Alexandru Dragomir

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alexandru Dragomir (November 8, 1916 with Zalău - November 13, 2002 in Bucharest) was a Romanian philosopher. He wrote his doctorate under the direction of Martin Heidegger in 1940.

[edit] Philosophy

Brilliant philosophical mind who refused to publish a single page in his life. He always sustained that publishing is of no importance to him. Instead genuine understanding is all that matters. Thus he never got involved in a public cultural milieu. Before his death, no one even knew whether he actually wrote something or not. Walter Biemel recollects that Heidegger much appreciated Dragomir's bright. Dragomir attended Heidegger's private seminars and it is said that, when the discussion seemed to not go any further, Heidegger turned towards him while saying: “Eh, what do the Latins say? ”. Was Dragomir close friend of Biemel, with which it translated into Rumanian “What metaphysics? ” (in 1942). At the end of 1943, Dragomir is obliged to leave Fribourg and the seminars of Heidegger and to return in Romania for the mobilization in the military service. It was the war. Even the insistence of Heidegger to ask for the prolongation of its stay in Freiburg cannot prevent its departure for the face. In 1945, the end of the war coincides with the Russian occupation and the introduction of the communist mode in Romania: Dragomir is seen in impossibility of continuing its thesis with Heidegger. It understands that its connections with Germany can be reasons for its political persecution and that its interest for philosophy was likely to involve its judgment. Dragomir understands that its life depends on its talent to dissimulate its philosophical concerns and to erase its bonds with Germany. Erasing in a continuous way the traces of its past, Dragomir worked in all the possible trades: welder, salesman, civil servant or accountant, always changing work, being regularly congédié because of its politically unsuitable “file”. Finally, he was an economist with the Ministry for Wood until his retirement in 1976. After 1985, it agrees to make a compromise as for its silence on its philosophical activity: it decides to hold several seminars deprived with the disciples of Noïca: Gabriel Liiceanu, Andrei Plesu, Sorin Vieru.

[edit] Legacy

After his death in 2002, one found at his place a hundred books with notes, comments on traditional philosophical texts, tests of investigation and phenomenologic analysis, philosophical and percussion extremely subtle descriptions. The majority of these texts are phenomenologic microanalyses of various concrete aspects of the life. One found texts about the mirror, lapse of memory, error, wear, alarm clock the morning, of what one names ugly and disgusting, of the attention, because of being mistaken in oneself, of the writing and orality, because of distinguishing and distinguishing, of unicity, and so on. They are the disparate and heterogeneous subjects, as if Dragomir made slip its phenomenologic magnifying glass on the diversity of the world and chose to analyze, for its own desire to understand, without another finality, such or such fact, such or such aspect of reality. However, one of its subjects is constant: they are the several books, entitled Chronos, in which Dragomir followed systematically the problem of time, and that during several decades: the first book goes back to 1948, containing many notes written directly in German, while the last date from years 1980 - 1990. After this discovery, one could start to recover the work of Dragomir. One already published at the Editions Humanitas three volumes: "Utter metaphysical banalities" (Crase banalităţi metafizice, 2004), "Five departures of the present. Phenomenological exercices" (Cinci plecări din prezent. Exerciţii fenomenologice, 2005) and "The Time Notebooks" (Caietele timpului, 2006). One envisages 5 more volumes. Lastly, as the reception of this thinker abroad should not delay, one dedicated a number of the review Studia Phænomenologica, containing texts of Dragomir translated into French, English and German, and texts on its personality, pertaining to those which knew it and which can testify to his life and his manner of philosophizing. Other translations appeared in the French review “Alter”.

[edit] Sources

• Alexandru Dragomir, Crase banalităţi metafizice, Humanitas, 2003 [1]
• Alexandru Dragomir, Cinci plecari DIN prezent, Humanitas, 2004 [2]
• Alexandru Dragomir, Of the mirror, in Alter, NR. 13/2005 [3]
• Alexandru Dragomir, Banal strangenesses of the man, in Alter, NR. 13/2005 [4]
• Alexandru Dragomir, Of the alarm clock the morning, in Alter, NR. 13/2005
• Paul BALOGH & Cristian CIOCAN (coord.), Studia Phænomenologica IV (2004) our. 3-4: The Ocean of Forgetting.
• Alexandru Dragomir - A Romanian Phenomenologist. [5]