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 nar-
rate 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 influential personalities for the
history of phenomenology in Romania. However, their lives also
seem to be exemplary for the philosophical life as such, which re-
veals its intrinsic value when facing the asperities of misfortune.

Let me start with a general question: Can philosophy exist with-

out freedom?
We usually believe that thinking, reflecting, and philosophizing
need always a certain degree of freedom. Aristotle is the first to sus-
tain, in the beginning of the Metaphysics, that philosophy started in

The copyright on this essay belongs to the author. The 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
64 CRISTIAN CIOCAN

Egypt, where the class of priests was exempted from labor, thus ob-
taining the necessary comfort for reflecting. 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 philo-
sophical 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. This type
of freedom made possible the most fertile stages in the history of
philosophy. If we think of the Greeks, we see that the flourishing 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 car-
dinals: this happened with the ancient philosophy, with the philoso-
phy of the Middle Ages, and again with the German Idealism. When
protection and freedom disappears, philosophy dies too, or it is sup-
pressed, as it is the case of the closing of the Neo-Platonic school of
Athens by a Justinian edict.
The terrible 20th century brought a totally different situation,
never met before, where the limitation of man’s liberty became a
state affair. 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 official ideology.
And we ask again: Can philosophy exist without liberty?
The Romanian case, and especially the case of the Romanian
philosophy under communism, can be understood against the back-
ground of a larger social context, the recent history of the countries
PHILOSOPHY UNDER TOTALITARIANISM 65

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

must understand its specificity.
The Romanian culture—as a national culture, in a national
language—is rather young culture. Even if the national cohesion
of the Romanians is older, the Romanian Nation affirmed 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 first 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, firstly 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, ac-
quiring therefore with them the philosophical ideas that circulated
in Occident. The first philosophical course written in Romanian
was elaborated on a German model by Eftimie Murgu in 1834-
36, for the Mihaileana Academy of Iasi and was the first attempt
to establish a philosophical terminology in Romanian Language.
We can note also the attempt of Mihai Eminescu—a famous
Romantic poet, himself very much influenced by the philosophy
of Schopenhauer—to 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,
66 CRISTIAN CIOCAN

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

philosophy who, more or less, are compiling the occidental treatises
of philosophy, offering an autochthonous variant of the scholar vul-
gate 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. The case of Lucian Blaga is more interesting,
because his philosophic oeuvre has an incontestable originality, being
however nourished from the climate of Spengler’s philosophy of cul-
ture. 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,
briefly, a culture able to integrate organically into the European cul-
ture. This 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 disfigured everything,
philosophy included.
We are now in the years 1945-47. The 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. Those
PHILOSOPHY UNDER TOTALITARIANISM 67

who remain lived under the threat of political imprisonment. The

most famous of them are arrested, tortured, their goods are all con-
fiscated and their families are terrorized.
How about philosophy? We can ask again: How can philosophy
exist without liberty?
The answer is not at all easy, and we can hope to find, by reading
between the lines of the destinies of Noica and Dragomir, the pos-
sible or the impossible solutions.

Nowadays in Romania, Noica is the most well known Romanian

philosopher. He is the Philosopher, that is, the greatest figure 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 phenome-
non: 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 intel-
lectuals visited him, in real pilgrimages, at his chalet in Paltinis,
situated deep in a mountain village of Transylvania. Briefly, the
phenomenon “Noica” marked in a radical manner the contempo-
rary culture of Romania.
But how can one arrive to such an incredible situation? The
explanations are manifold.
First of all, for the Romanian intellectuals, Noica represent-
ed a link between contemporary Romania and the intellectually
flourishing 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 fig-
68 CRISTIAN CIOCAN

ure of the generation of intellectuals who animated Bucharest and

its literary cafés 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 slo-
gans. It came naturally that such a figure as Noica became legend-
ary in the eyes of the intellectuals frustrated and anguished by the
endlessness of the “scientific socialism.”
Until 1945, Noica already published eight books and many ar-
ticles. He began at 25 with a volume that received the prize of the
Royal Foundation, at the same line as Cioran’s The Climax of Despair
and the famous book entitled No, by Eugene Ionesco. Afterwards,
he and his colleagues specialized in various fields: Eliade studied
the history of religions, Ionesco wrote theatre and literary critique,
Cioran went on with his insolent and radical reflections on death,
finitude and the absurd, but Noica chose to work, as a special-
ist, in philosophy, by translating and commenting upon Descartes,
Leibniz, Kant and Hegel.
Moreover, as he was wealthy enough, he had the material lib-
erty of pursuing his passion for philosophy. He dreamed, back in
the 1940s, to create a new type of philosophical school, where, ac-
cording 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 cafés in Bucharest where
PHILOSOPHY UNDER TOTALITARIANISM 69

people discussed vividly the most absolute, deep and speculative

subjects. The mainstream was a sort of vitalist and passionate exis-
tentialism, concerning the sense and non-sense if life, the destiny
of a nation, the voice of religion, the destiny of mankind; to sum
up—the eternal issues of all days.
But Noica’s thinking individualized itself by its ontological pre-
occupation. This lead, four decades after, to his main work: The
Treatise of Ontology. In part, he gave his ontology a national dimen-
sion, 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.” These 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 man-
ner 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 find the roots of these ideas in the 1940s. Here Noica
was preoccupied with the relationship between the spiritual dimen-
sion 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 ontologi-
cal 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
70 CRISTIAN CIOCAN

the essential ground for all thinking. We must also note that Noica’s
national dimension of philosophy was just one side of his ontol-
ogy, 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 indi-
vidual receives its determinations. If the ontological model is satu-
rated, we can talk of an accomplished Being. If the model is not
saturated (through various modes of ontological failures or non-
achievements), 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 fulfill its
Being. He used an ontological operator, a preposition difficult to
translate, întru, which is at the same time “in,” “in regard of,” and
“for” (and “to”), simultaneously being contained and an orienta-
tion 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 întru fiinţă] (such as the case with an artist—an
individual—who situates himself, by his works—the determina-
tions—for and towards the horizon of the general—his art) and of
a becoming within and towards becoming [Rom.: devenirea întru
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 affected. First, his goods are confis-
cated; it was the first measure of the Communist power: to annihi-
late the rich people. But Noica’s passion for philosophy remained
PHILOSOPHY UNDER TOTALITARIANISM 71

unchanged: even if the political society was catastrophic, Noica

founded in 1945-46, in one of his houses, a private school of phi-
losophy which was frequented by important Romanian intellectu-
als. But these private philosophical sessions could not be tolerated
for long by the officials, because there were some “reactionary and
bourgeois elements,” as it was said in the epoch. The 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. Three years after, in 1949,
when Noica was 40, he is forced to leave Bucharest. He was com-
pelled to forced domicile in Campulung, having an official inter-
diction 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, Noica’s philosophical virus has
not calmed down. He organized philosophical encounters with a
circle of friends, having the certitude that only spiritual life—in
which philosophy was the most important—can constitute a veri-
table 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 Noica’s attitude in front of the
historical disaster he lived in.
So, at our question—how can one make philosophy with-
out freedom?—Noica’s answer would be: well, by simply making
philosophy!
In this time of forced domicile, it is Hegel’s philosophy that
constitutes the center of Noica’s 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
72 CRISTIAN CIOCAN

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

years in prison. Philosophy seems to be the demon who wishes to
destroy Noica’s 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 first 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 benefits 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 fifty-six years old, Noica is allowed to come
back to Bucharest and he entered the Institute of Logic as a re-
searcher. 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. These young philosophers are much at-
tracted by his intellectual charm and by his philosophical virtuos-
ity, and therefore they all enter in a scenario of cultural and philo-
sophical pedagogy. For them, Noica was a singular and fascinating
figure, 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 in-
terpret Plato, Aristotle, the pre-Socratic and the Aristotelian com-
PHILOSOPHY UNDER TOTALITARIANISM 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 disciples—precisely Gabriel
Liiceanu, Andrei Pleşu and Sorin Vieru—regularly 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. This 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.
The Păltiniş Diary by Gabriel Liiceanu, now translated into
English, French, and German, draws the passionate and dramat-
ic story of this adventure. At its publication, the impact of this
Diary is immense and the work gains a great celebrity. The liberty
of spirit showed by this Diary fascinated the Romanian public,
whose actual liberty had been confiscated for several decades by
Communism. The Diary had an enormous influence on several
generations of young people, inspiring them with the philosophi-
cal 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 condi-
tions of a political submission.
Noica’s firm 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
74 CRISTIAN CIOCAN

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

same as the Czech model of Jan Patočka, the Romanian model of
Noica plays a remarkable role on the stage of contemporary phi-
losophy, 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.

The case of Alexandru Dragomir starts from some different prem-

ises. Until his death in 2002, we were aware of Alexandru Dragomir
only as a strange figure 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 figure. It was known that back in the
1940s he had been a student of Heidegger’s, studying for a PhD de-
gree in Freiburg. Those 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 figure, having a prodigious activity and an effervescence of
action even during hard times, Dragomir conceived philosophy as a
purely individual effort, 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
PHILOSOPHY UNDER TOTALITARIANISM 75

conferences. That is why he did not want to publish even a single line
during his lifetime, believing that writing is, as the myth of Theuth
at the end of Plato’s Phaedrus shows, the fatal enemy of thinking.
Dragomir considered that the Socratic manner of interrogating one-
self is the highest form of thinking. Therefore, he did not want to
have any contact with the official philosophical area contaminated
by ideology, and also he did not want to adopt Noica’s 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 high-
ly appreciated Dragomir’s sharp intelligence. Alexandru Dragomir
took part in Heidegger’s 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 Heidegger’s 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 con-
tinuing his studies with Heidegger. He quickly understood that his
relationship with Germany could be a reason for political persecu-
tion 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.
76 CRISTIAN CIOCAN

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 Noica’s
efforts to win Dragomir as a collaborator for his philosophical proj-
ects, Dragomir had systematically rejected his proposals, closing
himself in an insurmountable solitude.
Why? Maybe it was only a question of human psychology, be-
cause it might be difficult to accept Noica as master after two years
in discussion with Heidegger. But maybe there were profound differ-
ences 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 every-
where. The ways of Dragomir and Noica seemed for the moment
much too separate.
We know already what Noica’s 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 file led to
frequent dismissal. He finally 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 philosophi-
cal 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 philoso-
phy in Greek, Latin, German, French and English. After 1965, after
Noica’s 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 Dragomir’s opinion on his works.
PHILOSOPHY UNDER TOTALITARIANISM 77

It is said that Noica feared of Dragomir’s very exigent lecture and

extremely severe his judgment. It is said even that Noica has re-writ-
ten 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 pub-
lish, 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 lec-
tures and seminars, with Gabriel Liiceanu, Andrei Plesu, Sorin Vieru
and other prominent Romanian intellectuals as audience. It is prob-
ably thanks only to this breach that we are able to speak today of
Dragomir, thus saving his name from total oblivion. At that time,
Dragomir’s 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. Dragomir’s 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 philosophi-
cal 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 figure of Romanian philosophy into
a philosopher whose work can be transmitted and shared. Most of
these texts are phenomenological microanalyses or subtle and inci-
sive clarifications of various concrete aspects of the world in which
we live. One can find 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
78 CRISTIAN CIOCAN

mistakes, on writing and speaking, on making distinctions among

things, on being unique, and so on. There are very different and het-
erogeneous 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 con-
crete 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 significance, 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
first 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 possi-
ble to start recovering his work. The Humanitas Publishing House
has already published three volumes, Utter Metaphysical Banalities,
Five Departures from the Present and The Time Notebooks. It may
be that this book on time will prove to represent Dragomir’s most
important work.
So, to our question—can one make philosophy without
freedom?—Dragomir’s answer’s is similar to Noica’s, even if so many
things are so divergent concretely. Dragomir lived his philosophi-
cal 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 des-
tiny, 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.
PHILOSOPHY UNDER TOTALITARIANISM 79

Endnotes
1 For the life of Noica, we refer to the book of Gabriel Liiceanu, The Paltinis
Diary: A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture, Budapest and New York, CEU
Press, 2001 and to the articles of our colleagues Laura Pamfil 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.
2 Noica translates Porphyry, Dexippus and Ammonius. He directs also the first
complete edition of Plato’s works in Romanian; he forms translator teams
from Greek, Latin and German. Under his guidance the first systematical
translations from Heidegger begin.
3 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 frag-
ments 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 propo-
sition was refused, because of political reasons: in a Romania occupied by
the German Army, Heidegger was persona non grata… The 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
l’essence de la vérité (1948) and Kant et le problème de la métaphysique (1953).