The Last Chapter of the Last Book: an Excerpt

Autori: Viorel CIOARA, Michael S. JONES

Lucian Blaga was a prolific author, writing books of poetry, aphorisms, theater, history, one novel, and many volumes of philosophy. His last book, titled The Historical Being (Fiinţa istorică), is the final contribution to his fourteen-volume systematic philosophy.¹ The Historical Being has been translated into various European languages. Unfortunately, not a single volume of Blaga’s philosophy has been translated into English, including The Historical Being.²

Many years ago, I expressed to the Bucharest philosopher Mircea Flonta my desire to translate Blaga’s philosophy into English. To my surprise, he recommended that I begin not with the first book in Blaga’s systematic philosophy, but instead with the last. He offered two reasons for this unusual choice: Blaga’s earlier philosophy, though well argued, often employed language that reflected his passion for poetry. It had a tendency toward symbolism and metaphor and also not infrequently utilized religious terms and concepts that might seem strange to contemporary readers. These tendencies are less pronounced in his later philosophical works.

Flonta’s second reason for beginning with The Historical Being was that the final chapter of the book presents a sort of overview of Blaga’s philosophical system. This chapter, titled “Metafizica istoriei” (The Metaphysics of History), being the last chapter of Blaga’s last book, would be a natural place for him to summarize his philosophical vision, and that’s exactly what he does. By translating this book first, a general introduction to Blaga’s thought will be made available to English readers even before the rest of the books are translated.

I found these arguments convincing, and so I began translating Fiinţa istorică. I must confess that it has been a very slow process. Due to a heavy teaching load and some administrative responsibilities, I have only been able to work on translating during the summers. Some summers I have succeeded in translating a complete chapter, but some summers I have only translated half of a chapter or worked on improving an earlier chapter. Other projects have demanded my time – articles and books on other subjects, conference presentations, and all of the usual academic activities. Furthermore, translational difficulties were hard to resolve because I was doing my work in America and rarely had Romanians nearby with whom I could confer. Many friends helped me through email, but working on the translation through correspondence is a slow and time-consuming process.

Eventually, I decided that I needed to return to Romania in order to progress more rapidly. Happily, God provided funding in the form of a Fulbright grant, and my home university (Liberty University) gave me permission to take a year off from teaching. Thus in 2014-15 I spent the year teaching at the University of Bucharest’s Faculty of Philosophy. One of the courses that I taught was on Lucian Blaga. Naturally I felt a bit odd: an American teaching Romanians about Lucian Blaga – what a strange thought! But several students signed up for the class and I was determined to make it work. We spent half of our time studying Blaga’s philosophy and the other half refining the chapters of The Historical Being that I had succeeded in translating. The biggest gain from teaching this class, though, was that instead of having the students write traditional term papers, I assigned to each of them one of the yet untranslated chapters of The Historical Being to translate.

The translation assignment proceeded as follows. The students had half the semester to work on their translations. After the midpoint of the semester each student was required to make an hour-long presentation of his or her translation work. They were asked to explain to the class the content of the chapter that they translated, how they went about doing the translating, what strategies and tools they found helpful, what challenges they faced and how they overcame them, and things of that nature. Then they were to discuss with the class any passages that they were still struggling with and enlist the help of the entire class in coming up with a good translation. This part of the presentation was very helpful and also very enjoyable.

After the students had incorporated into their translations all of the help that was received during their oral presentations, the students turned their translations in for grading. Then I graded them and gave the students feedback on both the accuracy and the style of the translation. At that point the students were invited to revise their work and submit it for regrading. The reason for allowing the students to submit their work a second time was two-fold: I was hoping that it would result in improved translations and also that it would result in improved grades for the students. Some, but not all, of the students took advantage of this opportunity and submitted revised and improved translations.

I felt that this experiment in collaborate translating³ was a success: only a few students actually completed the course, but they were a considerable help to my project of translating Blaga. However, there were still several chapters that needed to be translated. Therefore, I determined to teach the course again as soon as possible. ICUB, the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest, offered to me a grant to spend one semester at the Faculty of Philosophy working on this project in the spring of 2021 (and Liberty University again generously offered to allow me to take a semester off from teaching). Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic prevented me from coming to Romania that year, but ICUB graciously deferred the grant for a year and in the spring of 2022 I again taught a course on Lucian Blaga at the Faculty of Philosophy.

The 2022 course was very similar to the one that I taught in 2015, and the results were similar, too: improvements were made to my translations and the students who finished the course contributed fine chapters to the English version of The Historical Being. I am extremely happy to announce that, thanks to the aforementioned grants, the generosity of my home institution, and the assistance of the students at the Faculty of Philosophy, the entire book is now translated into English. The translation needs additional polish before it is ready for publication, but my hope is to have it published in America in the very near future. Each of the students who contributed a chapter to the English translation will receive full credit for his or her work, naturally.

Returning to Flonta’s observation that it would be useful to have an English translation of the final chapter of The Historical Being because that chapter summarizes Blaga’s philosophical vision, now we finally have a translation of that chapter that can be published. The student who translated this chapter is Viorel Cioara, who in 2022 was a second-year student at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Bucharest. Chapter twelve is the longest chapter in The Historical Being. Viorel was a very conscientious student and put a lot of work into translating it. With feedback from the other students and final editing performed by me, Viorel has produced what I believe to be a very good translation. He has consented to having his work published in this collection.

The remainder of this article consists of an excerpt from Viorel’s translation of chapter twelve of The Historical Being. This excerpt exhibits how chapter twelve presents a summary of Blaga’s philosophical system.⁴

***

Lucian Blaga, The Historical Being, ch. 12: “The metaphysics of history”⁵

(482) A philosophy of history that does not attempt to rise to the pinnacle from whence it can turn its eyes in all directions, a philosophy of history that does not culminate in a metaphysics, can tell us much of all (483), of course, but such a philosophy cannot tell us everything. In general, a philosophy that does not coronate us with a metaphysics seems to us to be crippled or headless, without a torso or, at best, a creature limping through the valleys. A philosophy of history that does not contain within it or discover through its approaches a metaphysical vein remains a philosophy without a message.

In the long-term development of our philosophy, we have sought to provide a metaphysical terminus to both the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of culture. In specific chapters that can be found in their respective places, this metaphysic has been displayed and formulated; it can be thoroughly explored by admirers of such dreams. When we have resorted to forays into the cosmological realm, our metaphysical concerns have taken on larger proportions, becoming dominant and completely assimilating the strictly philosophical or strictly scientific ones. Namely, the metaphysical allusions scattered among the other lines are not lacking even in our “anthropology,” in which we nevertheless sought to keep ourselves, as far as possible, closer to an empirical material and to proper scientific methods.

We formed metaphysics, as I said, in the spirit of an overview of existence. Metaphysics is never immune to this temptation of the final leap. But unlike other thinkers, we have never overlooked the fact that we ourselves view our metaphysics more as a “creation” in which philosophy is combined with myth than knowledge with the pretense of adequacy in relation to all of existence. We also allow ourselves the belief, edifying in its own way, that mythical thinking, after being repressed from philosophy and science, still has room to breathe in metaphysics.

This lucidity in the use of mythical thinking is intended to protect us from any dogmatism. We no longer deceive ourselves by thinking we can anchor in the “absolute” with the help of the thought. This lucidity separates us from the majority of metaphysicians. For all metaphysicians feel themselves to be somehow the heirs, by an allegedly irrefutable testament, of “divine revelation” – even those who openly and explicitly no longer believe in such a divine revelation.

All post-Kantian metaphysicians sought to restore (484) the earlier dogmatism and restore consciousness’ severely shaken confidence in its handmaiden: the idea. All post-Kantian metaphysicians behave as if metaphysical concerns are justified only insofar as they set out from the premise that they have access to the “absolute.” An endless series of surrogates of divine revelation was thus created. From Fichte to Schelling, from Hegel to Herbart, from Schopenhauer to Edward von Hartmann and Bergson, we are find ourselves continually on this succession of surrogates of divine revelation. Our words of reproach are only directed at the dogmatic attitude of metaphysicians towards their own spiritual products.

Speaking thus, we have not said and do not say, of course, anything about the mythical validity of the metaphysics in question. Indeed, these metaphysical systems, if they have nothing of what could be a divine revelation, can have and of course do have a certain “mythical” validity that is very real although difficult to define. Metaphysics has its specific characteristics that should not be confused with the conventional “measures” of other spiritual realms. For our part, we have formed our metaphysics in full awareness of the situation we are talking about, a precarious situation, if you will, but nonetheless (in our opinion) both disturbing and giving uncommon satisfaction.

The essential theoretical elements with which we try to build a metaphysics of history are not unknown to our readers. They have also been the subject of various metaphysical assertions in our other philosophical works. There are three elements: the Great Anonymous, the world, and humanity. In the overall vision that we will develop, the three elements, acquiring contours and a number of aspects of relationship and correlation, will define their form, becoming sufficient grounds for a speculative construction by which we intend to give meaning to human history.

The idea of the Great Anonymous is a mythical-philosophical product of our thinking: we could say that it is a creation of our imagination that seeks ultimate meanings. The idea circumscribes the source of all that is, the generating center, directly and indirectly, of worldly existence. At another time, also through an intervention of mythical thinking, I attributed to the Great Anonymous (485) both divine qualities and demonic qualities. Divine and demonic attributes are not ascribed to the Great Anonymous in a purely abstract way; the attributes have an effect according to the modes of manifestation of the Great Anonymous.

From a cosmological perspective, the Great Anonymous is the generator of “differentials,” differentials from which, through processes of integration, according to the structural possibilities placed in them from the beginning and according to their actual powers, the world and humanity are created. The world and humanity arise not from any primordial natural intention, but as the products of a stalemate. For the first and most natural of the possibilities of the Great Anonymous is to generate other great anonymous.

The supreme concern of the Great Anonymous, which has infinite possibilities of “generation,” is to hinder, to prevent the infinite theogony that would lead to a decentralization of existence in general. In order to thwart a possible theogony, the Great Anonymous proceeds in reverse, that is, to the other end of its possibilities. It mutilates in the extreme its possibilities of generation, by emitting only differentials of its being and substance, or even not emitting some of the possible differentials.

From the “differentials,” and from the possibilities included in them, are made up, through autonomous processes of integration, the things and beings whose ensemble we call the “world.” In other words, the Great Anonymous keeps the generating processes under control in order to prevent infinite theogony and thus to ensure the centrality of existence in general. Ensuring the centrality of existence in general is the first law inscribed in the divine rule. We must also look at this law as an indication of the demonic feature of the Great Anonymous.

To ensure the centrality of existence, the Great Anonymous also takes other measures. To this end, it has instituted “transcendent censorship” over the world. If none of the beings resulting from integration can reach an absolutely adequate knowledge of reality, it is due to transcendent censorship. The Great Anonymous permits in the world of creatures only limited or relativized kinds of “knowledge.” Transcendent censorship comes into force especially in relation to the human being (486), and this in a structural way.

As the highest and most complex being resulting from the processes of cosmic integration of differentials, humanity is “structurally” censored. This means that humanity cannot arrive at an absolutely adequate positive knowledge of reality, neither of the Great Anonymous, nor of the surrounding world, nor of its own being. (Obviously, the possibility of absolute knowledge would enable humanity to replace the Great Anonymous.) Due to the fact that it is structurally subject to transcendent censorship, humanity is capable of relative kinds of knowledge, but it is definitely and irreparably denied access to positive knowledge of the “absolute.”

In fact, any being of this kind is stuck in the same situation. It could therefore be argued that the Great Anonymous instituted in existence, as far as the relationship between beings and the world is concerned, and as far as the relationship between beings and themselves is concerned, a “principle of the preservation of mysteries,” a principle beyond which no being except the Great Anonymous itself can pass.

By instituting in “existence” this principle of the preservation of mysteries, the centrality of existence and the position of the Great Anonymous are protected as a permanent arrangement that cannot be threatened by the aspirations or desires of any kind of being. If later we ask ourselves the question (and we will ask it) how “history” is possible, we will have to highlight several metaphysical conditions of the fact. For the time being, we limit our answer to this: through its multiple implications and consequences, the principle of preservation of mystery established in existence can be considered as one of the essential metaphysical conditions of the historicity of the human being and of the unshakable permanence of this historicity.

That history takes place in space, in time, and in the world is a matter of course. We do not need to go into detail on these issues. The “world” is the set of physical conditions through which history is felt in its varied forms of compositions. Through its moments, termed climate, landscape, calendar, and cosmic rhythms, the “world” conditions the (487) historical phenomena, their appearance and development, as well as their disappearance, but it does not decisively affect either the essence or the specificity of historicity. Historicity is an intramundane reality, an intramundane reality about which, however, we cannot get a complete idea without also defining it according to “transcendence.”

Historicity in its visible forms and in the sense in which we insist in the present study, is the way in which human existence, human existence in its fullness, unfolds in space and time. The “human” element will therefore be the center of our interest when we proceed to sketch a metaphysics of history.

We have had various opportunities to speak of humanity in our works of philosophy. Some threads taken from these works must be woven into the canvas we set out to weave. The fundamental aspects of our anthropology set forth elsewhere need to be mentioned in a few words. We have argued and continue to argue that humanity is the end product of an evolution through morphological and ontological mutations along a single line, which in the universe has been followed only by this being. On the line of human evolution, we do not believe that a higher level of existence than that which characterizes the human being is possible.

The fully human being, as we have endeavored to show in so many places, is characterized by two ways of existing. The first way, proper to the paradisaical man, which is only a prelude to human existence, is the existence in the horizon of the given world and for self-preservation. The way of life in the given world and for self-preservation is the basis of human life, but not its fullness and dignity.

Humanity acquires its fullness and dignity through the second mode of existence, resulting from an ontological mutation that is unique in the universe, through the mode of existence in the horizon of mystery and for its revelation. The full human is one who lives on the horizon of mystery and in order to reveal mystery to itself; I have also called this the “luciferic human.” Since we are writing a work on “history,” we immediately add this thought that comes to mind: historicity is a dimension of the luciferic human.

The incomplete human, who exists in the paradisaical way in the given world (which is noted by the senses) is, from a spiritual point of view, (488) equipped for the comprehension of the given world and for organizing its existence in this world with intellectual gifts that are merely adequate. We consider the intelligence of the paradisaical human to be supplied with “categorial” functions that have their seat in consciousness; with their help, the human (mode I) cognitively organizes the “given” horizon.

The complete human (mode II) exists lucifericly in the horizon of mystery that transcends the given world; this complete human feels called to reveal itself, through mythic creations, through conceptual abstractions, through artistic portraits, through visions or theories, the mysteries that open beyond the given horizon. Regarding these revelations that the human makes to itself, the human is also equipped with sufficient spiritual gifts. Among these we count the stylistic categories, categories that have their seat in the human subconscious. The stylistic categories put their seal on every revealing creation that the human mind reaches through its creative spontaneity. Being a keeper of stylistic categories, every human becomes a “stylistic field.” The stylistic field models every human creation.

Everything that the luciferic human creates, everything that it does, will hold a seal of style. The style of a creation or of an act is a distinctive and positive note of spiritual human products; this is so as long as we look at the things in an immanent and “human” way. However, if we look at things metaphysically and somewhat beyond the human, the other side of the coin comes to light: the categories of style that are imprinted on human creations prevent the complete success of any of the attempts at revelation in which humanity indulges.

All human attempts to reveal mystery prove themselves to be relative, weak. Due to the fact that a human cannot create in a revelatory sense except within the limits and under the constraint of a stylistic field, humanity’s products acquire by their very spiritual conditions a “historical” character. Historicity is an essential note of the human being. Beginning somewhere in the past, it has no ending, except with the end of humanity. The human has no access to an absolute revelation, so historicity is a permanent situation. Working along the lines of stylistic categories, creating inevitably in a stylistic field, the human feels elevated to (489) a mode of existence much superior to that of animals or paradisaical humans.

This mode, the second one, available only to the complete human, has a dignity to which other beings can’t aspire. Existence in historicity without the possibility of anchorage in the absolute is certainly a tragic existence, but it has a dignity that is peerless in the universe. The purpose of humanity is found in this mode of existence in the horizon of mystery and for the revelation thereof, in this mode of creating a stylistic field without any possibility of escaping relativity.

Historicity, is made clear to us as an essential dimension that cannot be removed from the complete human being. Historicity, in any of its moments, gathers in itself the truly tragic line of the human being. Historicity causes suffering and satisfaction, it causes peaks of disappointment, but also peaks of happiness for the human. Disappointments are linked to the fact that the human sometimes realizes the fundamental weakness of its creations. Joys are linked to the fact that its aspirations might find access in the absolute.

Historicity, is a dimension assigned to the highest mode of creaturely existence in the universe. Looking at things metaphysically, it is supposed that the Great Anonymous, instituting in the universe, and for every creature, the principle of preserving mysteries, holds the human being firmly on the “relative” line of revelatory creation. In this (admittedly metaphysical) perspective, the stylistic categories that the human is equipped with show a second meaning. For the human being, stylistic categories constitute a structural, positive way of “revelation”; in the metaphysical order, stylistic categories change their meaning, becoming limiting and impeding. Stylistic categories that, as immanent factors of the human spirit, lead us to revelatory creations like patterns that need to be filled, provide the significance of “transcendent brakes” beyond the perspective of the relation between the Great Anonymous and the creature.

In this metaphysical perspective, the human being, embarking on the path of its calling, of revelations, is constrained due to those very spiritual means that, in the face of the inner instances of the human (490) being, seem the most positive incentives. The tragedy of human existence comes spectacularly and eloquently from these diametrically opposed meanings that can be assigned to human destiny. But we just pointed out that this destiny causes the human being’s heights of suffering and happiness that other beings cannot feel. And if in order to describe human victories and losses we are permitted to resort to images from the mythologies of the nations, we would argue that hell and paradise aren’t terminal places of human destiny but permanent aspects of our historicity.

***

The object and subject of historicity is the complete human, meaning that not only the human that throbs in the horizon of mystery and for the revelation thereof, but also the human that lives in the given world and for self-preservation. Certainly, from the moment the human is declared complete, a change of direction regarding the paradisaical human also takes place. Because the paradisaic human, integrated into the perspectives of the luciferic human, ceases to be a terminus, becoming a functional element, or an antipodal, or a servant of another order. The paradisaical human, as long as it exists by itself, is oriented to the given world, confronting its adversities or gathering fulfillment that are suitable to the circumstances.

The paradisaical human is always capable of enlarging his horizon. This human of the natural, pre-historical state isn’t spiritually equipped with the garnish of stylistic categories, because he is outside of the perspective of mystery and revelation. He exists in the given world, he strengthens himself in the fight with surrounding nature, with the ages, with the elements, he fights with the beasts, he uses tools that he finds in forests or waters, without adapting them very much to his needs. He is a being of initiatives very close to those of the animals, but obviously more free of the environmental constraints than they are. We barely have any artifacts from this dawning of humanity; those that we have are problematic. All we have are eoliths. These stone tools show a period of dawning that could have lasted many hundreds of thousands of years.

Then, through an ontological mutation, (491) the luciferic human appears, not all at once, but in many stages that span hundreds of thousands of years. The “neanderthal” type human may represent a first, very long phase of the luciferic human. Following tangible clues that have come down to us, this human knew fire. The complete human and fire are Siamese twins. The Neanderthal was also in possession of the universal tool – the dagger – of a configuration not without style.

The Neanderthal had habits and rites: he buried his dead with their heads toward the sunset and lit fires on the tombs to sustain life in the dead. So he had mythical thinking, a mythical thinking in which appears the idea that the dead go toward the sunrise; he had a magical thinking that identified fire with life. The spirit of this Neanderthal kind of human throbbed primitively, but clear, in the horizon of mystery; this was what he was trying to reveal through mythic images and through the thought of magical powers. The Neanderthal surpassed the given world, he fled into transcendence, acquiring with this a spiritual dignity and a certain creator caliber. The first data about the Neanderthal civilization and mode of thinking are six hundred thousand years old.

Then the human distinguishes itself again from the dross of the animal kingdom. About the year 150,000 BCE the current type of human, homo sapiens, appears. From its ancestral past we have many different tools that are “styled,” and evidence of extensive mythical thinking and sustained magical thinking, magical thinking illustrated not only through rites, but also through sculptural works of art and paintings that form one body with daily life. We know the paintings, tens of thousands of years old, from the caverns in the south of France, that through their nature show that they are connected to those from Spain or North Africa. The first impression that these paintings give us is one of an unexpected excellence. Even today it speaks powerfully to us; this is, of course, first of all because of the extraordinarily stylized figuration. Homo sapiens clearly creates in a stylistic field. This creation that bears the imprint of style can then be followed, accentuating or diminishing, throughout the course of prehistory, passing victorious through all of its vicissitudes, as we approach history (492) proper. Creations appear in connection with a stylistic field, sometimes more closely, sometimes more loosely, but it is never lacking. It is understandable from what has been shown that, speaking of the historicity of the human being, we also refer to prehistory. Without any reluctance we close prehistory in the concept of historicity.

The subject of history is, once again, the complete human being. “Stylistic fields” appear at the same time as the luciferic human, in other words as that human that lives in the horizon of mystery and for revelation thereof. This solidarity of aspects isn’t unexpected. The stylistic field has its obvious role in this constellation of factors. The constellation is a constellation: it cannot be other than how it is. But we will return to these things later.

For now, we will make a few observations about the possible influence of the stylistic field and also some that go beyond what seems to strictly belong to it. Consequently, we see a style resulting from a bundle of determinants that place their stamp on the revelations that the human who is situated in the horizon of mystery makes to himself or herself. Once declared, a style becomes efficient even beyond this area. The style has repercussions on his or her other creations: tools, technical inventions, civilization with all its effects, the manner of practical reaction to nature, then clothing, then social organizations, modes of economic production – all these bear the unique influence and formative power that is style.

The history of human civilization is the proof that not only human spiritual creations, creations with revelatory intent in relation to the mystery that transcends the given world, but also all the products intended to create a more suitable environment, conditions more favorable to the human living in the given world, will have the pattern, stamp, imprint of a stylistic field. History offers, on any of its pages, brilliant examples of style that contaminate every manifestation of life and creation of an era.

Aspects of style stand out even in how a war is waged or in the tactic of a diplomatic action. The whirling, baroque wig of Louis the XIV, the way he carried out diplomacy, the shape he has given to the state, the way to fight a battle adopted by his commanders, the lifestyles of the Court, (493) closely resemble the tragedies of Racine, with the Versailles palace, but also the spiritual creations of various contemporaries from many nearby places, such as the monadology of Leibniz or the dynamically seen infinitesimal mathematics of Newton.

All these appearances of culture and civilization generally bear the mark of one and the same stylistic field. I have circumscribed the historical phenomenon elsewhere as a phenomenon that is born, endures, and eventually disappears in the setting of a stylistic field. In this chapter, metaphysically expanding the theory of style, we wanted to illustrate in the given theoretical framework the idea of “field” with some extreme examples. Some of these examples evoke the idea of a stylistic field in the phase of a sketch (the Neanderthal dagger); I then gave striking examples gleaned from prehistory (cave painting); however, an example from major history was also provided. We chose this example from among the most outstanding and complex in the history of Europe (the Baroque from the time of Louis XIV).

The conformation, the structure, the stylistic aspects of a historical phenomenon or product can be intuited as wholes, they can be analyzed and decomposed into component elements and then shown in terms of explicit knowledge. In our opinion, the style of a spiritual work, of a historical product, belongs to the field of possible findings, and its explanation does not go beyond the explanation by concepts of an empirical-concrete phenomenon in general. At this point, we emphasize once again the distinctive role of style when it comes to distinguishing between a “historical” phenomenon and other phenomena. Stylistic aspects make up the stigmata, the specific signals of a historical phenomenon compared to all the other phenomena in the universe. If the historical phenomenon is unique in the universe, it is through such aspects of style and nothing else.

We have spoken extensively about the stylistic aspects of cultural creations in our works of philosophy. The Trilogy of Culture and the Trilogy of Values provide readers with sufficient documentary material and enough analysis for those who want to incorporate the concept (494) of style. And not only that. As for style, we have attempted to propose an explanatory theory. We refer to the “categorial” theory in which we show that style, with its aspects, could be considered the result of a cluster of categorial functions. These abyssal categories, as we called them, as opposed to the “categories” of conscious intelligence, would be based in the unconscious depths of our spirit. To complete this theory, we have shown that the set of these abyssal (stylistic) categories is “cosmogenic”; they structure a “cosmos,” just like the categories of the understanding proper.

Later, we showed that these stylistic categories appear in the spiritual structure of humanity at the moment when it becomes fully human, a being that pulsates in the horizon of mystery and for the revelation thereof. Through the broad theory of stylistic categories, we in fact attempted to constitute an anthropology. For the definition of man does not seem possible without this factor of style. Using an image, flexible and abstract at the same time, that physics makes available to us, we decided to condense the whole rather quintessential theory into the concept of the “stylistic field.” The existence of stylistic fields in the universe and of phenomena that are produced in these fields bearing their imprints made it possible for us to explain, with more clarity than is usual, what a historical phenomenon is.

Our theoretical view of style has in the end been amplified by a metaphysics of style that takes the form of a metaphysics of history. Of course, the phenomenon of style (culture and civilization) has often been studied, but only as a phenomenon of completely secondary importance that does not, for example, extend beyond the sphere of interest of aestheticians. To clarify and explain this phenomenon, we have built a philosophical theory in the strictest sense of the word: the categorial theory of the “stylistic matrix” or the stylistic field that brought us to anthropology.

In order to obtain a comprehensive vision of existence, however, we eventually dared even more. We dared to compile, as a coronation of our aspirations, a metaphysical theory of style. This metaphysics, like any metaphysics ever constructed (495) under the sun, cannot be exempt from certain “mythical” elements; it gradually became a metaphysic of history. We ourselves testify that we have only wished this metaphysic of history to be what it is: a construct of meanings overshadowed by mystery – and nothing else.⁶

(Eseu apărut în „Imersiuni în opera lui Lucian Blaga”, Editura Universitară București, 2023, coordonatori: Florin Lobonț, Valeriu Sofronie, Marian Vasile)