysics of return." Now, when I feel myself to be so benevolently placed under the force of this "return of destiny," I regret that I did not carry the idea through to a conclusion. In sickness or suffering the body is immediately transformed from our friend into the most opaque enemy of the sole principle of continuity which exists in us: the mind. Only then, in this advance installment of death, do you feel how much imperfection is concealed in the secret places of a species which we praise as we climb perpetually over its surface. The problem is that in such circumstances it is no longer a matter of the poor narrow self, which Noica can never cease from mocking, but of an atom of spirituality, of a principle of persistence of which we are dispossessed from the position of a perishable formation.

19th to 25th January 1981

Monday, 19th January

1981

I can feel my diary starting to lapse into a certain monotony. It is beset by the repetition of exterior business: "I am back in Paltini§ with Andrei...," and so on. However, this time I am not with Andrei, but with Sorin Vieru, to whom I have been bound for almost fifteen years by a friendship which works itself out capriciously, in unpredictable doses, a friendship made up of a mixture of admiration and sadness, and I know not what strange sensation of injured porcelain. Sorin Vieru was the first to fall "victim" to Noica, after the latter entered the Center for Logic in 1965. Out of all the young people there, Noica latched onto him. He taught him Greek by opening Aristotle's Categories together and covering the grammar "live" as the rhythm of the text dictated. The formula suited Sorin, and, later, when the Plato edition was inaugurated, he was the only member of the team for volume I who did not have a degree in Classics. This did not prevent him from producing, with his rendering of Alcibiades I, one of the best translations of that tentative first volume. Noica hoped in time to turn him away from logic as a pure exercise for its own sake, or rather to lead him back to it after a long detour through metaphysics. And so began that extraordinary private course on Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind (1967,1 think), in which Noica caught me up too, after meeting me in passing in the entrance hall of Wald's home, where I had come for a moment to take a book, and Noica was just timidly putting on his galoshes in preparation for leaving. He was probably glad to see "a real youth" (I was no more than twenty-five, the age up to which he considered that cultural coaching could be most fruitful), and a few days later he contacted me through Sorin, inviting us to visit him weekly at his home (he stayed in Berceni at the time) for the course on Hegel.

146 Sorin thus remains associated in my memory with the relationship which I then began with Noica, and I can only be sorry that one of the most refined speculative minds—someone who shone out in our discussions with a brilliance which put the rest of us into the shade, perhaps even Andrei, later on, when the three of us made up a seminar on the Metaphysical Meditations of Descartes—should have left us in time, enclosing himself within his field of logic, where he cannot live comfortably, suffering as he does from the fact that he has no more than ten people to listen to him, and attempting from time to time a desperate escape into poetry, essay writing, or some Platonic dialogue. In the person of Sorin, Noica continually came up against someone marked by a great propensity to hesitation. Basically it is the same pestilence which so often preys on our culture, that of those who refuse to "attack," letting life wash over them and maneuver them as it sees fit. Sorin is in fact an asthenic, haunted by a giftedness which is boycotted, indeed almost repressed, by his lack of confidence in himself, and so doing all he can to setde into the camp of those who live their defeat in a fictive and protective manner, before they have even entered the battle and known the thrill of coming to grips with the resistant material of something outside themselves. Afraid of all that he ought to take on, somewhat sickly and prone to make of his own dissipation and inertia the shield behind which he retires to suffer in hiding, he has ended up by declaring that he belongs to the race of "cultural consumers" and not that of the "producers," that he is more attracted to the idea of accumulating for his own pleasure than to writing, that he feels like a perpetual student, and is haunted by the thought of picking up Latin again and starting to learn Hebrew. He only agreed reluctantly to start the translation of Plato's logical dialogues, for volume VI of the edition, and just now, as I write this, I can hear him leafing through a GreekLatin edition of the Parmenides and noting down words. He is becoming nervous about tomorrow evening (indeed he has been intensely nervous since he arrived here), when Noica has "booked" him to tell us about his cultural destiny and to talk about what exactly he sees before him and what his "complete works" will be made u p of. I am amazed at Noica's stubborn refusal to accommodate himself to Sorin. After fifteen years he still confronts him with the rule of efficiency, while Sorin has settled under the lazier sign of the Orient, of a meditation which does not need to be converted at all cost into action and "cultural achievement." In any case I am expecting something spectacular from their meeting, as Noica is well into the adventure of logic, with the Letters, of which he has already published two in Viata Romaneasca.

147 Our twilight games were inaugurated by Noica. "I intend to speak today about the stage I have reached after the Treatise on Ontology. The greatest danger was to go into entropy, into 'thermic death.' Moreover, I recall that when I finished the Treatise Gabi asked me what I had left to do from then on, inviting me, I imagine, to prepare for a long vacation. Well, I am glad to see that I have only gone into entropy on the level of friendships, of affective relations—I do not feel capable of new friendships anymore— but not on that of culture. I still have the joy of the new; I can still read what appears in the world; I feel that I still have something to say; I can still learn new German words—I don't know if I told you that I have decided to pick out all the words I do not know from Schroff s dictionary, and that I have got as far as 'S.' "Two things have made me go on and find a new cyclical pattern and order. First of all, it is stupid, I say, to end your life with a fulfillment and not with something left over. The end should not catch you frozen with a labor accomplished. You should not put your hands on your chest and provoke the end by waiting for it. It is more fitting not to expect it, to be caught in the middle of a gesture. As with any problem, which is true only if, once it is resolved, something is left over, so any true life should have something left over, not just a fulfillment. Secondly, I was hoping that after finishing the Treatise I might get someone like Carnap to say, 'There is nothing I can do: metaphysics makes sense.' And I do not think I have succeeded in this. Now I expect the Letters on Logic to consolidate my metaphysical positions. So there are two reasons why I go on resisting, and why I do not let myself get dragged into entropy. And I believe I have found a certain cyclical order: every two months I produce a chapter of Logic, a chapter of the Book of the Archei, and a fragment of my Diary of Ideas. "But perhaps Sorel will ask me how I have the courage to go down into the arena in which Aristotle and Russell did their exercise? Let me confess that I do it with humility, but without bashfulness. At my age I can no longer be bashful. So I go down humbly into the arena in which Aristotle and Russell achieved what they did, but I go there with the thought that they have nonetheless left some problems still open, that they have left enough space for me to enroll myself and present my little exercise. "But there is something else happening in this present stage. I feel more and more the need to prospect in the zones of the mind, of young minds; I feel the need to find again the flame of life at a time when my own extinction is beginning. Does this mean I am in search, indirectly, of my posterity? I do not know, but the

148 temptation to prospect, the inclination to seek spiritual deposits, is something which awakens in me from time to time. On this occasion I was provoked by a happening from outside. I have been asked several times to try to persuade Eliade to visit Romania, but in fact w e have him here already, not once but twenty-two times over. Romania today has twenty-two million inhabitants, and let us say that probably one young person in a million has genius. But for those twenty-two geniuses w e need trainers. I have brought a couple of pages to read to you, which I have entitled 'The Twenty-Two: or On Performance Culture.' If you think they work and you let me publish them, I shall send them to Marin Sorescu at Ramuri: A young French poet sent Valéry a manuscript of verses. Valéry read it and replied: "Sir, you have no talent. You may have genius, but I have no competence in such matters." But it is precisely in such matters that at least a few people, at the heart of a national culture, should have competence. For if w e have performance sport, which delights us as a spectacle and no more, so all the more must we have performance culture, which, whether it delights us or not, shifts the boulders in its path, and us with them. And to the extent that the performances of culture—whether in the realm of great inventions, of great ideas, forms of organization and social manifestation, or great artistic creations—are decisive for the affirmation and survival of peoples, it is well to reflect on the way in which they are produced. Some performances of culture are obtained without knowing. The Romanian language, along with a few others, is in itself a cultural performance. Certain forms of organization and manifestation of village life represented, in the past, a cultural performance. Folklore is sometimes a cultural performance at the ultimate level of creation. If w e are to believe that performances of culture are associated with a quality of inventive and creative genius, then these must be cases of a diffuse genius in action. But when the performances are no longer anonymous, as in our historical time, then the quality of genius is concentrated in individual people. How are we to discover it and take full advantage of it? In particular, how are w e to prepare young brains and make them bear fruit, just as w e make oil, gas, reeds and even rubbish profitable? It is probable that among the twenty-two million Romanians currently living there are twenty-two young people, one

149 in a million, who are gifted in an absolutely exceptional way. We do not need any more than that, in a country in which there is no lack of the intelligence and eagerness necessary to meet all the material and spiritual needs of the present day. But the question is not only how we find those twentytwo, but even more how we turn their virtuality into actuality. It would be simple enough to try the military approach: "All those who think they are exceptional—one step forward!" But we would find ourselves with too many candidates, and everything would have to start from the beginning again. And if Paul Valéry is right, and no one is competent in matters of genius, then we have no way of choosing from the many or from the few. Fortunately, however, Valéry's words are not conclusive— perhaps he himself had only talent and not genius—and other great cultural performers have said more encouraging things about detecting and taking full advantage of exceptional young people. Edison, if I am not mistaken, said that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. This changes everything. In this case outside intervention is not only possible; it even becomes obligatory—enter the coach. For it may be that everything in performance culture happens, as in performance sport, under the guidance of a coach. The coach indeed knows how to make someone perspire. Someone once complained to the manager of a great hotel in Switzerland about the person in the next room, who was playing the piano too much, and not even playing properly but just doing scales all the time. "That's Rubinstein," the manager explained. At over seventy, Rubinstein was still playing scales, still making himself perspire. You feel pity for some young girl or boy athlete who has to spend a good part of their "most beautiful years" (but are they really so beautiful if, as is so often the case, they do not provide a modeling for the rest of life?) as if they were under the rigors of some medieval order. And perhaps we would be filled with pity at the sight of a gifted youth condemned for life to the rigors of culture, especially as there is no certainty of the result, and you have to coach not just twentytwo but several hundred. But this is precisely the difference between the words of Valéry and Edison: the one would like to know at a glance who has genius, while the other says that it is only later, once the person has perspired for a long time,

150 that the miracle which contributes to the sending ahead of peoples and of history may show itself. And for this we need coaches. Teachers work with the rule, not the exception, and in any case they cannot devote themselves to a single disciple. And who else, even the incomparable institution of the family, has the competence and daring necessary? "Don't attempt too much," says the family to the young person. "Stay close to the shore if you want to be all right." But the coach is made of different stuff. Fond like a parent, as he is, of the young person, he says, "Throw yourself out into the stream; you won't drown." So where are our coaches? They are here already, aid they are certainly more numerous, in the field of culture, than those to be trained. It is the Romanian's vocation to be a coach. He has stayed on the edge for long enough throughout history and has seen how others have drowned. It is always easier to know how something should be done than to do it yourself. And anyway, good coaches might actually be those who have themselves achieved a performance. Professor Palade, the doctor who won the Nobel Prize, seems to have coached the team of the newly founded Institute of Biology in such a way as to give us the illusion that we might win another Nobel Prize some fine day. And Mircea Eliade could bring great orientalists into the world at any time, if we could convince ourselves that it was the duty of our country—the only one in Europe which is open culturally as much to the East as to the West—to give the world of tomorrow an exceptional team of interpreters; for spiritual interpretation demands a bit of genius too. But I am not thinking so much of exceptional coaches for exceptional young people, as of those great humble coaches, who are willing to attend to the growth of a stalk of wheat day by day. I once referred to them as the autumn rain which knows nothing of the harvest. If only we could find the good seed: just twenty-two grains! I listen to this text, in the ideas of which I have been growing for the last fifteen years, assimilating them and transforming them into a way of life, and I know not what spirit urges me to insubordination, like Alcibiades in his desire to escape from under the spell of the eiron of Socrates. A voice which I do not recognize rises in me and I hear myself saying, "Is it for us to withdraw the

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right to being from those who do not live culturally? You are affirming that the rest of humanity simply is not." "It is not I who withdraw that right: they deny it to themselves. They are content to live in statistics and sub-humanity. And I am not interested in statistics," replies Noica. "But you cannot reduce 'to be' to 'to live culturally'! That means suppressing the variety of humanity in the name of one ontological model and its ideal saturation. There is a to be' which is given by ethics, a heroism of honesty, not just a heroism of culture, which can end monstrously in the neglect of our obligation to open ourselves to others and to assume analogically the entire sphere of the human. In a moment in which the salvation of humanity as humanity is at issue, you cannot leave things just in the sphere of culture. After the Treatise you ought to write an Ethics, not a Logic. What we need is to create a new moral state of humanity, and not to save the mind in the niggardly form of those 0.1 percent who live culturally." "You are proposing, as I understand it, a doctrine of Seele and not of Geist." "I cannot see why Geist is unable to incorporate Seele. And why does die schône Seele have to be decreed to be a mere 'little soul' and sent off to the zone of non-being?" "You are speaking to me as Pierre Emmanuel used to do. When I said something similar to him he asked indignantly, 'Mais qu'estce que nous faisons avec l'épicier?' Well, allow me to reply 'hat we are not going to do anything with l'épicier, because the grocer is not, and he is not because he did not want to be, because he has done nothing in order to be. Are you going to end up by raising the problem in the ridiculous manner of that theology which at a certain time felt obliged to think about the salvation of mankind before the time of Christ? In the name of the false goodness which assigns the right to be in a universal way, humanity will die suffocated in its own rhythm of growth. What goodness is it that precipitates the world towards its own end?" "And what solution is it that proposes the preservation of humanity through its representatives of genius? All that remains is to consider that plagues and wars, and preferably some that know how to be selective, are a good thing, as they resolve the problem of to be in a 'natural' way." "No, that is not what I am proposing. I am proposing that the notion of goodness should be redefined, as it has become inoperable in the form that we know it. And to redefine goodness and obtain a 'new moral state of humanity' we need those 'twenty-two,'

152 one of whom might know how to do it. You can't dedicate yourself to the problem of the survival of the grocer, for the simple reason that he excludes himself, from the start, from living and being. After you have done nothing in order to be, what right have you to ask others to listen to you and to bend an ear to your grievance. L'épicier should be left to his own devices, as should Pierre Emmanuel, when he feels preoccupied with the problem of l'épicier." "I am not talking about the problem of the grocer. All I wanted to say is this: there is a human interval which does not fall into the precariousness of the subhuman, but does not share in the excellence of the genius either. And this interval is much too big to send it away into statistics and non-being. And there is something else: in the pure sphere of Geist, in which you move, there is no room to think of suffering, and, paradoxically there is no room to think of death either, which nevertheless constantly remains a scandal to the principle of continuity, and thus to mind itself. The serenity and optimism of your thinking threaten to evade problems which likewise belong decisively to the lot of humanity. Basically you live culture naturally, for you Geist has always been natural, and not the result of the coaching which you demand of others. And perhaps precisely because you have never made the journey from soul to mind—since you found yourself in mind from the very start—you cannot make soul a problem of mind, or even accept its imperatives, let alone its dignity." "My dear chap, perhaps you do not realize where all this goodness is taking you. Let me show you what Albert Schweitzer suffered, precisely because he was not capable of redefining goodness. He did not stop at goodness towards people, but,ended up taking everything into consideration, even the being of the snake or the insect. He was presumably vegetarian, but it is precisely here that we see the contradiction of goodness understood in this way. When an artificial method of photosynthesis is developed, people will look at us as we now look at cannibals. We shall be judged not only for the barbarity of raising brother calf or brother pig in order to eat them, but also for the barbarity of eating brother wheat. If we cannot find a way of redefining goodness, then we shall get into the aporia of a goodness which trips over its own comprehensiveness. But this redefinition can only be made from the positions of the mind and of culture. And I cannot refrain from quoting to every young person the words of a Latin writer (I forget who): Vita sine cultura, quasi imago mortis est."

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Tuesday, 20th January 1981 It is time for our morning walk. "My dear Sorel, I was saying to Andrei and Gabi last time that it is the people who have nothing to do who need immortality. They deserve to live on some green meadow of 'youth without age' hunting rabbits, as in the folktale. In contrast, someone who has something to do and has got on with it should die reconciled. Let me tell you that it is the same with some of the great peoples of the world and, if we bring the problem of limit into the discussion, I can distinguish three conditions: that of the Chinese people, that of the people of Israel, and that of the European peoples. "The Chinese people has lived willingly within a limit which limits. It erected a wall for itself beyond which it did not wish to pass. The wall is not a limit against which you push, because it is a self-imposed limit. It is a wall which is. But if you make a wall which you invest with being and you hide behind it, you end up by not being. You remain there for ever, but you are not. The Chinese people has lived eternity in its bad form. "The people of Israel has a wall which it does not want, but still does nothing to pass beyond it. The wall of the people of Israel is a wall which limits against their will, a wailing wall which is in fact everywhere, in Cracow as much as in Jerusalem. The people of Israel does not want to move its being from where it is, along with the wall. This wall, experienced in its negative aspect, as a wall of tears, is not attempted in the sense of transcending it. "Finally there is the condition of the European world, which has long had the sense of elastic limit, of limit which does not limit. But this world has ended up by Anglo-Saxonizing' itself. 'AngloSaxonizing' means the complete lack of limit. The Anglo-Saxons do not recognize limit. They are 'punctual,' reducing everything to their freedom as individuals. They have no wall, and thus they do not know the good sense of liberty—which includes limit and all— or that of eternity." Yesterday I borrowed from Noica the Autobiography of Ignatius of Loyola. It tells of a destiny provoked: in 1521 the young Loyola (twenty-six years old) is in the fortress of Pamplona, under siege by the French. Although there seems to be no way out for the Spaniards, the future saint persuades them not to surrender. In the course of an artillery confrontation, a bombard smashes one of his legs. He goes through several mutilating operations. The man of the world is out of the game. There follows a reorientation of his

154 vital energies. During his convalescence he reads the lives of the saints. Unable to imitate other men and surpass them, Ignatius begins to think of imitating the saints. He is to spend the rest of his life in this sacred competition. His first re-entry into the world after the Umwertung which has taken place in him is impressive: his new life's ideal is lived at first on the pattern of the old ideal of chivalry. Mounted on a mule, Ignatius heads for Montserrat. A Moor comes up behind him, and Ignatius tries to explain to him the meaning of the Immaculate Conception. The Moor accepts that such a thing is possible as far as conception is concerned, but not birth. They part. Ignatius, who relates to the Virgin as a knight to the lady he has chosen to serve, is full of remorse that he has been unable to defend her cause. He wants to catch up with the Moor and kill him with a stroke of his dagger. But he is uncertain if his new life's ideal allows such a resolution, and decides to let God manifest His will through the instinct of the mule: at the first crossroads the mule takes another road than that of the Moor. The saint's first vigil, at the altar of the Virgin in Montserrat, likewise takes a knightly form: one night without sitting or lying down, and another spent partly standing and partly kneeling. Our discussion comes round to the Autobiography. "It is a drama of man," says Noica. "See how, out of the three faculties of the mind—sentiment, intelligence and will—the impure one is will. Once will takes the first place, the person becomes unbalanced. And with Loyola it is precisely will that is the principal agent. Any great affirmation of the mind should be unstained by will. I don't mean that will should be absent, but that a good exercise of it means keeping it under control. Will, like the ethical in general, should be discreet: its existence should not be felt except when it is absent. That is why I can't stand Nietzsche: in the void of his philosophical consciousness nothing could appear but will, and will in its worst form, the will to power. Likewise, the ethical in general should not reach the point of virtuosity, but just that of an inner consistency in what you do. I very much like Kant's saying that the ethical is that behavior which ought to be done alone as if you were doing it in the community. I dislike behavior which sets itself up as 'ethics for others.' In any case I can't see how the authentically creative condition could fail to be also ethical. And when it so happens that this is not the case, the failing should be met with pity and not judgement. Pity is not the mere tolerance of a catholic smile cast over the whole world, but an overturning of the initial reaction and a way of not letting yourself be caught up in the play of the condemnable action. In fact judgement lowers you,

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because it gives you a self-assigned superiority. Pitié pour les forts, I say; you should have pity for the powerful, understand how they are torn up inside and so, in a second step, go beyond them." In the evening, Noica brings us some of his correspondence of the last few days: an article by a young man from Sighiçoara, a letter from Emil Cioran, etc. He reads the article to us. "When you write a book you need to have an idea, but when you write an article you need to have many ideas." From Cioran's letter of 22nd December 1980 I recall the following: "Ze six septembre tu m'écrivais: «J'ai l'espoir qu'on réinventera l'Europe...» De loin, cette perspective est concevable; non de près. Dans mes accès d'optimisme, je mise sur une dégringolade générale. Il faut bien s'accrocher à quelque chose. Vu d'ici, Pâltini§ paraît la dernière survivance du Paradis. Je suis bien puni d'avoir voulu à tout prix m'en éloigner." "I have no doubt that humanity will manage to recover, even if it does not succeed in the 21st century. What is serious is that people no longer have faith in their own future, and that they live in a foolish infinity: in the infinity of inventiveness, or of goodness—as I was saying yesterday—or in that of consumption. I amused myself this morning, on the way to the canteen, with alternative versions of Hobbes's saying about homo homini lupus. In the course of a discussion with Herder, who was presenting him with a project for an ideal society, Goethe replied: 'It might be so, but that will mean that each of us is the nurse of the other.' So we have homo homini curator. We have not got there yet, but if you allow me license I can say that we are in the stage of homo homini 'corruptor, ' of man who lives the foolish infinite of consumption. Everything corrupts us nowadays, goods and ideas alike. Even you are corrupting me with the books you brought here. But in contrast, I have no doubt that the 22nd century will be a good one for humanity, after the 21st has been one of purgatory, of recovery through cleansing from fear." I give Noica Bochenski's Introduction to the Logic of Authority, which we have translated for the opening set of the "O" collection. Thomas translated it in two weeks (effectively in six days, translating at a rate of some twenty typed pages each day!), and Sorel, alongside Plato's Parmenides, is working just now on a few pages of preface, which he will read to us when they are finished.

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Wednesday, 21stJanuary

1981

I am approaching the completion of my Preliminary clarifications to the Phaedrus; I have finished writing the paragraphs regarding "authenticity," "the period of the dialogue's composition," and "the characters." All that is left are the notes on the text. There is a huge literature, of which I only have access to a small part. All I can do is to try to systematize the existing material. In fact I am "moving potatoes from one crate to another," as Noica said when he heard of my notes on Plato. The labor pains at the birth of each volume of Plato are becoming greater and greater. There is no real team. None of us is working only on Plato, and no one is ready to dedicate ten years of his life to the edition, giving up his own books and projects. I have decided to give up translation, and so see this dialogue, and the volume of Heidegger, rather as overdue debts; I feel the need to liquidate everything, and get on with peratology for once. "Philologizing" around Plato, I have come to realize how it is possible to arrive at the "technicizing" of the humanist disciplines, at the rupture between a preoccupation with values and the silencing of their formative function. What I fail to understand, however, is how an author, or a creator in general, can live in complete disjunction from the ethical-aesthetic load of his work. How is it possible to say that the shadow which he casts over the work is of no interest? Can the quality of the shadow be of no interest? Or, in other words, how can you do humanistic studies without feedback? Even the job of the woodcutter has a formative function. Socrates and Plato knew very well the meaning of this supreme accord. I am tempted to paraphrase Plato: "But tell me, Crito, can we imagine a wise man of old times or a great tragedian teaching the people what is right, beautiful and good, while himself behaving like a common scribe, despising and abasing in every day of his life all that he has said and written, or if he is a painter or sculptor in stone, everything of value that he has aroused in us by the strokes of his brush or his chisel?" This is Sorin's evening. "Sorel," says Noica, breaking up some Carpati cigarettes to fill his pipe, "will give us a report, not a report on his activity, but a report on his position: where are you and where are you going?" "I am at the stage of quantity, so I am, in fact, nowhere. I am merely living a belated youth, a celebration of ideas: I have tried out many things and I have wandered a lot. All the same, what have

157 I achieved up to now? I have insisted on syllogistics, which has given me satisfaction. I can say that among the logicians in this country, my small contribution to syllogistics is recognized. In any case, syllogistics suits me: it is something with perfectly defined borders, perfectly adapted to my modest mathematical powers. What does syllogistics give us? Not very much, but it is 'very nice.' If I had remained with syllogistics, I would have been like a clockmaker assembling timepieces in a little workshop in the age of the electronic clock. However, I set out to wander through modal and deontic logic, in which I presented a few things in Germany, with Menne and Kutschera. Unfortunately, at Regensburg one of my papers on modal logic fell flat, because, unknown to me, what I was presenting had already been done. I felt like an inadequately documented provincial, but above all I was annoyed that I had taken pains over a problem which had already been solved. In the field of modal logic I have also written a popularizing article, which I see is very much cited among linguists. "Deontic logic opens the field for me towards practical reason, norm and action. What is important for the historian of deontic logic is that systems of norms contain mismatches, contradictions between formalism and interpretation. This is the challenge for anyone who spends time on deontic logic nowadays. There is thus the full possibility of constructing projects for adequate systems, which are consistent and non-paradoxical. And on the other hand, a field of action for the logician opens up here due to the fact that normative authority can contradict itself. From the logical point of view this contradiction is very interesting. You can try either to resolve the contradictions, or to study the situation of the person who is subject to contradictory norms. "However, what I can say in conclusion is that I have gone along the easy road of logic. The difficult road is associated with the new mathematical apparatus: category theory, topoi, lattices, vectorial spaces, all of which have burst in on logic as instruments. The apparatus of logic is renewed every thirty years or so, and we are now at such a moment of renewal. This moment also places me at a point of decision: should I take this road or not? It would take several years, and I am not sure if my abilities are up to it. You asked me where I am placed. I am placed in front of this problem. And in logic I am placed in a position which is certainly not that occupied by the avant-garde in the field. In the logic of today there are far more extraordinary adventures in preparation, in which, however, from my present position, I have no way of participating. You should not understand from this that it is not possible to function

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fully in modal logic, or even in syllogistics. But these are readyformed fields, not newly discovered theories, where great ambitions can find their outlet." "What are we to understand from all you have said?" asks Noica. "That you are made in pieces? Or that logic integrates and unifies you? With this question I am facing you with your destiny as a scholar. Why pass to mathematics for the sake of logic, when you could move with your logic into the philosophy of culture? You are the only one of us who could achieve such a thing. To go along the line of the philosophy of culture using the means of modern formalism would be, I believe, the only way of saving both logic and yourself. Every logician, when he sets out on the road of no return of logic, becomes a Pierrot: a creature half black and half white. If it is pursued without a cultural opening, logic cracks you. Menne redeems himself by going to church regularly, Bochenski by trying to annex logic for Catholicism. You write poetry, without completely recognizing yourself there either. Why do you behave as if you were made in pieces, when your huge cultural appetites allow you to unify yourself in your being? You notice that nowadays every discipline, and philosophy above all, wants to cover everything. It is a miracle that in the world of science there are cultural consciousnesses now arising who want to take account of everything. Why don't you do it with logic? Why accept the situation of fellow traveler? Why be Pylades when you could be Orestes? "Now let me tell you where I think the logic of today goes wrong. Formalism passes from indifference to the world to indifference to consciousness. And doesn't it drain everything when it is unable to find consciousness again? You know Escher's pictures of the stairs which go nowhere. 'But look at them. They are stairs, aren't they?' say the logicians. But stairs which go nowhere are no stairs at all. "I like to understand the history of the world not in a Hegelian way but through the Kantian table of categories: the necessary, the real, the possible. Until the time of the Greeks it was the necessary that predominated. The pre-Hellenic world lay under nature, under the gods, and, with the tyrants, even under men. The Greeks entered the real, a historical real which I understand as an entry into adequacy: man with nature, man with history, man with man. And we live today in the possible, in a new type of inadequacy, experienced inside ourselves this time, not outside, as it was in the historical age of the necessary. But alongside the real, positive possible—the possible of 'it might be'—there is a bad form of the possible, and it is precisely from this possible that the logic of today

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takes its substance. It is the possible of which Bachelard speaks, the possible of 'Pourquoi pas?': 'Why not this way too? Why not system X too?' Logic no longer has any way back, and can no longer get out from under its holy indifference, for as long as it thinks of the possible in the form of 'why not?' In culture the great things are those which concern us. Logic has ended up by not concerning us anymore. Mathematics is the only science which has claimed the right to speak about nothing and it ends up speaking about everything. Everyone today is expecting logic to go back over things and to take stock of them. 'Physics is a logic,' says Weizsäcker. Biology, with its genetic codes, would like to be a logic, a logic of living things. History itself dreams of logic. And at this very time, when everyone is expecting something of logic, the logicians themselves are minding their own business playing gracefully in the sphere of 'why not?'" Sorin: "There is much truth in what you say, but also much that needs refinement or even rejection. In the first place, mathematical logic has grown out of the world of today, and is integrated in the cultural complex of this century. Even with its possible, bad or good, logic is responding to the possibilism under which the world of today lies. In the second place, it is true that logic conceals an alienating side within itself, which is only exalted by the fear of unprepossessing formulae. But the risk of this alienation can be overcome if you manifest an initial goodwill towards logic. You must relate to logic by giving it some credit from the start. "Let us take, for example, formalism itself with its formulae. Do you really think there exists anything which can remain in pure indifference through its intense functioning? Even the formulae end up by losing their artificiality, by becoming 'naturalized.' Just as a steel ship, if it is immersed in the water and set to function, ends up by coming to life and integrating itself into the aquatic environment, so artificial languages are caught up in the end into the normal respiratory rhythms of a culture. What was mathematics in the beginning, even in the form of calculation? It was the preserve of a caste, a secret doctrine. But the language of mathematics has gradually entered normality, and today every schoolchild knows how to extract a radical, something which before a certain time belonged to the realm of the esoteric and artificial. Is the numeral itself not a form of naturalization of mathematics? Any formula, any artificial being, may become embodied, through gradual familiarization and adjustment, in the world of culture. For today's children the car has the same normality as a cow; in fact for most of them it has an extra dose of normality on top of that. Can

160 we say that formulae remain in indifference when they end up incarnated in machines?" Noica: "This is precisely what is so serious: that they are incarnated only in machines. The machine beats time on the spot; it is tautological; it does not carry the infinite within itself. The engine, says Heidegger, is the mechanical expression of the eternal return to the same thing. The machine is the incarnation of the artificial in the artificial." Sorin: "In any case you are judging too severely the possible in which today's logic is complicit. In this empty possibility we should see the waste which precedes any incarnation. In order to obtain a successful synthetic product doesn't the chemist 'play' with hundreds of useless ones? Formulae are indeed 'beauties with no body,' but they end up by acquiring one. Imaginary numbers were also seen as mere fictions, and yet in the end a way was found of justifying them and making them intuitive. What am I trying to say? That there are mysterious and unpredictable connections between this world of shadows which is logic and the real world." Noica: "I grant you that for as long as logic is in motion it should be left alone, because I do not know what it may yield in the future. And indeed there is in logic a model of exactness which anyone might envy if he sets out to obtain not empty truths but truths complete with exactness. And my drama lies precisely here: that I have not also obtained exactness. That is why Carnap cannot take me seriously, because I have truths without exactness. However, what I in my turn ask of logic is precisely that it should not remain in empty exactness. I ask it to open itself towards its own truth, and to reintegrate itself as an act of culture. "But there is another thing that perplexes me about you logicians: how can you accept that logic should function today on the basis of three absurdities. The first is the law of non-contradiction. How can you refuse contradiction, when contradiction exists and is fertile, even 'logical' and real? The second absurdity is material implication-, 'any truth implies any other truth,' as in the famous example 'if 2 x 2 = 4, then New York is a big city'; or 'the false implies anything, including truth,' for example 'if 2 x 2 = 5, then New York is a big city.' And the third absurdity is the problem of equivalence: 'any true proposition is equivalent to any other true proposition,' for example 'it is snowing outside' is equivalent to 'the Sibiu train arrives in Bucharest at 3 o'clock.'" Sorin: "Yes; from the point of view of truth value, these two propositions are equivalent. It is the easiest thing in the world to attack logic at the level of examples. Writers who have mocked at it

161 (from Molière to Ionesco) have proceeded that way. But if you don't bring it down to the level of examples, logic doesn't look so ridiculous. Machines, for example, function perfectly with material implication." Noica: "All right; let me put it another way. Forms are abstractions, and as such are abstracted. Let me ask you: are they abstracted out of things or abstracted from things? I say 'out of,' and you say 'from.' You make abstraction from things. In fact you contradict the very word abstract,' which is 'taking out o f and not 'taking from.' You remain in nephology, with your suspended forms. But form, form is the thing itself in all its fullness, the thing which gives up its soul, and only thus arrives at form. To render up your soul is everything. We ourselves are not 'in form' unless we live in such a way that each moment is a death, a rendering of the soul. Here w e can talk of form, not in your suspended forms. "Because they make abstraction from things, the forms of today's logic live in a state of complete evasion; they no longer know how to go back over things except in order to inform them. The form which in forms, the form which is no longer the emanation of the thing, its soul,' ends up in the realm of statistics, of classification; it no longer has the weight of meaning. You lose the orientation which meaning gives, and you fall into the interchangeability of statistics. Between Socrates is mortal' and 'Elpenor is mortal' you make no distinction, although only the former took upon himself and lived throughout his life the condition of a mortal; in other words he prepared himself for death by giving a full meaning to life, while the other lived the condition of a mortal only to the extent that he was saved by the experience of Socrates. So not all that dies statistically dies in the human sense. The Greeks only applied the word brotoi, 'mortals', to people, and in its full meaning only to some of them. They never said that the horse was mortal. As I understand it, form has the weight of meaning, while for you it only has that of the symbol which no longer distinguishes, the symbol which becomes a matter of statistics and classification."

Thursday, 22ndJanuary

1981

"While w e were out walking yesterday, Gabi again asked me two inappropriate questions. The first: What is the efficacy of philosophy? Philosophy puts the world in order, he said, as Hegel does (and I suspect he was being malicious at this point), or as I have

162 tried to do in my Ontology, but the world takes no notice of the order it is put in. The second, perhaps even more inappropriate, and connected in a way to the first, he called the 'Atlantis problem': If this world passes away, what will become of all our endeavors? Where will 'those far off be, for whom I want to be the better consciousness, when consciousness itself is no more? What has become of the Plato and the Shakespeare of all the Atlantises? If the whole world can become an Atlantis, does the theme of vanitas not immediately acquire sense? If Plato's Heaven does not exist, to take us up into a true eternity, then, he says, humanity has no sense. "Although I do not like the questions, let me nevertheless try to answer. How does philosophy enter into the world?' Gabi asks me. In a spectacular way, I tell you, just as mind in general enters into the world in a spectacular way. In order to enter into the world, mind does not distribute itself immediately through it; it does not distribute itself immediately in a multiplicity, but first of all in One, which in its turn distributes itself and becomes multiple: the One God is distributed in the Only Son, and only the latter distributes Himself in all. To have a Son is everything. The ultimate miracle of philosophy is the ultimate miracle of mind itself, which as One is not diffused as many but only as one, truly multiplying itself only in the second instance. For you to understand better, think of the Fibonacci series. It is created by the addition of each number to the one before it. However, this rule is only possible starting from the number 2. The number 1 has to be accepted as an exception. You can say, for example: 2 + 1 (the number before 2) = 3; 3 + 2 = 5; 5 + 3 = 8; 8 + 5 = 13, etc. But in the case of 1 you have to make an exception: 1 must be added to 1 (not zero) in order to set the series in motion and for the multiplication to appear. So here also there is the need for a first 1 and a second 1: Father and Son. God did not make us all sons. "So that is how philosophy enters into the world. 'How has Hegel entered into the world?' Gabi asks. Isn't philosophy shut away in universities?' No, because Hegel distributed himself in Marx, and Marx is distributed through the whole world. Let me give you a humbler example: Daniel the Hermit. He did not make order among all the yeomen of Moldavia: he put a single man in order. Georges Sorel, with his Réflexion sur la violence, entered into the world through Lenin. Kant himself entered into the world through President Wilson, who declared in 1918 that it was impossible for East Prussia not to be German as Kant had been born there. So you see how Kant came to influence the political geography of Europe,

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and later, as a result, its history. So the philosopher fertilizes a single person, w h o goes on to fertilize the rest of the world. "As for the second question: What is eternity for us? We abuse the word, says Gabi, when we apply it from the position of finitude to a state of being which is threatened with finitude (the values created in some Atlantis). But this way of raising the problem is hybrid, because it links temporality to absolute values. It has given birth to a topos (time the devourer of everything) which continues to dissolve thinking and spiritual experience. And regardless of the refinements which have been reached in approaches to the problem of time, in Augustine or Heidegger for example, we still remain with the image of the linear time of Chronos, who gets indigestion devouring his own children. Time has thus a truly bad beginning, and one which it cannot shake off, whatever efforts are made to ennoble it. The obsession with time has remained in philosophy as a foolish obsession. I have also asked myself why the Greeks had a god for time and did not have one for space. It is an interesting question. When you really discover space, as we have done in our century, time is swallowed up by space, becoming its fourth dimension, as with Einstein. It is clear that we have annexed time to space, proposing different times for different galaxies. Space is a conquest of modernity. The mathematics of today are mathematics of space; with the problem of topoi, of lattices, and so on, they are only geometrizing, practicing topology in the literal sense. So much so that those who, like Bergson or Heidegger, remain today annexed to the problem of time, seem to me to be belated. We have to get out of the problem of time and make a god out of space, a better god, not destructive like Chronos; for space is bildend, formative."

Friday, 23rdJanuary,

1981

The tour of Paltini§, which we make after breakfast, begins in cold and thick fog. Noica speaks with a scarf over his mouth, and towards the end of the walk he is gesticulating in an inspired manner, with the scarf in his hand and his overcoat flapping. It is the most splendid peripatetic peroration of these days. He gets gradually warmer, like a mechanism which reaches its point of maximum force by way of a succession of abrupt movements, but once arrived there is set going in the certainty of its own rhythm. "I am living a miracle which I would like to share with you. In fact it is the miracle with which I started, the miracle of 'how is

164 something new possible?' I now regret that at the time I wrote that book I didn't know how to attack the problem metaphysically. If I had known Wittgenstein with his tautology, he would probably have provoked me to tell my thought in its purity, not descending into its history. Now I no longer feel the need to do this, and indeed I am delighted to see that I have lived this idea, that my life has unfolded itself under the sign of 'how is something new possible?' What matters is to be attentive and to distinguish in the apparent monotony of the days how the new appears. Perhaps in this simple attention we can also unravel the mystery of the coming of the new in the late hours of life. How is something new still possible for me, after the Treatise? It is possible precisely on the basis of the new which each day brings with it. So be attentive to the new in each day and you will see how the miracle is born. "I have finished reading Bochenski's book, Introduction to the Logic of Authority. It has won me over, for all that it betrays the mind of an Anglo-Saxon who lacks the 'metaphysical thrill,' as indeed he honestly declares from the start. But I could not help thinking of what Heidegger would have done with the problem of authority. There is no doubt that he would have gone backwards, as he usually does. And he would have been right to do so, for the natural tendency of today's culture is to progress by regression, as mathematical logic initially promised to do too, when it set out to go 'back to mathematics,' although as it is practiced today it has ended up going blindly forward, into the space without landmarks of 'why not this way too?' Heidegger would have gone backwards and would have said that auctoritas comes from augeo, 'to increase.' Any true authority brings with it an increase which obliges the other to submit. You only truly submit when you feel the increase. So Heidegger would have started by seeking the roots of authority, not its functions, as Bochenski does, and when you send it back, to its roots, authority becomes a matter of investiture: who invests you and how you are invested. But I am delighted to see that both Andrei and Gabi have been thrilled by a work of analytical philosophy." "Andrei and Gabi," breaks in Sorin, "who probably have not read many works of this sort, came to Bochenski like two boys caught in the snare of the first Verführerin. It is no wonder they are so enthusiastic." "That Verführerin business reminds me of what a very nice lady said to me after my Hegel book, Stories about Man, came out. I was busy explaining to her that in relation to Hegel I am just a sort of Apostle Paul, going about with a staff in my hand spreading some-

165 one else's idea. 'So you're a fancy cocotte,' she whispered in my ear, 'alluring passers-by into Hegel's brothel.' What do you make of that? But telling you the story with Hegel and the fancy cocotte reminds me that I have a surprise for Sorel. Three days ago I wrote to Geo Bogza, and added in a P.S.: 'I have got your friend Sorel, with whom you went round Techirghiol, cutting wood for me.' This morning I got a telegram: 'Don't let Sorel go till he has cut down the whole forest.' I wonder if Sorel would mind if I reply: 'Can he stop at Fagara§?' "However since we are talking about physical condition, since Gabi has had a warning from destiny, and Andrei is living with one which he doesn't want to take any notice of, I would like to say that I don't think they respect me all that much, if they have refused to learn the one good thing that I am able to teach them: to ensure that they can finish the course. If you want to achieve cultural performance you have to live till you are seventy, and in order to live till you are seventy you have to learn to take a walk every day. Walking is itself askesis, exercise par excellence, and all the other sports are no more than a suite of variations on the theme of walking. What lies before you is a long-distance race, not a sprint. So you need to make your body an ally, and if the animality of man is his mobility, then you are obliged to respect your moving being."

Saturday, 24th January 1981 "You saw that yesterday evening did not turn out well because we dispensed with the constraint of the program. For this reason I propose a list of points for this evening. I shall go back to the problem of authority so as to settle my accounts with Bochenski— and with this occasion I have written a few pages for my Diary of Ideas—then I shall give Gabi an answer as to what I think about 'Romanian culture and the world stage'; and finally, I have found my motto and I want to communicate it to you. "I was telling you yesterday that Heidegger would have attacked the problem of authority starting from the verb augeo, 'to increase.' 'Whatever enlarges me is true,' says Goethe. That which increases me has authority. He who knows more than the other, for example, has authority, because it enlarges him. This is an authority of exterior type. But there is also an interior authority, of which Bochenski says nothing: for example, the authority of the soul over the body, as Plato tells us. As long as it guards the body

166 from excesses and appetites which would be its undoing, the soul is able to increase the body. But in that case I cannot accept that there is no 'reflexive authority' as Bochenski claims. Is there no reflexive authority with the Stoics? Or what about Kant? "In this way I get at the essence and scope of authority only through augeo, without needing all the apparatus of Bochenski to say something true. Along the line of augeo I can draw out everything there is to be drawn out, but I can also unify everything. For that is where Bochenski's treatment falls down: he stops at authorities and loses sight of authority. Thus he finds the archei, I would say, but he cannot rise to the eidos of authority, the principle of authority, which is, however bland it sounds, reason. Of course you will say that as long as I want the concept of authority, one which is distributed without being divided, I am reducing authority to that form of unity which can then be easily invoked by some holder of absolute power. It is clear that in the name of the eidos there can be imposture, but that does not stop me from seeking to see the eidos myself. However, Bochenski remains trapped at the level of the intellect which separates and is then incapable of uniting the parts; he remains with epistemic and deontic varieties of authority, and fails to see that the common source of both, the source which invests them with authority, is reason. So I would reproach Bochenski that he speaks not of authority but of authorities, just as the Europeans speak of liberties and not of liberty, and as for the book as a whole, I would say that it leaves us where we already were at the beginning. For if at the end of the whole discourse all we find out is that we should not accept any kind of authority without a critical spirit, then the book leaves us where we were anyway. The writer who does not shift a problem, who does not exercise a dislocating force on the material which he analyzes, and on the person he analyzes it for, does not have 'reason.' Indeed he does not even have the right to speak and to write. So much for Bochenski. "Now for Gabi's question yesterday: 'Why can't we go out onto the European stage with what we have achieved?' Gabi would like, I think, 'a song with room for the whole world,' while all I want is a song with room. And such a song is a conquest of each day as it comes. Just as Goethe says of liberty, so joy must be won daily. And so I come to the motto I have chosen for myself: Nulla dies sine laetitia. Laetitia means discipline, labor, effort, suffering, doubt, invention, and joy. But true joy can only be found in culture: the rest is just pleasure. And joy, if it is true joy, will show itself in the end. 'Poetry, fire and love' cannot be hidden. And nor can the joy

167 of culture. What would you have liked? To spend our evening with French television? The Upanishads, with the discretion of that 'come sit by me,' were not on French television—and see how they still win through."

Sunday, 25th January

1981

Tomorrow afternoon we are all leaving for Bucharest, after paying a call around lunchtime on Relu Cioran in Sibiu. This evening we drink tea in the room and take stock of the week's activity. I have just read in the Revue de Métaphysique an article by a Hungarian writer on philosophy and the problem of pain, and Sorin has alerted me to some words of Simmel's—"How is it that in the history of philosophy there is so little room for human suffering?"—so, seeing Noica, I quote Simmel's question to him. "Philosophy is not interested in suffering," Noica replies, "for the simple reason that, like goodness, it exists in the order of the soul, not of the mind. The most philosophy can do is to record suffering when it occurs and then call the man of religion or the politician to do something about it. You ought not to understand such an attitude as a form of indifference or callousness. The 'arrogance' of philosophy is not elitist but metaphorical. Philosophy does not deal with everything that exists, but only with what really is, with what bears ontological saturation within itself. For philosophy, whatever is not materia signata simply is not. Philosophy claims the right to offend the world and to say, 'It doesn't interest me.' When it does descend to the material and the individual, philosophy stops there only to the extent that they are signata. It selects. If I come as a do-gooder I fail in the end to save the individual. I would even go further, and say this: the indifference of general salvation is in fact an immense contempt; it offends humanity by leaving it in its teeming undifferentiated mass. The religion which deals with anyone, and Pierre Emmanuel who is worried about the fate of the grocer, will never show who is and who is not human. By showing who is human, philosophy gives those who are not the chance to become so. "But to return to suffering: when you suppress suffering, as doctors do for example, you bring the person back to degree zero; you place them back on course, but you do not set them floating. The mind, on the other hand, breathes into the person's sails. I used to enjoy making fun of Burghele, telling him that their profession is

168 all about 'putting a handle on the axe': the axe handle breaks off and you put it back. 'You've got a stone in your kidney? I'll operate and get you back on course.' "That type of suffering does not enter into the zone of the mind. And when it does enter, as with the Indians, where everything is understood as suffering, or in the case of Jesus, we are no longer dealing with that poor old suffering that knocks us off course. "Let me give you an example of what it means to pass from the mind to the soul, using the two variants of Youth without Age: the Romanian one and the Sicilian one. You know how the Romanian tale ends. The Prince is given leave by the fairies of the land of Being to return to earth, he finds his parents' house, opens the thronos, and there in a corner is death, his death, who greets him with: 'It's a good thing you have come back, for it would have been the end of me if I had waited any longer.' "This is how the Sicilian variant, the only other one it seems, which is discussed by §aineanu, ends. Back on earth, the Prince is allowed to stay here only a day (or is it an hour?). After seeing his parents' house, he prepares to return to the land of eternal youth. But on the way he sees a cart stuck in the mud, he tries to help, misses the time for his return, and has to remain on earth. The Sicilian tale has shifted things from mind to soul; foolish goodness has come into play. The do-gooder ends up getting the cart out of the mud and losing Being. "But we were taking stock of the week's work: so, Sorel has done his preface to Bochenski's Logic of Authority, and has done some translating from the Parmenides. Gabi has written his Preliminary Clarifications for the Phaedrus, and I have finished my interpretation of the Phaedo. "With the Phaedo, I started with the following idea: while the pre-Socratics all have a peri physeos, Platon is the first to obtain a peri psychés: a raising of anima to animus, I would say, or of the individual mind to Mind. This is the theme of the dialogue. And it is achieved in two stages. Firstly: what is access to the mind? (the paideic problem)—the answer being: through 'death' to life, as authority of the soul over the body, etc. And secondly: what is mind in itself?—the answer being: Ideas themselves. Thus immortality is the passage of the individual mind into Mind. "But there is a third problem raised by Plato, to which he is unable to respond directly, so that he shifts it all into myth: in Mind, are you still there as an individual? Is Socrates still Socrates in the world of Hades? In the face of this question, Plato lays down his arms and passes to the register of a fictive geography of heaven.

169 "To this question, the answer of Christianity will be: 'This earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.' And here we come back to the problem which Gabi raised a few days ago: is there a persistence of the mind as mind? If we understand 'my words' as logos, then the logos is always present, in the form of the laws of nature, for example. But what about the logos as individual identity? To that question Plato does not have an answer, while Christianity promises that each will be called by name, and the affirmation sounds almost electoral. "But can we talk of eternity (or rather of aeviternity) in the context of these cults of time, in which we are living? "You know what I have been pursuing through the Treatise, and now through the Logic, is a way of giving an ontological status to the individual, in conditions in which philosophy, anchored to a general (in heaven') which is divorced from the individual, ends up by condemning it. Everything, in culture, has tended towards the neglect of the individual and an escape from reality. The sciences and the theory of the general float in the sky, while philosophy brings everything back to the real, to things themselves. Philosophy says: Heaven has sent me to tell you that it does not exist. Fulfill yourselves! Descend to earth!' Of course the earth on which philosophy moves is not to be confused with the real which is set up by television, the categories of life or the machine. What I keep declaring is that what is interesting is only the individual and the real which can carry the seal of to be, the fullness of being. "But what then happens to the problem of time? The condition of the individual caught in my ontological model already represents an ex-temporalization. We have emerged from the condition of Chronos, once we have an ontological model to set above that of time the devourer. And indeed all forms of human affirmation are the revolt of Zeus against Chronos. In each of us there is a Zeus who wishes to bind Chronos. 'In each human being a Zeus makes his attempt.' The beauty of the myth is that it is more contemporary now than it was illo tempore. Zeus is more Zeus now than 'then,' because our time has found, in spatiality, a needle to sew up Chronos's jacket. In the 22nd century we will make Chronos an ally, leaving him galactically, Sicily and all. European civilization is anti-Egyptian par excellence. The pyramid sets itself against time in a rough, heavy way; Hegel says it is the most stable form of matter. We, on the other hand, face time with the most graceful form of spatiality, which is put at our disposal by the topology of mathematics.

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"So what rehabilitates the individual is precisely the fact that the individual is Christo-phor ('Christ bearing'), theo-phor ('god bearing'), or even Dii-phor ('Zeus bearing'), and that it thus replays the struggle between Zeus and Chronos. "Of course this way of thinking of things does not solve the problem of eternity as eternity and leaves the 'Atlantis problem' unresolved too. But you should approach such insoluble problems with a good grace. You ought not to behave like the child in the story who shouts, 'The emperor has no clothes!' Everyone knows the emperor is naked, but the rules of the game have to be respected. Why do you have to shout out loud about the 'trouble of being born? And is it really such a trouble, when it is in your power to carry a god within yourself?"

7th to 11th May 1981

Thursday, 7th May 1981 I arrived in Paltini§, together with Sorel, at ten o'clock yesterday evening. It rained all the way. After Ra§inari, when we began to climb, we found the road blocked by rocks and boulders which had been dislodged by so much rain. They looked ugly, in the darkness of the night, like a collection of signs of the unpredictable, and we wound our way round them with bated breath. This morning Noica comes up to our room. He has just read Secolul 20, in which Heidegger's Letter on "Humanism" has been published, and our discussion comes round to Noica's preface. I tell him of a recent discussion with a friend who judged the preoccupation with the publication of Plato or Heidegger to be a form of evasion, of "non-engagement." As far as translation is concerned, he said, it is more urgent to work on Adorno than Heidegger, who may give rise to some minor fashions or sad pastiches, but will never provide a theoretical instrument for the understanding of real situations. What needs to be done is the description of the Situation in words which have not become mere terms in a linguistic network void of all meaning. We need a terminology whose critical resources have not been exhausted. And it is Adorno, my friend went on, who gives names to things, who offers a model for the way a situation ought to be described and raised to consciousness. "Every time I hear such things I am amazed," Noica begins. "True history is not always born as the history of events. There is no sense in describing a situation which no longer bears the concept in itself. When you look back over history on the scale of a lifetime or of the immediate historical act, you often have to smile. And if you think of the 'engagements' of the great personalities of culture, then you realize how much of the ridiculous there can be in indi-

174 vidual lives, if they are judged in their own small context. Imagine how Leibniz would look, with his life-long obsession with the idea of a crusade! While the great states of Europe knew, well before the Peace of Adrianople, that the Ottoman Empire had had its day— 'the sick man of Europe' they used to call it—Leibniz was dreaming of crusades! And think of Goethe, with his terrible stammering, who, after admiring Napoleon for years, and basically looking like a traitor, writes in 1813 Epimenides Erwachen, declaring that he has awakened, to all appearances, from an epimenidic slumber'! And what happens if we judge Plato in a historical context, Plato whom we see praising Sparta in an Athens which Sparta has defeated? 'Turned Turk' they would say nowadays. Or Aristotle, with his Macedonian sympathies? And what about Eminescu, with his backward-looking, feudal obsessions in an age when Romania needed bringing up to date? "I have finally come to understand what Julien Benda says in La trahison des clercs—the words which infuriated us all when we were young: 'C'est un trahison de pactiser avec le siècle.' Poor old Julien Benda was right: for not everything that happens in the century is history. In fact this is what I have wanted to show lately. I have wanted to set things back on three levels: whatever plays a part in history, in ontology, and in logic is a privileged situation. So: not all that happens is history; not all that exists is invested with being; and not all that is formulated is the concern of logic. "I would ask your friend this: how can he come to talk to me about Adorno and engagement—an engagement which can fall into the ridiculous of the insignificant and the contingent (fighting an Ottoman Empire whose days are over!)—or, in other words, how can he come to talk to me about an Adorno who flings you into the contingent, and set him against Heidegger, who shifted history from its place single-handed, thus saving the word from its degraded condition? What does Adorno's terminology signify alongside Heidegger's recovery of language, a recovery which concerns not some fragment or other of our being, but our being in its entirety? Into a world in which knowledge has primacy, Heidegger brings thinking and understanding, brings the response of understanding, the only approach which is still capable of rehabilitating metaphysics. In a world which is merely one of communication, Heidegger continues to see in the word communion and community. "Think what such a thing means in a world haunted not just by the current degradation of the word, but also by the ascesis which Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy brings with it. I have recently

175 finished reading Hintikka's book, which Sorel lent me: Knowledge and Belief. You should see how well read Hintikka is, how well he masters Aristotle! But see at the same time what it means to pass through great culture and to abandon it for the ascesis of analysis and logic. These people refuse synthesis! The ascesis of logic, like the religious variety, becomes a religiosity without religion: an approach to the purity of an objectless thought. But you should see where Hintikka's book ends up, where Hintikka takes his problem of 'I know that I know.' It ends up with poor Schopenhauer, for whom the problem of 'I know that I know' is ultimately resolved to the simple fact of knowing: Schopenhauer thus misses the very miracle of philosophy, which is reflexivity. But if this is where you end up after you have set out in the course of two hundred pages to 'analyze the logic of two notions'—as Hintikka puts it in his subtitle—if all you end up with is Schopenhauer's folly of over a century ago (demonstrated by formal means, it is true), then allow me to say that all you are doing is blocking me, that you do not move me from my place, but leave me where I was anyway. And then let me affirm, at the risk of making Sorel angry with me, that Hintikka is not even an Alexandrian; he is a mandarin. And it is the worm of mandarinism—manner in the place of substance—that has spread today over culture with this Anglo-Saxon spirit, with the logical formalism which in America has almost become a theological subject and whose one saving grace is that it generates the paradox of gratuity at the heart of the pragmatic spirit. Alongside all the Hintikkas of today, Wittgenstein seems to me like a god: he attacked all the great problems and did so with a sense of responsibility which those of today no longer have. Wittgenstein is a peak of preSocraticism in a world which Alexandrianizes and mandarinizes. The world of today is a terrible place; and it may be that only those who have known how to preserve monotheism in the conditions of diaspora can still save it. Only they can still counter the wasteland culture of the Anglo-Saxons, converting culture back into the good monotheism of the mind."

Friday, 8th May 1981 I have brought Noica the typescript of the article which Andrei wrote for issue 10-11-12 of Secolul 20: "The rigors of the national idea and the legitimacy of the universal." Haulica had been filled with enthusiasm when he read it. There is in him the struggling

176 pathos of the consciousness which has preserved its reflexes in the face of reality and which, instead of a melancholic retreat into the sometimes dull eternity of great cultural gestures has chosen the sublimity of skirmishing moment by moment. "My dear chaps, I have read Andrei's article and I want to tell you how much it has unsettled me. Andrei is an obstinate character, but one who does not know the risks of obstinacy. You must judge for yourselves, and Andrei, for I beg you to tell him, must judge in his turn whether it is worth accepting such a risk. I don't contest the fact that the article is a fine one in the attitude which it takes and the consciousness which it brings into play. I don't deny that all of us have felt the need in youth to be fine in that way. But when you make such fine gestures, the problem is not to fall on one which will block you. When you have the nature of a fighter, as Andrei has, you run the risk of remaining at a certain moment the man of a single gesture. You know, I'm the one who...' I, for example, could say, 'You know, I'm the one who voted against King Carol's constitution!' For in 1938 (when I was in Sinaia) I did indeed vote against King Carol's constitution. I was asked why I had done so, and I ended up replying in writing. Why? In order to win the right to vote against the Legionary constitution too, I said. I wanted in this way to affirm my independence, which, however, I later lost foolishly. I am not saying that by this article Andrei risks producing the gesture which will block him. But his obstinate nature always carries such a danger: the danger of losing one's trajectory for the sake of one sublime gesture. "But I would propose now that we judge what is the nature of such gestures. In the first place they conceal a measure of impurity: the impurity of the spectacle. This is the drama of the ethical in general: you do not make a gesture for yourself, but for others, and so immediately it becomes impure. Most of the time, the ethical is not a fulfillment from the inside outward, but a monumentalizing of the ego coming from outside. And when culture sets out on the way of the ethical by means of such 'takings of attitude,' it enters into the junior phase of rostrum culture.' "But things do not stop here where such gestures are concerned. What we do is not just a spectacle for others; it can also destroy them. Our gestures are not just ours; they also concern others, at least to the extent that they have assisted us and approved, let alone that they may have imitated us. That is why you cannot play with an ethics of your own; in fact it also has a bearing on other people. To resume, I would say this: gestures of this sort are done with the sense of a responsibility, which, on the one hand, may be false, and which,

177 furthermore, may create havoc round about you. With bare ethics you end u p guiltier than without ethics at all. And if your starting point is a primacy of culture, then I can ask you: What do you prefer? A fulfilled cultural destiny? Or one which is broken in the sublimity of a moment's demonstration? "I am saying all this out of a concerned love for Andrei: it is a sort of pro salute Andrei. I want us to help him with our brotherly and fatherly appeal. To say to him: 'Be compassionate to yourself and to us: you are not just you, you are a community. Have mercy on yourself and on others.' "What Andrei is proposing by such a gesture is a form of foolish wakefulness against a fertile somnambulism. And for his salvation 1 have three things to say to him. The first is just this: How can you agree to wake u p from your somnambulism? How can you push us to wake u p from our somnambulism? Our somnambulism does not give the measure to one or other of us, but to the whole community. I am no longer I, and you are no longer you. I accept as a matter of humility that I am w h o I am, but also as a responsibility. Andrei sees me walking the tightrope and says: 'Look, the neighbors are quarreling. Get down and separate them!' 'Leave Heidegger a bit,' he says to Gabi. 'Leave your peratology for a moment, to cross swords with someone or other in FlacaraV But if you keep waking up, you will never reach the end of these things, which do not only concern you, which are not just yours. "The second thing is this: you don't fight with just anyone. You need to choose your enemy. Who do you fight with? With a retired professor w h o has done nothing all his life? With a bunch of amateurs? If you must fight, then fight with gods, not valets. You canor you risk placing not be the slave of your own bouillonnement, yourself indifferently on all sorts of battlefields. "And thirdly: w e are in a world in which you need to act in such a way that, while preserving your own dignity, you nevertheless do not need to arrive at your own invalidation. Don't invalidate the gift which carries you beyond yourself, into a vaster responsibility, for the sake of matters which turn out to be secondary in the end. There was one man in our generation w h o stood above us all, by his reading, his fantasy, the grace of his intellect, his moral consciousness. He was called Mircea Vulcanescu. He died in prison in 1950. He had been sentenced to five years, and if he had not chosen to do what he did he would have survived the sentence and would have entered into the vaster responsibility which he had towards everyone else. J u d g e for yourselves whether or not I am right in what I argue.

178 "I found out a year ago why he died. At that time it was not permitted to speak in the cell. But in fact those imprisoned together used to set up little 'cultural universities': they learned languages, did history, philosophy, talked about their novels...One day the guard heard them talking and came into the cell: 'Who was talking?' They had all been talking. If they had all kept silent, if no one had accepted the blame, they would have received a collective punishment: staying on their feet for a few hours, or something like that. But seeing that no one spoke up, Vulcanescu took it all upon himself, and denounced himself alone. What followed? He was taken from the cell and put in the 'isolator.' It was winter; in the isolator water had been spilt on the floor and had turned to ice. In the first day of isolation you got nothing to eat and you were kept undressed. So he was undressed and taken to the isolator. There were another four or five prisoners inside. They were all clapping their hands and jumping, trying to keep going till evening. At a certain moment a young man of about twenty collapsed. Vulcanescu was fifty, and thought it was more important for the young man to live. So he lay down on his back on the floor and told the others to put the youth on top of him. It was a sublime gesture. The young man survived. Vulcanescu got pneumonia and died. Let me ask you: Was he right to do what he did? Would it not have been more deeply ethical to have thought of what he owed the others, of all the good he had to do for the whole community once he got out of prison? To have thought of all those with whom his extraordinary mind might have been shared? What I am preaching is not cowardice, or general moral ugliness, but ethics put in the service of something, not ethics for its own sake. For his first gesture, when he took the blame for everyone by saying that he had been talking, represents bare ethics, in the practice of which he made himself guilty, forgetting a larger responsibility. Vulcanescu carried with him a vaster mind, towards which he had deeper obligations. It is possible to preserve both your dignity and the consciousness of that larger responsibility. "Public life is full of the traps which pure ethics lays for you. Here we find the danger of falling into the intoxication of the 'fine gesture,' of ethical gesticulation, just as in every beautiful woman there is a seduction which provokes a false need for love in you. In another world, Andrei might have ended up seduced by public life, letting himself be confiscated by the glory of Parliament for example. For his article, if I may judge it—and I am tempted tomorrow to go through it again paragraph by paragraph to see how substantial it is—is no more than a fine parliamentary speech. Well, if you must

179 make the gesture, then make it for its substance, not just because it is fine. It is more a gesture of scholarly dignity than a scholarly act. But from Andrei we might expect content of thought too, not just attitude. What do I remain with that is positive from his urticle? With a 'know thyself applied to the undecided 'national soul? No, I remain only with polemics. If Andrei wins, then he wins, as sometimes happens at tennis, through his adversary's error and not his own stroke. The article talks splendidly 'against' and 'about,' but it never for a moment talks 'in.' It might have been able to do so if he had started from the quotation from Maiorescu, rather than ending with it without making any use of it. For if in the struggle between truth and a resistant nation it is ultimately the nation that perishes and never truth, then all that had to be said was: 'The Hittites are dead, and so are all the peoples who did not rise to culture. He who pursues false culture risks perishing. Don't play with fire.' That would be enough. Andrei has not attacked the vice in its substance: he just attacked the 'whiners.' But it's not worth fighting with whiners, and you do not have the time."

Saturday, 9th May 1981 From 10 o'clock till 11: the Pâltiniç Tour. Some athletes from the training camp, conscientiously warming up, come along behind us. "It is sad to see," comments Noica, "how much precariousness there is in all that is not touched by mind. Sports people and beautiful women quite simply provoke my pity. I see how they struggle to live in the favorable moment, in the kairós, the favorable occasion, to live their 'top form,' ever terrorized by a 'still to come' and by the dread of decline, of the void which lies in wait for you when you base everything on this. While in mind everything is ceaseless growth; every new day is a profit, not a loss, and with every hour you feel closer to your 'form.' The occasion is not punctual here, but is life in its entirety. Not to mention the fact that in mind there is never 'too much,' and that that satiety never appears which accompanies every other form of pleasure or consumption." At the beginning of the year the Hommage à Duiliu Sfintesco came out in Orléans (on the occasion of his reaching the age of seventy). In the chapter of Témoignages Noica writes about a type of intellectual specific to the 20th century: homo planetarius, he who has his homeland everywhere and creates for everyone. "Why didn't you choose for yourself the condition of homo planetariusT Sorel

180 asks Noica. "How do you think it is possible to obtain the universal directly through the universal, as you lead us to believe these homines planetarii do, the great dwellers in exile of the 20th century?" "I stand on the 'old position,' that of obtaining the universal through the idiomatic, the national. I relate to the universal through 'in(to),' not through 'in.' To touch the universal from the position of the idiomatic is the very principle of mind. But without canceling it, the 20th century has brought a corrective to this principle: it has brought along the need for a real universality, a universal through the generic, not the specific. The 20th century carries with it the generic version of the universal: 'Workers of all lands— but also capitalists, Esperantists, intellectuals—unite.' This century is a century of internationals, of people who, naturally enough, have not fully succeeded, precisely because the principle of mind— the universal through the idiomatic—has not struck deep enough. And for the principle to validate itself, 'internationalism' has needed to see and recognize its limits. However, even within the limits of this success, the type of homo planetarius has been born, in solidarity with the mass media, able to move over the globe, in solidarity with the planetary network itself. It is not by chance that this human type has been born now; he is a unifying factor for the earth, in the moment in which the earth is preparing to enter into apoikia, galactic swarming, when it is preparing for the meeting with an extraterrestrial type of reason. "In the condition of the generic universal we may place all those who take account of the problems of the planet in its totality. Eliade is a homo planetarius, a 'grabber,' one who takes account of whatever is mind on Earth. Cioran is also a homo planetarius, taking account of all the hopelessness of the world. In his youth he was only in the condition of Romanian grief, just a single form of hopelessness. If he had continued to dig into Romanian grief until he found its 'in(to),' in which even the Japanese can recognize himself, then he would have obtained the universal in its classic variant, through the idiomatic. "I realize that in speaking thus I am looking condescendingly on those who find themselves in the condition of planetary vagabondage, a condition which belongs to the aspect of civilization and not that of culture of the mind. But why is there not a planetary culture? Because we are in Crusoe's situation: reason has not met another form of reason. For as long as we do not meet another reason, for as long as there is no 'confrontation with the other,' for as long as Gilgamesh does not meet his extraterrestrial Enkidu, planetary culture will be denied us.

181 "The problem of this 'other reason' forces us to be prudent when we speak in the modern world of 'subjectivity' and 'anthropology.' We must recognize the good measure of subjectivity and not reduce it to the psychological ego, and not even to man. Nowhere in great philosophy, neither in Kant nor in Heidegger for example, was man ever under discussion, as Foucault believes, but merely the human paradigm of reason. Both Kant and Heidegger ultimately obtained the meeting with another reason. They did not do 'anthropology,' because they felt the limits of life on Earth. They spoke of man as of a generic singular, a hapax legomenon. Our drama, when we speak of reason, is that we are dealing with a simplet and not a multiplet. But with Kant as with Heidegger, man is a 'holomer': a part which bears the whole within itself, without confiscating it or holding it in exclusivity. Of course if you want to be unkind to Heidegger you can tag him with: 'Attends que je t'expliqueF You know the story. A man comes home and finds his wife in bed with her lover. 'Attends que je t'expliqueF she says to him. As if there were something left to explain in the situation. So if I want to be unkind to Heidegger, I can say to him, as Derrida does: 'If Dasein is not man, it is nevertheless nothing other than man.' 'Attends que je t'expliqueF says Heidegger. What more can you explain, when you say that language is the place of Being, and that it is there that man lives? But all the same we have no business being unkind to Heidegger. For Dasein is not simply man. It may be the spirit of language in the privileged hypostasis of Earth."

Sunday, 10th May 1981 We walk to §anta, planning for the next day an excursion by car to Gura Riului (the village where Blaga spent his summers), and on to Cisnadie and Cisnadioara, where the Teutonic Knights settled in the 13th century. On the way, returning to the subject of Andrei's article, Noica speaks about the discussion in their generation concerning the opposition between Eliade Radulescu and Maiorescu. "We wondered who was right: Eliade Radulescu with his 'write, lads, write!' or Maiorescu with the critical circumspection and balance displayed in his theory of forms without substance. And we all recognized that forms have their own dynamism, and are capable, by their simple functioning, of giving themselves a content. However, Maiorescu was not only wrong when he condemned forms with-

182 out substance; he was wrong again when he installed them in the only place in which they did not apply: in philosophy. The trouble with Maiorescu, who was a logician, is that he put empty form in the world in the one place where it cannot give itself content. But why should this be so? Why is it only in philosophy that form without substance is guilty? Because, out of all the engagements and behaviors of the social ego, philosophy is the only one which requires a meeting with origins. In philosophy you can't stay in a world of knowledge, which by its very nature is derived, but in one of understandings, which cannot but be original. In an Alexandrian culture you can do anything, except philosophy. You can have derived culture in science, in medicine for example, as with Davila, who in two decades gave this country a generation of doctors who were ready to face the demands of the war of 1877. An institute of biology can create biologists, or an institute of informatics informaticians. All the valid forms of a culture are derived. But you cannot have derived culture in philosophy, where you must meet mind in its original form. And instead of understanding the lesson concealed in the refusal of Eminescu, who at the age of twenty-five denied his competence to occupy a chair of philosophy, saying that he did not know enough Sanskrit or Greek (German was not under discussion)—in other words that he lacked the means to come close to what is original—Maiorescu, in whom we hear the logician speaking, the practitioner of empty forms, rushed to set up departments ox philosophy without having people properly prepared to fill them. He called Negulescu to Ia§i, for example, after a mere six months' study in Paris, and instead of work from the original texts, he encouraged the general lecture, precisely the sort of teaching which does not go into the depths of the matter. So if Maiorescu was proved right, it was once only, and that in his own discipline: in philosophy, the only place where you cannot rely on the dynamism of forms. "Philosophy seems to have made two recoveries in this country, after being set on the wrong track by Maiorescu. One took place before the war, in the time of my generation. Then came Alecu's generation, the Sibiu Group and others, with whom we see not exactly philosophy but rather a taste for culture and a culture of surfaces. But with some of you there is a new recovery going on, a new restoration of the foundations." In the evening, in Noica's room, the discussion centers on Sorel's study of The Historical Fact in a Logical Perspective. There are almost forty dense pages, not very accessible to someone who is unaccustomed to works of logic. Noica read them in two hours,

183 moving through them with the ease and grace that he has when he applies hermeneutics to a folktale or a Platonic dialogue. In his hand he has four pages of notes, written in a tiny, compact hand. What happens is fascinating. This study in applied logic is shifted onto an epic and dramatic register. For two hours, Noica retraces every step of Sorel's itinerary, recapitulating at intervals, creating moments of suspense, maintaining the tension and arousing curiosity, producing spectacular "turnings of the tables," transforming the logician writer into a knight-errant who meets Frege, Wittgenstein and Von Wright along his way, riding with them for a while before going off in the end to find his own road to a new Land, one in which logic is set to accompany history in a world of the possible, of "what could be" and "what might be." Noica reads Sorel just as he did Hegel, "telling his story," and retelling it, with an amazing daimonic ability to blend, for a time, into the being of the other, and yet to rise in the end, with this new prey, back to himself. It is the supreme reverence that anyone can do you: in place of the distant and hurried greeting, a friendly pause in your garden. Sorel is so touched that his face is frozen in an expressionless stare, like Trakl's "blue of the wild" w e both float in a pious etourdissement. "You see, my dear chaps," says Noica as w e part, "they probably know the election results now in France. But I believe that true history has not taken place there, but rather in our little penthouse room, where w e have judged Sorel, where w e have shown that his limits are the limits of his instruments, and where w e have prayed for the salvation of his 'logical soul.'"

Monday, 11th May 1981 This morning w e made our trip to Cisnadie and Cisnadioara. W e went down a forestry road towards Gura Riului, where w e were to stop at the villa of Mrs. Viorica Manta, a good friend of Blaga, of Relu Cioran and of Noica's. Apart from two months in the summer, when she rules over the villa in Gura Riului like a queen mother, Mrs. Manta lives in Sibiu, and every time Noica goes down to see her he returns home spoilt, with savoury snacks and homemade cakes arranged in a sage and refined manner in coffee or chocolate boxes, which recall for me the larder landscape of my childhood. It was in the villa here that Blaga spent almost twenty summers, and with his thoughts on the place and on who knows what love experienced at Gura Riului that he wrote the poem "Bocca-del-Rio"

184 ("Bocca-del-Rio / Wound in space..."). We descended, with the River Cibin on our right; the place was deserted and poisonously beautiful. All around was the profusion of spring and I was tempted to stop at every turn. "Why here and not there?" Noica teased me. "You can only choose generic places, but I am taking you to one particular place." We passed by a house seemingly flung down at a bend in the road, which, on an earlier visit with §ora and Dragomir, Noica had christened "Wittgenstein's House." After an hour's drive w e arrived in Gura Riului, and went first to meet "Mr. Patru," the caretaker of the villa. The houses are set in a row, adjoining each other and bound together by great gates. As a result the lanes are framed by long continuous facades, so that you can see nothing except the ground you tread on, the walls and the tight, wooden arches of the gates. I asked myself where there could be room for so much promised beauty in a place which seemed so mediocre at first sight. W e arrived at the villa, with Mr. Patru's wife as guide and key-bearer. The gate was unlocked and w e were unexpectedly greeted by a space modeled according to different laws. The white villa, with its roof of red clay tiles rounded at each of the four corners, had the pleasing elegance of houses from before the war. With its air of restful luxury and eternal vacation, it emerged from the edge of a meadow which extended as far as the eye could see. In the foreground, on the left, a huge disheveled willow tree raised up its head, quite in tune with the slight sensation of abandonment which hung about the place, with its closed shutters and deckchairs folded up and leant against the wall of the veranda. W e went round the house, accompanied by the ragged shadow of a group of birches, and penetrated the interior through the back door. The house has four large rooms, furnished with period pieces. In the room where Blaga slept, as well as the usual bed, there is also a mahogany chest of drawers, a small work table in Regency style, and a glass case with some photographs of Blaga and editions of his poems. We improvized a breakfast, somewhere far behind the house, on a long table, over which hung the branches of two immense fir trees. Noica told us how he discovered Paltini§ (in 1975, I think) while he was spending a summer in the villa of Mrs. Manta, who had actually invited him to settle down here. He preferred Paltini§, however, because it left him free of obligations; and furthermore he had everything he needed there: canteen, telephone, mail, and above all an ideal place for walking, the "Paltinij Tour," which involved an hour's walk on a good asphalted road. Suddenly his coaching instincts were reawakened; he started to chide me for

185 not doing my "scales," for not having an hour every morning in which to practice, for example, my Latin. "I'll give you a Patrology, from which you should read every day a few pages of Roscelinus or Abelard." I asked him how he thinks our books will look after fifty to a hundred years. "Like some strange products, unexpected in einer so diirftigen Zeit. They will provoke wonder, probably, with their refinement and elegance. Perhaps we are all, in our calophilism, the effigies of an Alexandrian age, which continues to secrete culture desperately, as a form of survival." It is with reluctance that I departed from the paradise of "Boccadel-Rio." We headed for Cisnadie and Cisnadioara, where Noica wanted to show us a "model of colonization." In Cisnadie we stopped at the monastery in the center, erected in the 12th century. The lower walls are still in the early, Romanesque style, while the rest is Gothic. Cisnadioara, a completely Saxon village, is the point zero of the Teutonic colonization. "I like to see here becoming in space," said Noica, and asked us to imagine how those few hundred knights of the Order would have looked during that move of over two thousand kilometers, how they chose this place on a height defended on two sides, in the middle of wild nature, far from any road and any invasion route. Others would have come in their footsteps (but what was the attraction to come?), with women, children, carts, cattle. We may imagine next how they prospected round about, how they chose the direction of expansion towards Cisnadie, and then the terminus point on the plateau where they would build Sibiu. "It all happened in a few decades, and with an extraordinary effectiveness. By the end of the 13th century, Sibiu had come together perfectly as a town; it even had— I showed you once—an 'old folks' home,' which, according to the inscription, has functioned without interruption since 1292. But it is impossible to understand how such a prosperous community, open towards the rest of Europe, never in eight centuries achieved any form of great culture." We closed the circle of our trip, leaving Cisnadioara by the road which cuts through the forest and leads to Ra§inari: a route of about five kilometers which, before the war, the Sibiu people used to take in the summertime, returning home in their carriages after a day at the famous bathing place in Cisnadioara. We joined the road to Ra§inari; every time I go on it, this road seems to me to be the way of access to a differently arranged reality, a reality in which it sometimes happens that I participate, but which I feel more often that I am holding magically, from a distance, by the power of the feeble pages in which I try to recount it.

186 This slow migration towards something else begins the moment I pass by the cemetery of Ra§inari and catch a glimpse from the car of the stone lions which watch over the vault of Metropolitan §aguna, and the name of his Holiness in large inlaid letters over the door of the vault. I was slow to realize, perhaps on my third journey to Paltini§, what a curious arc of time was opened in my mind by these images. When I was little, and used to browse unknowingly among the more attractive books in the house, losing myself here and there in insignificant details—I would count the dandelion seeds on the cover of the Larousse, for example, where they were scattered by the gentle breath of a feminine profile—I kept coming back to the sumptuous cover, in glossy blue-gray, of a book on which was written in flowing letters of gold: "Andrei §aguna, Metropolitan of Transylvania." I had, of course, no idea who §aguna was, I didn't have much of an idea what a Metropolitan was, and my images of Transylvania were not very clear either. That book, with its golden letters which fascinated me and the figure of the Metropolitan in ceremonial vestments, disappeared in time from the house, and its image fell into some dead-end of my memory. I never thought of it again, and may not even have heard the name of the Metropolitan mentioned since that time. It came back into my mind unexpectedly, when the inlaid letters above the vault awakened the memory of those other letters, on the book cover, which had been dormant in me for thirty years. These superposed images have given me the sensation that in fact that place, which I saw for the first time scarcely five years ago, had been known to me for a long time, or that, while I was leafing aimlessly through the book about the Metropolitan I was preparing an essential step, which I was to tread towards the meeting of my own future. All these sensations, which I am trying to unravel now, are aroused every time I pass in front of the cemetery in Ra§inari, and take the place, unseen as they are, of the boundary which must somehow separate the "land of Paltini§" from the rest of the world. When I pass that place, the pulse of my being seems to be different, and everything, absolutely everything is left behind, so that I am no more than a point absorbed vertiginously by a concentration of force situated somewhere at the summit. I had brought Noica Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, volume 55, borrowed from Tertulian's library, the volume which includes his lectures on Heraclitus and the problem of logos. We return the books which we have exchanged lately and, while he is looking for that Heidegger volume, Noica says: "I still have a slight regret that I never went into teaching. But Heidegger's lectures, with their

187 dilution, have put me at ease. It is strange to see the loquacity that someone is capable of who chided the human race for its lack of measure in the use of language. And it scares me to see how piously his lectures have been preserved. We might have expected the second part of Sein und Zeit, for example, to have emerged from his drawers, after he had let it be understood that he had not published it so as to punish the public, which had shown itself to be unready and unreceptive after the appearance of the first part of the work. But if two-thirds of this Gesamtausgabe is made up of lectures delivered the length of his teaching life, then it is a big disappointment. In this volume, for example, Heidegger wonders for tens of pages whether logic is of things or of thought, without being shy of the banality of the problem, or of proposing in the end, in the place of logic, the logos of Heraclitus. "However, I have been wondering, seeing where teaching can take you, if any of the great philosophers was also outstanding as a teacher of philosophy. And I have to accept that, apart from Hegel, there is no one to invoke in this sense. We may find a case like that of Kant, who did not mix his system of thinking with his university lectures, remaining, in contrast, in platitude (he based his course on logic, which followed the traditional tripartite arrangementnotion, judgement, reason—on the work of Tetens, a professor of the time, whose book he kept beside his bed). Or we may have lectures in which the original system of thought is taught, as in the case of Fichte or Schelling. Either way, the teaching ends up in failure. In the first case, the original thinker disappears behind the presentation of impersonal knowledge, and in the second, we have 'closing which closes,' rigid systems, one system if we consider Fichte, or five in the case of Schelling. Here, this was what happened with Blaga, with whom you could only discuss within his own horizon. But when the system in which you enclose yourself is one which opens outwards, then you end up understanding the other thinkers too and being able to teach at the highest level. However, only Hegel achieved this; he is the only modern thinker whose system is a closing which opens. If people have come to laugh at philosophers with systems, this can be explained precisely by the fact that these are closings which close. You can't do hermeneutics with such a system, and, being unable to do so, you have no way of entering into the thinking of another. "So there is a terrible risk in teaching: either you do it before you have obtained the idea, and then you have to agree to be a mere manipulator of knowledge, or you do it after you have obtained it, and then it is unlikely that you will be able to reach the

188 thinking of others; you remain in your own enclosure, or, like Kant, you accept the divorce between the being of the thinker and that of the teacher. Another risk is half-success: you achieve your own filter, conquering, varied, but in the name of some ideas, not in the name of one idea. "Saying all this, I do not mean to deny the usefulness of teaching. The problem is how to reconcile it, and whether indeed you can reconcile it, with that of creativity. There are destinies which are clearly placed in the condition of teaching: you deliver lectures, work them up and publish them, as Eliade did with his Histoire des idées et des croyances religieuses. There is, in successful teaching, the good becoming-in(to)-becoming of culture, just as there is a good becoming-in(to)-becoming of the species, for example that which, with their maidenly hybris, the Danaids refused, thus being punished by having to live bad becoming-in(to)-becoming, symbolized by filling bottomless barrels. So what I wanted to say, referring to Heidegger, is that in philosophy, if you do not reach the situation of Hegel, there is no point in living simultaneously in the condition of creativity, of becoming-in(to)-being on the spiritual plane, and in that of teaching, of becoming-in(to)-becoming. And because teaching can rarely attain becoming-in(to)-being, it has been said that it is incompatible with philosophy."

July 1981

I set out with Thomas to spend three days in Paltini§, with the intention of making some final modification to the Heidegger volume, in the light of Noica's observations. However, we found Noica in a very agitated state. He was scarcely recognizable. In place of the usual well-regulated unfolding of each day, he has overwhelmed us the whole time, from 9 a.m. almost to midnight, with an uncontrolled stream of talk, with unpredictable reactions, flashes of tyranny, unaccustomed volubility and irrepressible outbursts of weeping, after which he has been ashamed and bitterly deplored his old age. A week before he had suffered a sudden increase in blood pressure (dizziness, blocked ears, etc.), and had gone down to Sibiu for a thorough medical check-up. The results indicated that everything was fine, but probably a fear of the end had begun to grow somewhere in his soul. He has told us repeatedly that you must always be on the attack, so as not to be overcome by the torpor which announces the end. And, God, he did indeed talk without a break, as though afraid of any moment of silence. The first morning we did the "Paltini§ Tour," but without the rhythm which he was usually able to impose on this preparatory walk. He insisted on showing us the place beside the Hermitage where he wants his grave to be, and above all he talked, talked a great deal, descending for the first time, perhaps, with so much relish and despair into his past. We now heard him, for the first time, recounting memories of his reclusion, and clearly feeling the need to review his whole life. He was determined to meet again in Bucharest some acquaintances whom he had not seen for years, but who now seemed important to him because they "knew anecdotes," anecdotes from his earlier days. At the Metropolitan's House, beside the Hermitage, there was a Mr. Hossu from Cluj,

192 w h o m he asked to join us and to tell us about "the love life of Blaga and Ro§ca." "You've no idea how many anecdotes this man knows," he kept repeating, on the way up to the house beside the Hermitage to meet Mr. Hossu. He w h o had sung the praises of old age as the absolute accumulation point of life, from which it is natural that its deepest senses should be reflected, who had expressed wonder that cultivated humanity had not learned in seven thousand years how to die, who had amazed me with his un-human or superhuman quality, with everything that he did or felt differently from the way it is usually done or felt, I now found trembling, chattering, chuckling, threatening and weeping—how like an old man, and how human too. And a need to finally put the world in order was arising in him too. This man who had devoted his life to "Romanian culture," w h o had chosen to stay in the country, who had never really had a family, w h o had forgotten his children (rejoicing that they had detached themselves from him, leaving him to work out his destiny unimpeded), who had spent the years of his maturity in forced domicile and in prison (all this time writing ceaselessly, perhaps thinking that he would never see a single line published), this man who, in other circumstances, would have been "founding things right, left and center" and who, coming out of his reclusion, had sought permission to become the cultural coach of the young, the man who had ended up, at over seventy, as a cultural reference point for the country and who had polarized around himself the loves and hatreds of our writers, becoming, as he himself liked to say, "an institution," this man now finally—after leading an "ahoretic" life of somnambulism, and urging others to do the same, so as not to invalidate themselves—wanted to put the world, if not in its entirety then at least the world of culture, in order. "I'll show you!" he kept threatening, and w e understood that his words went through and beyond us, carrying us into a vaster torrent, which was ready to envelop the whole world and jolt it out of the inertia of that "Romanian good-for-nothingness" which he had damned without qualification when he ended his letters to the publishing house directors w h o were proving shy of taking on the publication of the complete notebooks of Eminescu in facsimile with: "...bloody Romanian good-for-nothingness! Respectfully yours, Constantin Noica." After his article in Ramuri about "The Twenty-Two and Performance Culture," he launched a campaign to "harvest future geniuses." He went round Cluj, Sighi§oara and Timi§oara, and was intending to go on to Craiova and Ia§i, to survey the "young people

193 with a future" of twenty-five to twenty-eight years of age. He made up a file on each town, with a record of every young scholar under two headings: "What he knows" and "What he needs." He then proceeded to knock on the door of the local authorities, asking that these young people be employed for a time in fictitious posts, as athletes are, and allowed to develop their cultural performance. How must he have looked on this circuit, touched by that same holy madness which had seized him, eight years previously, when he called insistently for the publication of Eminescu's notebooks in facsimile? He told us that in Timi§oara he had wept, making the woman on duty at the County Committee for Culture weep too. ('"How is it possible?' I asked them. How is it possible that you can pay five thousand soccer players for a lifetime when they only deliver for ten years and let the rest of the time trickle away, while the five or six people you have in the county who are exceptionally gifted in their minds cannot have a few years set aside for cultural training, with a view to selecting from among them the one who will some day bring a Nobel Prize to this country? How is it possible?' And then I burst into tears ") Noica has come down several times, in the most unphilosophical manner, into this world touched by the rule of skepticism, thinking to model it. On several occasions his sorties into the arena of the Act have conferred on him the air of a man who has let his irritation build up in silence so that you wonder at his outbursts, with their apparently disproportionate fury and passion. Often what has given rise to these violent irritations, the forms of manifestation of a love which feeds on the defects of the beloved object, has been, when they could not target the situation itself, a mere symptom. So it was this time, when we found him, among other things, thrown off balance by an article of I. Gr. in Luceafarul, proposing that the Church of the Heroes in Tirgu Jiu be moved "a few meters," so that Brancu§i's Column of Infinity may be seen unobstructed from the Gate of the Kiss. Noica's devastating pamphlet (which is to be offered for publication in the same journal, Luceafarul, by way of "right to reply"), calls I. Gr. "a member of the contemporary red brigades" who mutilate famous works of art; it calls on him to leave the country, to whose manner of living the infinite he remains a foreigner, and finally asks him to leave the Writers' Union (which Noica is going to leave in any case). It ends with these words: So I have sought the counsel of my elders at the Table of Silence and have decided on another course: let us, as human

194 beings and fellow Romanians, ask you to repent. Let us urge you to keep silence for a year or two, putting ash on your head and, perhaps, following the example of the poet Peguy, who undertook a pilgrimage on foot every year from Paris to Chartres. I have decided, or I might dare to say we have decided, to go on foot from Bucharest to Tirgu Jiu, to kneel in the Church of the Heroes and to pray—not for your soul and your salvation in eternity, but for your salvation in the Romanian age and its everlastingness, which may have more chances of enduring, with its measure, than the measurelessness of America. May Brancu§i then forgive you, may the elders and children of Tirgu Jiu forgive you, and so may the Romania archeus, in whose name I have written. How does all this fit in with the lecture he gave Andrei over his article on patriotism in Secolul 20? Or the way he begged me emphatically a few months back not to denounce the plagiarism and imposture of Tudor Ghideanu, head (I think) of the Department of Philosophy in Ia§i, regarding Heidegger and contemporary philosophy in general, saying that the gesture which seemed to me purifying and moral would be an unworthy act in relation to the cultural orbit in which I stood? Why had he abandoned his Letters on Logic to skirmish with someone like I. Gr ? If it is true that, in a world in which everything has become "action" and "practice," writing and books alone have kept an authentic soteriological sense, then by doing all this Noica has betrayed the "fertile somnambulism" which aims at intervention not precariously in contexts, but in destinies and communities. But sooner or later none of the great thinkers, from Plato to Heidegger, could resist the lure of the Act. As far as Noica is concerned, there is no doubt that, if circumstances had not held him in check, he would have ended up very far from the model of pure thought which acts only in as much as it thinks. His "School of Wisdom," which he has dreamt of from his youth, was basically a fully fledged institution, which only had to formulate its methods in order to set in motion and direct scholarly destinies and, through them, the lines of force of a whole society. And it remains to be seen whether the project has not, in the end, succeeded. In his eagerness to "found" he has met and influenced people from the most diverse fields of culture, and it may be that one day, when they all come to realize that they have a common source, they will be amazed to find out how great was the number of those who

195 made their way through that "school" which will never be found on any map of public education in the Romania of these decades. Although the means available to him have been much more modest, the influence of Noica on the life of the mind in Romania can be compared only with that of Maiorescu. He was not a minister of culture; he could not set up departments and literary circles; nor could he send young people to study at the state's expense. But he made u p for all this with the extraordinary formative force of his work. After the "Maiorescu moment" and that of the inter-war period, the history of our culture will undoubtedly also record a "Noica moment," the full extent of the impact and significance of which cannot yet be measured. He lived the ideal of culture with such an intensity that everything that fell outside cultural relations remained for him in nonbeing. In the name of the primacy of culture he frequently sacrificed everyday human duties, reformulating ethics in the light of the cultural commandments. Around 1973 he held at Snagov a series of extraordinary "English lessons for waiters," a fantastic demonstration, in which he got completely caught up, of the fact that philosophy can begin anywhere. He had just got ready to leave the house for one of these lessons w h e n his wife, feeling sick, asked him not to leave her alone. Putting on his galoshes he replied: "Whether it is great culture or English lessons for waiters, my duties are the same." And he left. To me he confessed that he loved me more than his own son, w h o was living in "perfection without performance" (having become a monk), while he could still h o p e for a "cultural achievement" from me. And w h e n I was in hospital for an operation and spoke to him on the telephone, he asked if I had enough inner peace to be able to go on working. All these gestures, which can certainly be judged as monstrous, had, however, their basis in an attitude which was, in the first place, directed at himself. For a good part of his life he knew squalor, but he did not live it with relish or despair; rather he quite simply ignored it, precisely because he ignored himself as a being. ("I do not love myself," he once confessed to me. "I discovered one day that I had an antipathy towards someone: he was like me. I do not love my name; I do not love my phlegmatic nature. I would have liked to have been the Prodigal Son, and in fact I have been the Brother. But by not loving myself, I have escaped from myself. I have escaped from the somatic condition, without any further need to transform it into mind. 'Ahoretics,' and I am the first among them, can easily enter into ascesis.") In Cimpulung he was once found in his room, dressed in an overcoat, overshoes and bonnet, reading

196 Augustine; the water in the basin in the middle of the room had frozen. The "God of culture," the only one in whom he believed, and to whose judgement he was convinced that he would be summoned, together with all the worthy and unworthy of this culture, had blinded him, it is true, making of him not a man but a medium, who had been granted the right—like all those who have intrigued their contemporaries and pushed a community forwardto be measured by a different standard. I have kept having the feeling, in the course of these days, that his unaccustomed hurry is due to his desire to leave everything in order around him. On one of the mornings, after the three of us had had a perfunctory look at a few pages of Heidegger—we were unable to concentrate, and his impatience was rising—Thomas went downstairs before us and, when we were alone, he said to me in an almost testamentary tone: "My dear chap, I beseech you to take your destiny seriously. Leave Heidegger alone; he is a Sackgasse, a dead-end. To do things properly you need to have the Greek miracle in one pocket and the German in the other. Let's say that you have the former, although you still haven't really done Aristotle thoroughly enough. Now is die höchste Zeit to start a profound incursion into German idealism. So you will leave everything on one side, and here is what I am asking you to do. I know someone who has Bruno Cassirer's famous edition of Kant, in eleven volumes. You will buy it and for two years you will read it from cover to cover." I was imprudent enough to ask him—as a matter of mere curiosity—how much it would cost. This irritated him terribly. "How much will it cost? You'll see right away how much it costs! But first let me tell you who the edition belonged to; it was Mircea Vulcänescu's. You will go and buy it—but only for two years—for five thousand lei. Now are you satisfied? Five thousand lei to be able to read it and have it by you for two years. When Pythagoras created his theorem he sacrificed, as you well know, a hundred oxen. Unless you give five thousand lei to read this edition, Kant will not enter into your head and you will never do your peratology. I am asking you to make a sacrifice of symbolic value. It is a matter of a transfer between generations, of an almost initiatory act. You must understand this and not let me down with vulgar questions about how much it costs. And let me tell you something else. If you are thinking of answering me that by entering a silence of five or ten years you risk failing to keep up with your contemporaries, if you are going to reply, I mean, that you are scared by the barren diligence of others, then let me tell you that you are letting me down for a second time. For if you write for

197 those around you and in your own time you write in vain. So help me, help me bring something into the world. With my books I have obtained no more than a simple sequence, a syn-logos. Perhaps you will obtain the concept. Believe me that we never really know what we can become. For me, you are already what you can become. Don't let me down!" His voice began to tremble, then he burst into tears and left the room. I remained on the other side of the door, not knowing what to do, feeling very insignificant, powerless, and, above all, scared.

Constantin Noica may consider himself—and does indeed consider himself, I believe—a happy man. A happy man is that man who discovers in all the stages and acts of his life a subtle accord between the happening of that life and the meaning that he has conferred on it. But such an accord may be achieved in at least two ways. There are happy natures, who are capable of discovering everywhere, even where it is not to be found, that harmony between the content of life and its meanings. In such cases happiness becomes a secretion of subjectivity, apt to interpret every event as a confirmation of its own Project, and to see even the presence of the negative as a more complex strategy in the economy of ultimate success. Noica is such a happy nature. He has known happiness almost as an element of his biological endowment and has known how to walk with it through life and through the world with that irresponsible and unconscious grace which is possessed only by saints and sages. In fact for many years, starting in 1948, he led a life of squalor: ten years of forced domicile in Cimpulung, then six years of prison out of an initial sentence of twenty-five. During his time of forced domicile he lived by giving private lessons in mathematics and foreign languages at five lei an hour. However, he has declared that this period of his life was beneficial, and that prison was "a delight," a period of spiritual renewal and an opportunity for meditation. Any bad thing ended up for him by being good; the "bad thing" that he had not gone into university teaching, that he had not been honored and sought after, he understood as the "good thing" that he had been able to get on with his own business in peace. There is, however, an objective foundation to happiness, when the accord of which I have been speaking is real, when the hap-

199 penings of somebody's life come of their own accord to meet the meaning which has been instituted and the aim which has been pursued. Noica has known happiness in this second sense too, which is in fact the only true and real sense. In the last phase of his life, history has gone over to his side, helping and favoring him. Noica's explosive entry into Romanian culture began with the year 1968, a year marked by two distinct and parallel phenomena in Romania: on the one hand, a liberalization of thought, a tacit acceptance of the fact that it was possible to think and to create culture, apart from dogma; and, on the other hand, an elevation, from the point of view of official policy, of national differences above supra-national integrating ideologies. Noica's entire thinking, with its twin directions—construction of systems, original visions and personal hermeneutics, and the obsession with defining a national spiritual profile—came to meet these two distinct phenomena. More than that, it answered to a twofold need, which had appeared objectively: the need to restore a thinking that went back to origins, after years of the mental monotony induced by a dialectical and historical materialism brought down to the level of an instruction manual and instrument of catechism; and the need for selfdefinition, the restoration of a national consciousness. Hence the success which Noica's work had in Romania, starting in 1968, and its influence on the young generations of intellectuals. He had the happiness of finding a massive opening, in the very happenings of history, for the obsessions, meanings and aims of his life.

An unresolved tension: the idiomatic and the universal But this situation, which is reflected in its entirety in the work of Noica, concealed the possibility of a terrible contradiction. Emergence from the asphyxia of dogmatism presupposed a fresh discovery of the great sources of culture, and an opening towards universal and western values. The definition of a national spiritual profile, on the other hand, presupposed a rediscovery of tradition, of the indigenous, and, at the extreme, the risk of exalting the nationally specific and eliminating, as "foreign and impure," cultural influences of western type. Noica tried to avoid this tension, affirming that the important thing was to work in and for Romanian culture with the means and

200 values of universal culture. But it is no less true that these two aspects remained in his work in a strange exteriority, with his writings aligning themselves to two distinct and autonomous horizons: on the one hand, studies of the history of European philosophy, of metaphysics, hermeneutics and logic, which demonstrate a veritable reverence for Greek and classical German philosophy (his commentaries on the Platonic dialogues, Open Concepts in Descartes, Leibniz and Kant, his commentaries on Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Parting with Goethe, Six Maladies of the Contemporary Mind, Treatise on Being, False Treatise on Logic); and, on the other, works anchored exclusively in the indigenous phenomenon, all of which have the word "Romanian" in their titles: Romanian Philosophical Utterance, Creation and Beauty in Romanian Utterance, The Romanian Sentiment of Being, The Romanian Mind at the Balance of Time, Eminescu: the Complete Man of Romanian Culture. The immediate ridicule to which such an approach lays itself open is clear. Is it possible for philosophy—which from the Greeks to the present day has been an exercise concerned with the universal, and which, in its greatest moments, has even avoided anthropology, preferring to speak not in the name of a human reason but in that of a general reason (das Bewußtein überhaupt, in Kant's words), valid for men, angels and gods alike—to descend so far into the regional that it speaks at the level, and in the name, of the spirit of a nation? We may ask, by analogy, if it is possible to speak of an English, French or Italian sentiment of being, or likewise of an English, French or Italian philosophical utterance. And if not, then is it possible in the case of Romanian culture because of a certain patriarchalism which has been preserved here, and which, suddenly, instead of seeming a handicap, may be invoked, exalted and transformed into an argument for superiority? The road is thus opened towards a mildly ridiculous nationalism, and it is no wonder that Cioran, with his ears alert to, and weary of, all the nationalisms of the age, was quick to congratulate Noica, a short time after the publication of the Romanian Sentiment, on his "Paraguayan sentiment of being." In committing himself to this road, Noica started from the idea of an excellence in the Romanian spiritual substance, an excellence detectable in the first place in the language, which he saw as a sort of natural spiritual deposit, specially suited to creation at the level of philosophical meditation, in the same way as the Greek and German languages. Noica uses the word "Romanian" in compound expressions, just as he might with "Greek" or "German," consider-

201 ing the justification for speaking of a "Greek sentiment of being" or a "German philosophical utterance." And if whole philosophies have been elaborated around a single word—like eidos for the Greeks, or Dasein, and even the modest Gestell, in Heidegger—why could the same thing not be done around a Romanian word, which might be every bit as able as these to sustain a whole system of philosophy? The Romanian preposition intru, which can be satisfactorily translated neither by the German zu nor the English into, has become for Noica a fundamental ontological operator, with the help of which he has constructed in a spectacular manner an entire treatise on ontology, finding, in this simple preposition, the connecting term between becoming and being.

Culturalism as access to a truer history For the generation which took its first steps onto the public stage of culture around the years 1968 to 1970, however, Noica meant and still means something different. When, after twenty years of silence, Noica reappeared in Romanian culture, he came to meet the need for moral purity and for a universalism of culture. Culture should be pursued in the name of a tautological ideal; it was a spiritual practice carried out with one's thoughts on the "God of culture," and which took its strength precisely from an exacerbated consciousness of its immanent logic, from the preservation of the great cultural alphabet of the European and universal mind. It was in the name of this ideal that Noica directed us towards the great texts and instruments of culture, which were sources in an absolute sense, sources for a mind that does not shut itself within regional frustrations and pride. He represented, for our generation, a guarantee of the mind in its cultural variant, a purificatio spiritualis which had to be maintained and propagated precisely through access to the tried and tested sources of this purification. Perhaps culture had never before in Romania taken on such a soteriological value. To master Greek, Latin and German, to translate and publish—in a world wounded to the point of death by twenty years of dogmatism—Plato and Plotinus, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger, to write erudite and refined books—all these were moments of a ritual of liberation in the mind, in a world in which everything was weighed and validated according to the criteria of "action" and "practice." This lateral liberation, discreet and unspectacular,

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blameworthy, it may be, in its intellectual egotism, was and still is the form of survival for all that is best in the Romanian spirituality of today. But is not this "liberation" a flight from history? Did Noica not indeed say somewhere that the Romanian's vocation is to linger on the banks of history and watch others drowning? If by history w e understand the sequence of events which happen to us, but also without us and beyond us, then, for Noica, culture did indeed mean a withdrawal from history. But if culture and the mind represent the natural medium of humanity's existence, as water is for fish and air for birds, then to live in culture is in fact to enter for the first time into the truer and more essential history of humanity. And in this type of history anyone may participate, if he is not indeed obliged to do so by his very essence as a human being. It is the will of culture that decides the fulfillment or failure of a human destiny, and not engagement, which is never free (and always guilty) in some act or other. And no one has any excuse for their failure to fulfil this destiny; if people have "read books by lantern light before now" then no sociological argument may be invoked to excuse those w h o have not entered into culture or w h o have failed within it. Culture raised to the rank of a metaphysical entity and transformed into the unit of measure of "true history" becomes what w e might call Noica's culturalism. This "culturalist vision" is consistently extended also over the great historical communities. Truly, according to Noica, the destiny of peoples passes through culture, and those peoples w h o have not created great culture—the Hittites or the Etruscans for e x a m p l e have disappeared from history. Cultural capital and cultural production are the guarantees of a people's survival, and not the extent of their participation in the events of the world; in evidence might be cited the case of the Turks, w h o shook the history of Europe for centuries, only to end u p agonizing in their own cultural void. The history of a people is thus the history of its culture. Noica made this into an existential proposition; he took it u p o n himself, that is, to the extent that he bore witness to it by the inner and outward order of his o w n life. He chose to serve Romanian culture with a passion that proves that what was at stake was not simply culture, in the rather superficial sense in which w e usually use the term, but the very being of a community to which only culture could give the depth and degree of certainty of an essence. Only thus can w e understand the missionary tone which can be sensed in the principle moments of his life and in his work itself. A certain

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feverish desire to found things (projected institutes, editions and "schools of wisdom"), and the rather desperate endeavor to create a "true culture"—in the place of one threatened at times by amateurism and facility, and at others by erudition and sterility—come out of his fear that at the "Last Judgement of universal history" we will not have the necessary documents to justify our right to existence, and will remain "a mere village lost in history."

Thepaideic dimension: in search of future geniuses Was it possible to achieve such a "true culture" only by building up one's own body of work? There are creators who are content to carry out their own work in a supreme and egotistical creative pride. But when "creating" implies the destiny of a community, and thus becomes the essential hypostasis of historical being, then there must appear creators who will also teach others to create. "Teaching," in this case, means awakening in others their forgotten cultural being. This is what is implied in the paideic dimension of Noica's personality. And it points us, coherently and inevitably, to his "culturalist" ontology: the idea that there is a "paradise of culture," an unchanged scale of values, a "classical culture," in which the essence of humanity finds and develops itself. But how is it possible to perform this Socratic task of awakening in people the memory of things which they have never known? Noica had no access to the traditional institutions of public education, and if he had ever been invited to teach he would probably have refused. For he dreamt, all his life, not of an organized system of education, in which the content of thinking was taught, but of a "school of wisdom" concerned only with thinking. "Returning to culture" meant returning to an Adamic culture, prior to the fall into sin of officialized and institutionalized culture. However, in order to achieve this, you need to know how to seek and select your pupils, just as Socrates sought and selected his from among the young men with beautiful minds in the city. Socratism had to be reinvented and made to live again, purer, lonelier and guiltier perhaps, in another city of the world. So Noica detected his young men in the agora, by way of public rumor, and established a relationship with them, the essence of which was a differentiated contact with the mind of each pupil. A paideic pat-

204 tern of a much more oriental and patriarchal type was thus remade, as in the world of the Upanishads, dominated by the gentle atmosphere of that "come sit by me and listen." Paideia became in this way a ludic relationship, a superior game between coach and trainee, an initiation into the esotericism of culture, directed ultimately at cultural creation as a strange form of modern sacrality. For does not culture, this modern variant of the objective mind, bring with it the "good forgetting" of the narrow ego and a peaceful access to an enlarged self. Started modestly, almost with the discretion of foresight, Noica's paideic adventure ended in the quixotic sublimity of one who needs to transform the whole world into the stage of his actions. If Romania has twenty-two million inhabitants, are there not among them twenty-two—one in a million—with exceptional gifts? Noica began to launch, single-handed, a campaign to "harvest future geniuses." He went round most of the large cities in the country, to survey the "young people with a future" between twentyfive and twenty-eight years of age. He kept up a file on each town, with a record of every young scholar's situation under two headings: "What he knows" and "What he needs." He then proceeded to knock on the door of the local authorities, asking that these young people be employed for a time in fictitious posts, as athletes are, and allowed to develop their cultural performance... To a world which does not know the blandishment of prosperity, or which perhaps cannot know it except by renouncing its own moral being, there remains the chance to live more authentically, closer, that is, to the human essence, in a comfort of the mind. And it was precisely this which seemed to Noica to be the "blessing of Romania." Any descent into Hell may be borne, if the paradise of culture remains possible. And paradoxically it was easier to find the paradise of culture here. In saying "here," I do not for a moment wish to imply any naive belief in the superiority of the east or of Romanian-ness in relation to the two-thousand-year-old culture of the European West, but merely a state of cultural hunger, which Germany, for example, experienced immediately after the war, but lost once it was transformed into the "Germany of butter." "Here" means the country where, for example, Noica's Becoming in(to) Being was published in 1981, while in Paris they were reading with a thrill the prophecies of Nostradamus about how the world would end at the conclusion of the second millennium. So something is happening in Romania, and it is happening especially in the catacombs of the mind, there where the Upanishads

205 were also born; they had no need, in order to win through, of French television and the places where today the one-day myths of humanity are made and unmade. And it may be that if there were cultural competitions unbounded by language barriers, just as there are international championships in gymnastics, then Romania would appear with a team which would leave a deeper and more essential impression, in the short memory of the world, than any gymnast or tennis player can ever do.

Postscript I have been rereading these pages; they seem to describe a possible paideic model in the world of humanist culture. For such a model to be brought to birth it is, of course, necessary for there to be both a rectorial mind and one which feels the need and wishes* to be modeled, supervised and increased to the point where it can cut itself loose, part from, indeed even turn against, the one who has accompanied and guided it for a time. It is well known that without such a fertile betrayal no paideic model can truly reach its saturation, and in an excessively prolonged discipleship it does no more than live its own failure and destruction. The problem, with any paideic model, is that in trying to end up as Plato, you risk becoming nothing, when you could at least be a "minor Socratic." But where thought is concerned, is it possible not to wish to take this risk? The moral of these pages, which belongs to the rectorial mind, is that thinking represents an original act of the human being, which cannot be lived by delegation, but has to be won by "murder." In the world of the mind, this "murder", which is desired by both sides and foreseen as an obligatory act in any paideic scenario, becomes the highest form of affirmation, conferring on the victim a moment of supreme beatitude and offering him, by this new embodiment, the chance of another life. On the other hand, the inability to commit this "murder," or hesitation about committing it, will make the victim suffer, and he will render his soul as a sigh of relief when the apparently delayed stroke is finally felt. It will transform him into that which he has desired from the very beginning to be: a happy victim. * The will to be modeled, the nerve of any paideic scenario, is a merit shared between the modeler and the one who is modeled.

Addendum to a biography T w o stopping points along Noica's way

The arrest Noica did not know how to recount his time in prison, and when he did so, in Pray for Brother Alexandru, he ended up by lamenting the condition of the torturer, and not that of the imprisoned. By a strange dialectic of reversals, the interrogator became the subtle victim of the concentration scenario, while the interrogated came to play a subordinate role as the occasion of his mutilation. "A few days ago I met my interrogator in the street," he told us sometime in the 1970s. "He seemed to have shrunk; he had suffered a stroke and was dragging one foot. 'How are you getting on?' I asked, unable to master my compassion. 'As you can see...I keep a tobacconist's shop.' I left him, wondering who, in the ultimate logic of life, was the victim." It was in this register that Noica recounted the whole "lesson" of his detention. He had "expected" prison. ("I felt it had to come.") And when it happened, it seemed to him like a "good deed." A rest, a break, a stop on the way of life to rearrange one's appearance: no more than that. Even the scenes of torture he reported as if he were speaking about someone else, a protocol, a simple detached description of a technical procedure. "They laid you on the ground naked, with your face to the floor. They put a leather mat on your back, leaving your buttocks exposed. Then you got two strokes with a whip on each buttock. The first cut your skin; the second, which fell on exactly the same spot, made you pass out. Since then I have been unable to sit on a chair without a cushion." Only when I heard this did I understand why, when I first came to know him and we used to meet at the Academy Library, he always carried a little inflatable rub-

210 ber cushion in his briefcase, along with his papers and books. It was prison, too, that helped him to understand the "aptness of folk speech." "I never knew why they talked about 'green stars.' It was only when I received a terrible slap in prison and I literally saw, for a few minutes, wherever I turned my head, green stars, that I understood how much truth there is in that expression." All the same, he did have some little outbursts of revolt. When he came out of prison, in 1964 (after six years of detention), he no longer had any teeth, and he wanted for a while (as his I.D. photograph of the time bears witness) not to replace them, so that the world might know what a communist prison could do to us. "I gave up after a short while, when a doctor friend told me that I was going to wreck my stomach." He also told me how, shortly before their release, the political prisoners were put in a car and taken on a tour of Bucharest, to see what "achievements of the socialist regime" had sprung up in the meantime while they were in prison. '"You have made some beautiful things,' I told them, 'but you have made me uglier.' And I turned my face towards them with its sunken and toothless mouth." About the manner of his arrest he never spoke, so it is only from the account given me by Mariana Noica, after her husband's death, that we can have an idea of what took place on that winter's night in Cimpulung. "They came in the evening at about nine o'clock, on the 11th December 1958. We were at table, Dinu, Oana—who was seventeen and in the eleventh grade—and myself. We had two rooms: one was our bedroom and the other, in which we ate, was Oana's. Oana was my daughter from my first marriage; I have told you before, Gabi, that my first husband died when he was twenty-eight, a year after we got married. For about eight years I hardly saw the world. I had started to practice spiritism and people around me thought I was going mad. Then, at a certain point, I began to pray, and gradually I felt that I was coming back to myself. "So eight years had passed when I met Dinu. Like him, my parents-in-law had forced domicile in Cimpulung, and Oana spent most of the time with them until she was six or seven. In the summer of 1949 I came from Bucharest to Cimpulung on holiday. Dinu's cousin, Bebe Noica, and his wife Neta Noica, were friends with my parents-in-law, and we all went out together, 'down to the river.' That was the entertainment in Cimpulung: going down to the river to sunbathe and swim. "That day Dinu came to the river too. We met the very day he turned forty: 25th July 1949- He stayed for a while at the river, we

211 talked, and then he made his excuses and said he had to make an 'ascent of the mountain.' The 'mountain' was a local hill, a bit larger than the rest, and Dinu, who took himself very seriously, had prepared sandwiches with the intention of spending the rest of the day 'up there,' in solitude and meditation. I remember that he impressed me, but at the same time I couldn't help laughing at him. In any case it was funny what happened that day to Razvan, his son, who was then seven, and who had come to spend some time with Dinu. In order to make his 'ascent' and take stock of things in solitude, Dinu had left his son with some friends who also had a small boy, Ionuf Rizescu, about the same age as Razvan, who, they tell me, was later your colleague at high school, at Spiru Haret. Anyway, after his meditation on the mountain, Dinu forgot about Razvan, and remembered only at midnight, when it was too late to take him back. Dinu had got divorced already in 1947, so that Wendy could get back her British citizenship and leave for England with the children, Razvan and Dina. They only managed around 1955. We became engaged the following year, in the presence of my parentsin-law—Dinu could hardly make ends meet, so the rings were made from what little gold I still had—and I moved up to Cimpulung. In any case, I had been sacked a short time before from the Foreign Ministry, where I had been working since 1944. "So, there we were, sitting at table when the doorbell rang. I got up. The front door opened into a corridor which ran past the two rooms. I opened it and found myself face to face with four individuals. I can't remember how they were dressed. All I can recall is that the one who stood in the doorway had his shirt collar open, although it was the middle of winter. I entered the room, with the men behind me. They took Dinu into the bedroom. I wanted to go with him but they wouldn't let me. I just got as far as the door, and saw the one who was last to enter putting his hand on the stove. It was cold, because we economized as much as we could on coal. 'It will be warmer where you're going,' he said, and started to laugh. Then he shut the door. "They kept him there till three in the morning, in a sort of preliminary interrogation. When they had finished they said I could go into the room to say goodbye. There were some books and papers thrown carelessly into a sheet on the floor, because the bedroom was also where Dinu worked. We embraced. Dinu looked scared. I can't remember what we said. Then he kissed Oana. No, no, I didn't cry. I didn't cry at all. You'll see. They left, taking with them the sheet with the things wrapped in it. Others were waiting outside. The house, the neighbors told me the next day, had been sur-

212 rounded. Can you imagine Dinu running away? But I have really no idea what they imagined he was like. "I went back into the house and put Oana to bed. I shut the bedroom door and spent the rest of the morning walking about the room, not knowing what I was doing. When, around noon, I heard Oana getting up, I went into her room and hurried to look at myself in the only mirror we had in the house. I could have sworn I had turned white. I had not turned white, but, without shedding a single tear, my eyes had lost their light. When I say they had lost their light, I don't just mean that my look was dull after a sleepless night. The most wonderful things which God had given me, and for which I think I had been loved, were two real lights which played all the time in my eyes. How can I put it, Gabi? They were just like two stars. Well those lights had disappeared and I lost them then forever. "But something else happened. When I am annoyed or depressed I can't talk to anyone. So once Oana had wakened, I went back into the bedroom so that I would not have to talk to her, and lay down on the bed with a book in my hand. At a certain moment, since she had not managed to go to school, Oana told me from the door that she was going out to get the next day's homework from a fellow pupil. I heard her going out and then I got up. "I didn't tell you that for six months I had not prayed. I was angry with God. I got up and started walking about the room again. I didn't know what to do. And then I heard a voice, a clear and commanding voice, saying just this one thing: lRoaga-te\ Pray!' Don't laugh at me, Gabi, because it was the voice of an angel. I have no doubt. And even now, after forty years, I still have the intonation of his voice in my ears, firm and pure, pausing for a moment on the first syllable as if to give it emphasis: 'Roaga-tel' "I went over to the wall, I fell on my knees, and I started to pray. And it was only then that I burst into tears."

The end On the morning of 25th November 1987, in his room in Paltinig, Noica woke up early with the impression that there was a mouse in his room. Still dizzy with sleep, he got out of bed without turning on the light, tripped on the edge of the carpet, and fell. The Paltini§ Tour which he had walked daily with forthright steps for ten years failed to speak up for him. As he fell in an involuntary pirouette,

213 the bone of his hip gave way. ("It will all be over, Gabi, when I can no longer take my walk. My strong point is my feet, not my head, and it is my belief that every true philosopher thinks first of all with his feet.") He lay on the floor for several hours, until Andrei Cornea, who happened to be in Paltini§ to spend a few days in the company of Noica, turned up. In the afternoon an ambulance from Sibiu transported him to the county hospital, where he was taken into ward 13 in Dr. Marin's orthopedic section. Did the mouse really exist? Or had it just been a phantasm which, for whatever reason, had been troubling Noica for a while? What is certain is that the following day, Thursday, when I arrived at Sibiu around six in the evening, I heard from the doctor that he had tried again, an hour before, to get out of bed to "catch the mouse." When I entered the room, together with Relu Cioran, he embraced us and playfully apologized for what had happened, as if he had been playing some practical joke. Then he hurried to inform us of the hidden presence ("under the bed") of the ubiquitous animal. In a quite inexplicable manner, the mouse had accompanied him all the way down to Sibiu, only to reappear in his hospital ward. I recalled how, a few months previously, in the course of one of our evenings together during my last stay in Páltini§, he had asked me if I knew the story of the man who got up in the middle of the night, awakened by a sound of gnawing, and started rummaging through every corner of the room. "Well, in the end he found out what it was: it was his conscience gnawing at him." And, delighted with his anecdote, Noica laughed heartily. I attached no importance to his words at the time, and even remember wondering at the dubious delight with which Noica savored the infantile joke. Had this mouse, which had come to close a destiny, really emerged, as the mouse of his death, from some corner of his room in Paltini§, or from the infinite rooms of his conscience, from which Noica was now trying to expel it, refusing to accept that it could happen that he, Noica, could enter into the space of his own anecdote, and end up—what shame for a philosopher—gnawed by his conscience? But in any case, why should it be shameful for a philosophereven the most shameful thing of all—to be gnawed by his conscience? "Never, my dear chap, let the past get on top of you. Because it only ever comes in two bad forms: that of regret and that of remorse." From the very beginning, Noica had done nothing but raise, between himself and the world, the shield of his own system. Our entry into the world is the entry of invalids. Everything around

214 me contributes to my disintegration: history, current events, most of the people who cross my path, and above all my own experiences, my exaltations and sorrows, that tearing evil which gnaws within me and which rises to the surface as the poisoned flower of my soul. Mathesis, Noica's first book, was born out of this quarrel with the undoing richness of life, with life lived as it occurs, or which lives itself as it wishes. Written at the age of twenty-three, this book still bears the mark of the barb which had fixed itself early in the flesh of a vulnerable adolescent. If the world buries you in itself, like a sinking sand, denying you from the beginning a face of your own, and if your experiences burn you and disintegrate you, do you not urgently need to devise a weapon of defense and attack, and to direct it against the infinite evil of life? Noica discovered right from the beginning—and it is for this very reason that he is both a philosopher and a sage by vocation—that the idea and the system are the sole remedies available in the face of the overwhelming assault of life. These two things are pedagogic and formative: neither is a matter of blind aspiration towards knowledge and order for their own sakes, but rather of saving order. In the face of the disordered torrents of life, Noica raises, as both anathema and civilizing act (meaning one which gives form and the rule of the mind), the cross of his own idea: "You always need an idea as the organizing principle of life." And the torrents die down and enter mildly into the framework proposed by the philosopher. From the beginning, consciousness, which creates its own object in order to master the unmediated content of life, becomes the location of an extraordinary tension of the will: with the help of its constructs, I dominate myself, transcend myself, and emerge from the slavery of the "soul". Mathesis was a book about the good housekeeping of the inner life with the help of philosophy. Noica's constructivism—his system—was placed in the service of a philosophy of life with a definite soteriological component: if you succeed in putting the world—and yourself—in order with the help of certain mental articulations, you will win salvation with serenity. And serenity means emerging from the order of the soul and passing into that of the mind. The idea, as agent of philosophy, means precisely this: the way of putting a distance between you and yourself. This voluntarist program which he set out in his first book was respected and fulfilled by Noica with a sort of sacred reverence towards himself. The figure of Noica is drawn in the lines of this repeated effort: if life is not worth living unless it is embraced through an idea, then this idea must be endlessly refined in order to become more and more capable of submitting life to its em-

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braces. There is no definitive installation into mind (as domination of the impulses of the soul), just as there is no installation into sainthood. It is clear that in this program there was no place for a mouse gnawing in a corner of his consciousness. It had to be driven out at all cost, de-internalized, sent to wander under the bed or in the very real corners of the room. It could not be allowed to spoil, now at the end, the lifetime's creed of a philosopher, and to muddy the crystal-clear waters of his geometries. A consciousness starting to erode, about to receive all the alluvia of the soul which had been carefully kept at a distance for so long, would have brought the thinker down to his knees. And Noica had to end up on his feet, bearing witness to Ms idea. And it was through this very idea, at work for the last time, that the mouse had been evacuated from his consciousness and sought, at the cost of his life, in a real space. I noted down at the time, on a piece of card, with no intention except to keep a reminder, fragments of the events and words of those last eight days which I spent by Noica's side, divided between hope, despair and acceptance. (It was only in the last day that I realized that I had come to watch his end.) On Friday 27th November I noted down: "Signs of fever (bronchopneumonia). I find him in the evening in ward 1, Intensive Care. He is sitting across the bed, leaning on the wall, with a pillow behind his back, his legs hanging over the edge of the bed (the humiliating sadness of hospital pajamas and socks). His somnolent head leans wearily forward. When he senses that there are people around—doctors or friends—he starts to speak, slowly and with great difficulty, scarcely moving his lips, his sentences lost before they are finished. It is a delirium, but a delirium articulated by ideas." Some of the phrases which I hurriedly took down from this feverish discourse have lost their meaning since then. For example: "About the volatilization of medicine." Noica had always had an ambiguous attitude towards medicine, which was no more than the reflection of the ambiguity with which he related to his own body: a mixture of peasant panic and Epictetic detachment. He gave credit to doctors and teased them at the same time, enjoying drawing their attention sometimes to the not-yet-understood areas of their field, or sometimes to the dry pragmatism which can repair the body as offhandedly as a workman mending a damaged tool. His little speech on the volatilization of medicine, made ad hoc, for the benefit of the doctors who surrounded him at that moment, probably involved something of this sort. I recall that, in conclusion, he said with a pleading and reproachful tone: "Why

216 don't you operate on me, for goodness sake?" And after a pause: "Since you still haven't learnt to allow one to die..." Then, as if he were sharing a secret with us: "I have hosts of angels, you know, to help me." At no time in these days did he give any sign that he feared death. When his nephew, Dr. Nicolae Noica, proposed that he be transported to Bucharest for an operation in extremis, he replied: "I would rather die in Sibiu than get better in Bucharest." The problem of his own death he saw strictly in terms of housekeeping, without the least shiver, as a mere undesired dysfunction, interrupting the completion of a project. "My dear chap, I would like to face the youth of the country again next summer in Paltini§," he said to me tentatively, two days before his death. Although I was in permanent contact with the doctors, I did not sense the end coming (I think they were afraid to accept it), and I do not think he suspected it either. The tone of his letter of 1st December, the last in his life, which he asked me to give to Mariana Noica, is one of confidence in his own words, and not of false comfort, designed to dispel the fears of those close to him: My Dear Mariana, This is the first letter I have sent since the accident. I am ready for anything, but it seems that everything will work out well. In the first phase I shall be something of an invalid, which will impose restrictions on my life. Then I shall be back to normal. Having things to do and things to write, I am happy. I thank you for everything and kiss you, Dinu. But nothing worked out well. A blood clot from the fracture entered his circulation and caused a pulmonary embolism. On the evening of Wednesday, 2nd December he began to have difficulty breathing. All the same, the next day, which was to be his last, began peacefully. He spoke to me in the morning, under the impression of a dream in which he was striving to carry an idea through to its conclusion, about the "dreams of the soul" and the "dreams of the mind." "The dreams of the soul are those which disintegrate our being, not only when they harass us with fears or remorse, but even when they enchant us with their joys. And why is this so? Because the joys of the soul do not stay, they have the consistency of a cloud, and you can't find them again when you turn back to

217 seek them. The dreams of the mind, on the other hand, involve constant joy from the very beginning; they place you in an order which is higher than you are. They are in fact dreams of the deepest and cleanest depth, and for that very reason they are of the order in which we all meet. This depth is not that of psychoanalysis, but that of the place in which we all become One. The dreams of the mind are our dreams of angels. After a certain age, since we are what we make ourselves, it would be natural to have only dreams of the mind." In the afternoon, towards five o'clock, he got up in the same good mood, and asked to be put in an armchair. In place of the pajama top he was wearing a pink tee-shirt with short sleeves, the only one I had been able to find in the shops on Strada Mare and which now gave him a juvenile and almost sporting appearance. He talked with the doctors and asked to be allowed to smoke a pipe, although every breath was accompanied by a wheezing which grew in intensity by the hour. When he bid me goodnight, around nine o'clock, perceiving me, I think, for the last time, and turned his face to the wall, the air which he had tasted with relish and despair could no longer find room in his lungs, blocked as they were by acute oedema. I was there throughout this prolonged drowning, with one hand resting timidly on his shoulder, murmuring from time to time without any sense, as I knew he was no longer able to hear me, and addressing myself from now on to that other being of his, which lay beyond his hearing and the hypoxia which had taken hold of his brain and which had invaded his face with the gray that foretells death. "Mr. Noica, Mr. Noica, I am here, I am here..." At a certain moment he twisted himself round with unexpected strength, turned his face suddenly upwards, sat up straight, beat the air twice with his hands, like a huge bird, and, before falling back, he uttered, as though springing from a final lightning flash of his mind, the German word Unbedingtheit. "unconditionality." As he fell back on the pillow he went into a coma. Clinical death followed three hours later, after midnight, on 4th December at twenty minutes past one. In the course of these eight days that I had spent by his side I do not think I had wept even once, and I did not weep even now as I looked at his bluing face outlined against the white of the pillow, and at the decent politeness of the impeccably aligned body with which we are accustomed to meet death. It is amazing to realize with how much application and precision we can function in such moments, how in the company of the most beloved beings we make the visible inflexions of the heart disappear, and leave a place

218

only for the actions which truly have to be done. In such moments we are cold and exact, and we carry out with a surprising competence things which we have not even imagined hitherto, or which, when we thought of them, we associated with a shiver of repulsion. In those eight days I shaved him every day and I noted the joy with which he gave himself up to this necessary luxury, he who had denied himself the luxuries of life or who had had little share in them. I was not doing these little things because I was caught up in a mythological scenario—he was the great Noica and I his humble disciple—but quite simply because I loved him. I learned then that any love, to be sure that it is true, must pass the test of the action which would normally provoke aversion. I who had refused until then to take into consideration the existence of biology and its failures, and who had turned my head in disgust from the infirmities of life, massaged his feet daily, wiped his sweat and changed him, and cleaned his denture plate under the tap after every meal as naturally as I washed my own hands. In all this there was no trace of piousness, merely caring love, that love which appears before a being loved in affliction and which transforms him, by this very fact, into your child. I caught myself then being severe with him, giving and refusing permission, promising and offering rewards, using imperative tones. Helpless and beloved, Noica had in those days become my child. I arrived in Paltini§ at seven in the morning. I had to ask Metropolitan Antonie, who was there for a few days, for permission for Noica to be buried, as he had wished, beside the Hermitage. Before reaching the Metropolitan's House, I went round to Noica's chalet, thinking to pick up the notebooks containing his Diary of Ideas, as I feared that the Securitate would be coming to visit the place as soon as they found out about his death. I had just left Sibiu an hour before and I was still functioning with that automatism of efficiency which leaves no room for tears. As long as I was participating actively, the final suffering of Noica had not even produced a sigh from me. I had to detach myself from the logic of death's occurrence, to be able to perceive death as such in all its horror. And now, all at once, as I crossed the threshold of the room, this death took on an evidentiality which I had not perceived even before his corpse. Why is it that we feel people much more through the gentle imprints that they leave on things that belong to them than in the massiveness of their existence? I still continue to feel the presence of my mother prolonged in the gestures I learned from her: a certain way of holding a cup in her hand, of putting a pillow in its case or of peeling an apple in a continuous spiral. And the grief

219

which seizes us in these moments comes from the expression which the irremediable takes on when we meet things which the lost person has left behind. So I went into Noica's room, and it was only when I stood at the edge of the bed in which he used to write, leaning one side against the headboard, with a plywood tray on his knees, that I slowly slid down and, burying my face in the shabby mattress on the bed, I began to weep.

Glossary* AL-GEORGE, Sergiu (1922-1981): Orientalist, known particularly for his studies of Sanskrit grammar, a leading figure in the development of oriental studies in Romania. He was imprisoned from 1958 to 1964 along with Noica and other prominent intellectuals. BARBU, Ion (1895-1964): Mathematician and poet, the translator of Shakespeare's Richard III into Romanian. BERCEA, Radu (b. 1954): Indologist, translator of the Upanishads and other Sanscrit texts into Romanian, Director of the Sergiu Al-George Institute of Oriental Studies in Bucharest since its foundation in 1990. BLAGA, Lucian (1895-1961): Poet and philosopher, born in the Transylvanian village of Lancram. His principle philosophical works take the form of three trilogies, of Knowledge, Culture and Values. He is famous for his notion of the "Mioritic space", according to which the character of the Romanian people is determined by its origins in a land of rolling hills and valleys. BOGZA, Geo (1908-1993): Writer, avant-garde poet, and journalist, well known for his investigations of social issues. BRANCU§I, Constantin (1876-1957). Sculptor, born in a village near Tirgu Jiu in Wallachia, based in Paris from 1904, known interna* Note on Romanian pronunciation. All vowels should be pronounced, except finali, which is generally silent; / or e before another vowel sounds like English y (e.g. Ion resembles the English yon). The letters peculiar to Romanian are a and i, which both sound something like the / in fill, a which sounds like the a in about, and the consonants y and f which are pronounced like the English sh and tz respectively. Before i or e, the letter c represents the sound of the English ch in church, and g is as in the English gem\ in all other cases they are pronounced as in the English coat and goat.

222 tionally as a pioneer of modern abstract sculpture. Many of his works draw on motifs from Romanian folklore and folk art. In 1938 he set up a monumental complex in Tirgu Jiu, comprising the Column of Infinity, the Gate of the Kiss, and the Table of Silence. BRAUNER, Harry (1908-1988): Ethnologist and musicologist, imprisoned for twelve years. Bradej;: The village name which Noica finds so pleasing (21st February 1979) means literally "Little Fir Tree". Brincovenesc: Architectural style associated with the period of Constantin Brincoveanu, ruler of Wallachia 1688-1714, revived as a Romanian national style at the end of the 19th century. Caietele Inorogului ("The Unicorn Notebooks"):A RomanianFrench cultural periodical published in Paris. CALINESCU, George (1899-1965): Dramatist, poet and novelist. Best known for his work as a literary critic and his monumental History of Romanian Literature. CARAGIALE, Ion Luca (1852-1912): The greatest Romanian dramatist, famous for his social comedies and prose sketches of life in late 19th century Romania. (English translations include The Lost Letter and Other Plays, Lawrence and Wishart, 1956). The epithet "abyssal" is applied to him in the title of a study by Alexandra Paleologu (q.v.). Cimpulung: A small town in the southern foothills of the Carpathians. CIORAN, Emil (1911-1995): Philosopher, much preoccupied with themes of alienation and despair. He was born in the village of Raginari, close to Paltinij, and was a contemporary of Noica's at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in Bucharest. He obtained a scholarship to study in France in 1937, and settled there permanently after the Second World War, thereafter writing in French. Among his principal works available in English translation are On the Heights of Despair, The Temptation to Exist, and The Trouble with Being Born. Cisnadioara, Cisnadie: village and town in the vicinity of Sibiu. The former is overlooked by an early 13 th century church, one of the oldest Gothic buildings in Romania, built on the summit of a rocky outcrop. Like many towns and villages in the region these were historically German settlements. COMARNESCU, Petru (1905-1970): Art critic, a leading figure in the Criterion group of young Romanian intellectuals in the 1930s. CORNEA, Andrei (b. 1952): Philosopher and political analysis, one of the translators of the Plato into Romanian, currently Associate

223 Professor in the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Bucharest and a member of the Group for Social Dialogue. CORYDALEOS, Theofilos ( 1 5 7 0 - 1 6 4 6 ) : Greek cleric and philosopher, teacher at the Academy of Ia§i in Moldavia and author of commentaries on Aristotle. With the exception of those texts which Noica succeeded in translating into Romanian and publishing, his work remains unpublished. CREANGÀ, Ion ( 1 8 3 7 - 1 8 8 9 ) : Author of literary folktales, such as the famous Harap Alb, and childhood reminiscences, a founding father of Romanian prose and creator of some of the best-loved images of village life in Romanian literature. CRETIA, Petru ( 1 9 2 7 - 1 9 9 7 ) : Hellenist and philosopher, translator of works by Plato, Ovid, Dante, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, author of studies of classical literature and philosophy and of philosophical essays. DANIEL the Hermit: 15th century Moldavian monk, traditionally regarded as the spiritual guide of Stephen the Great (q.v.). DAVILA, Carol (1832-1884): Doctor, organizer of the army medical service and the public health service in Romania, a leading figure in numerous organizations, including the Romanian Red Cross. DUMITRESCU, Sorin (born 1 9 4 6 ) : Painter, more recently known for his paintings on religious themes, influenced by the Orthodox icon tradition. ELIADE, Mircea (1907-1986): Writer and historian of religions, student of Indian philosophy in Calcutta 1928-31, having previously graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Bucharest, Romanian Cultural Attaché in London and later Lisbon during the Second World War. He settled in Paris in 1945, and subsequently moved to the U.S.A. where from 1957 he was Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. Besides his numerous scholarly works, many of which are in English or French, he is the author of a number of works of fantastic fiction in Romanian. The discussion of the initiatory symbolism of the Symplegades (mentioned on page xxx) can be found in his Birth and Rebirth: Rites and Symbols of Initiation (1958). ELLAN, Alexandru (b. 1910) Historian, specialist in Byzantine and medieval Romanian history. EMINESCU, Mihai (1850-1889): Poet, journalist and philosopher, regarded as the national poet of Romania. His most famous poem, the ballad-like Luceafàrul ("The Evening Star") draws on a mixture of Romanian folklore and Greek and Oriental my-

224 thologies, to express the tragic condition of the genius on earth. Although the rich musicality of his language is hard to capture in translation, several English versions of selected poems exist, the earliest being that of Sylvia Pankhurst and I.O. Çtefanovici (1930). Fâgâra§: a town in southern Transylvania, between Sibiu and Bra§ov. Flacâra ("The Flame"): A literary journal. FRUNZETTI, Ion ( 1 9 1 8 - 1 9 8 5 ) : Poet, translator, art historian and critic. HÂULICÂ, Dan: Art critic and founding editor of the periodical Secolul 20 (q.v.). "ION and MÀRIE": the simple peasant protagonists of numerous comic anecdotes. Màrie is a rustic variation on the more standard form Maria. IONESCO, Eugène ( 1 9 0 9 - 1 9 9 4 ) : Dramatist, an innovator in dramatic technique and founder of the Theater of the Absurd. Born in the Wallachian town of Slatina, the child of a French mother and a Romanian father, he spent much of his childhood in France, going on to study French at the University of Bucharest, and later for a doctorate in Paris, He finally settied in France in 1945. His first novel, NU ("NO") was published in Romania in 1934 and was awarded a Royal Foundation prize at the same time as Noica's Mathesis\ his debut in the theatre came with La Cantatrice Chauve ("The Bald Soprano"), first performed in Paris in 1950. IONESCU, Nae ( 1 8 9 0 - 1 9 4 0 ) : Logician and philosopher, a formative influence on the young Romanian intellectuals of the inter-war period. IORGA, Nicolae ( 1 9 7 1 - 1 9 4 0 ) : Historian, professor at the University of Bucharest and an exceptionally prolific writer of historical books and articles, a key figure in the development of Romanian historiography. In the inter-war period he entered politics, becoming Prime Minister in 1 9 3 1 - 3 2 . He was assassinated by the Iron Guard in 1940. KLEININGER, Thomas (b. 1946): Translator, essayist and editor. KOGÂLNICEANU, Mihail ( 1 8 1 7 - 1 8 9 1 ) : Historian, an active participant in the Revolution of 1848 and advocate of the union of Moldavia and Wallachia, Prime Minister of the United Principalities 1 8 6 3 - 1 8 6 5 .

LUPA§CU, Çtefan ( 1 9 0 9 - 1 9 9 0 ) : Romanian philosopher settled in France. MAIORESCU, Titu ( 1 8 4 0 - 1 9 1 7 ) : Founding father of Romanian literary criticism and Conservative politician (Prime Minister 1 9 1 2 -

225 13). He was a leading figure in the Junimea movement whose periodical Convorbiri Literare ("Literary Conversations") counted writers of the stature of Eminescu (q.v.), Creanga (q.v.) and Caragiale (q.v.) among its collaborators. His famous condemnation, in an article of 1868, of "forms without substance" in the modernization of Romanian institutions is often quoted. MOISIL, Grigore (1906-1973): Mathematician, specialist in functional analysis, differential geometry and mathematical logic, associated with the early use of electronic computers in Romania. NEAGOE Basarab: Prince of Wallachia (1512-1521), famous as a builder of churches and monasteries, and for his Precepts addressed for his son Theodosie. NEGULESCU, P.P. (1872-1951): Philosopher, professor at the Uni-

versity of Bucharest, and Minister of National Education (19211922), the author of a number of books on Renaissance and modern philosophy. NOICA, Mariana: Second wife of Constantin Noica. NOICA, Wendy: First wife of Constantin Noica. PALEOLOGU, Alexandru (b. 1919): Writer and critic, closely associated with Noica while living in Cimpulung in the early 1950s, after his initial career in the Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs was interrupted in 1948 following the Communist takeover. He later worked as a researcher at the Institute of Art History and an editor at the Cartea Romaneasca ("Romanian Book") publishing house. He was imprisoned from 1959 to 1964, along with Noica and a number of other distinguished writers and intellectuals. After the Revolution of 1989, he was Romanian Ambassador to France from January to May 1990, and is currently (1999) a senator. Paltini§: A small skiing and hiking resort, situated at an altitude of 1442 meters, close to the southern Transylvanian city of Sibiu, PARVAN, Vasile (1882-1927): Historian and archeologist, specialist in primitive and Greco-Roman cultures. He played an important role in the setting up of Romanian schools of archeology. PIPPIDI, Dionis (1905-1993): Classical philologist and historian, professor at the University of Bucharest. Specialist in ancient history and Greco-Roman epigraphy. PLE§U, Andrei (b. 1948): Art historian and philosopher, prior to 1989 a researcher at the Institute of Art History of the Romanian Academy and a lecturer in history of art. Since the Revolution of that year he has held public office as Minister of Culture (1990-91) and Minister of Foreign Affairs (1997-99), as well as being the founding editor of the influential weekly Dilema, and

226 the founder of New Europe College, a center for advanced studies in the humanities and social sciences in Bucharest. PREDA, Marin ( 1 9 2 2 - 1 9 8 0 ) : Novelist, director of the Cartea Romaneasca ("Romanian Book") publishing house. RADULESCU, Ion Heliade ( 1 8 0 2 - 1 8 7 2 ) : Writer, linguist and politician, founder of the first Romanian newspaper, Curierul Romanesc ("The Romanian Courier") in 1829, exiled for ten years after the failure of the Revolution of 1848. He was a great promoter of western influence in Romanian culture, and encouraged the publication of translations into Romanian, while also trying to stimulate new Romanian writing with his famous slogan "Write, lads, write!" RADULESCU, Mihai: Music critic implicated in the 1 9 5 8 "Noica trials". He committed suicide in prison while under investigation. RALEA, Mihai ( 1 8 9 6 - 1 9 6 4 ) : Philosopher and sociologist of Marxist inclinations, director of the journal Viata Romaneasca ("Romanian Life"). Ramuri ("Branches"): A literary journal. Romania Literara ("Literary Romania"): A long-running literary weekly, directed at the time by George Iva§cu. SADOVEANU, Mihail ( 1 8 8 0 - 1 9 6 1 ) : One of the best known Romanian novelists. §AGUNA, Andrei ( 1 8 0 9 - 1 8 7 3 ) : Metropolitan of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Hungary and Transylvania, a promoter o f education and publishing in Romanian in these territories, founder of ASTRA, the cultural association of the Transylvanian Romanians. His burial place in Ra§inari is marked by the impressive monument described in the Diary (11th May 1981). §AINEANU, Lazar ( 1 8 5 9 - 1 9 3 4 ) : Linguist and folklorist, the author of a comparative study of Romanian folktales in which he examined their relation to the tales of neighboring cultures and those in other Romance languages. Scinteia ("The Spark"): Official newspaper of the Romanian Communist Party. Secolul 20 ("The 20th Century"): A prominent literary and cultural periodical from the 1970s to the present day. Sinaia: A mountain resort in the Carpathians, on the main road between Bucharest and Bra§ov, famous for the late 19th century royal castle of Pele§ as well as for its ski slopes. Snagov: A lake-side resort 40 km to the north of Bucharest. §ORA, Mihai (b. 1916): Philosopher and essayist. SORESCU, Marin ( 1 9 3 6 - 1 9 9 7 ) : A well known poet and dramatist.

227 STANILOAIE, Dumitru ( 1 9 0 3 - 1 9 9 3 ) : Orthodox theologian, specialist in patristic studies, editor of an edition of the Philocalia. STEPHEN THE GREAT ( 1 4 3 3 - 1 5 0 4 ) : P r i n c e o f Moldavia from

1457,

and one of the greatest medieval Romanian rulers, famous for his struggles against the Turks and as a founder of monasteries. STOICHIJA, Victor (b. 1948): Art historian, currently professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Among his works available in English are A Short History of the Shadow, Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art and Goya: the Last Carnival. Techirghiol: Town in south-eastern Romania, near the Black Sea port of Constanta. TERTULIAN, N.: Marxist philosopher. TEODOREANU, Alexandru "Pastorel" ( 1 8 9 4 - 1 9 6 4 ) : Writer of satirical prose, known particularly for his epigrams, a member of the circle associated with the journal Viafa Romaneasca ("Romanian Life"). In the second epigram of the sequence quoted in the Diary (9th October 1977), Teodoreanu uses an apostrophe in place of the more correct hyphen in l-am pierdut ("I've lost him"), hence the reference to apostrophes in Noica's reply. Tirgu Jiu: See BRANCU§I, Constantin TUCULESCU, Ion ( 1 9 1 0 - 1 9 6 2 ) : Painter, a notable colorist whose works are characterized by motifs drawn from Romanian folklore. Universul ("The Universe"): A pre-war daily newspaper. VIANU, Tudor ( 1 8 9 7 - 1 9 6 4 ) : Literary historian and philosopher of culture, famous as a university teacher. VIERU, Sorin (b. 1934): Philosopher, in the period covered by the Diary, researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Romanian Academy, since 1990 Professor in the Department of Moral and Political Philosophy of the University of Bucharest. In addition to his own published works in philosophy and logic he has translated texts by Plato and Frege, and a volume of his poems was published in 1990. In the same year he was among the founding members of the Group for Social Dialogue, and is a regular contributor to its weekly paper Revista 22 and other periodicals of Romanian civil society. VULCANESCU, Mircea ( 1 9 0 4 - 1 9 5 2 ) : Philosopher, sociologist, economist, a leading figure in the Criterion group, author of a work on The Romanian Dimension of Existence. As recounted by Noica in the Diary (8th May 1981), he died in prison. WALD, Henri (b. 1920): Philosopher, author of a number of works on logic, semantics and the theory of knowledge.

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