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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
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

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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. 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 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. The 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? The 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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destroyed by the imperialism of the Soviet regime. However, we must understand its specicity. The 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. The 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. The 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. 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 disgured 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

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who remain lived under the threat of political imprisonment. The 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? The 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? The 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 The 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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people discussed vividly the most absolute, deep and speculative subjects. The 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. This lead, four decades after, to his main work: The 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. 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 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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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. 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 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. These 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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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. 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 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. The liberty of spirit showed by this Diary fascinated the Romanian public, whose actual liberty had been conscated for several decades by Communism. The 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. The 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. The 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. 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 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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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 Platos Phaedrus shows, the fatal enemy of thinking. Dragomir considered that the Socratic manner of interrogating oneself is the highest form of thinking. Therefore, 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. The 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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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. There 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. 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 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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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 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 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 lessence de la vrit (1948) and Kant et le problme de la mtaphysique (1953).