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In
this unique work, Noica analyses history, culture and
the individual in what he describes as the fundamental
precariousness of being. 'Maladies' of the spirit are
no longer debilitating, but creative for our European
interest in change, unity, and diversity.
Cover
Art and Colour Section
Florin Stoiciu belongs to a young generation of Romanian
printmakers whose work fits within the wave of a multiform
post-modernity. Like Noica, his explorations of contemporary
continuities and change in Romania are bittersweet,
with an existential undertow.
Constantin
Noica
Posthumously awarded the Herder Prize
Awarded a Doctorate in Philosophy for his thesis 'Sketch
for the History of How Anything New is Possible', published
in 1940. He worked as a Philosophy consultant at the
Romanian-German Institute in Berlin (1941-1944) and
as a researcher for the Logic Centre of the Romanian
Academy. Between 1949 and 1958 he was held under house
arrest in Cimpulung-Muscel and was later imprisoned
as a political detainee (1958-1964).
'When
you arrive in the wide world you will see that your
inner limits are more painful than your outer limits'.
All these fragmentary episodes, and many others contain
something enigmatic. I have the feeling that they say
something important and enigmatic about Noica's ethos.
Sorin
Vieru
Romanian philosopher and publicist
Extract
Besides the somatic maladies, identified for centuries,
and the psychical maladies, identified for barely a
century, there must also be maladies of a higher order,
of the spirit let us suppose. No neurosis can explain
the despair of Ecclesiastes, the sentiment of exile
on earth or of alienation, metaphysical ennui, the sentiment
of the void or of the absurd, the hypertrophy of the
I, rejection of everything, and empty controversy; no
psychosis can explain economic and political tumult,
abstract art, the demonism of technology, and the extreme
cultural formalism that nowadays leads to the primacy
of empty exactitude.
There can be no doubt that some of these orientations
have resulted in major creations. Nevertheless they
still represent a great maladjustment of the spirit.
But whereas the somatic diseases have an accidental
character (even death, it has been said, is accidental
to living being) and the psychical diseases are somehow
contingent-necessary, because they arise from man's
individual and social conditioning, both of which are
still accidental, the maladies of the spirit seem to
be constitutive.
What we shall be trying to argue in these pages and
those that follow is that the maladies of the spirit
are in fact maladies of Being, ontic maladies, and for
this reason, in contrast to other maladies, they may
well be constitutive of man, since, although the body
and the soul also participate in Being, it is the spirit
alone that fully reflects it in both its power and precariousness.
Diseased Being also is, in one of the variants of 'is'.
Living and dead things can be left blocked in one of
the maladies of Being, which they then conceal with
their apparent certitude, but which man, with his higher
incertitude, reveals...
If,
for example, a scientist achieved interminable prolongation
of life and placed the procedure at the disposal of
mankind, he would have to be showered with laurels in
the first instance and then brought to trial in the
second. He would be a falsifier of values, specifically
a falsifier of Being. Just as there are falsifiers of
money, so too there can be falsifiers of values other
than money, for example falsifiers of truth or beauty
and, in particular, falsifiers of good. (One part of
modern technology poses the question of whether, by
producing certain types of useless goods, it falsifies
the idea of good). Insofar as Being is a value, or even
'the value' at the heart of the real, it may thus be
falsified: just as some people pass on false money,
so the scientist in question would offer us false Being.
Though we can do without false money, it is likely,
however, that we would not be able do without the false
Being thereby obtained and that the falsifier would
go unpunished. Rather we would use false Being in an
attempt to endow with sense and ontological plenitude
an existence which, within its ordinary limits, cannot
very easily discover its Being. In other words, with
a false Being (like the existence of the amoeba, which
in duration surpasses all other terrestrial existences)
we would aspire to compensate for a void <vid>
in Being.
Perhaps only then, through the dilation in time of human
life, would we see our emptiness <golul> of Being,
the same as in the Romanian folktale Unageing Youth,
which admirably shows how dreary man’s life would
be if it were projected onto the screen of eternity.
One does not have the right to demand the prolongation
of such a life, burdened as it is by chronic anaemia
or a veritable spiritual haemophilia. One cannot accept
the gift of its prolongation. But one can ask oneself,
once one understands that eternity is not sufficient
condition (and perhaps not even necessary) to confer
full Being, whether somehow it is not something other
than the fact that he is 'transient' that makes man,
as has been said, the diseased being par excellence.
Beyond the chronic malady of human being, that of being
mensurate in time (if indeed this is a malady), the
true maladies of man would come to light, as a Being
in time which is incapable of finding its measure within
time.
Given
that the interminable prolongation of life is an extreme
example, let us, in order to reveal the deficiencies
of Being in man, select another example, one that is
closer to hand and will soon appear before our very
eyes...
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