2

Philosophy without Freedom:

Constantin Noica and Alexandru Dragomir
Cristian CIOCAN
University of Bucharest
Romanian Society for Phenomenology

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I discuss about two major Romanian

philosophers: Constantin Noica and Alexandru Dragomir. I narrate their spectacular biographies, in order to show how powerful
can be the resistance through philosophy, even in the hard times
of political totalitarianism, as they were, for the Eastern Europe,
under the communist dictatorship. It is true that Noica and
Dragomir are two of the most inuential personalities for the
history of phenomenology in Romania. However, their lives also
seem to be exemplary for the philosophical life as such, which reveals its intrinsic value when facing the asperities of misfortune.

Let me start with a general question: Can philosophy exist without freedom?
We usually believe that thinking, reecting, and philosophizing
need always a certain degree of freedom. Aristotle is the rst to sustain, in the beginning of the Metaphysics, that philosophy started in
he copyright on this essay belongs to the author. he work is published here
by permission of the author and can be cited as Phenomenology 2005, Vol. III,
Selected Essays from Euro-Mediterranean Area, ed. Ion COPOERU & Hans
Rainer SEPP (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2007), available in printed as well as
electronic form at www.zetabooks.com.
Contact the author here: cristian.ciocan@phenomenology.ro

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CRISTIAN CIOCAN

Egypt, where the class of priests was exempted from labor, thus obtaining the necessary comfort for reecting. But besides this comfort,
this freedom from daily necessities, it takes another type of freedom
for the philosophical instinct deeply enrooted in man to be able to
develop as a free philosophical exercise, in a live and creative philosophical culture, allowing for a polyphony of voices and a dialogue of
the various points of view. I am not referring here to a total freedom
in an ideal republic of philosophers, but a certain degree of liberty.
I refer to political freedom, the civic or social freedom. his type
of freedom made possible the most fertile stages in the history of
philosophy. If we think of the Greeks, we see that the ourishing of
philosophy was possible in a free political climate. Philosophy always
developed under a certain protection, a more or less tolerant attitude
of the authorities, be they kings, emperors, noblemen, popes or cardinals: this happened with the ancient philosophy, with the philosophy of the Middle Ages, and again with the German Idealism. When
protection and freedom disappears, philosophy dies too, or it is suppressed, as it is the case of the closing of the Neo-Platonic school of
Athens by a Justinian edict.
he terrible 20th century brought a totally dierent situation,
never met before, where the limitation of mans liberty became a
state aair. When such a regime goes on for several decades, as was
the case of Communism in Eastern Europe, the transformations can
be atrocious, for generations are born and die in a concentrationary
universe, without light or hope. Under such a regime, philosophy is
reduced to an instrument of the propaganda, an ocial ideology.
And we ask again: Can philosophy exist without liberty?
he Romanian case, and especially the case of the Romanian
philosophy under communism, can be understood against the background of a larger social context, the recent history of the countries

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65

destroyed by the imperialism of the Soviet regime. However, we

must understand its specicity.
he Romanian cultureas a national culture, in a national
languageis rather young culture. Even if the national cohesion
of the Romanians is older, the Romanian Nation armed itself
explicitly with the occasion of the historical events that traversed
Europe around 1848, gaining its independence from the Ottoman
Empire only in 1877. Concerning philosophy, the rst name that
we must mention is that of Dimitrie Cantemir (1673-1723), a king
of Moldavia who corresponded with Leibniz and who was elected
a member of Academy of Berlin in 1714. Even if his philosophical
activity was rich enough, he was recognized in the world most for
his work of historian. His works about the Ottoman Empire were
immediately translated in several languages and were known by
Voltaire, Byron and Victor Hugo. Unfortunately, rstly because of
the historical vicissitudes, because the Romanians have not known
large periods of political stability where the humanist culture could
develop itself, the case of Cantemir rested a singular one.
And thus it went until the 19th century, when the Romanian
started to study intensively in Berlin, in Paris and in Vienna, acquiring therefore with them the philosophical ideas that circulated
in Occident. he rst philosophical course written in Romanian
was elaborated on a German model by Eftimie Murgu in 183436, for the Mihaileana Academy of Iasi and was the rst attempt
to establish a philosophical terminology in Romanian Language.
We can note also the attempt of Mihai Eminescua famous
Romantic poet, himself very much inuenced by the philosophy
of Schopenhauerto translate fragments of the Critic of the Pure
Reason in 1878.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, the circulation of ideas
increased and the Romanian Culture began to enter, step by step,

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into the circuit of European Culture. We nd many professors of

philosophy who, more or less, are compiling the occidental treatises
of philosophy, oering an autochthonous variant of the scholar vulgate of Paris, Leipzig and of Berlin. But with this occasion, ideas
were spreading, the philosophical vocabulary gradually growing
and we can speak of a philosophical climate starting to consolidate.
Concerning the philosophers themselves, we can mention some
names such as Vasile Conta or Constantin Radulescu-Motru, who
produced philosophic works of an originality somewhat limited by
the mode of their time. he case of Lucian Blaga is more interesting,
because his philosophic oeuvre has an incontestable originality, being
however nourished from the climate of Spenglers philosophy of culture. Unfortunately, the work of Blaga was not translated at the right
moment and therefore it could not enter the circuit of the European
ideas, as it without doubts deserved to be.
Between the two World Wars, the Romanian culture became
very lively, very creative, very promising, a highly developing culture,
students having studied in the most famous universities in Europe,
professors with European diplomas, specialized academic journals,
briey, a culture able to integrate organically into the European culture. his period, which proved to be very fertile, very ambitious and
very high-spirited, produced new and provocative voices, which after
the Second World War, became famous in the West, as it is the case
of Mircea Eliade, Eugene Ionesco or Emil Cioran.
However, at a certain moment, the disaster arrived. A disaster
that unfortunately went on for decades and disgured everything,
philosophy included.
We are now in the years 1945-47. he war was over, the Russian
army occupied Romania, the communists seized the power, the king
abdicated and left the country. Most Romanian intellectuals left
Romania for the West and constituted a powerless diaspora. hose

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67

who remain lived under the threat of political imprisonment. he

most famous of them are arrested, tortured, their goods are all conscated and their families are terrorized.
How about philosophy? We can ask again: How can philosophy
exist without liberty?
he answer is not at all easy, and we can hope to nd, by reading
between the lines of the destinies of Noica and Dragomir, the possible or the impossible solutions.
Nowadays in Romania, Noica is the most well known Romanian
philosopher. He is the Philosopher, that is, the greatest gure of the
Romanian philosophy today. We can say this the other way: it is
due to Noica that philosophy acquired in Romania in the 1960s
and the 70s a great prestige, incredible for a country subjected to a
totalitarian regime. Noica himself became almost a mass phenomenon: he had the force to pass to several generations of young people
the virus of philosophysing: hundreds of young people started to
dream of learning ancient Greek and German in order to access
the fundamental sources of philosophy. Hundreds of young intellectuals visited him, in real pilgrimages, at his chalet in Paltinis,
situated deep in a mountain village of Transylvania. Briey, the
phenomenon Noica marked in a radical manner the contemporary culture of Romania.
But how can one arrive to such an incredible situation? he
explanations are manifold.
First of all, for the Romanian intellectuals, Noica represented a link between contemporary Romania and the intellectually
ourishing country that Romania was before the Second World
War. For them, although that Romania between the two wars had
not been exactly a paradise, however, what now happened under
Communism was certainly a hell. Noica himself was a central g-

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ure of the generation of intellectuals who animated Bucharest and

its literary cafs in 1930s-40s, along with Eliade, Cioran, Ionescu,
Mircea Vulcanescu or Petre Tutea. Since Noica chose to remain in
Romania, not wishing to immigrate to the Western countries, he
brought with him the symbolical heritage of a whole generation.
We was the living proof that our country once knew normality,
liberty, a cultural excellence, completely opposed to the decades of
communism, who forced upon people the supremacy of suspicion,
of poverty, of ideological confusion, of the automatism of the slogans. It came naturally that such a gure as Noica became legendary in the eyes of the intellectuals frustrated and anguished by the
endlessness of the scientic socialism.
Until 1945, Noica already published eight books and many articles. He began at 25 with a volume that received the prize of the
Royal Foundation, at the same line as Ciorans he Climax of Despair
and the famous book entitled No, by Eugene Ionesco. Afterwards,
he and his colleagues specialized in various elds: Eliade studied
the history of religions, Ionesco wrote theatre and literary critique,
Cioran went on with his insolent and radical reections on death,
nitude and the absurd, but Noica chose to work, as a specialist, in philosophy, by translating and commenting upon Descartes,
Leibniz, Kant and Hegel.
Moreover, as he was wealthy enough, he had the material liberty of pursuing his passion for philosophy. He dreamed, back in
the 1940s, to create a new type of philosophical school, where, according to Lean Bloy, you cannot say who gives and who receives.
He dreamed of making out of philosophy a way of life, without
doctrines and school lessons, and opposed to the rigid pedagogical
style of his time. His Philosophical Diary stands for all these ideas.
Socratism was at home in Romania. Not in classrooms, not in
the university, but in the famous literary cafs in Bucharest where

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69

people discussed vividly the most absolute, deep and speculative

subjects. he mainstream was a sort of vitalist and passionate existentialism, concerning the sense and non-sense if life, the destiny
of a nation, the voice of religion, the destiny of mankind; to sum
upthe eternal issues of all days.
But Noicas thinking individualized itself by its ontological preoccupation. his lead, four decades after, to his main work: he
Treatise of Ontology. In part, he gave his ontology a national dimension, which is much contested by some contemporary critiques.
However, it was a rather harmless matter: as Heidegger worked upon
his thinking starting from the German language, always using the
etymological exploration, Noica did the same with the Romanian
language, starting from the nuances of the Romanian equivalent
of the verb to be. For, between pure being and pure non-being,
the Romanian language has, according to Noica, a privileged way
of expressing, with a very special richness, the various modulations
of the verb to be. hese ontological variations of the verb to be,
which pass through several types of eventuality, of possibility and
impossibility, constitute the foundation used by Noica to build his
ontology upon. He analyzed and articulated in a systematic manner these modulations of the verb to be into an ontology which
kept a national trace, being probably the last philosophical system
of the 20th century.
We can nd the roots of these ideas in the 1940s. Here Noica
was preoccupied with the relationship between the spiritual dimension of a nation, as deposited in the language, and its spiritual elites,
who explain this richness encapsulated in language and who make
the transition from the pre-ontological dimension to the ontological one. For Noica, the explicative force of the Romanian language
was the soil for the roots of his meditation. And this is the closest
point between Noica and Heidegger, for both of them language is

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the essential ground for all thinking. We must also note that Noicas
national dimension of philosophy was just one side of his ontology, the other being shown in the most abstract Hegelian manner.
Noica discusses about an ontological model, made up from three
fundamental elements: the individual, the determinations received
by the individual, and the general in relation to whom the individual receives its determinations. If the ontological model is saturated, we can talk of an accomplished Being. If the model is not
saturated (through various modes of ontological failures or nonachievements), we talk of the various ontological modulations or
modalities, regarding the Being to be accomplished. Here, Noica
distinguished two modalities of becoming: a becoming regarding
the Being accomplished, and a becoming which failed to fulll its
Being. He used an ontological operator, a preposition dicult to
translate, ntru, which is at the same time in, in regard of, and
for (and to), simultaneously being contained and an orientation towards, close to the German zu and to the English into. It was
this particular preposition which enabled Noica to speak, within
his ontological system, of a becoming within and towards Being
[Rom.: devenirea ntru in] (such as the case with an artistan
individualwho situates himself, by his worksthe determinationsfor and towards the horizon of the generalhis art) and of
a becoming within and towards becoming [Rom.: devenirea ntru
devenire] (such as the case with the family life, which is within and
towards procreation and generation). For Noica, the Being and the
becoming within the horizon of Being, are always of a spiritual and
cultural nature.
But let us return to our history. After 1945 the persecutions
began and Noica was directly aected. First, his goods are conscated; it was the rst measure of the Communist power: to annihilate the rich people. But Noicas passion for philosophy remained

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71

unchanged: even if the political society was catastrophic, Noica

founded in 1945-46, in one of his houses, a private school of philosophy which was frequented by important Romanian intellectuals. But these private philosophical sessions could not be tolerated
for long by the ocials, because there were some reactionary and
bourgeois elements, as it was said in the epoch. he economic
elite was not the only obstacle for the Communist society, but also
the intellectual elite. And if Noica was part of the intellectual elite,
he was placed under strict surveillance. hree years after, in 1949,
when Noica was 40, he is forced to leave Bucharest. He was compelled to forced domicile in Campulung, having an ocial interdiction to leave this village in the provinces.
But not even during this long period of reclusion, of ten years,
lived in a very poor material state, Noicas philosophical virus has
not calmed down. He organized philosophical encounters with a
circle of friends, having the certitude that only spiritual lifein
which philosophy was the most importantcan constitute a veritable form of resistance in front of the nothingness established by
the new regime. We must say that this idea of resistance through
culture is the fundamental idea of Noicas attitude in front of the
historical disaster he lived in.
So, at our questionhow can one make philosophy without freedom?Noicas answer would be: well, by simply making
philosophy!
In this time of forced domicile, it is Hegels philosophy that
constitutes the center of Noicas preoccupations. In 1957, he sent
to a French publisher a manuscript containing a commentary on
the Phenomenology of Mind. But, being considered as subversive,
the manuscript is intercepted by the Romanian secret services.
Consequently, in 1958, Noica and his colleagues are arrested and
prosecuted. Although he was 49 years old and having already passed

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through ten years of forced domicile, he still received twenty-ve

years in prison. Philosophy seems to be the demon who wishes to
destroy Noicas life, until the privation of all liberty. And it seemed
to succeed.
But the game was not over. Noica was of course tortured in
the prison, as were all the others, but after a time the authorities
allow him to read. While Hegel is forbidden, he can however ask
the permission to read Marx; and he reads Marx all along. Finally,
he goes only through six years of prison, because in 1965, with the
occasion of the rst relaxation of the Communist system, Noica is
set free and somewhat rehabilitated. Even if he will be always under
the strict surveillance of the Securitate, in the last twenty years of
his life Noica benets of a certain tolerance from the part of the
Communist regime, and therefore he could hope to remake his life
and his philosophical dreams.
In 1965, being fty-six years old, Noica is allowed to come
back to Bucharest and he entered the Institute of Logic as a researcher. Tireless and incorrigible, he held some private seminars
on Plato, Kant or Hegel, where he encounters some researchers
from the young generation: Gabriel Liiceanu, Andrei Plesu, Sorin
Vieru or Victor Stoichita. hese young philosophers are much attracted by his intellectual charm and by his philosophical virtuosity, and therefore they all enter in a scenario of cultural and philosophical pedagogy. For them, Noica was a singular and fascinating
gure, the only personality one could chose in Romania as master
in philosophy. For Noica, these young scholars were an irresistible
temptation for his vocation of cultural trainer in philosophy.
Noica works another ten years at the Institute of Logic in
Bucharest, until his retirement. He starts to translate and to interpret Plato, Aristotle, the pre-Socratic and the Aristotelian com-

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73

mentators.2 He also starts to publish his own works on his own

ontological project.
After 1975, Noica retreats to Paltinis, a mountain village near
Sibiu, where he begins one of the most beautiful adventures that
Romanian Culture has ever known. His disciplesprecisely Gabriel
Liiceanu, Andrei Pleu and Sorin Vieruregularly pay him visits at
Paltinis, they live and work together under the direction of Noica,
they translate and interpret classic philosophical texts, in a pure
and intangible solitude, in the kingdom of spirit. his adventure
lasts more than a decade. Noica persuades his disciples to learn
Greek and German, he gives them cultural tasks to carry out, he
makes their reading and research program, assuming therefore the
position of master who does everything for his disciples to reach
excellence in philosophy.
he Pltini Diary by Gabriel Liiceanu, now translated into
English, French, and German, draws the passionate and dramatic story of this adventure. At its publication, the impact of this
Diary is immense and the work gains a great celebrity. he liberty
of spirit showed by this Diary fascinated the Romanian public,
whose actual liberty had been conscated for several decades by
Communism. he Diary had an enormous inuence on several
generations of young people, inspiring them with the philosophical pathos and the passion for philosophy, not only before the Fall
of Communism in 1989, but also after this historical event. Noica
became the Phenomenon Noica and, paradoxically, philosophy
became the queen of the Romanian Culture, even under the conditions of a political submission.
Noicas rm belief in philosophy, in cultural life and in spirit,
was his constant answer in front of historical vicissitudes and in
front of the nothingness of totalitarianism. His resistance through
culture before the desert of ideological non-sense was his surviving

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formula in the impossible universe where he was forced to live. he

same as the Czech model of Jan Patoka, the Romanian model of
Noica plays a remarkable role on the stage of contemporary philosophy, an episode that deserves maybe more attention, because it
constitutes a modality in which philosophy was able to survive in
spite of the lack of liberty, which seems to be in fact its necessary
condition.
he case of Alexandru Dragomir starts from some dierent premises. Until his death in 2002, we were aware of Alexandru Dragomir
only as a strange gure who moved more or less mysteriously in
Romanian intellectual circles. All that we knew of him comes from
those who actually met him, because Dragomir never wanted to
make himself known. Indeed, he had a sort of aversion towards the
idea of becoming a public gure. It was known that back in the
1940s he had been a student of Heideggers, studying for a PhD degree in Freiburg. hose who had the chance to meet him during the
last decades of his life said that he possessed a fabulous philosophical
knowledge, that he was brilliant as a thinker, and had an insightful
and lively mind. However, what greatly intrigued those around him
was the fact that he never cared to publish a single page in his life.
He always said that publication was of no importance to him, and all
he was interested in was understanding. Hence he constantly refused
to enter the cultural industry. Indeed no one knew if he ever wrote
anything. He constantly refused, therefore, to enter in any cultural
and public enterprise. At the opposite of Noica, who was an essential
cultural gure, having a prodigious activity and an eervescence of
action even during hard times, Dragomir conceived philosophy as a
purely individual eort, in a complete solitude. Dragomir situated
himself outside any culture industry and outside any philosophical
Gestell, with its journals and its public, with its modes, congresses and

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75

conferences. hat is why he did not want to publish even a single line
during his lifetime, believing that writing is, as the myth of heuth
at the end of Platos Phaedrus shows, the fatal enemy of thinking.
Dragomir considered that the Socratic manner of interrogating oneself is the highest form of thinking. herefore, he did not want to
have any contact with the ocial philosophical area contaminated
by ideology, and also he did not want to adopt Noicas formula that
the proper place of philosophy is always culture.
Walter Biemel, the famous editor of Husserl and Heidegger,
and intimate friend of Heidegger, remembers that Heidegger highly appreciated Dragomirs sharp intelligence. Alexandru Dragomir
took part in Heideggers private seminars and it is said that when
the discussion came to a dead-end, Heidegger used to turn towards
Dragomir asking: Well, what do the Latins say? At the end of 1943,
Dragomir was forced to leave Freiburg and Heideggers seminars and
to return to Romania for recruitment. It was wartime. Although
Heidegger insistently demanded that Dragomir should be allowed
to continue his studies, he had to join the army. Twenty years later,
Heidegger still recalled Dragomir very well and was asking for news
on him.3
And when Romanian history took that terrible turn in 1945,
when the end of the Second World War coincided with the Russian
occupation and the establishment of Communism in Romania,
Dragomir found himself confronted with the impossibility of continuing his studies with Heidegger. He quickly understood that his
relationship with Germany could be a reason for political persecution and that his philosophical endeavors might very well result in
his being imprisoned. He anticipated all this and understood that his
life depended on being able to dissimulate his philosophical concerns
and his connection with Germany.

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He participates for a few times, in 1945-46, in the clandestine

philosophical encounters organized by Noica in his underground
philosophical school, but he is not very convinced. In spite of Noicas
eorts to win Dragomir as a collaborator for his philosophical projects, Dragomir had systematically rejected his proposals, closing
himself in an insurmountable solitude.
Why? Maybe it was only a question of human psychology, because it might be dicult to accept Noica as master after two years
in discussion with Heidegger. But maybe there were profound dierences between Noica and Dragomir, between their visions on world
and philosophy, between their manners of understanding oneself in
front of the totalitarian universe beginning to impose itself everywhere. he ways of Dragomir and Noica seemed for the moment
much too separate.
We know already what Noicas trajectory was: forced domicile,
prison, rehabilitation. But Dragomir, what did he do? Apparently
nothing. Continuously covering the traces of his past, Dragomir
worked variously as a welder, a vendor, a clerk or an accountant; he
kept having to change his job, as his inconvenient political le led to
frequent dismissal. He nally managed to work, until his retirement
in 1976, as an economist in a company exporting timber.
Nothing related to philosophy. It might be tempting to say:
Behold a failed destiny! But this would be far from the truth. For
in private, Dragomir never ceased to exercise his brilliant philosophical intelligence. For decades he lived a double life: his everyday social
life on one hand and his life of solitary philosophical research on the
other. He continued to work upon the fundamental texts of philosophy in Greek, Latin, German, French and English. After 1965, after
Noicas release from prison, he and Dragomir have evidently met.
And while Noica started to publish, he sent his books to Dragomir,
being always very anxious about Dragomirs opinion on his works.

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77

It is said that Noica feared of Dragomirs very exigent lecture and

extremely severe his judgment. It is said even that Noica has re-written his Treatise of Ontology after the numerous critical comments by
Dragomir. Even when the political climate became, to some extent,
more permissive, Dragomir remained unwilling to write and publish, in spite of all the proposals he received. After 1985, however,
he agreed to make a compromise regarding the absolute silence
of his philosophical activity: he decided to hold several private lectures and seminars, with Gabriel Liiceanu, Andrei Plesu, Sorin Vieru
and other prominent Romanian intellectuals as audience. It is probably thanks only to this breach that we are able to speak today of
Dragomir, thus saving his name from total oblivion. At that time,
Dragomirs interlocutors, i.e. already well-known Romanian cultural
personalities, were so amazed at his performances of philosophical
virtuosity, that they started recording and taking extended notes of
his lectures. Dragomirs name started to spread, as the hidden king
of Romanian philosophy.
Dragomir could have remained for ever a brilliant Socratic spirit,
without a real, transmissible philosophical work. But soon after his
death in 2002, more than one hundred notebooks were found in his
apartment, containing notes, commentaries on classic philosophical texts, essays of phenomenological research and analysis, and very
precise and insightful philosophical descriptions. And what is even
more important, many of them are original texts which have turned
him from a legend or a mythical gure of Romanian philosophy into
a philosopher whose work can be transmitted and shared. Most of
these texts are phenomenological microanalyses or subtle and incisive clarications of various concrete aspects of the world in which
we live. One can nd texts on the mirror, on forgetfulness, on error,
on how things get worn out, on waking up in the morning, on the
spectrum of ugly and disgusting things, on attention, on making

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mistakes, on writing and speaking, on making distinctions among

things, on being unique, and so on. here are very dierent and heterogeneous topics, as though Dragomir watched the diversity of the
world through his acute phenomenological lens, for the sole purpose
of his own desire to understand. His genius was to discover within
the banality of the everyday events of our lives, within the most concrete experiences we deal with daily, within those aspects which we
deem to be the most self-evident and implicit, the profound layers of
meaning and fundamental signicance, which he then analyzed with
a fascinating sharpness.
Yet one topic remains constant: there are several notebooks,
called Chronos, in which Dragomir thematically and systematically
pursued the problem of time over a period of several decades: the
rst notebook dates from 1948 and contains many notes written
directly in German, while the last notebooks date from the 1980s
and 90s. After the crucial discovery of his notebooks, it was possible to start recovering his work. he Humanitas Publishing House
has already published three volumes, Utter Metaphysical Banalities,
Five Departures from the Present and he Time Notebooks. It may
be that this book on time will prove to represent Dragomirs most
important work.
So, to our questioncan one make philosophy without
freedom?Dragomirs answers is similar to Noicas, even if so many
things are so divergent concretely. Dragomir lived his philosophical life in such a vivid way that no totalitarian regime could stop
him. Even more radical than Noica, who was himself a champion of
philosophical tenacity, Dragomir is an unique case of philosophical
rectitude. While I know of no other comparable philosophical destiny, I believe that his life deserves to be known, because it manifests
the intrinsic vital value that philosophy has, even in the worst times
of history.

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79

Endnotes
1

For the life of Noica, we refer to the book of Gabriel Liiceanu, he Paltinis
Diary: A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture, Budapest and New York, CEU
Press, 2001 and to the articles of our colleagues Laura Paml and Sorin Lavric
in the electronic journal Arguments vol. 2/2003. More information about the
Romanian Philosophy can be found at www.romanian-philosophy.ro.

Noica translates Porphyry, Dexippus and Ammonius. He directs also the rst
complete edition of Platos works in Romanian; he forms translator teams
from Greek, Latin and German. Under his guidance the rst systematical
translations from Heidegger begin.

Dragomir was intimate friend with Biemel, who was German by his birth,
but Romanian by his education, having done his studies in Brasov and
Bucharest. Biemel has already published in a Bucharest journal some fragments from a Heidegger translation. In 1943, Biemel and Dragomir have
translated together the conference Was ist Metaphysik? And they proposed
the translation to a Romanian publishing house. Unfortunately, their proposition was refused, because of political reasons: in a Romania occupied by
the German Army, Heidegger was persona non grata he translation was
published 13 years later, in 1956, in a journal of Romanian Diaspora in Paris.
After this unfortunate start in Romanian, Walter Biemel served himself as
Heidegger translator in French, translating with Alphonse de Waelhens De
lessence de la vrit (1948) and Kant et le problme de la mtaphysique (1953).