excerpts
ΙΙ
The Being of Being
Quantitatively, existence can be conceived of from the point of view of unity or of multiplicity, from the point of view of the whole and from the point of view of the parts. From the first point of view, what we will discover is the nature, in its twofold aspect of world and times. From the second, what we will discover is the individual or the Being, the chance or the fact.
The nature is one, rich, complete, constant, beyond transformations, strong, eternal, always equal to itself; at least at first sight; the Being is multiple, weak, inconstant, changing, ephemeral and threatened by destruction. As the poet says:
Only man is changing
The earth forever wandering.
But we stick to one place.
As we were, so we remain.
An inbred sufferance, an organic lack of fulfillment seems related to the idea of division and of separate subsistence. Chance seems sometimes without sequence or sense, other times it has a meaning and it reveals a destiny. The world has thus a complex character, which we might find useful to examine closer.
1. The Being as a whole: the nature as world and as times.
The notions of space and time – the first ones through which the human mind sifts the idea of being – are not familiar to the Romanian people, in its everyday discourse.
The Romanian, when he wants to situate a thing in space, talks about “place” and when you ask him about time, he will answer by talking about “the times”. What is the connection between this time and this place with what is? The answer is not difficult at first sight. It was already given, and what we will say here is not new.
The place and the time appear as two far-reaching receptacles of the particular existences, which encompass everything there is, like two frames or two vessels, which these things fill with their being.
The totality of these beings that fill the time and space with their being makes up the nature, in its two aspects: “the world” and “the times”, and the nature is the first object on which the Romanian’s grasp of existence focuses.
We don’t know and we don’t want to express preconceptions about the question on whether everything that is, is in a place and at a time; that is, if the whole of existence happens in space and time; but globally, for the moment, this is the way we find the world: in time and in space.
The first characteristic. For the Romanian, the world is not only a spatial receptacle, neither is it just a temporal receptacle, but it is a temporal and spatial receptacle in which what is makes its Being known.
The world, since it happens in space and time, is not only a hierarchical architecture of essence, but it is also becoming, a flow. Depending on whether the thought of its Being is projected spatially or temporally, the nature is a happening in the world or in the times.
The place and the time are thus the two large receptacles of the nature. The world is firstly made up of everything there is in a place and of everything that happens anywhere. And maybe… of something else as well. We cannot help insisting on the idea of happening (and it is not without interest that this flow takes the name of a celebration) which is represented by this gradual development, this great procession of the world that fills the time and space.
However, the “place” and the “times” are also dimensions of the world; that is, they are means which enable us to arrange, place, situate the beings that are in it. The Book of Ecclesiastes, so full of meaning for the Romanian soul, says: “A time to sleep and a time to wake.” And common speech has it that all things are done “when their time comes”, just as all things are placed “where they should be”.
There is thus a kind of preconception in speech, namely that things have, in the world, a certain place and a certain time of their own. In other words, that nature is a make-up of beings, bearing a certain arrangement up to a point. We say: “this world is ordered”, but we say it is so only “to a certain extent”, because the order of this world is not flawless. Anyway, it is not currently flawless. For, if it is true that for the Romanian, eventually, “justice will always come to the surface, like oil”, it is also true that, until then, “justice walks about wounded”.
There is – as we shall see – in this world a certain “weak spot”, a certain principle of movement, of disorder, a certain freedom, due to which not all things are complete, in their proper place, and neither do they come at the appropriate time, but they impose a search or a waiting period. But this doesn’t mean that there is no possibility of order.
Thus, in “space”, we order the things that stand still and the space would be enough for this, if things stood still. But, since things are moving, that is, they change and they transform themselves, alongside the state of stillness there appears a state of change, and the things that used to be arranged next to, into, under or over each other, are now arranged in time, one after another, in a row.
The space has its familiar dimensions: length and width, that is extent; and height and depth, that is, capacity. However, the latter, the depth, the height and maybe the width as well, seem to be special, not just because only they give the world its full meaning of inclusion; but also because they bring in the world of expanse an idea of appreciation and of qualitative hierarchy of the Being. The depth or the height of a thing implies, indeed, a more select nature of the Being than that of an ordinary thing.
Time has its dimensions as well. At first sight, time only has one dimension: length. Since things are arranged one after another, that is, they make up a row, the length of time might appear as its only possible dimension. At a closer look however, time has a volume as well, that is thickness. For, since the world exists all at once, as an inclusion of several things all given at the same time, all things have their own specific sequences of successive events. The nature, in its wholeness, unreeled in time, cannot be thus – as it was shown by others as well – a single stream, but a collection of streams, which together make up a global stream of partial streams.
In reality, the world has all the dimensions of space, plus the unfolding in time. The time is therefore, for the Romanian, nothing else than the world in a constant change. And consequently, “the times” are for him not only flow but also content.
Understood this way, not only as flow but also as a receptacle of existence, the times have one more character. They don’t only unreel endlessly, but they also find fulfillment.
The fact that the times have depth is also important because it opens up a new problem. If all things pass, and if everything has its own sequence of transformations, that is, if there are parallel developments or developments that interweave, we can seize not only the thread of a single happening, but we can get hold of the ends of several such threads, which are unreeled in the same direction and we can connect them. Thus, the “gromovnic”, which deals with interpreting “the signs of the times”, not only of the rain and of the blizzard, or of life, but also of the more significant times: of wars, of ages, even of eons, becomes possible.
The thing that dominates this entire conception of the Romanian world is, as we can see, the feeling of an immense universal solidarity. Each fact resonates in the entire world, each and every gesture propagates its music in everything there is, the same way the Cremonese violins resonate inside whenever one plays at one of them. A man’s life is connected to the fate of a star. A man’s bad deed clouds the sun and the moon. This thing, which the researchers into the Romanian ethos have long ago highlighted, represents the first important Romanian feature of existence in its totality.
This would be easily explained if the Romanian’s “world” were a perfect hierarchy of substances, governed by their essences. One can only assume that any shift in one of the parts would make the whole quiver.
Truth is that things are more complex and the Romanian view on the world leaves enough room, as we have seen, for imperfection and freedom in its internal structure. If there are such resonances, this presupposes the fact that in this conception of the world there is an interdependence prearranged by incidents and a hierarchy pre-established by beings; and that, however, there is something that unsettles it.
The second feature of this world, related to the first, is the one which we could find once at the basis of the entire mediaeval thought: the idea that all things have a meaning, that the world is a book of signs, a “trepetnic”.
The questions: “Is it a good sign?” or “Is it ill-omen?” accompany, with the Romanian, every incident in this world. And his world is not a neutral one, one with incidents without meaning or connection to each other; on the contrary, it is a world suffused with evil or benevolent powers, with callings or silences, with revelations and concealments. In a way, all things of this world are beings and have something to say to the one who can listen. The shadow of the tree that allures you; the earth that sometimes holds out when you want to cut through it with the plough and which lets itself be cut through other times; the well which calls you to quench your thirst; the tree that invites you to take its fruit; the bird that sings to you of good or ill omen; the rabbit that crosses your path; the wicked fairies that catch you in their dance reel if you linger at road junctions at night… everything is enlivened, fresh, ceaselessly alive in this concrete world. Everything refers to you, urges you, invites you, caresses or menaces you!
All things are beings with their own intentions and gestures. They do not represent a static make-up of essences ranked according to their degree of Being, but a vast procession in which the symbol reveals the individual and the individual conceals the symbol. The visible world, in which things happen like signs from beyond towards us, doesn’t reveal only an invisible world, to which it stands in a relationship of essence-appearance; the visible and the invisible world interweave with fickle efficiency, like in mythology.
This dynamic and fickle completeness of the Romanian existence is not to be found only in our countryside world. But, in cities, where things have become more laicized and the world more “positive”, things take a different turn. For, what else is this desire to find out, this continuous chase for “novelties” of the Romanian from the city, their thirst for rumors and the way in which it is quenched as soon as their fantasy shows them that what seem to be the facts incline towards a meaning that appeases them or takes a menacing attitude, like the wicked fairies at the road junction, for the belated night pilgrim?
You start from the everyday life, and, inadvertently, you find yourself in a legend.
Let us consider a little everything that is particular in this atmosphere of vivid action and reaction, of conversation between man and events (…) and we will understand that the Romanian existence unfolds in a sort of fairy tale-like world, in which what we call “positive reality” dissolves into a dynamic and animistic plurality, in which the interpretation looks for its good or evil signs. And this is another trait and another dimension through which the Romanian existence acquires its own profile. To it is connected, naturally, the remark that “the Romanian is born a poet” or that “the Romanian is smart”. And to it, is also connected the fear that “the Romanian is not constant”, or the ascertainment of the so-called “Romanian skepticism”, of the “non-pragmatic character of the Romanian” or of his “lack of tenacity”…
The Romanian existence however, does not include only this world, but also the world beyond. The fact that this world is defined through an adverb, with no reference, is full of significances. The world beyond has a strange status compared to the one here. One might expect to find it separated by a spatial border: here, beyond. One actually finds it separated by a change in the nature of the Being. The world beyond is not “outside” this world. What separates us from it is a sort of internal restriction, of borderline, a distinction of an existential nature, an inclusion of the Being, similar to the one that entitled us to talk about the brothers from “beyond”, before the First World War. Can anyone imagine a Frenchman calling an Alsatian, before 1918, frère de l’au delà? One cannot. Au delà implies, with the French, a threshold of no return, which makes the employment of the term inappropriate to any immanent usage, whereas with us, between “here” and “there”, there remains a customs.
The world beyond includes this world as well. It is an open receptacle, which encircles this world from all sides, permeates it, fills and fulfills it. The invisible things exist, like the visible ones, even if they are not given in space. But if they are sometimes given in time and therefore they appear in the world as incidents threaded on the string of time, this string is not endless. Hence, it does not include the things which might be outside the string, extraordinary ones, neither does it include those above the string, from after “the consummation of time”. The existence, as a whole, “the world in general”, exceeds thus, from all angles, the time and space, the place and the times in which things are settled in “this world”.
Regarding the content, now, the horizon of the Romanian world is not limited to deed, to attempt or to the purpose of the action. It is a concrete horizon, which another one surpasses from all sides though, and which crosses that other one as well, in all directions.
There is no existential disruption, abyss, for the Romanian, between this world and the world beyond, between the present times and eternity, there is only a borderline, a gateway.
The sharp distinction between the existential presence of the concrete individual, subject to dissolution, who knows he will die and is afraid of this, his fright being the real existential clue, and the impersonal existence of the world, in which everything is done and undone, is replaced, with us, in a way, by a distinction between two worlds: this world and the world beyond. But the distinction between what is here and what is beyond is made applying completely other criteria than the difference between “I am” and “I am something” in Western metaphysics.
Firstly, this world is not a world of “presences” in the acceptation of current metaphysics. It includes the things that “were”, but “are not anymore”. As well as the things that “can be”, but “are not yet”. These stretch the realm of this world towards borders that seem absurd to the “Western logic”; because for it, what is not anymore, cannot be “anywhere”, as “to be” means “to take place”. Similarly, the things that “can be” are not because possibility is, with the Western logic, a mixture of being and non-being, that is, the simultaneous assertion of the conjunction and of the disjunction of existence and non-existence, in other words the existence of what is relative either is or is not, and therefore, in an absolute sense, is and is not.
For the Romanian existence, to which the things that are, are not connected by presence, that is by the hic et nunc existence, the questions persist obstinately. What is to be done with the consummated deeds? And what is to be done with those that are to come?
They are, however, “in the world”. And, if “this world” is too small to enclose them, then there is another world, “beyond”, for them. And this is how the world “beyond” appears naturally, as an extension of this one, as a place of the same passing. And this is to be remembered. At a deeper level, it is as if there were no distinct two worlds, no other world.
The difference between this world and the world beyond does not offer to this one, to “the presence”, any existential privilege. The world beyond activates and is efficient, just as this one. Actually, if one looks deeper, it has a greater efficiency. However paradoxical it might seem, this extension, this passing, appears in the Romanian existence in the shape of an immanent process that is nevertheless accomplished in the complete existence, which is not that of this world, but of the one beyond.
The gash that exists between “presence” and “non-presence” does not affect the “essence of the world” for the Romanian. The whole qualitative unfolding of the world is independent of the gash between this world and the world beyond. The “happening” of things unfolds simultaneously on this level and on the eternal level. The height and depth ideas are valid for both heaven and hell, as well as for the visible world, even if heaven should not be “here”, but “there”.
The idea of “nowhere” does not mean something out of the world, but the impossibility of situating something within the world. The world is everything, but it is also “everywhere”. The world is complete, but it is complete with a passing. The things in it are not final, in their proper place. They “drift” and sometimes they “come back.”
Between this world and the world beyond there is a certain inter-connection. “Beyond” does not actually mean “outside”, but “another way”. The people here sometimes pass “beyond” in their dreams or while awake. The people “beyond” linger around here. Thus, there is no abyss between “here” and “beyond”, but a sort of customs, and if you pay the duties, you will pass. “Beyond” does not define a spatial border, but a quality of the Being.
“The endlessness” of the world is an issue of perspective. In fact, this world has an end. But, where this world ends, the world beyond begins. What is more, the world beyond begins even before this world ends. The world beyond pervades and permeates this world.
Even “holiness” appears as immanent. It pervades everything. The sun is holy. The sheep is holy. The house is holy. Everything that is where it should be and when it should be, with a certain purpose, is holy. The holy justice, the holy country, even the holy beating!
How rich are the distinctions that mark, in Romanian, this idea of continuous happening that fills time and even goes beyond it! Starting with the metaphysical and the quasi-Spinozan “forever”, which is the time when everything is given at once, for which eternity is only the unity of the whole, and not in the least its “endlessness”; adding the continuously flowing “always” or its synonym, which shows the way in which the continuity of the flow melts the moments (the time atoms), “interminably”; or overriding the boundaries of time from this world, in order to contain the one beyond as well, in this continuity of happening, and ending up with the religious “eternally”, which means “always forever”, that is, time and eternity together, or with its derived indicative “de-a pururi” – what a richness of nuances!
We remember how startled we were 15 years ago when, trying to translate a text by Péguy for the first time, we realized that, for notions which he strived to coin in French, by juxtaposing concepts such as: continuellement toujours or éternellement toujours, for which we should have translated “always forever” or “perpetually forever”, we find in our language, already existing, these notions of “eternally”, “to live eternally”, distinctions which our ancestors’ language had made centuries before.
The reflection on this “forever”, for instance, is of great interest, because it opens the way to a fundamental Eleaticism of the Romanian sense of existence, which, nevertheless, coexists paradoxically, in parallel and concomitantly with a Heraclitism, just as fundamental, in the feeling of the never-ending happening of things in the world.
We cannot but stop and draw attention here to the difficulty which Eminescu himself experiences, when he tries to drape in the body of Romanian language conceptions that are foreign to those of our people, as for instance in the lines:
There was no today, or tomorrow, or yesterday, or forever.
For, one was all and all was one.
If “forever” really means “forever”, that is “all at once”, then, instead for the line to say what it says, it should say: “There was no today, or tomorrow, or yesterday, but forever.” The next line would have thus been the actual explanation of this “forever”, that is, when: “all was one and one was all”; and not its contradiction.
But then, another problem would have emerged. How could the poet, with his sharp sense of language and ideas, have identified the confusion of all things in the initial nothingness from the following lines:
When the earth, the sky, the air, all that was ever seen
Were from among those that have never been,
with the Romanian term: “forever”, which, with its roots and with the same construction as the Greek Îν και παν, means exactly the opposite of these lines, namely, the inexistence of nothingness, even its impossibility, because it represents precisely the indestructible permanence of the Being, not its destruction?
The explanation would reside perhaps in the derivation of Eminescu’s formulation from a French prototype: Racine’s similar lines from Les plaideurs:
Le monde, l’univers, tout, la nature entière
Etait ensevelie au fond de la matière,
in which the “matter“ has a Platonic meaning of “non-existence”, developing on the Ovidian: Unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe…
The difficulty of rendering the Vedic nothingness in the Eleatic phrasing would then be understandable.
The same reflection could be triggered by the incongruence from the lines which declare that: the earth, the sky, the air and all that was ever seen were from among those that have never been, in which one can perceive the incapacity of language to express without contradiction the fact that a thing “was” and the fact that it “never” was.
In the languages in which presence has a privileged position in existence, this line could have a consistent meaning, for the “existence” would mean “presence”; whereas in our language, in which the existence has only a very weak such meaning, and where, hence, we cannot define the “here and now existence”, projected logically backwards, as non-existence in any way, the meaning of the line reaches a serious deadlock.
2. The lonely Being: chance, the individual, God
Where does this indisputable, protean character of existence come from? Where from this distinction between what is here and what is beyond? What are the roots of this special non-positive, poetic thrust of the Romanian into existence, in which the world conceived and imagined acquires the same significance as the existence as such, becoming undistinguishable from the latter?
In order to understand, we must abandon the being of the whole and focus on the being of the part, on what we refer to through the existence of every thing.
We used the notion of “individual” as a guiding idea, a relatively stable aspect of concrete existence, opposed to chance, as a permanent and unitary deposit of qualities, incidents and deeds, to which the strange evolution of the Latin ens came in Romanian.
Defining this individual as a singularity of personal existence, we found him nevertheless related to the wholeness of existence, through his place and time.
In search of the characteristics of this individual we distinguished the two forms of specific existence: the Being and the thing, ascertaining the prevalence of the former over the latter, as the essence of the Romanian individual.
Further on, we found a confirmation of the personal character of existence in the distinction between the male and the female appearance, seeing that this distinction does not concern only a part of the being, but goes to the roots. Then, we discovered the essence of “manhood” in the active nature and of “womanhood” in the enduring nature. The lack of the neuter gender in Romanian confirmed to us the impression that the idea of existence was not formed here according to the pattern of things, but to that of beings; and the existence of the epicene revealed to us, instead of the existence of the first type, a certain weakness of “manhood” in front of the state of crowd.
Examining the elements necessary to the characterization of the individual, we cast aside first “the nature”, as we found in it too general a delimitation of the variation limits of this individual’s qualities, a delimitation which he can sometimes escape due to circumstances and which cannot be opposed to God’s work. However, we kept the nature as a logical instrument for classifying the Beings, casting it away as a root of the act of being; a situation which allowed us to explain the lack of an entire set of Western controversies in this mentality.
We then discovered the possibility of completely defining the individuality of the Being, on a logical level, by “appearance”, “sense” and by “fate”, defining successively the first as the key to the individual’s qualities, the second as an integral of his possibilities, and the third as an extensive set of the incidents he experienced. On the existential level, the only principle of individuating him seemed to be God’s work.
Moving on to the roots of the Being, the Romanian metaphysics revealed in God a concrete, paradoxical, lonely Being, but present everywhere, an individual above the nature, but pertaining to the nature, prototype of manhood, individualized in three active appearances, and the rest of existence, compared to him, merely reflects his work.
Thus, although the idea of concrete existence did not generate in Romanian a type of existence similar to that of things, but one similar to that of the person, it could not be solved in the vein of an energetic personalism, but in the vein of a theophanic personalism, the individual seeing himself, eventually, like the incident, as a reflex, an illusion, a non-autonomous phenomenon of the universal Being.
Where from the Romanian “fatalism”, defined not as indifference towards the concrete conditions of the deed, but as an integration of the act of being into the universal rhythm, regarded as a revelation of God’s will. Hence the ritualistic character of the Romanian act of being, in the non-realistic sense, derived and symbolic.
We cannot enlarge upon these ideas here. We indicate them however, because their perspective completes the overview of the points outlined in this study on the Romanian dimension of existence, with the chapter on particular existence, incompletely tackled in last year’s conference.
III. The Nature of the Being
Starting from the quantitative idea of existence, we looked at it as a whole, then as a part and gradually, during this study, we sounded out its property.
We should now consider more closely this quality and try to elucidate the remarks made about it.
1. The Being as property: the instance and the mode of being
Philosophers have long tried to distinguish two meanings of the verb to be: indeed, “is” can mean two apparently different things: the mode and the instance of being.
In the first acceptation, we use the verb to be when we say: the sky is blue; the problem is difficult; man is an animal. Or, when we say, with the poet:
All is dust, the world is like this, and so are we.
In these cases, the verb to be merely links a subject with a predicate, that is, it attributes a property to a being. In all these instances, the respective judgment expresses a mode of being, the state or the nature of the grammatical subject and a relation of logical affiliation.
There is however, another usage of the verb to be. When, for instance, you exclaim with the poet:
To be, both sad and empty madness!
Or when you wonder with him:
And then, who knows if it is better
To be or not to be…
Or when you say: I am; the world is; my thought is; God is.
The first meaning has nothing mysterious in it. Or, more precisely, the verb to be mediates and links, as I have said, a property to a Being. The verb to be attributes a property to a Being or ascertains that a property belongs to a Being, that a Being has, possesses a property. The second meaning is more difficult to clarify. For, although it is clear to all of us that we understand it, in reality we will find it very hard to define, that is, to show exactly what we understand by it. The difficulty is linked to the very nature of the definition. And this is why: to define means to explain a thing by others. In the special case of existence in the second meaning, of existence per se, ontologically, this thing is very difficult, if not even impossible. Why is that? Because in this second acceptation, the idea of existence is the most general idea which we can express about a thing. Each and every thing, taken into consideration one way or another, allows this predicate. No other idea can therefore clarify it completely.
The fact that the idea of existence is the most general one we have about any thing is not hard to understand. In this general sense, each and every thing we talk about is. It is, for the very fact “if this hadn’t been for real, there wouldn’t be a story about it” But here, the problems arise. As general as this idea is, it is completely indefinite. And therefore, of no use. If I am and this thing in front of me is as well, and if it is also what I think of it and what I wish for it – then the idea of “is” is equivocal and does not help at anything. And still, this is not completely true, since I answer in a meaningful way to the question whether a thing “is” or “is not”. Hence, the need to try a definition of this idea of existence with the purpose of reducing it to an acceptable meaning.
Philosophers have tried to reduce this second idea of existence to others, starting with Parmenides, who stated that existence is unity, and passing – through many – to Berkeley and to the idea that existence is perception and ending with Heidegger, for the moment, who states that existence is the individual subject’s fear of annihilation. Thus, a list of general ideas, a chart of categories meant to clarify the idea of existence, was gradually made up.
One distinguished quantitatively the unique existence of the world from the existence of its particular beings; the existence of the whole from its parts. One distinguished qualitatively the concrete Being from the conceived-of Being, the asserted existence from the denied one, the finite existence from the infinite existence. One distinguished the Being that exists in itself from the Being that exists in relation to others and, in relation, one distinguished: the univocal relation cause-effect from the reversible, functional relation, from the mutual action. One distinguished the immutable basis of things from the fickle incidents and from their relations, the matter from the incident. Then, one distinguished between what makes a thing to be (the cause) and what makes it to be what it is (the essence) or even the one that is (the person). One distinguished the Being that can be from the one that cannot be and from the one that is. Then, one distinguished the Being that is but might not be from the one that cannot but be. Possibility, impossibility, reality, contingency, necessity have enriched thus the arsenal of existential distinctions, the contents of the modes of being.
I beg your pardon for stopping upon such scholastic considerations. Their mention is nevertheless necessary for understanding the remarks that follow. What needs to be remembered is that at the root of all these existential distinctions there remained the difficulty created by the initial opposition between the meaning of “to be something” and of “to be, pure and simple”. Because all attempts at defining the meaning of “to be” through something else turned this something else into a kind of “to be something”, in which the first “to be” dissolved, while the first meaning, the existential meaning, continued to claim its autonomy materialized through the possibility of denial, of denying the pure and simple existence of someone or something. Is it? It isn’t.
The existence, in the strong sense of the word, the concrete existence, in fact the act of being – although it depends historically on several distinct ideas, such as that of act or of form, of matter or basis- is closely connected, in Western metaphysics, to time and space. An individual or a thing exist in this sense when their Being can be individualized hic et nunc. And, starting from this concrete existence, one defines the idea of existence as something that “takes place”. Thus, even if the German conceives of it starting from the idea of action (Wirklichkeit), while the Frenchman conceives of it starting from the opposite idea, that of object (réalité), they meet when defining this idea, by relating it to time and space. Indeed, the German calls this existence per se: da sein (to be here, to be present, presence per se), and the Frenchman says about such a fact that it “takes place”. We, the Romanians, when we want to refer to such a fact, we say: it “happens”. We don’t say “it takes place”. The latter is how our journalists, who translate their thoughts directly from French, speak. The Romanians, however, say it “happens”.
Presence is, naturally, also placement in time: in our time and at the moment of speech, in both European languages. What we must notice is that for defining this special “time” one usually resorts to space. In fact, in Romanian, when we shout: “present” we understand “here”. Thus, it might seem that there is no distinction between them. The “presence” of the thing would mean in Romanian the same as the German da sein and the French avoir lieu. Once the thing is identified in space, situated, once it “takes place” and it is here – it is!
However, what does this it “happens” mean for the Romanian? Those who studied it give it two roots. For some, “happening” only means “to be situated in time”. For others, the term has, originally, the acceptation of establishing a certain place of passage, in templo habere, referring to the astronomic moment in which a star reaches the zenith, when it can be seen at the meridian. Still, is it the same thing? No, it isn’t. And this is why. It “happens” doesn’t mean that a thing acquires a surplus of being, that it is created, that it emerges out of nothingness; it simply means that it “changes”, it transforms itself or, more clearly related to time, that it “passes”.
The distinction is as follows: for Western man, once a thing is ascertained, that is, situated “in space”, once it “takes place”, once it happens, that thing, that fact is; for the Romanian, what happens has a sort of being “before being” and it preserves it even after it stops being in the world, in this hic et nunc sense. Its entry into the world is like a fall from another world, a “passing”, not a “creation”.
It cannot be just an incident the fact that this idea, which means “event” and which should abound in all the wealth of the Being, also has the meaning of “hazard”, of occasional occurrence, of accident, of meaningless event.
If it were a true fact that if a thing happens it means it comes from nonexistence and acquires existence, as those who try to relate to the Romanian “happening” all their acceptations of the “event” or of the “fact” of Western metaphysics; and, if this attribute were acquired through the insertion in time, through “exposure”, that is through the insertion in the world and in time; then, why is a “time-related” thing an ephemeral, precarious thing, a diminished existence which has nothing from the consistency that the temporal existence acquires in the West, compared to the conceived-of existence, and is not an efficient, strong, sure thing, existing per se?
This should set us thinking. It confirms what we have said so far, namely that for the Romanian, “to be present in time and space”, that is “to happen” and “to be in the world”, doesn’t represent any addition of Being, compared to simply being, anytime and anyplace, even beyond time and place.
We are confronted here with an element of atemporality and of spacelessness of existence, with which we, the ones who were shaped in the vein of Western philosophy, must get used to, and to which we always show a certain degree of clumsiness.
The little importance reality has for the Romanian is also shown in the word that means “real” in Romanian, the word “aievea”, which did not spawn its own philosophical development, the invasion of reality being met in Romanian philosophy only at the same time with Western philosophy. But the very fact that the root of this word, which is used to refer to the real, is likely to be ab aveo, the ablative of aevum, that is “existence since times out of mind”, “for ages”, and not since now or from here, corroborates what we have said so far.
Just like “the happening”, the word which means real existence in Romanian derives thus from “the continuous duration, which has no end, eternity, time, a long time”. At the root, “aievea” means thus existent “for ages”, since times out of mind, and not actual presence. Regarding the philosophical developments that could start from the existence “aievea”, I think that when this “aievea” is only an adverb, the limited possibility of denying it, from which the development of philosophy could spring, represents of course another sign of weakness of the problematic scope of this notion.
There is another notion by which the Romanian seems to distinguish between what is and what is not and by which he seems to show now and then that a thing is achieved. It is the quantitative idea of plenitude that we have talked about. “My dream came true”, synonymous with “I saw my dream come true” has the clear meaning of “achieved”, of something that was actually materialized, and not only imagined. But it is precisely the resort to a quantitative notion for expressing what represents the essential quality of existence which proves the difficulty with which the Romanian spirit moves on this field. Whichever the genesis of this term might be, a strange thing happens for the Romanian: “to be” doesn’t mean either to be in a certain time, a privileged time, neither to be in a certain place, a privileged place. To the Romanian idea of existence, it is enough to have been sometime and somewhere, anytime and anywhere and, since the future is unknown, it is enough only to “have been able to be”.
This does not belong exclusively to the Romanian. This adventure happened, naturally, in the old world to others as well. But there, the existential meaning of esse dissolved its predicative meaning, so that the entire effort of most recent philosophy focused on the existential preoccupation. There is here, naturally, a change related to an entire process of transformation in the European civilization. The Romanians kept the old essentialist attitude, though. With them, the existentialist attitude was dissolved by the predicative one.
The Romanian characterization of the happening requests another specification. For the current Western metaphysics, a happening is, above all, a fact, an action, an undertaking. For the Romanian, on the contrary, the happening is more a change of state, that is, the result of such an action, experienced by an individual, being or thing, something that happened, something that happened with you, that is, an incident. Not a deed that you have done.
The insertion of events in time appears, as I have said before, not as the result of a subject’s performance, but as the result of an incident. The fact that “pathos” doesn’t mean only suffering in Romanian, in the narrow sense of pain, but also a metaphysical alteration of the Being, that is, an incident, suffering of another’s action, recording it in one’s own Being, receiving it, is attested by the phrase from the liturgical chant which talks about “suffering joys”.
The Aristotelian category of passivity, of incident, of pathos, meaning endurance, receipt, metaphysical affection, which was dissolved in Western metaphysics, under the pressure of the performance, into the idea of “mutual action” at most, prevails with the Romanians over that of activity, of action or of energy, at least as far as “the world” and all its beings are concerned. The existence does not appear as a subject of the action for them, be it general, as nature, or particular, as the individual or the incident, but as a background for pathos and incidents, a change of states under another’s power. This is precisely what the chronicler means by being “under the times”.
Moreover, the ascertainment of this disposition makes it easier for the Romanian perception to ascend from the incidents of this world to the creator of all things, “the attempt” being for him not the pragmatic sounding of the possible from the perspective of the private being’s interests, but grasping the creator’s intentions toward this Being.
We find here, as I mentioned above, a trend which gradually disappeared from the current Western metaphysics, just as significant as the triumph of experimental science, which consecrated there the triumph of homo faber.
2. The denial of the Being: opposition and limitation
We are approaching a key point in explaining the notions discussed so far, namely, the idea of denial.
The Romanian – this is known by anyone familiar with them – is a born antagonist. Whatever you might propose, his initial tendency, the temptation of his thought, is to be against it. What is strange, is that his opposition does not destroy what it denies, but it creates, together with what it denies, a reality that enhances instead of depleting.
Why is the Romanian’s spirit negative? Why isn’t his denial effective?
This great act of denial, the possibility of saying no, of being against something, is the sign, the barrier through which Western thought sorts out the possibilities of existence from the impossibilities, and the contingent existences from the necessary ones. Well, this barrier does not function with the Romanians in this way. The reason? The Romanian denial does not have an existential, but an essential nature. The Romanian will always be against a certain way of being, not against the fact of being. Hence, he will always oppose another way to a certain way of being. He is not therefore negativistic, but restrictive! The Romanian has an essentially reconciling frame of mind if you impart with him the level on which you intend to be right! What he will not allow you is to be right on the whole or from his perspective.
This fact explains the excessive tolerance – perhaps unmet elsewhere – of the Romanian for the other. This is because for him, eventually, nobody is absolutely an other. As nobody is, for him, absolutely different…
Every time the Romanian denies, saying: “It isn’t”, his denial is only relative. It is always assumed that “it is not here”, or “it isn’t like this”, or “it isn’t yet” or “it isn’t this one”. The Romanian denial is always the denial of a quomodo or of a quod esse, and not of esse per se, in its existential sense. Even when the Romanian says that something isn’t at all, he still doesn’t deny its being. This very “at all” proves of what kind of “no” we are talking about.
“Not to be” doesn’t thus have an absolute meaning for the Romanian. The whole ontology is for him regional, and all Being – a way of being.
The function of negation is to deny the existence in a certain region of the world or of being, that is, to deny an attribution or a placement; not a fact. Even when he negates a fact, the Romanian only negates the placement of an existence at an inappropriate level.
Since “presence” doesn’t have, with him, the privilege of becoming, so that based on it one could distinguish what is from what is not, the negation is deprived of the privilege of distinguishing anything but differences between things, between essences. Its function becomes purely determinative and restrictive. By the mere act of searching, one attests the existence on a level, which is itself a level of existence. What the negation implies is only unsuitability between one level and another: between a “here” and a “there”.
Supposing that the one who denies by definition, the one who is nothing but the embodiment of the denial spirit, the Devil, were Romanian and were in front of God’s judgment throne, he could never have opposed God’s command a non fiat, a “no”, a “let it not be”, but he would have rather demonstrated to God that he sees things differently and better than him. Which would not have made him less diabolical, or less dangerously tempting for endowments.
It is important to keep in mind this Lucifer-like, not Satanic, nature of Romanian denial, in its absolute form. Because Satan alone is the one who says: “no”, who fights to undo God’s will, who represents thus an active, existential denial; whereas Lucifer simply speculates on the possibilities, that is, on the attributes and capabilities of being, enclosed in the nature of things.
That this is the orientation of the Romanian mind when it negates, is proven by the fact that the pure and simple negation can be juxtaposed in Romanian with the assertion, as in the phrase “ba da”, the opposition emphasizing, paradoxically, the assertion, instead of denying it.
Similarly, denying the negation: “ba nu” does not transform it into an assertion, as the reiteration of negation does in every language; the denial remains an existential opposition, whereas the negation continues its specific function of logical restriction. This meaning is also confirmed by the possibility of the Romanian language to deny without using “no”, by using only “de”, with the specification of the negated region: “defel”, “deloc”, etc.
That the time, as a whole, is privileged over the space, can be seen from the fact that one cannot say “devreme” and mean a negation, as one says “deloc” or “defel”, “devreme” meaning precisely: before the established time. One can see clearly the relative restrictive meaning with which this preposition is used in the case of negation as well. Similarly, the juxtaposition of this “de” with “tot” meaning absolute, without restrictions, grants the privilege of time to “all”, changing the expression, this time, like by reiteration, into an absolute assertion. Which we expected.
The weakness of the Romanian denial to reach current existence, however characteristic, is not absolute though.
The Romanian knows, as we have seen, the word “real”, by which he distinguishes reality from unreality. He also uses that “ba”, which represents the existential opposition, the active denial, the ethical, ontological resistance, and which, juxtaposed with “da”, can formulate not very elegant alternatives. The Romanian has, finally, the idea of “naught”, whose relative nature is debatable; but especially, he has the idea of “annihilation”, which has an undisputable existential meaning.
But, as in the case of “plenitude”, this “naught” comes from a quantitative idea which means “not a bit”. The lack of the qualitative aspect and the limiting nature of the negation remain thus fully ascertained as tendencies of the spirit.
Those mentioned before must be judged, naturally, only as some inclinations or tendencies of the Romanian spirit, not as absolute standpoints. However, the fact that neither “aievea” [real], nor “ba”, or “naught” generated philosophical distinctions, besides the act of “annihilating” or “exterminating”, emphasizes the importance of these tendencies.
It is only the ideas of “annihilation” and “extermination” that attest more consistent tendencies of negation of the Being for the Romanian spirit. But if these negations of the Being have a rather ontological nature – as they do not deny, at least apparently, only the way but the very fact of being – they are related to an indisputably factual, artificial, practical meaning, to the idea of an undertaking or an act of destruction, of annihilation, of extermination.
Nevertheless, since the active power is interpreted by the Romanian not so much as the power to get something out of nothing, but as the power to give a shape to someone or something, that is, as the power to build, to gather and to arrange, from preexistent elements, new structures and shapes, the concepts of “extermination” and “annihilation” will involve an idea of dismantling the whole into pieces, of decomposing, of dismembering it rather than an idea of passing into nothingness.
What disappears through this act of destruction is the “fact” of the aggregate, of the shape or of the structure; not their “existence”.
One can imagine the “(ex)termination” of a rule or of a state, conceived as an “organization” of a certain kind, the “annihilation” of certain ways of being, or even the liquidation of certain particular existences. The individual himself may cease to be present or to be active. “In the world”, of course. However this doesn’t mean that all kinds of his existence disappear completely. He doesn’t cease to be completely. He is not “anymore” in time. But since he “was”, he is more than if he hadn’t been “at all”. By the mere fact of his passage through the world before his extinction, by the mere fact that he “was”, he acquired a surplus of being which remained with him and somewhere, in his own self, which is, naturally, different from the level of his active presence in the world, but which is no less a level of being, it still is, since it can be currently distinguished from what is not, as it neither is, nor was it not.
Every time the Romanian says he “annihilated” something, he shifts his thought from the level of existence of the thing itself, which he annihilated, to the level of temporal existence, the level at which its disparate elements still survive. It is only here, on this level and on the level of the act which united these elements, that the “annihilation” was accomplished. It is only here that the annihilated thing is not anymore, has ceased to exist. Not on its own level, of shape or structure, where not for a moment did it cease to exist, on which the annihilation did not reach it, and on which it survives, just as before. Can one assume that a song ceased to exist when the voices and the instruments that perform it finished playing their part? How then, would its “reenactment” be possible?
Thus, to the extent to which the capacity of acting is confronted, in Romanian, with the weaknesses we examined above, one assumes that this active opposition remains inefficient against the Being, in its general and plenary sense.
Extermination does not touch hence the Being itself, in this strong sense either. It does not reach its core.
