Talk:Constantin Noica

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Biography

    Constantin Noica, Romanian essayist, philosopher, polyglot, erudite and poet, was born on the 12th /25th (the two different dates are due to the fact that the Romanian government adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1919) of July 1909 in Vitanesti in a family of aromanian origin. He went to studies in Bucharest, at the Dimitreie Cantemir and Spiru Haret high schools, following then the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy which he finished in 1932. Noica continued his studies in France until 1939 and in 1940 he obtained his doctorate for philosophy in Bucharest. During the Second World War he was referent for philosophy at the Romanian-German Institute in Berlin (1940-1944). 

After the war, the Russian army which remained on the Romanian territory imposed the instauration of a communist regime. Due to the communists, many of the Romanian thinkers, such as Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran and Eugen Ionescu, had to leave the country in order to be able to continue their works. Constantin Noica didn’t do the same and, as a consequence, he was harassed by the communists. First, he was forced to live in Campulung-Muscel for 10 years (1949-1958), then he was condemned to 25 years of prison as a political convict because he made public the book “Histoire and Utopie” by Emil Cioran who had left the country for France. Fortunately, he only spent 6 years in prison (December 1958 – August 1964). After his retirement in 1975, he lived the rest of his life near Sibiu, at Paltinis. Constantin Noica died in 1987, on the 4th of December, having left behind him numerous philosophical essays.

Philosophy

The 20th century is thought to be dominated by science. The model of scientific knowledge, which means transforming reality into formal and abstract concepts, is applied in judging the entire environment. This kind of thinking is called by Noica “the logic of Ares”, as it considers the individual a simple variable in the Whole. The existence is, for this scientific way of considering things, a statistical fact. In order to recover the individual senses, the sense of existence, Noica proposes, in opposition with “the logic of Ares”, “the logic of Hermes”, a way of thinking which considers the individual a reflection of the Whole. The logic of Hermes means understanding the Whole through the part, it means identifying in a single existence the general principles of reality. This way of thinking allows one to understand the meaning of the life of a man oppressed by the quick present moment.