Appraisal Vol. 11 No. 4, Spring 2018​
​Book Review

​ISSN 1358-3336​

​Lucian Blaga: Selected Philosophical Extracts

Eds. Angela Botez, R.T. Allen, Henrietta Anisoara Serban. Delaware/Malaga: Vernon Press 2018, 192 pp.
​In the space afforded by a relatively short book, less than 200 pages, the editors accomplish a great deal in selecting centrally important extracts from the com­plex, prolific and illuminating writings of Lucian Blaga (1895-1961), the son of a village priest in what is now Romania, and an influential and prominent philosopher between the two world wars. After WWII Soviet Russia imposed a communist regime upon Romania, and Blaga lost his university post and was forbidden to publish. Now all his works are published in Romania, which also include poetry, plays and a novel. This admirable selection focuses virtually all Blaga’s major philosophical themes, in his own words, with a very useful introductory chapter by the editors, who also introduce each chapter on the specific themes dealt with therein.

In the Foreword, Calvin O. Schrag writes ‘It has been said of Dostoyevsky that he was Russia’s greatest metaphysician. With equal propriety is can be said of Lucian Blaga that he was Romania’s greatest meta­physician’. This clearly indicates the weight attributed to him by those familiar with his works.

A polymath, Blaga assimilated and wrote about subjects as various as epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophical anthropology, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, and philosophy of religion, and at the same time locating them all in his centrally important notion of culture, with all the implications for the profound differences in cultural style. Style is another important notion that relates to the whole of his epistemology with its illuminating, synoptic urges. For example, in Chapter Ten, where he writes about the importance of the spatial horizon in cultures, seen so variously in Russia, Egypt, Arabia, Greece, South America and his own beloved Romania. This is a subtle, complex and rewarding notion, linked to his idea of Mioritic Space, which embraces music, architecture and landscape of a particular culture, which he calls ‘cultural morphology’, but insists that the culture is more fundamentally founded on the deeper, unconscious notion of ‘abyssal noology’, where a deeper expression and outlook of a culture is found in, ‘a well-structured and relatively self-suffi­cient psycho-spiritual reality’ (p133) which all cul­tures have in common (and which it seems to me is what enables us to understand other cultures, if we are attentive). This ‘deeper expression’ is based in struc­tures similar to Kant’s categories. Consciousness (a feature of cultural morphology) can ‘betray’ style, the true expression of a culture at this deeper level, by its conditioned and too focussed interference. This resem­bles Anton Ehrenzweig’s ideas about the creative relations between consciousness and the unconscious in individual creativity, seen in his The Hidden Order of Art (Paladin 1970), critical of, though based on Freudian theory, but which it seems is also sympa­thetic to Blaga’s more Jungian approach.

Some of his ideas can be seen to have features in common with such as Thomas Kuhn, Michael Polanyi, Merleau-Ponty, John Macmurray and, in child psy­chology, D. W. Winnicott. Although very far from identical all have illuminating things to say about the nature and necessity of culture, finding original ways of escaping from the Cartesian idea of the isolated self, which led to the shallows of scientism, materialism and positivism, with their pseudo-problems of mind-body, fact-value etc.

Yet Blaga has a large space for fruitful dilemmas and antinomies, especially those that he suggests cannot be resolved, like his example of the wave-corpuscular theory of light in quantum physics. We have to live with these and accept that knowledge cannot always dissolve the mystery of what is. The response of Kuhn, though, might be that we need to look at the problem with an entirely different para­digm. This is where Blaga’s two notions of knowledge arise: Type 1, what he calls paradisiac knowledge, which applies to normal problem solving by logic, normal awareness of a world we take for granted, whose luminous example is science; and Type 2 knowledge, which he calls Luciferian knowledge, which deals with ‘mystery’, new realms of once un-comprehended and even incomprehensible reality, which he calls minus knowledge, which has no conscious presuppositions but allows the unconscious to offer ‘solutions’. This might resemble what’s been said about Kuhn, above, where these new forms of knowledge can totally reorient an approach to exist­ence. But, having said that, Blaga insists there are logically irresolvable dilemmas that indicate the presence of what he calls The Great Anonym, which he is happy for people to call God if they wish. Within his metaphysics and meditations he concludes that the Great Anonym is the great creative force that created the universe, but in its infinite fecundity is able to continue self-creation ad infinitum, but who has to relinquish this creativity because there would then be lots of ‘gods’ who, through their creative and contra­dictory wills, would cause chaos and consequent destruction of the universe. Thus, the Great Anonym relinquishes his creativity for the good of his creation. Thus, a moral act underpins existence. But He, She, It is aware that humanity, through its burgeoning knowledge, could one day rival The Great Anonym and, through humanity’s will, cause chaos and the destruction of existence. For this reason, knowledge for humanity is made to exist in impenetrable mystery, but out of this comes man’s rich creativity, constantly trying to find absolute knowledge and constantly and necessarily failing, but creating wonderful approxima­tions to it, in all the sciences, arts and religions. It seems all such notions are seen as heuristic. Now this, as we can see, is once more consonant with Kuhn, who is quite aware that paradigms will never capture what is, without remainder.

These extracts take us on an adventure of ideas, at which a review can only hint, and although the language and some of the ideas might at first seem a little ‘grandiose’ for hardboiled westerners, they are worth persisting with. There are lots of insights, which open up other ways of seeing, other realms of mean­ing, which shine light on current and eternal philo­sophical issues.

The Introduction and the introductory passages at the start of each chapter are helpful and the Glossary, explaining each of the sometimes seemingly esoteric neologisms, which all link in an overall synoptic theory, helps in charting one’s course. I believe the journey is very worthwhile for the reasons already given as we try to interrogate the mystery of existence.
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As an introduction to Blaga, which goes beyond the superficial in some detail, this book is admirable, despite its compact format.
Alan Ford

Vernon Press Presents

Persons, Institutions, and Trust
Essays in Honour of Thomas O. Buford

Edited by James M. McLachlan, James Beauregard, Richard Prust
​The papers presented in this volume honour Thomas O. Buford. Buford is Professor Emeritus in Philos­ophy at Furman University where he taught for more than forty years. Several of the papers in this volume are from former students. But Professor Buford is also a pre-eminent voice of fourth generation Per­sonalism, and Boston Personalism in particular.
Personalism is a school of philosophical and theo­logical thought which holds that the ideas of “per­son” and “personality” are indispensable to an adequate understanding of all metaphysical and epistemological problems, as well as are keys to an adequate theory of ethical and political human interaction. Most personalists assert that personality is an irreducible fact found in all existence, as well as in all interpretation of the meaning of existence and the truth about experience. Anything that seems to exist impersonally, such as inanimate matter, nevertheless can exist and have meaning only as related to some personal being. The Boston Personalist tradition was inaugurated by Borden Parker Bowne and continued by Edgar S. Brightman, Peter Bertocci, John Lavely, Carol Robb, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
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