LUCIAN BLAGA: THE HUMAN BEING DESTINED FOR MYSTERY, CREATIVITY AND KNOWLEDGE

Abstract

Lucian Blaga (May 9, 1895 – May 6, 1961) is a Romanian philosopher of knowledge, history and anthropology with a “metaphysical vision of the totality of existence” (as he explains in 1938, aged 43, in his work entitled The Sketch of a Philosophical Self-Presentation) was influenced since his youth by Kant, Schopenhauer, Bergson, in structuring his antireductionist and anti-positivist perspective in philosophy. The main concepts of his philosophical system are the mystery, the style, the culture, the metaphysical and creative being, the Great Anonymous, the unconscious and the abyssal categories. We are going to address here mainly the historicity of the human being and the concept of mystery. This philosophical investigation is guided by the metaphysical principle, the problem of mystery and the problem of style, correlated in specific manners with the concept of a creative human being destined for mystery and capable of knowledge, dynamic, as well historical as spiritual, becoming onto being. The study addresses briefly the similarities and differences of the philosophical categories employed by Lucian Blaga against the Kantian categories. Also, we approach the relation of Lucian Blaga’s philosophy to Rortian philosophy and to certain ideas expressed by Michael Polanyi. The thesis of this paper is the idea that human expression overlaps human existence (and historicity), with her manifestations of knowledge through creativity; fashioned by the “stylistic matrix”, generated by the “abyssal categories,” with “ontological functions” correlated to the structure of the unconscious human spirit. Although not a personalist, Lucian Blaga emphasizes to such an extent the ontological difference of spiritual and creative nature between the human beings and other beings, that the perspective described is close to the area of personalist studies.