Daimon, creativity and science (transdisciplinary flight)

“Daimon, creativity and science (transdisciplinary flight)”, Noema, XIV, 2015, pp. 203-256.

Sursa: http://noema.crifst.ro/ARHIVA/2015_2_11.pdf

ABSTRACT.

It is a gleaning within the history of ideas, starting from the focus on the concept of daimon. But the goal is to understand why the unconscious was considered – at the end of Classicism and realism, as well as in Romanticism, and also in the post WWI – as being more important than the consciousness, and which would be the significances of this standpoint.

The paper emphasises the history and power of the metaphor of daimon, the difference people made between consciousness and the demonic character of things (since at the same time consciousness is not a demon, and daimon would be just consciousness), as well as the balance between the conceptions about the power of the human spirit resulting from the consciousness or from the unconscious. The personification of this power has manifested through the concepts of daimon and genius.

The specific of consciousness – intentionality and awareness – are related to the unconscious, and to life. Surpassing the instinctual (automatic) level of life, consciousness means creation and creativity: which reflect and depend on the joy of life, and need a specific moral telos.

The last chapters of the paper focus on the logic of the intertwining of language and consciousness, and on science and philosophy as historical realisation of the revolutionary character of consciousness.

KEYWORDS. daimon, metaphor, consciousness, unconscious, life, Aristotle, Lucian Blaga, Henri Bergson, Alain Badiou, Paul Ricoeur, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Daimon as consciousness

Professor (Polytechnic University of Bucharest), Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Romanian Committee for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Romanian Academy. Though Jean-Jeacques Rousseau did not write that the human freedom would consist in not doing what the individual does not want (and not in doing what he wants)² for the same reason as Plato, actually his phrase superposed to the ancient wisdom and kept attention in a direct manner to the inner cause of the human or moral behaviour: it is the conscience of man that guide him and this conscience does never annihilate his will, then his free will, but only brings into presence the reasons or criteria to choose, to differentiate between good and evil. Only by subordinating himself to the “voice of conscience” is man free in a human manner, since the consequences of the infringement of the human inhibitions and values deeply harm, and sometimes irremediably, his life, his freedom and his representations about his dignity and meanings of his life. Because, although the immediate and visible cause of an intention – i.e. of “what he wants” – would suggest that man would be and feel free, and happy only by following this first intention, in fact in his deep down he is oscillating, he has doubts and brakes which he is even afraid to express. Thus, without voice, the conscience – after its deliberation and countering the reasons of temptation – stops man to do what in his profound humanity he does not want: and this liberates him and allows him to focus on the best alternative from this standpoint, and to choose³. Only in this situation is his will free.

But nearly 2500 years before, Socrates has said the same thing: he has transfigured the “voice of conscience” into “the sign” given by a deity placed in the deep of his mind, like a sort of homunculus manifesting only through a “voice”: “The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything”⁴. Yes, man is free to choose and thus to act/to do something, but only when his conscience approves the limits/criteria of the field of human possibilities.

Conscience is a complex entity where some visible – because transposable into discourses aloud – tendencies and states direct man toward his even harmful desires and interests, while other tendencies and states should counterbalance the former. And since every desire, will and

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire”, Sixième promenade, in Oeuvres complètes de J. J. Rousseau, avec des notes historiques, Tome Premier, Paris, Chez Firmin Didot Frères, MDCCCLVI, p. 434 : « Je n’ai jamais cru que la liberté de l’homme consistât à faire ce qu’il veut, mais bien à ne jamais faire ce qu’il ne veut pas ».

Indeed, the first “best alternative’ is to choose, although this is a huge burden.

Plato, Apology, Translated by Benjamin Jowett, 31d, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html. feeling has its voice in the human’s mind, the moral sentiment should also have one. More: because the former are more vocal as expressing man’s will to live, the latter is more discrete and has the function of the darkness full of mysteries which emphasises the bright existence, that which deserves to be. “I want…” is stronger than doubts, deliberation and critique of reasons. It seems as if only the former would belong to man, speaking on behalf of his desires, and man himself would consider this normal arriving to equate them with him/his voice, while the inner voice inferring from the possible consequences of the intentional will seems to be strange from man, as a pestering and coercive force outward him. But many times one no longer grasps the series of declarations always attesting the same attitude of the power to want and do, while is attentive to and surprised just by the positions opposite to the pertinacious affirmations. This is the reason why has Socrates called this position “the voice”.

This voice of conscience is like a divinity: something that seems to be autonomous from man and, though manifesting itself as a “voice” within him, being superior to him, looking at him from the sky allowing a view over the whole of his problems, temptations, interests, life. But, because this divine voice lies in the human being, it is a “demigod” or “spirit”, “illegitimate son of gods”⁵: a daimon.

What is a daimon? The Presocratic origins and Socrates In Sanskrit, demon is said in many ways. We can select dAnava that, as an adjective means “belonging to danu”, which is a class of demons but also wind, air, prosperity, fluid, drop, dew, and as general adjective – courageous⁶, conqueror, valiant; dAnava and asura are demons enemies of gods/devas (asura – spirit (good and evil), sun, opponent of the gods); (amura – intelligent, demon) etc.); amanuSya is man, demon; zamanISada – demon, night-goer, evil spirit; devazatru – demon (asura or raksa), foe of gods. Deva/sura is god, and daiva is fate.

This origin suggests what the Indian myths contain⁷: that it is about two layers of deities/abstract forces and characteristics of the world – both manifestations of brahman (immensity)⁸ –, superposed in a historical process where the social models of relationships of competition have

Ibidem, 27c and d.

But the name of “the perceptible form of the Cosmic being” is also courageous, Alain Daniélou, The Myths and Gods of India, The Classic Work on Hindu Polytheism from the Princeton Bollingen Series, Inner Traditions / Bear & Co., 1991, p. 57.

R. K. Narayan, Gods, Demons and Others, New York, The Viking Press, 1964.

Alain Daniélou, ibidem, pp. 20-22. transposed into a worldview where the principles of space and life/of cosmic evolution have had to be put in order in a coherent manner. Asuras were older deities related to “an age when the world was still in its infancy”⁹: forms of life transposed as inclinations which, however, can “drag us toward our lower instincts…the powers which are antagonistic to enlightenment”¹⁰. But the process of separation of deities born from the same origin does not reflect a simple Manichean image about the world, but rather the model of competing humans where someone lose and other ones win, and thus “the asuras gradually assimilated the demons, spirits, and ghosts worshipped by the aboriginal tribes and also most of the gods of the other non-Vedic populations of India. In the later epics, the term asura becomes a common name for all the opponents of the Aryan gods and includes all the genii, the daityas, and danavas and other descendants of the seer Vision”¹¹.

Basically, this was the situation in the Greek¹² mythology too. For the historical aspect, the analysis of Aram Frenkian has showed a formal distinction between different types of supernatural forces. But for the hermeneutic aspect, Paul Ricoeur¹³ has emphasised that the ancient Greek gods were at the same time both good and evil, leading humans astray (as in the Iliad), determining an evil fate or blinding them because they were jealous of their cleverness and courage (see Oedipus). The Greek tragedies have put face to face the human “heroic greatness” and the “predestination toward evil”, being “the sudden and complete manifestation of the essence of the tragic”¹⁴.

Aram Frenkian, the fine Romanian classicist and philosopher, told us¹⁵ that there was a battle between the old Indo-European deities signifying the natural forces – called δαίμωνες or θεών, and both names emphasise how people got at the idea of supernatural force, since the first word means spirit, something which moves things, transforms them and imposes the

Ibidem, p. 140.

Ibidem, p. 139.

Ibidem, p. 142.

The δαίμόνιoν/δαίμων – divinity (good or evil), genius – has its origin in the interjection δαί, meaning what, thus showing curiosity, and δαϊω, to divide, to share, but also to learn, to burn up (from here: δαίoς, adjective – inimical, warlike, and clever, made prisoner; but also δαίς, feast). The spirit conceived of by people as standing behind the not yet known things was at the same time their desire to learn (by separating aspects) and thus to transform. thought, and the latter, θεός, has the same root with θεώρησις/ θεωρία, which means that people have contemplated the spectacle of the dynamic of the world and have abstracted the origin or cause of this dynamic as something exterior to them and which can be but contemplated –, therefore, between the old “pandemonism”¹⁶ and the anthropomorphic Olympians. The Pre-Socratic philosophers have ridiculed the new worship of the latter, while developing the problems raised by the former.

Actually, the anthropomorphic Olympians have appeared with the institutionalisation of religion within the polis. But, because of the fragmentation of society in many poleis, the Olympians have had different local forms, in local worships. These local gods have confiscated the characteristics of the old spirits and, at the same time, had the important function of local social cohesion.

But the “social revolutions” (the fights between aristocrats and democrats), the invasions (as that of Persians in the Greek cities of Asia Minor), colonisations (especially those of Sicily and South Italy), the contact with the immense wealth of the West and the refinement and luxury

M. Detienne, La notion de Daïmôn dans le pythagorisme ancien, Préface de J.-P. Vernant, Paris, Société d’Édition « Les Belles Lettres », 1963, has shown that, while θεός and ἥρως have had their festivals in poleis and obviously figured representations, δαίμον had not: it was not “present” in the life of poleis, as the former were. At the same time, δαίμωνες seemed to intervene in the ordinary life of people as some “non identified powers”, while θεών were defined at the superior level of a different, organised and parallel world, “independent” from that of man and thus intervening or not in his life randomly (but demons intervened always, as natural forces). (More: in extraordinary situations – when gods perpetrated crimes –, the demons intervened even in their lives, by following them; see the Keres: Hesiod, Theogony, 220).

Concerning Pythagoreans, they have developed the extraordinarily fruitful conception of δαίμωνες as souls (ψυχές), spirits materialized as εïδωλα (bodies), so not as mental images but as specific realities as the essences of the human beings. The human soul is a δαίμον separated from the body and it has to be treated carefully, since the whole humanity of man lies in the soul: therefore, man’s life must be pure, purified even by controlling, refraining one’s feelings and instincts related with the body, in order to realize one’s δαίμον. But what does purification mean? The soul or the δαίμον knows – and in principle knowledge could be total – and only by knowing is the soul purified. Knowledge is which realises the purification of the soul: how much knowledge, so pure becomes the soul.

Pythagoras’ conception makes the transition between the mythical moment of the Greek history, when δαίμον had many/indeterminate meanings, and the philosophical one (having as core the logos) when δαίμον has the precise meaning of (materialised) reason/capability. In this last hypostasis the soul or δαίμον is “intermediary between the two planes of reality, that of gods and that of humans”, p.170. (Gods which should represent the perfection, and humans who are fragile, limited, difficultly realising their real nature). of the Eastern culture¹⁷: have, all, undermined the local patriotism and generated relativism. The sophists were just the bearers of this relativism.

However, they were not condemned by the severe leaders and judges of poleis interested in keeping their indestructible force. Only Socrates was, and this because he promoted the universalistic and fix values of truth, reason/science and morality: which, in case they would have won they would have undermined the ancient particularistic Greek polis and the fragmentation of power. Nevertheless, the rationalist universalistic tendency has continued with Plato and Aristotle and has constituted, on the level of spiritual life, the grave digger of the ancient world.

No wonder that Socrates has called the universalistic spirit of truth/ reason/knowledge¹⁸ / morality, a demon¹⁹. This name, meaning spirit, was borrowed from the old Greek thinking whose polytheism still was the bearer of a kind of universalism: that of the universal forces of nature, including the nature of man. Thereby, this universal nature of man was the “thesis” put before the “antithesis” of particularistic forms and dependences. Socrates, with his enthusiasm, has related universalism with the varied manifestation of the humans: his “synthesis” meant that the universal values may be transposed into ethos by and through logos. Daimon was the logos able to grasp and promote the universality in the relative ethos.

In this respect, a forerunner, Heraclitus of Ephesus, for whom the reason gave the nature of man – since “wisdom is to speak truth and consciously to act according to nature”²⁰ and, if people think before acting, thus think to their own thoughts and deeds²¹, it means that “It pertains to all men to know themselves and to learn self-control”²² – has called the nature

Aram M. Frenkian, op. cit., p. 213.

See Diogenes Laërtius, Life of the Eminent Philosophers, Book II, Socrates, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Eminent_Philosophers/Book_II#Socrates, 31: “There is, he said, only one good, that is, knowledge, and only one evil, that is, ignorance”.

Πλάτωνος Ἀπολογία Σωκράτους, (ed. John Burnet, 1903), http://khazarzar.skeptik.net/ books/plato/apologig.htm: 31d: “δαιμόνιον γίγνεται [φωνή]…”.

Heraclitus, The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature, translated from the Greek text of Bywater by G.T.W. Patrick, Baltimore, N. Murray, 1889, (Source: Stobaeus Floril. iii. 84), http://www.classicpersuasion.org/pw/heraclitus/herpate.htm: 107.

“Self-control is the highest virtue”, ibidem (it is the first part of the phrase already quoted). Ibidem, 106. of man (in fact, the manifestation of his spirit in his character²³) δαίμον. More: we cannot grasp the spirit of a concrete man but through his character, “Ἡ. ἔφη ὡς ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων”²⁴, the character is daimon (and if so, it’s normal to consider the character of man as his fate, as in the English translation²⁵).

The persistence of daimon

As we know, Christianity was the bearer of both continuity and discontinuity in the human culture. Concerning our problem, it has continued both the concept of daimon and the separation of soul and body, this last idea taken over from Pythagoreans, via Plato.

We find the concept of daimon under the form of demons, opposed to God not as the Devil does – Devil which has a divine origin and a significant power [since it is “the obstacle/the adversary”, ha-satan (Hebrew), sending to both the human relationships and the Manichean image of the original existence of contradictory forces/inner constitutive contradictions of the world] – but as disembodied spirits, remained after the flooding determined by God as punishment of the first humans. Though these ones (Elioud) were children of the sons of God (Nephilim)²⁶ with terrestrial women²⁷ (but even by this fact they were already fallen from, let say, their status), they were very wicked: it was the stamp of their fathers, was it? This wickedness was the reason of God’s flooding, but after the flood God has allowed the existence of some of them between men and women, but only as spirits, disembodied. Now imagine the poor devils, how could they had to feel being without body but contemplating the life of people! They could be but malicious, fulfilling the function to deceive men and women tending to lead them astray: until the final judgement over these transient beings.

May the spirits be inner (evil) voices of humans, as did some commentators suggest? Commentaries usually deal with metaphors and

As later on, Plato (or rather Socrates) in The Republic [617e]: “No divinity shall cast lots for you, but you shall choose your own deity” / “οὐχ ὑμᾶς δαίμων λήξεται, ἀλλ’ ὑμεῖς δαίμονα αἱρήσεσθε”.

Heraclitus, Fragments, Diels-Krantz, 119, (Plutarch, Platonic questions, 999 E.), English translation John Burnet (1912), http://philoctetes.free.fr/heraclite.pdf. develop meanings of these ones. But the Christian religious tradition has insisted on the objective external character of spirits which have, thus, the force of external “natural” states with whom men must fight. The conscience of humans would only have the colour of the creation of God, and men only have to assume faith, therefore to “know the truth”, in order to overcome the external spirits of the evil²⁸.

The second aspect emphasised here is the separation of soul and body, and the contradictory representation about the human nature. On the one hand, this one was impure, since it pertained to a being with impure body. On the other hand, the core of the human nature was the human essence and since this essence was given by the soul which was divine and had a divine origin, the human nature has reflected this divine essence of man (which, however, was not impermeable to the evil spirits many times sheltering within different corners of his mind).

Indeed, from a standpoint, Christianity has continued the optimistic image about man, founded in the capacity of the human being to know, to understand and, thus, to tend toward perfection (though this one is never attained). But, at the same time/from another viewpoint, the separation soulbody has suggested the separation of knowingness, the divine core of man/the soul, from instincts and bodily feelings (many times seized by evil spirits), and thus the former was somewhat exterior to man, as his censor and mentor. This is the reason the Christian tradition did not develop the concept of human nature: not this nature has constituted the essence of man²⁹.

Actually, what is the meaning of this separation and of the predominance of the soul? It is that Christianity was and has developed a

I am not interested here in discussing the concrete battle of man with his sins. According to the Christian dogma, the spirits can enter the soul of weak people and tempt them from inside, and these people can influence (then from outside) the others, the not yet-contaminated. See: “Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood”, Revelation, 22:15; “And I saw, coming out of the mouth of the dragon and out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet, three unclean spirits like frogs”, Revelation, 16:13; “For false Christs and false prophets will arise and perform signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible, the elect”, Mark, 13:22; “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation”, Matthew, 12: 43-45; etc. profound individualistic explanation of man: the soul, through its divine nature, is which has power over man, not the moral principles (which reflect inter-human relationships), nor the complex and contradictory system of human relations. It’s obvious that every human being has to act and live according to his/her understanding of things and his/her fight around the principles of good and evil. Just because man decides himself, in his mind, and chooses between good and evil, is he responsible: consequently, no theory about man may escape the privileged focus on his individuality.

However, to explain man as only effort of his mind to understand God, as only private relationship between his soul and divinity, to construct a system of duties where the superior one, the duty towards God, generates and explains all the other, in the same line with the private relationship of the soul and God which would influence man and his social connections – all of these do not explain man in his completeness: because his body keeps its own impure essence and thus it can be but mortified. This idea was continued in the metaphysical demonstration of Leibniz concerning the source of the evil in the original limitation of man.

Consciousness is not a daimon

But, as we know, the Christian tradition was not reductive at all. Its suggestions were captured and developed in many direct and transfigured forms. One of these suggestions was related to consciousness.

Indeed, Christianity carried on the ancient idea of γνῶθι σεαυτόν – know yourself – put as popular wisdom in the forecourt of the temple of Apollo at Delphi and associated with many philosophers. Concretely, the formula has meant that knowledge is a human characteristic and the mental process confronts any object interesting for man, including his own being: in philosophy, knowledge was no longer a specific of gods and given by them, humans were absolutely able to appropriate it, though in an imperfect manner. But as we saw, Socrates has promoted the idea of knowing and knowing himself, this meaning to discern things, to assign them a value and to act according to the good: all of these as the result of an inner voice, as a daimon. Would this not contradict the previous conclusion?

Actually: not at all. And not only because philosophy has shown that the human reason may know the logos of things (the universal order, kosmos, being the deduction following the model of ordered knowable things, order meaning that they have causes and thus they are determined): because these ones testify each other, knowledge meaning, first of all, logic³⁰. But also because: the problem of the inner voice should not be treated as a metaphor. And one of the fathers of Christianity has warned against this metaphorical interpretation.

St. Augustine of Hippo has made a fine theory of knowledge where (continuing Plato from the standpoint of the worldview, and Aristotle from the one of the analytical method) the difference, the relations and the succession of intelligence/comprehension/thinking, sounds, words, meanings are explained. Man thinks, first of all, without words. He does not yet know the thing in front of him. But he considers this thing as well as he can, and thus, after he knows it, he has a “truly thought”³¹: “in what manner each thing is known, in that manner also it is thought, i.e. is said in this manner in the heart, without articulate sound, without thought of articulate sound“³². Step by step, he forms the words, since “this something of our mind, which can be formed from our knowledge, is to be already called a word, even before it is so formed, because it is, so to say, already formable”³³.

The problem of St. Augustine is not so much the formation of words from sounds, but the consecutive place of words towards thoughts and understanding. The word corresponds to “a something in our mind” which is not yet formed, but formable, and comes after “that thing in seeing which we speak inwardly”³⁴. Briefly, “the word that sounds outwardly is the

But also, Bernard Bolzano, Theory of Science, Attempt at a Detailed and in the Main Novel Exposition of Logic with Constant Attention to Earlier Authors (1837), Edited and translated by Rolf George, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1972, Book Two, Part III, § 201, p. 274: “the words ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ in their proper sense designate objects that are real. ..From this it follows that grounds and consequences should not be considered kinds of causes and effects and that the relation of ground and consequence is not subordinated to the relation of causality; grounds and consequences are truths, not something which has reality, such as causes and effects”.

“This does not show, however, that the concepts of cause and effect are not parts of the concepts of ground and consequence. The best surmise is that those truths which assert the existence and attribute of a cause are a ground, and those which deal with the existence and the attributes of the effect are to be considered consequences….p. 277, mathematical truths can be related as ground and consequence, although they do not deal with objects that have reality”.

This is because “that which is known is capable of being truly thought, even at the time when it is not being thought”, St. Augustine of Hippo, On the Holy Trinity [Book XV], http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_PostNicene_Fathers:_Series_I/Volume_III/Doctrina l_Treatises_of_St._Augustin/On_the_Holy_Trinity/Book_XV/Chapter_15, 25.

Ibidem.

Ibidem.

Ibidem, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post-Nicene_Fathers:_Series_I/ Volume _III/Doctrinal_Treatises_of_St._Augustin/On_the_Holy_Trinity/Book_XV/Chapter_14, 24 (my emphasis). sign of the word that gives light inwardly; which latter has the greater claim to be called a word”³⁵.

And – as if we would hear Plato – “not only the numbers of syllables, but the tunes also of songs, since they are corporeal, and pertain to that sense of the body which is called hearing, are at hand by certain incorporeal images appropriate to them, to those who think of them, and who silently revolve all these things”³⁶.

A final moment is also sketched: man “is able to understand a word, not only before it is uttered in sound, but also before the images of its sounds are considered in thought”³⁷. This is a complex fact, where the “signs” – which are the words – represent the things behind these signs and people understand things through their “signs”. And more: in order to discuss with the absent fellows, “letters have been invented” which “are signs of words, as words themselves are signs in our conversation of those things which we think”³⁸.

This order of succession – 1) representing (AB, the first understanding), 2) imaging, 3) sounding, 4) understanding³⁹ – is much clearer when we face the big question of truth or, somehow more important or more pointed, the recognition by people of the true words. “The true word then comes into being (AB, in fact, it arrives to our mind) when it arrives at that which we know, and is formed by that, in taking its entire likeness”⁴⁰. And man does not say true words, in fact true discourses, when he repeats them or simply utters them. Because: man’s statements must lie on the knowledge of facts described by those statements. I quote the next

Ibidem, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post-Nicene_Fathers:_Series_I/Volume _III/Doctrinal_ Treatises_of_St._Augustin/On_the_Holy_Trinity/Book_XV/Chapter_11, 20.

Ibidem.

Ibidem, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post-Nicene_Fathers:_Series_I/Volume _III/Doctrinal_ Treatises_of_St._Augustin/On_the_Holy_Trinity/Book_XV/Chapter_11, 19.

Ibidem.

But see the ancient Indian representation: “the process of the manifestation of speech, like that of the universe, takes place in four stages. First, in the undifferentiated substratum of thought, an intention appears. Gradually this intention takes a precise shape. We can visualize what the idea is, though it is not yet bound to a particular verbal form and we are still searching for words to express it. This is the second stage of the manifestation of the idea. Then we find words suitable to convey our thought. This transcription of the idea in terms of words in the silence of the mind is the third stage, the fourth being the manifestation of the idea in terms of perceptible sounds. These four stage are known as the four forms of the word”, Alain Daniélou, The Myths and Gods of India, p. 38.

St. Augustine of Hippo, On the Holy Trinity [Book XV], http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nice ne and_PostNicene_Fathers:_Series_I/Volume III/ Doctrinal_Treatises_of_St._Augustin/On the_Holy_ Trinity/Book_XV/Chapter_15, 25. paragraph because its beauty is at the same time a warning against some present public practices: “Is our word, then, born of our knowledge only? Do we not say many things also that we do not know? And say them not with doubt, but thinking them to be true; while if perchance they are true in respect to the things themselves of which we speak, they are yet not true in respect to our word, because a word is not true unless it is born of a thing that is known. In this sense, then, our word is false, not when we lie, but when we are deceived”⁴¹.

Therefore, man has to know what he says: he has to discern, to compare, to doubt (because “those things that come into the mind from the bodily senses, among which so many are otherwise than they seem to be, that he who is overmuch pressed down by their resemblance to truth, seems sane to himself, but really is not sane”⁴²), to arrive to a synthetic definition: in order to make his words as firm criteria of the understanding of the world. “Because to us, to be is not the same as to know; since we know many things which in some sense live by memory, and so in some sense die by being forgotten: and so, when those things are no longer in our knowledge, yet we still are: and while our knowledge has slipped away and perished out of our mind, we are still alive”⁴³.

But what does “to know” mean? Not from the point of view of logical inferences and operations, but from a phenomenological one: it means to be aware of the multi-level mediations between us, who try to know, and things. This awareness is like an inner voice (verbum interius) which expresses through gestures and words and letters, and which is aware of the different moments of understanding as well as of expressing in different ways: sometimes, this inner voice chooses to express itself through gestures in order to be seen, or through sounds directed to our ears etc., but although “speech and sight are different things… in the bodily senses”, in our mind “the two are one”, “to see and hear are the same thing in the mind”.

And the same is with speech. Actually, the consciousness is a series of speeches which, at a level are “heard outwardly” and at another, as

Ibidem, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post-Nicene_Fathers:_Series_I/Volume _III/Doctrinal_ Treatises_of_St._Augustin/On_ the_Holy_Trinity/Book_XV/Chapter_14, 24.

Ibidem, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post-Nicene_Fathers:_Series_I/Volume _III/Doctrinal_ Treatises_of_St._Augustin/On_the_Holy_Trinity/Book_XV/Chapter_12.

Ibidem, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post-Nicene_Fathers:_Series_I/Volume _ III/Doctrinal_ Treatises_of_St._Augustin/On_the_Holy_Trinity/Book_XV/Chapter_14, 24 (my emphasis). “inward speeches, i.e. thoughts, are…seen”⁴⁴. This consciousness is a world of “silently thoughts”, “speeches of the heart”, “Inner and Mental” words⁴⁵.

Is it too much to speak about a phenomenological view avant la lettre? No, since it is always the self-awareness that manifests: “when we doubt, our word is not yet of the thing of which we doubt, but it is a word concerning the doubt itself. For although we do not know whether that is true of which we doubt, yet we do know that we doubt”; when we lie, it’s the same (and here – a beautiful description of the paradox of the liar); when we see and when we enter upon knowledge, we have “sight of sight, and knowledge of knowledge”⁴⁶. And, again, more: the most conspicuous example of self-awareness is the permanent consciousness – doubling every other manifestation – of “the knowing that we are alive”⁴⁷.

In fact, people can both detach this consciousness and always consider it. And not only the self-awareness of the fact that we are alive, but also that we know, we are in front of things, we are curious, we try, we experiment, we are glad or sad etc., all of these “belong to the nature of the mind itself”⁴⁸.

There is not here a question of constructing a metaphorical representation about knowledge: the human processes and forces are not shipped into a metaphor. The daimon has no place in this explanation – do not forget, in a work written about A.D. 400 – nor God simplifies the picture: because He is a Pater humankind needs of since it is not yet confident in its forces, He is a mirror of man’s potencies, and the model of man, thus having a significant epistemological function.

The personified character of the modern daimon and its metaphorical meaning

The obvious contradiction between the admission of demons and, on the other hand, the creation of the world by God has led to ambiguities

Ibidem, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post-Nicene_Fathers:_Series_I/Volume _ III/Doctrinal_ Treatises_of_St._Augustin/On_the_Holy_Trinity/Book_XV/Chapter_11, 18.

Ibidem, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post-Nicene_Fathers:_Series_I/Volume _ III/Doctrinal_ Treatises_of_St._Augustin/On_the_Holy_Trinity/Book_XV/Chapter_11, 20, 21.

Ibidem, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post-Nicene_Fathers:_Series_I/Volume_ III/Doctrinal_ Treatises_of_St._Augustin/On_the_Holy_Trinity/Book_XV/Chapter_14, 24.

Ibidem, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_PostNicene_Fathers:_Series_I/Volume_III/Doctrina l_ Treatises_of_St._Augustin/On_the_Holy_Trinity/Book_XV/Chapter_15, 25.

Ibidem. never solved in the Christian tradition⁴⁹. First of all, demons were in their majority evil spirits influencing and even confiscating people. But how could these spirits exist, since the creation of God could be but good? St. Augustine has answered with the sophisticated theory of the goodness as the being created by God, but as states in different degrees of being. The evil is not another competing being, nor was it created by God, therefore it is not a being: but it is the act through which one chooses a state with a lesser goodness (and certainly it is the result of this act), the absence of the higher state of goodness.

Would the choice of a lesser goodness be only the consequence of the human free will? First, it is: and the evil that people reckon after their choice has the important function to show them, by comparison, the direction and goals they should follow. But, secondly, since man is the creation of God and represents the highest perfection of all the creatures and, on the other hand, he is a vulnerable, delicate being, he is “helped” in his choices by some disembodied spirits: benevolent – angels – and malevolent, demons, actually all of them under the “all-seeing eye” of God⁵⁰.

More: because many processes⁵¹ related to man were not understood, these spirits – souls as of the humans’, which transform too into spirits⁵² – sometimes embodied as incubi, were synonyms of these processes and forces, having the epistemological function to explain the natural level of man. In this respect, though demons were most of time evil, the attitude towards them was a cold rejection: one must not spend time with the evil, one has only to remove it.

The problem of the meanings of demons cannot be separated from the interpretation of the serpent from the Myth of Adam or of the devil as primeval personage in and of the world created by God. According to Paul Ricoeur, Finitude et culpabilité: La symbolique du mal, Paris, Aubier, 1963, these figures have represented the exteriority of the evil, because humans have considered the evil as a strange phenomenon, but also because they could not understand its sudden presence, even without they choosing it; this fact have led not only to human tragedies, but also to people’s understanding of their tragic destiny: and this understanding has appeared also in the myths where, for example, the serpent was a tragic figure since it was “already there and already evil” (p. 445). We may oppose to this traditional view, that of Romanticism inheriting Renaissance, and obviously that of Enlightenment. Briefly, the Romantic perspective has developed a synthetic image of man as creator. He was no longer a weak being dependent on God, but an autonomous individual whose free will can transform the world. Man’s creativity – in imaging, thinking, writing, painting, carving, debating – is such a marvellous quality that through it man seems to no longer be the humble creature of God, but the glorious creator of culture, of the cultural/artificial level of man and of the artificial world.

But, because not all the humans were able to be philosophers, artists, writers, musicians – most of men toiling in painful and ceaseless routine activities as if they would fully accept their subordination and forbidden change (as Nietzsche showed later) –, Romanticism has glorified the individual intellectual creator, that who invents new paths in the human culture and rejects those already existing and framing the impetuous force to manifest his own uniqueness.

And, because this creative force still was something mysterious, far beyond the psychological processes emphasised by philosophers, both this force and the person of the creator were called the daimon/demon (Goethe).

From the materiality/objectivity of the Pythagorean daimon – spirit separated from the body – to the Romantic demon of the first phase of European modernity: it was an essential difference. While the former was a theoretical concept, responding to an analytical investigation of the human being and its psychological forces, the latter was consciously put as a metaphor (as a “mythical thinking”, said Blaga in Daimonion), a symbol of the exceptional individual, tortured by his awareness of the irrevocable contradiction between his creative potentiality and will and, on the other hand, the concrete happenstances not allowing its actualisation. Consequently, while the former was considered as a natural fact and even in the later development in Christianity it was treated as an inevitable objective fact (which one can but avoid), the Romantic daimon was a consciously chosen metaphor reflecting a historical psyche determined by a historical context.

The historical separation between the physical and intellectual labour, thus the social distance transfigured into a unilateral model of man – though the model of a creator and despite that this model can be seen as the millenary aspiration of man to have a creative work and life – and, the more so as the modern era with its industrial spring has revealed the process of reduction of man to a useful function (deployed rather routinely and external to his will to create) and object since everything seemed to be subordinated towards the universal object of money, all of these have in fact required the motif of daimon. Since the Romantic intellectual could not anymore trust in a direct critique of society – the revolutions have proved to having been run aground because all the previous expectations and enthusiasm have vanished in front of the inherent and victorious cold quest for profit and its celebration –, since he did not see any solution by reviving the medieval utopias focusing on human solidarity, and since he faced the effervescence of conformism and subordination, he could but advance the non-viable figure of daimon. A lonely rebel (nostalgic sublimation of the failed revolutions), opposed to every conformism, so full of courage and determination, but remaining always alone: “immutable and cold” (definitely alienated from a society that rejects him) as Eminescu, the greatest Romanian poet has characterised his Evening Star/Lucifer (1883), and “Alone in all the universe/ Abandoned, without love or hope!”, as Lermontov has observed in his Demon (1829-1839).

If we do not forget Paul Hazard’s explanation of the historical cultural succession which marked the emergence of modernity: a) the predominance of medieval values of established social order, social conformism, fidelity towards religious dogmas and political authority, and then b) the impetus of rationalism, spirit of doubt, freedom of the individual and rejection of the traditional institutions – which led to the revolutionary transformations of society⁵³ –, we may understand that Romanticism and its motif of daimon were the outcome of the apparent defeat of rationalism and its exploits. It was only a “demonic” person that who could defy a bourgeois mass civilisation that stops man to express his will to search for what is the core of the human being. But if so, the daimon of Romanticism was a sublimated form of the revolution which was to be – but failed – the climax of reason (imagined not so much in the Classic era than in the Enlightenment’s spirit): a form mixing pessimism and revolt, inherently perishable. Indeed, this form was a symbol of the helplessness of man beaten down by the historical process; he could only revolt in the name of his unique conatus in felicitatem, but this revolt and the happiness resulting from it were only of short duration: one cannot be long time an uncomfortable fallen angel, can one?

Or, as later on Nietzsche has showed, the present man of the modern society is only a transition from apes to the possible man-to-come, the “superman”: the latter is not the non-human ideal, but the ideal-type of man, existing in every individual, since it is the overcoming of man, emphasising and realising his “will to power”, indeed the will to express his

Paul Hazard, La Crise de la conscience européenne, 1680-1715, Paris, Boivin et Cie, 1935. unique potentiality in a human manner⁵⁴. For Nietzsche – who was not a Romantic – the modern, triumphant society hinders man to manifest humanly, i.e. to manifest his will to create, arising from his deep living force and refusing the conformist rationalism which only has tamed man’s will to a creative life⁵⁵. Only in this respect is the world of instincts the real mirror of man’s power and will to power: because the superhuman, as the tendency of every man’s striving for a creative life, is Nietzsche’s key figure, but this means a being able to explain, logically, the profound dependences and causality of its entire entity. Namely: to consider the relativity of truths and theories about man and to balance them, or make hem to prove the desires and passions of the humans in the real life⁵⁶. Thus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883-1885), Translated By Thomas Common; Zarathustra’s Prologue, 3, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm#link2H_4_0004: “Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?... All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame…Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes… The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman SHALL BE the meaning of the earth!.. I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not… Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!”.

Ibidem, XXXIV, Self-surpassing, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998h.htm#link2H_4_0040: “Your will and your valuations have ye put on the river of becoming; it betrayeth unto me an old Will to Power, what is believed by the people as good and evil. Onward the river now carrieth your boat: it MUST carry it. It is not the river that is your danger and the end of your good and evil, ye wisest ones: but that Will itself, the Will to Power—the unexhausted, procreating life-will… And this secret spake Life herself unto me. "Behold," said she, "I am that WHICH MUST EVER SURPASS ITSELF… Only where there is life, is there also will: not, however, Will to Life, but—so teach I thee—Will to Power! …Verily, I say unto you: good and evil which would be everlasting—it doth not exist! Of its own accord must it ever surpass itself anew”.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Translated by Helen Zimmern, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm: “36. Supposing that nothing else is "given" as real but our world of desires and passions, that we cannot sink or rise to any other "reality" but just that of our impulses—for thinking is only a relation of these impulses to one another:—are we not permitted to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this which is "given" does not SUFFICE, by means of our counterparts, for the understanding even of the so-called mechanical (or "material") world? I do not mean as an illusion, a "semblance," a "representation" (in the Berkeleyan and Schopenhauerian sense), but as possessing the same degree of reality as our emotions themselves—as a more primitive form of the world of emotions, in which everything still lies locked in a mighty unity, which afterwards branches off and develops itself in organic processes (naturally also, refines and debilitates)—as a kind of if daimon had an evanescent presence – as an exceptional man, differing from all the other human beings – the superhuman is the creative tendency of every man.

Anyway, the Romantic daimon was the protagonist of a narratio fabulosa, a telling whose significance exceeds the concreteness of the plot and characters⁵⁷: a metaphor consciously put in order to suggest not only a different meaning than that generated by the story as such, but a meaning of higher order.

In poetry or painting, the Romantic daimon was personified: as a fallen angel it was not considered a maleficent spirit, but glorified as a positive ardour characterising man. The same happened in literature and philosophy, but here the person of daimon has become the (best) individual creator: the genius surpassing the skills required by society and guaranteeing the integration in it. Lucian Blaga has observed in his essay Daimonion⁵⁸ – that collected the conceptions of Goethe, Leibnitz, Kant, Eduard von Hartmann, Schelling, Fichte, K.W.F. Schlegel and A.W.

instinctive life in which all organic functions, including self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, secretion, and change of matter, are still synthetically united with one another—as a PRIMARY FORM of life?—In the end, it is not only permitted to make this attempt, it is commanded by the conscience of LOGICAL METHOD. Not to assume several kinds of causality, so long as the attempt to get along with a single one has not been pushed to its furthest extent (to absurdity, if I may be allowed to say so): that is a morality of method which one may not repudiate nowadays—it follows "from its definition," as mathematicians say. The question is ultimately whether we really recognize the will as OPERATING, whether we believe in the causality of the will; if we do so—and fundamentally our belief IN THIS is just our belief in causality itself—we MUST make the attempt to posit hypothetically the causality of the will as the only causality. "Will" can naturally only operate on "will"—and not on "matter" (not on "nerves," for instance): in short, the hypothesis must be hazarded, whether will does not operate on will wherever "effects" are recognized—and whether all mechanical action, inasmuch as a power operates therein, is not just the power of will, the effect of will. Granted, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one fundamental form of will—namely, the Will to Power, as my thesis puts it; granted that all organic functions could be traced back to this Will to Power, and that the solution of the problem of generation and nutrition—it is one problem—could also be found therein: one would thus have acquired the right to define ALL active force unequivocally as WILL TO POWER. The world seen from within, the world defined and designated according to its "intelligible character"—it would simply be "Will to Power," and nothing else”.

Macrobius has called the allegorical narratives which serve to inspire men “to accomplish virtuous deeds or to contemplate the truth”, K. Sarah-Jane Murray, From Plato to Lancelot: A Preface to Chrétien de Troyes, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2008, p. 22. Or see Dean Swinford, Through the Daemon's Gate: Kepler's Somnium, Medieval Dream Narratives, and the Polysemy of Allegorical Motifs, New York, Abingdon, Routledge, 2006, p. 67. Schlegel, Nietzsche about the genius and the demonic – that the latter is a broader concept than the genius because it consists of the free and unforeseeable forces of the intellectual creation. The demonic has here a positive sense, sending to the process of addition of new and original works which support the most valuable beliefs of man, and this positive openness and ground is possible just through the forces it moves: not only the reason but also – and rather – the irrational and the unconscious. Indeed, intuition is the irrational and unconscious driving force of an “organic creation”, the only one creating a cultural style, the persistence of a culture. Briefly, Blaga has shown the presence of the demonic in Goethe on some levels where mostly it consists of the unconscious and the irrational (in psychology, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of culture).

The idea of daimon/demonic has persisted even after Romanticism: and not because it was linked to the religious concept, but because of its metaphorical power. Just this metaphorical meaning was then utilised.

Power of the metaphor

Like the hero – whose myths have followed the same structure all over the world because they reflected the same psychological characteristics of man (where the possible later rebellion would issue from the same psychical sublimations of the first social relationships of the child)⁵⁹ and the “collective ego” of communities⁶⁰ – the daimon was a metaphor: in folklore, religion and in literature and philosophy. In fact, even when the daimon was considered an objective spirit resulted from objective processes, it was a metaphor⁶¹.

A metaphor is a “foundational element” (not only of philosophy, as Hans Blumenberg has demonstrated, but) of the human understanding of things, even though the metaphor is historically constructed, i.e. it appears in some historical contexts, certainly related to their antecedents and to the possible universe of conjectures. It is a foundational element because it

Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Interpretation of Mythology (1909), Translated from the German by Drs. F. Robbins and Smith Ely Jelliffe, http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/mbh/index.htm.

Ibidem, http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/mbh/mbh17.htm, p. 72.

As well as the devil, functioning as cause of the evil, and being the other face of the good, Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1900): indeed, the devil has passed through the same moments as daimon „in ancient times”, objectifying man’s fears and impulses, etc., http://www.sacredtexts.com/evil/hod/hod20.htm. “resists in the conceptual translations”⁶² or has no clear conceptual synonyms (“it cannot be translated into concepts”⁶³) – namely it cannot be defined because it has a history, while concepts can –, it emphasise the fact that truth is more than a simple adequatio rei et intellectus and sometimes this more cannot be transposed through or into clear words, and, like a paradigm, the metaphor has a truth which is “vérité à faire”⁶⁴.

Thus, a metaphor does not only transmit its meaning – resulted from the movement from a name of a thing to another thing called by the same name⁶⁵ – then not only “something fresh”⁶⁶ (but at the same time fitting to the thing⁶⁷) but, since it is deployed only within a discourse, transmits and thus creates the meaning of the discourse as such⁶⁸. Actually, the metaphor regards the use of language – and certainly, of specific languages, as the philosophical – and chooses one use, one path to develop meanings. The problem is that philosophy (as metaphysics, says Derrida) dissimulates its commitments to a certain choice objectified in a metaphor. But just this choice is in sight. More: the metaphor is used just to dissimulate the original presumptions which have generated the metaphor. It seems as if philosophy would give meanings independently from the original presumptions it assumed (AB, presumptions as worldview, let

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960), Translated from the German with an afterword by Robert Savage, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2010, p. 3.

Ibidem, pp. 6-7.

Ibidem, p. 15.

Aristotle, Poetics (Translated by S. H. Butcher, pp. 3308-3354), in Aristotle, Works, Translated under the editorship of W. D. Ross, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1925, 21, p. 3339: “Metaphor is the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is, proportion”.

Aristotle, Rhetoric (Translated by W. Rhys Roberts, pp. 3132-3308), in op. cit., Book III, 10, pp. 3280-3281: “words express ideas, and therefore those words are the most agreeable that enable us to get hold of new ideas. Now strange words simply puzzle us; ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh”.

Ibidem, Book III, 2, p. 3265: “Metaphors, like epithets, must be fitting, which means that they must fairly correspond to the thing signified: failing this, their inappropriateness will be conspicuous: the want of harmony between two things is emphasized by their being placed side by side”; as the following: “Likewise also ‘well-starred’ may be taken to mean the man whose star is good, as Xenocrates says ‘well-starred is he who has a noble soul’.’ For a man’s star is his soul”, Aristotle, Topics (Translated by W. A. Pickard-Cambridge, pp. 326-532) in op. cit. say)⁶⁹. But with all the dissimulations, the use of metaphor has traces. By revealing the movement of change of meanings (here, from the demonic to creation/creativity and genius), the metaphor a) threats the first meaning, b) suggests the change as such and c) advances the imperative of the new path/conception: that of the use of this metaphorical meaning.

In this line was the metaphor called as “vivid”⁷⁰. Indeed, daimon has become a symbol and a symbol applies “'labels' to events”⁷¹. Thus it shows, and proves to be aware of, the two meanings of the word: the denomination and the “objective” spirits – they themselves a metaphor, the personification of the evil – and the transposition of this designation to human beings who behave as free, somehow anti worldly spirits. The transposition was conscious, a metaphor consciously coined. This metaphor is, as Ricoeur has observed, both opposing to the “ontological naïveté” which “ignores the implicit ‘is not’” and to the “critical pressure of “the ‘is not,’ los(ing) the ‘is’ by reducing it to the ‘as-if’ of a reflective judgment”⁷². The Romantic writers knew very well what they did by considering the creative humans as daimons. This metaphor has a “truth”⁷³ which reveals the ambiguity or equivocalness of being, as Aristotle has observed. It suggests the direction we should go in order to understand the ousia, the essence of things. And this essence is, here, the meaning of the metaphorical meaning of daimon.

As we saw, one of the most important fact of the taking over of the concept of daimon by Romanticists was – and Ricoeur has well observed the tragic character of a representative of the evil (the serpent from the myth of Adam) and the ambiguous image of gods and God who have imposed evil conditions and characteristics to humans – the transition from the bad sense to the good sense of the word of daimon. Obviously, the concept contains the information that daimon is the symbol of the evil (and the Romantic creator is like a demon), but at the same time it suggests not only that, actually, the Romantic hero is neither a demon nor the coryphaeus of bad alterations, but also that he is the bearer of the most valuable peculiarities and tendencies of man: courage, idealism, activism, trust, spirit

Jacques Derrida, “La mythologie blanche. La métaphore dans le texte philosophique”, in Marges de la philosophie, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972, p. 273.

Paul Ricœur, La métaphore vive, Paris, Le Seuil, 1975.

Paul Ricœur, The Rule of Metaphor (1975), London, Taylor & Francis e-library, 2004, p. 276.

Ibidem, p. 294.

The metaphorical truth is related to the “the ‘realistic’ intention that belongs to the redescriptive power of poetic language”, ibidem, p. 292. of self-sacrifice, purposefulness, respect of sentiments, critical spirit, with all that flow from these; but, because these impulses of the soul involve social non-conformism, i.e. are opposing to the modern cynicism and wellordered customs and rules aimed at preserving the existing power relations at all levels, and even are able to transform the picture of society, of the human goals and self-esteem, society has called the Romantic personages demons, anti-social beings (by underlining the “as if”) and at the same time these personages themselves have felt their difference from the ordinary people integrated within an unjust and restricting society; they were demons as the desirable model of the future man (as gods – see Zarathustra –), free to manifest humanly; the “is” is related to both the impossibility of this manifestation in the modern society – namely, only an “extramundane” being having the possibility to actualise its capability – and the “taking over” by the Romantic creators of the label of “extramundane” origin; and, as “extramundane”, they did not assume the quality of an angel: but only that of a fallen angel, of a daimon.

But why would the Romantic personage be the bearer of the abovementioned heroic features? Because: he was the personification of the highest level of spirit or conscience, of the highest level of knowledge.

Power of the human spirit and the unconscious

Continuing the Enlightenment – which, besides, has continued Classicism etc. –, the Romantic philosophy and literature has emphasised the power of the human spirit or conscience. The goal of this operation was that of “salvation” of the human being: not through its love of God – which would mean in fact the preservation of the status quo, that does not save man – but through its creation. Indeed, only creation was thought to be man’s salvation.

What kind of creation? Not of furniture, houses and tools – since until then people have made them and the result was not so much positive as the optimistic singers of modernity would claim⁷⁴ – but of works of art, poetry, philosophy, painting. Taking over the Renaissance soaring of the individual, Romanticism has concluded that creativity is the power of consciousness, and this power is manifesting in the genius. The only heroism possible after the vanishing of the revolutionary illusions issued

The Romantic writers certainly knew J.-J. Rousseau’s “Discours qui a remporté le prix de l’Académie de Dijon; en l’année 1750; sur cette question, imposée par la même Académie: Si le rétablissement des sciences et des arts a contribué a épurer les moeurs”, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes de J. J. Rousseau, avec des notes historiques, Tome Premier, Paris, Firmin Didot frères, libraires, imprimeurs de l’Institut de France, M DCCC LVI, pp. 463-476, where the conclusion is not at all reassuring. from Enlightenment was that of intellectual striving. And only some individuals were able to create extraordinary works of art and philosophy, and by supporting this standpoint Romanticism proved to be realistic: it has described the result of the experience of the historical separation of the physical and intellectual labour, the distance between the intellectual creation and creation as such.

By creating exceptional works, the genius seemed to deny the habitual situation of man within morality: this one was given and imposes conformism and stillness, au fond nonliberating, and creativity, the seed of divine within man, is frittering away in this framework. Thus the first movement of the Romantic worldly hero was that of a harsh critique of the existing ἠθoς.

And since conscience was the bearer of conformism, since it was the origin of reflection, in fact of what is visible (although it was too the centre of imagination, but imagination itself was not yet understood), it resulted that another part of the soul was hat which gives birth to the ardour of creativity: the unconscious⁷⁵.

Not the conscious self-mastery was important, but on the contrary, to unleash the unconscious: to understand it, in order to squeeze from it the power to create.

According to Schopenhauer, the will arises from the unconscious⁷⁶, but represents life in its totality, or it is the first manifestation of life: and life is visible, or at least ought to be visible, through the efforts of conscience.

As Blaga had put into evidence, the Romantic writers equated the human spirit with the demonic, because of its creative power, but this demonic is found only in the genius. And the face of the human spirit that was the dwelling of creativity was rather the unconscious.

Now we can understand why was the unconscious glorified – as it was in Eduard von Harmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869)⁷⁷ and to whom Blaga was so indebted, however without quote him –: because it had, in the Romantic view, a bigger power than the simple reflection or judgement over visible things. The unconscious meant what was persistent, beyond every contention of the apparently changing real world, and only by starting from the unconscious would one have had the guarantee of surpassing the conformism of conscience. In this Weltanschaaung, the internal voice of the (moral) conscience was supported only as impetus of creativity, only if it accompanied the creative enthusiasm.

This perspective emphasised the difference and, more, the opposition between the development of humanities – (poetry, philosophy, religion) and the development by them of the potentiality of metaphors and speculation, privileging an internal hexis (ἕξις – disposition) to the darkness where only the genius makes clearings which cannot however erase the obscurity – and the exactness, the rigour of science, step by step realised by the human consciousness, by knowledge. But this historical opposition was thought to be useless in the aftermath of the WWII⁷⁸, this turn reflecting both the progress of scientific methods in humanities and the tendency of science-philosophy integration (in an inter and trans-disciplinary framework).

Consciousness and the unconscious

The essence of consciousness is its intentionality⁷⁹ toward things interesting for man. The specific means of living beings to use their environment and to live as long and well as possible was generated by specific movements and organic transformations aiming at acquiring the needed exchange of matter, energy and information with their external by Angus Nichols and Martin Liebscher, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 173-199, has demonstrated why von Hartmann’s objective idealism (the unconscious being not only an absolute principle, but in fact “the only individual and substance” (p. 182), the Absolute) has brought any coherent conception about the nature and constitution of the unconscious – he speaking only about its identity and continuity – and more, has offered no critical development of his metaphysical presumptions (p. 194). Epistemologically speaking, any philosophical presumption needs a theoretical justification, without which the result is no longer philosophy (“the designation 'unconscious' does not of itself identify a property which turns any explanatory wheels: it merely creates a space for the postulation” (p. 184). Such a theoretical supply has only the function “of passively certifying” (p. 199).

Charles Percy Snow, The Two Cultures (1959), London, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Let quote Arthur Schopenhauer, ibidem, Chapter XIV. On the association of ideas, p. 324 (and not Husserl): “It is just as little possible that a thought can appear in the mind without an occasion as that a body can be set in motion without a cause”. And Chapter XIX. On the primacy of the will in self-consciousness, p. 412: “The intelligence is like the sun, which does not illuminate space if there is no object from which its rays are reflected”. surroundings. The climax of the evolution of this specific means, the human consciousness, implies many types of focuses on the existence, as well as many types of interrelated processes having the focus on as their core (attention, memory, representation, anticipation, imagination, feelings/sentiments; but also as meaningful practices – individual as well as collective⁸⁰). We may easily say that intentionality is a feature of the order of the conative force⁸¹.

See also Dermot Moran, “The Ego as Substrate of Habitualities: Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Habitual Self”, Phenomenology and Mind, Volume 4, July 2014, pp. 27-47; Christian Ferencz-Flatz, “A Phenomenology of Automatism. Habits and Situational Typifications in Husserl”, Phenomenology and Mind, Volume 4, July 2014, pp. 65-83.

Arthur Schopenhauer, ibidem, Volume I (1844), Translated from the German by R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp, Seventh Edition, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1909, Fourth Book. The World as Will, § 54, p. 354: “the will, which, considered purely in itself, is without knowledge, and is merely a blind incessant impulse, as we see it appear in unorganised and vegetable nature and their laws, and also in the vegetative part of our own life, receives through the addition of the world as idea, which is developed in subjection to it, the knowledge of its own willing and of what it is that it wills. And this is nothing else than the world as idea, life, precisely as it exists… it is all one and a mere pleonasm if, instead of simply saying “the will,” we say “the will to live”; § 56, p. 398: “the will itself, which is everywhere the inmost nature of this life”; p. 399: “We have long since recognised this striving, which constitutes the kernel and in-itself of everything, as identical with that which in us, where it manifests itself most distinctly in the light of the fullest consciousness, is called will. Its hindrance through an obstacle which places itself between it and its temporary aim we call suffering”. Or, ibidem, Volume II, Chapter XIX. On the primacy of the will in self-consciousness, p. 416: “in all animal natures the will is what is primary and substantial, the intellect again is secondary, adventitious, indeed a mere tool for the service of the former, and is more or less complete and complicated, according to the demands of this service”; and p. 424: “For the will alone is aυτoμaτoς”.

In an explicit phenomenological key, Michel Henry, “La question du refoulement”, in Présences de Schopenhauer, Sous la dir. de Roger-Pol Droit, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1989, pp. 296-315, has demonstrated that here life is not an external and objective datum, nor a “nothing” or an “unconscious”, but “the first appearance, the first realisation of any conceivable experience: is proves itself immediately and without distance in such a manner that the phenomenality according to which it phenomenalise and its immediate proof becomes effective…is affectivity” (p. 306)…”every power is first of all a pure proof of itself” (p. 308). “Or, the power we speak of, the hyper-power of Affectivity which throws life in itself and gives it the proving of itself and the enjoying of itself…is the power of representation” (ibid.)…”The knowing of life knows the representation which poses in front of it, because it is not other than the self-knowledge of the act that poses in front of”…”This self-knowledge should be known in its own phenomenality, i.e. as affectivity, as self-impression of of the seeing and thus as its affect” (p. 310)…” the affect, in itself, belongs to life” (p. 313).

In the same respect, Thomas Mann, [Schopenhauer - Ausgabe schrieb (1938)], Les pages choisies et expliquées par Thomas Mann, Texte de Schopenhauer: traduction par J.-A. Cantacuzène; Texte de Thomas Mann: traduction par Jean Angelloz, Paris, Correa, 1939, p. 47, has observed the primordiality of life: “life ought to not fear from the spirit and knowledge, Conscience is oriented toward, and its intentionality supposes: - precise things, - the possibility to appropriate these precise things/at least to join them, - the possibility to stay in front of the world as an independent force, which is dominant because it is spontaneous and chooses, - the prefiguring of an “ordered” world, answering to the human consciousness according to its expectations related to the world; but thus the order of the world is because it is worked by the conscience, - that the whole of the world appears as such only as a result of discrete focuses, - that conscience appears as an ordering force; as the ancient Greeks have ascertained: the logic of mind is/gives the model of the world, or the human logos is tantamount to the logos of kosmos/of things.

But intentionality supposes also multiple levels of awareness, generating consciousness. This awareness means the cognisance of the limits (of awareness, of focusing, and their results) and it makes possible the self-critique and self-correction of both conscience as a whole and its processes.

If so, consciousness underlies the unconscious, since this one is the superposition of n experiences of the conscience. In this respect, oblivion is like the myth: it retains bits of the “essence”, mixing and introducing these bits into new stories and thereby even changing – adding, for example – the original significances of facts⁸². The unconscious is a reserve of the conscience only in the sense of a whole of histories of n intentionalities⁸³.

and on the Earth the spirit, and not life, has the lesser force and the biggest need to be protected”.

See James Spedding, “Preface” in Francis Bacon, “De sapientia veterum” (1609, 1623), The works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St Albans, and Lord High Cancellor of England, Collected and edited by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, Volume XII being volume II. of the Litterary and profesional works., Boston, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1857: volume XII, pp. 404-425; Also Max Friedrich Müller, Essay on Comparative Mythology (1856), Edited, with additional notes and an introductory preface on solar mythology by A. Smythe Palmer, London, Routledge and Sons, New York, R.P. Dutton and Co., 1909.

Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the eminent philosophers, Book IX, Chapter I: Heraclitus, VI [7], http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/diogenes_laertius/lives_of_the_eminent_philosophers/complet e.html: “Of soul thou shalt never find boundaries, not if thou trackest it on every path; so deep is its cause”.

And to these intentionalities it is reality that corresponds: “It needs must be that what can be thought and spoken of is” Poem of Parmenides, English translation: John Burnet (1892), VI, http://philoctetes.free.fr/parmenidesunicode.htm. Only on this line of reasoning is the unconscious the sedimentation of cultural experiences, of man’s relations with the world: hence a source of cultural styles (studied by Blaga). Consequently, not the unconscious is a “daimon” – as Blaga also has considered –, but conscience in its completeness. The unconscious functions according to the same mechanism of intentionality.

Therefore, the unconscious is a ghost of the integral conscience and, in order to create, man needs awareness. The higher degrees of awareness seem to be more important⁸⁴ than a style one unconsciously takes over (in folklore, as Blaga has showed⁸⁵). Because: the style itself is questioned, becoming an element of reality and thus an object of research, and in this way it is used in new cultivated creations. Obviously and letting aside the important theoretical problem of the inquiring of the cultural styles, the focus on the unconscious as the source of cultural creation was an “unconscious” reflex of the intellectuals pertaining to a worldview of the natural and eternal difference between the physical and intellectual labour and of the natural and eternal model of society based on this difference: because the folk art – for example, the Romanian – was not considered by Blaga a species of major culture⁸⁶, and he also considered that only a bundle of individual representatives of men of genius could configure this major culture. Moreover, the problem of the unconscious has become a kernel of the philosophical debate not so much because of its fertility⁸⁷, but because of historical sociological causes, and these causes cannot be neglected⁸⁸.

This standpoint of sociological causes cannot be ignored neither in the philosophical discussion of consciousness. For example, higher degrees of self-awareness are specific to superior levels of operations of conscience: the more automatic are they, the lesser they need self-awareness. And this is obvious at both the level of biological distinction between medulla and the brain of superior animals – separating the functions of automatic reflexes and responses and, on the other hand, of choices – and the one of social division, where the soldiers or other humans who firstly must obey and not choose are educated just in the direction to not exercise their (rational) control of their self-knowledge. Because this control brings also the questioning of values they are determined to accept⁸⁹.

Henri Bergson: consciousness and life

If we reconstitute in mente the process of consciousness and if we bind the results of biological sciences – without which our imagination has not basis and reason anymore, since we cannot stay at the level of myths that only assert – we obviously start from the needs a living/moving being would have in its environment. These needs have imposed the internal organisation of living beings so that they could remember past interactions as well as they could anticipate the results of their reactions (and later on, the states of the environment, even when they do not interact within). Consciousness – a functional structure and its results – means just memory and imagination⁹⁰.

The functions of the organs formed in order to realise these needs – as the already mentioned medulla and brain, but also nerves, cells, axons, neurons, synapses etc. – were the responses of living beings to their own conatus, endeavour “to persist in its own being”⁹¹. This will to persist was an impetus or active force which included “a sort of act or εντελέχειoν, which is midway between the faculty of acting and the action itself and involves an effort, and thus of itself passes into operation; not does it need aid other than the removal of impediments… (being) energy or virtue, called by the Germans kraft, and by the French la force”⁹². Bergson has called it vital impulse, generating vital features never realised totally, but always in course of realisation⁹³, or being an “unforeseeable creation of forms”⁹⁴, having only individual finality and interdependence with the spontaneity of movements and consciousness.

Conscience means to choose, facilitated by and boosting just spontaneous movements, because the living beings (as animals) behaving in such a manner have no the possibility to obtain on site (like plants) the matter and energy needed for their existence⁹⁵. Once again: if our actions cease to be spontaneous and become automatic, “consciousness withdraws”⁹⁶ and the self-awareness is even “harmful”: as in societies developing “cheerful robots”⁹⁷, I add.

The present collaboration between neurologists and philosophers has showed that conscience appears as the cells receiving the external impulse/message are searching for relations with other cells which stock the information related to the received message. (The importance of Plato’s recollection is obvious).

Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics (1677), III, Prop. VI, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm#chap03.

G.W. Leibniz, “On the Reform of Metaphysics and of the Notion of Substance” (1694), in The Philosophical Works of Leibniz, Translated from the original Latin and French, with notes of George Martin Duncan, New Haven, Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Publishers, 1890, http://archive.org/stream/philosophicalwor00leibuoft#page/n11/mode/1up, pp. 69-70. The withdrawal of consciousness does not mean its annihilation, but only its automatic manifestation: through instincts, as in animals, whose choice is a simple accessory of conatus, said Bergson, or whose choice is only the result of a “functional conscience able to utilise representations” but not of a “phenomenal conscience” being aware of the subjectivity of the individual and of its situation in relations with other humans and using the representations of these other humans, so being aware of the subjectivity of the others; the choice of animals is not the result of the spirit, logical and expressed through words⁹⁸.

Consciousness develops beyond instincts: by opposing to every acquired habit another one, and to every automatism – another one but contrary⁹⁹. Actually, consciousness transforms the matter into an instrument, while in animals the conscience is an instrument of the living matter. The quiddity of consciousness is its “faculty to take out from itself more than it contains”¹⁰⁰.

Therefore, because the result of the upsurge of life is just its specific – the unexpected, freedom, creation –, it is conscience that which “materializes” and emphasises the human creation: always through and with consciousness. This one means an “effort”¹⁰¹ that is painful without its automatically answer to a more or less simple stimulus/perception; in « L’effort intellectuel », see infra, Bergson even exemplified: “What means to recognize an object if not to serve of it?” (see the construction of the psychology of consumer in the market economies).

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, New York, Oxford University Press, Inc, 1959, pp. 166, 171. “materialization”, and both the effort and its material result constitute the obstacle, the instrument and the stimulus of the human conscience.

If so, the highest creation of man is the “creation of the self by the self”: of something ineffable realised “from nothing or from very few” but constituting “the richness of the world”.

The sign of man’s consciousness and élan vital is the “joy of life”: it is not “pleasure” since this one is only the means nature gave to man in order to conserve his life, but the “announcement” that life has succeeded and that “there is creation”¹⁰².

Therefore, according to Bergson, consciousness is a force (a daimon, metaphorically speaking) as a world apart (from processes, words etc.). As we know, in Popper too there are different worlds, world 2 and world 3 interacting.

As the Romantic daimon has signified creation, as Bergson’s consciousness is creation. As we saw, Bergson has considered the moral creation – in interpersonal and collective actions – the highest. But it was the same with the Romantic heroes: they were the flame bearers of modernity, of the critical thinking, imbued with love for the humans.

Science, as activity, was cut from the flux of life and consciousness: for a bigger efficiency (measuring the trajectories between ideal goals, methods and results) of the critical spirit¹⁰³. But science is really creative only if its processes and results are moral. The roundness of Bergson’s theory is thus very useful for the present debates concerning science and, generally, the intellectual effort.

permanent translation from the level of perceptions and images to that of meanings, as well as from abstract representations to relations and to words (leaving aside the fact that this translation itself requires words). But – as later Wittgenstein has showed – words have not an absolute meaning, but they reflect the context of phrases.

All these translations from the dynamic scheme to the perceived image are accompanied of effort: because they involve different levels of conscience.

Concerning the intellectual creation/invention, the starting point of scheme is an ideal, a certain effect desired – for this reason, something abstract – and the result is the succession of concrete representations of the realised effect.

Intellectual effort means slowdown and delay. The time of slowdown and delay is just when one feels the effort, the anxiety of the gap, but the richness of the mental state is in proportion to the effort it testifies. Therefore, the mechanism of association is accompanied by the mechanism of effort.

Ontologically, the effort measures the gradual transition from the less realised to the more done, from intensive to extensive, from a reciprocal implication of parts to their juxtaposition.

Henri Bergson, « L’énergie spirituelle » (1911), pp. esp. 18-25.

This critical spirit is which supposes professional skepticism: something differentiating science and philosophy from myths and religion. Intermezzo: Lucian Blaga, the unconscious and mystery From the standpoint of neuroscience, the simple biological phenomena of man – as moving, or the function of organs when the body receives food (and different food) –, as the above-mentioned relations between the cells of the brain take place somehow unconsciously. For example, only when the body receives harmful food (and the functioning of organs deteriorates), the brain sends pain signals and man becomes conscious about his biological being. From this standpoint, it is not good to be always conscious of every bodily functioning: their unconscious origin would be a warranty of the efficient automatic behaviour of the body and, chiefly, that the unconscious retracts in governing the inferior levels of the biologic and gives all the time and energy to consciousness to “apply” at the superior levels of man’s existence. What are these superior levels? They are those which suppose decision – so reason – and capacity to do this. And, as Bergson has observed, those exercised when man has the possibility to decide and create, and – has Aristotle showed – when the choice is possible¹⁰⁴.

Accordingly and once more, consciousness is more “demonic” than the unconscious, and on the other hand they interrelate in such a way that one cannot exclude their levels from the understanding of man’s main peculiarity, the reasonable response to and integration within environment.

From the viewpoint of psychoanalysis, the unconscious – as complex of mental strata containing all sorts of wishes (and, obviously, information) and the desire to solve the incoherence or conflict between them¹⁰⁵ – is the origin of the individual’s behaviour and veiled reactions and interpretations¹⁰⁶. And because this origin is a superposition and mixture of the individual’s experiences, it would be richer in impulses and tensions than the consciousness which always expresses in rational or socially accepted ways and thus tempers and represses the hidden feelings. The opposition between the conscious and the unconscious would be the cause

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (Translated by W. D. Ross, pp. 2536-2787, in op. cit., Book III, 2, p. 2584: man chooses “only the things that he thinks could be brought about by his own efforts”, and deliberates (thus manifesting his rationality), Book III, 3, p. 2586, “about the things that can be done by their own efforts”, and not “about the things that involve movement but always happen in the same way, whether of necessity or by nature or from any other cause”. of psychic disorders and, since the conscious expresses itself through all the sciences of logic, psychology, epistemology, linguistics, semantics, would the psychoanalysis discipline focusing on the unconscious, so considering it a daimon, not be necessary?

From the point of view of analytic psychology, there is also another form of the unconscious: the collective one, consisting in patterns of thinking common to all humans, and collecting these patterns or motifs during and following the species’ experiences¹⁰⁷. “This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents”¹⁰⁸. In fact, it is not a daimon, but a pattern existing in every human being: the problem is only to detect it and its mechanism, the archetypes somehow governing us, but in a very remote manner.

Lucian Blaga took over Jung’s concepts, subordinating them to his task to explain the stable elements of national identities: the folk cultural style would reflect just the collective unconscious of a people.

But in Blaga, the unconscious is a daimon because it seems to be consonant with mystery, which is the origin of the world, at least the world as we know it (for this reason, mystery is called by him The Great Anonymous [Marele Anonim, in Romanian]). As mystery is undefined, so the unconscious is: both having only the peculiarity of being the origin (of knowledge and of the cultural style). This generative peculiarity is which gives to both The Great Anonymous and the unconscious the “essence” of a daimon¹⁰⁹.

Ernst Cassirer An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (1944), New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1972, p. 223, has pointed that the different forms of the human culture are not united through an identity in their nature, but through a conformity in their fundamental task.

Carl Gustav Jung, "The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious”, in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1934-1954), Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 9 (Part 1), London, Routledge, 1991, p. 43.

Michael S. Jones, The Metaphysics of Religion: Lucian Blaga and Contemporary Philosophy, Cranbury, Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp., 2006, p. 89, note 4, has correctly emphasised: “in Blaga the term (AB, daimon) becomes a synonym for the Great Anonymous. …somewhere in between God and the devil: it is the good Creator of existence, but it achieves its end through a utilization of certain strategies that are not likely to be appreciated by those that are subjected to them. One example of this is that humanity is created with the desire to penetrate mystery, but is also prevented from doing so (at least in an ultimate sense), so that humanity is forever instilled with a creative drive. This drive gives humanity purpose in life, and at the same time it furthers the indirect genesis aspect of the MA’s overall plan (AB, MA = Marele Anonim). Thus the term daimonion refers to the MA conceived as But what does mystery mean? First and foremost, we ought to know that Lucian Blaga has erected a contradictory theory from a methodological standpoint. On the one hand, he has considered mystery in ontological key, as a founding entity, seeming to naively assuming the idealist legacy. On the other hand, his epistemological key is far more interesting and fruitful. Most of the Romanian commentators have insisted on the ontological meaning of mystery, as a name of the Almighty, in a gay agreement with both the ideological mainstream and the traditional naïve direct essentialism. In fact and aside from his own comfortable confusion and opportunism, Blaga was a fine ironist suggesting a non-conformist fertile epistemological line veiled under a metaphysical wrapping.

People have always started from that which they knew. But what did they know? Things – as, for example, substances: not the founding five elements, nor the abstract ΰλη, but the concrete manifestation of this matter, i.e. united with a form – as substance (Aristotle). To all these things they gave names (Plato, Aristotle). To put the beginning under the sign of the name/naming meant to put at the beginning the known. Only from the concrete things have philosophers speculated finding the essences. Ontology was based on the known.

But Blaga has started from the unknown. It is not important here that he called both the results of this unknown and the unknown itself as “divine”/divine substance (at least sometimes) (more than von Hartmann, whose name he did not mention). Nor even – but this has too an epistemological significance – that the Great Anonymous [Marele Anonim] was both the unknown and the known world. What is valuable is that the unknown was deemed as the “explanatory centre” of the world and that it was an epistemological landmark, since the difference between the unknown and the known gave the axes of the world (the “divine differentials”).

The result of the process of knowledge is the infinite set of qualities of the already known world. But these qualities configure either after adding and revealing new information (“plus-knowing”) or by emphasising the discontinuity, by-interpreting and internalising the new (“minus-knowing”). Namely, just because we do not know (we only add some new information or interpret them), we want do it, and the unknown gives us the direction.

something like ‚God with a dark side’, and would perhaps be translated ‘evil genius’ or ‘diabolical genius’”. Things which we more or less know have a name. But the unknown could not have any name. This is the reason the unknown or mystery is called by Blaga “anonymous”, without name.

But the irony of Blaga appears when he describes the exploits of the Great Anonymous. This one is not an omnipotent God, since it has generated the worse of possible worlds (in religion, we see this world as the result of creation; and, epistemologically speaking, would the world of cognisance not be a very imperfect one?); it is a liar, because it deceives (the knowing minds); it is funky: it does not want to transmit to reflecting humans its own anarchical laws; it is irrational (actually, beyond reason) and has a “sacred egotism”, he refusing to reproduce itself. Read in epistemological key, all this is clear and tasty; in ontological key – at least disconcerting, if not even a scandal. But Blaga’s intercalated references to God, divine and cosmology have led many commentators to search for the author’s absolute ontological revelations and truths.

Continuing to use ambiguous terms – sending both to religious meanings and epistemological metaphors –, and this use is another sign of irony, Blaga has shown that knowledge is either for practice, accumulation, demonstration (somehow as in the Kuhn’s “normal science”), as “in paradise”¹¹⁰, or a “Lucifer’s knowledge”, speculative, creative, even renouncing to the habitual logic but pulling off the new just through this removal from the logic of the known.

By equating the Great anonymous with mystery¹¹¹, Blaga has advanced both the idea of the absence of the absolute and its presence, calling it “a metaphysical metaphor”. This richness of meanings inwards his metaphors would be which remains from philosophy, seemed to say Blaga. Indeed, the raison d’être of philosophy is just what remains from it.

Language as daimon

Long time ago, philosophy has searched for the understanding of what is beyond the appearance of things. And since this could be deduced from the common moments, and the elements of appearances are the basis of the general characteristics, in fact ideas, a step forward was the inquiry of the subjective means to arrive at.

Yes, our ordinary approach is that we arrive by mental processes to abstract concepts and the grasping of the general which however would exist somehow in things. But this approach is the result of education that explains to children that even till now they learned to relate concrete things, nevertheless they also worked with abstract features, like colours etc., and that these abstract features would be not only the outcome of the ability of their senses and reasoning but also the real existence of something more deep. Simply put, the first Greek philosophers were ontologists, i.e. they have arrived to the “principles”¹¹² or “essences” of being: theses “principles” or “essences” were the most important for the lovers of wisdom, since in order to understand who we, humans, are and what is our place in the world, it was first necessary to comprehend the world as such. And since we are parts of the world, they patently arrived to the conclusion that the world is ordered (kosmos), and has its own logos which miraculously our own reason overlaps or superimposes.

But following the Socratic turn, Plato has questioned our ability to reach the ontological explanations. This is the reason of the Platonic construction of ontology starting from epistemological inquest.

We have, certainly, senses which reflect things as they appear to us. This was an ancient conclusion, since in Sanskrit a name of the appearance – AbhA – was that which is lighted (avabhAsita) or shining (AbhAta): only the lighted things are perceived by us.

But we are gifted to understand, to realise much more than we see with our eyes. Our mind, in fact our “soul” is which does this. Our soul pervades the shining peel of things surrounding us: indeed, we see with the eyes of our minds¹¹³. Actually, it’s normal to not trust too much in our bodily sensations¹¹⁴, because on the one hand, even the visible of things is moving, misleading and discernable when we reflect a little upon them¹¹⁵, and on the other hand, as reasonable beings we search for what is constancy and efficient for us, landmarks in our being in the world. And thus we understand that we should detach this constancy as persistent meanings which are immaterial¹¹⁶ and values of our life¹¹⁷.

What is the mechanism we can do this? Plato has answered that we arrive to have in our mind just the essence of things we see. This essence, the unchangeable Forms, is reflected in our souls (this is the essentialist ontology inherited in the whole history of philosophy): we retain and remember ideas, grasped with our mind, as copies of the Forms¹¹⁸.

The Socratic turn has thus generated the development of the theory of knowledge, the only “novel” turn until the second half/last decades of the 19th century on, when the philosophical and linguistic research has emphasised the creative function of the means of the human knowledge, language¹¹⁹. Despite its conservative character – communication requiring strict rules – language means an active and productive attitude of people acquiring and using it. This function has first appeared regarding myths as specific discourses (I already quoted Max Müller), metaphors, and was later developed by hermeneutics, and after, concerning language as such, by all the disciplines of linguistics: but both hermeneutics and linguistics have intertwined and generated semiotics, the study of meaning-making.

Because man has the power of speech, he can constitute such a complex and contradictory world of things, including meanings, so that on the one hand, this world may have an autonomous power over him – would this power not be/act within the fatum, however mastered by gods? – and on the other hand, his effort to speak emphasises that the result of the expressing is bigger even than the general impression the speaker has in his mind. Language seems to have its own life towards intention and thinking, Ibidem, [Page 151]: “409. Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle: Sound is immaterial. For it is not air, but it is the form about the air and the appearance [επιφανεία] after some sort of percussion which becomes sound; and every appearance is immaterial; for it moves with bodies, but is itself absolutely immaterial”.

Plato, Symposium, [209a]: “there are persons… who in their souls still more than in their bodies conceive those things which are proper for soul to conceive and bring forth; and what are those things? Prudence, and virtue in general; and of these the begetters are all the poets and those craftsmen who are styled 'inventors'”. and even the levels of reality seem to depend on it¹²⁰. Actually, the reason of things would depend on language, since the reasonable or intelligible is tantamount with the expressible, while the irrational is the non-expressible, the indefinable.

Since ‘the key” of language is not only in our mind but in our lifestyles/ways of life which push us to some or other kinds of use of signs, it results that “language games” (Wittgenstein) and the frame of communication – tone, repetition, sound, mimics, other signs – gives the nuances and meanings of language (language as the concrete discourse).

In the 20th century philosophy developed by and after the linguistic turn, language seemed to be the basis of the phenomenon of mind (as a mischievous daimonion interceding man’s will to express his thoughts): somehow in two directions, though connected each other and leading to analytic philosophy. One was that of Wittgenstein: to concretely understand the language games within the social practice seemed to become the most exciting goal of philosophers. (But the same was said several decades before: in fact, Engels has suggested that mind, language and social practice are interdependent and develop together¹²¹). The other was the logical positivism that questioned the philosophical tenets from the standpoint of the possibility to reduce concepts to aspects empirically given and thus clear-cut. In reality, both directions were interested to make a “battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language”¹²², i.e. to clarify and correct the confusions, language automatisms/clichés of philosophical myths which considered as supreme explanations the schemes and manners to see¹²³.

The meanings of words – better, of discourses, i.e. including gestures, sounds – are not only post festum explainable by people and linguists, but immediately recognisable (as the pain, for example), because the messages of these discourses/vectors of these words are public, intended to be heard by other humans.

More: discourses could have locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary meanings – or acts, if we differentiate the levels of intentions and cognitive elements –: the first being surface meaning – that of the component words which describe and have an ostensible meaning (the locutionary, “constative”¹²⁴); the second – its real, intentional meaning deriving within the context, either the speaker wants to cover or uncover it and although this meaning is true or false (the illocutionary, that many times “masquerades”¹²⁵ the speaker’s intentions, or uncover them); the third is meaning as an (may be unintended) effect on the listener, namely somehow external to the performance of an utterance.

All of these superposing meanings are formed through an historical (obviously social) process of genesis of grammars, of language structures, common codes and rules which constitute the frame of the individual and collective uses. In the combination of linguistic units (phonemes from sounds, words from phonemes, phrases from words, discourse from phrases), the degree of freedom of the users grows as the level of complexity of units increases¹²⁶.

This rich field of meanings emphasises the “demonic” character of language, its Janus type use – as in the old Aesop’s fable of the tongue. The impression of “demonic” increases when the informational supply of language, determined by the reality people focus on, develops through metaphors: and in their speeches, people use very often metaphors and other tropes. Long time ago, people have constituted languages reasonably – according to the empirical proofs given by practice – and philosophers have understood that logic is which puts order into their logos. They have formalised the exterior manifestation of thoughts – judgements –, hoping that the respect of logical rules would preserve the clear-cut expression of thinking, and that this transparent expression would put language again in a subordinated position towards thoughts: since these ones would only reflect things.

But logic could and can not counter the creative power of language: it is only a guardian of thinking (transforming man into the only “watchman over the house of Being”, as Heidegger said, but he has considered not only logic, but metaphors/poetry as well): and a sympathetic guardian, since it is both firm and supple. And thoughts reflect things in different manners. There is, first of all, a global and indistinct prehension of the fact we focus on – when we mix different standpoints and different levels of focusing on and we arrange them in a first approximate view (we certainly choose, some ones calling this intuition) – and later a distinctive and analytic understanding. In this second moment, our first hesitating and indecisive choice becomes both simpler – since we are helped by empirical proofs, by judgements and demonstrations which supports one conclusion (with all our deep belief of relativism of things, and irrespective of its real truth) – and more complicated: at least because this conclusion does not mean that it expresses the absolute scientific meaning, but only that it is the conclusion constituted on the basis of the person’s existing knowledge.

This is the reason that people use metaphors¹²⁷ and, generally, different (rhetorical) figures of speech. They transmit to participants in dialogue both more information and imagination and feeling not yet expressible in a literally dry utterance¹²⁸.

Indeed, the intentional consciousness is propositional/ transposable into propositions: we know “objects” through sentences about them, we are positing in front of propositions, and not of objects, and we analyse their truth-value¹²⁹. This situation is even in front of the knowing

They are “revealing”; what do they reveal? The complexity of things, would we answer; Blaga’s formula is better, however in the register of metaphors: “the living of man in the horizon of mystery”, Lucian Blaga, Geneza metaforei şi sensul culturii [The Genesis of Metaphor and the Meaning of Culture], Bucureşti, Fundaţia pentru literatură şi artă “Regele Carol II”, 1937, pp. 20-40.

Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 1, Special Issue on Metaphor (Autumn, 1978), pp. 143-159. But also Sebastian Purcell, “Hermeneutics and Truth: From Alētheia to Attestation”, Études Ricoeuriennes/ Ricoeur Studies, Vol 4, No 1 (2013), pp. 140-158, as emphasis of the richness of interpretations, as a kind of deciphering of metaphors. subject who is free to choose the values he judges according to his examination of the truth-value of the propositions describing them¹³⁰. Just in this process – which the analytic philosophy faces, towards the old criticism – new and new daimons appear: of ghosts of values, of traditional beliefs, of plural intentions and plural, including hazy, analytical means of understanding. Unlike Tugendhat, I do not think that the analytical approach is the only key “to make the non-explicit explicit”. Rather the sociological criterion of truth and false, the assumption of historicity and, as Vattimo underlined, the refuse of relativism, suggest the necessity of an integral philosophy, uniting not only the analytic with hermeneutics¹³¹, but also epistemology and ethics in a “sociological turn”.

Man cannot live without expressing his life. Language is only one way to do this, or through language man expresses and creates a new sphere of reality, “the 'ideal' universe”¹³² of myths and religion, science, philosophy and art. In the interstices of all these parts, man experiences many daimons, but just by struggling to get clarity in the understanding of problems he faces, he arrives to defeat some of them and choose freely. Anyway, he cannot blame the demons haunting him through the name of occurrences, destiny, conditions and historical prejudices in each field and discipline: his own will to choose the good and not the evil depends on his capacity to judge and go beyond the external conditions, to his own human responsibility¹³³.

cognizance II, controlled through logic. But he was the supporter of a naïve realism, according to which thought does add nothing to the object, and neither the language. Nor the genius does not create, he only sees that which is not seen by others (p. 88). The discovering of reality is not a question of intuition or thinking, but only of procedures of control.

Nevertheless, we should mention the philosophical context he replied to. It was the spring of post-IWW irrationalism in Romania, and he was interested to show that: a) both the theses of the emancipation of language from thinking and the strict overlapping of language and thought are dangerous for philosophy, and writers should seek clarity by thinking, not in clack, b) philosophy cannot be reduced to the understanding of the ineffable individual of the contemporary nominalism, c) nor to the expressing of indeterminacy.

Ernst Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination (1979), Translated by Paul Stern, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1986, p. 264.

Santiago Zabala, The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst Tugendhat, With a foreword by Gianni Vattimo, (2004), translated by the author with Michael Haskell, N. Y., Columbia University Press, 2008, p. XVI.

Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (1944), New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1972, p. 226.

Science as daimon

Every reflective intellectual creation – as art, philosophy and science – involves a high degree of awareness, higher than in myths and religion. Because: the first – as science and philosophy – aims to offer a logical, consistent, demonstrated (demonstrable) discourse¹³⁴, and not only assertions based on exterior authority, while art wants to create in the domains of sensibility and life, and this creation requires both a fine and tormented consciousness.

But let we leave here aside art: not because I would adhere to the barbarous attitude that despises it because of its force of revealing the tensions and non-conformism of life, sensitivity and creation, while science would reduce and frame life within the borders of cold calculus, demonstration and objective things; no: opposing to Michel Henry who considered (in the trail of the banal Heideggerian reduction of the causes of the contemporary alienation to the technological prevalence¹³⁵) that the modern development of science would have lied at the origin of the destruction of subjectivity and cultural creation¹³⁶, I consider science not only a form of culture and, thus, human creation, but also/rather a form marked by the same structure of social relations as art and philosophy are. Thereby, science may divert from its original meaning, including during Galileo, of rational emphasis of the human rational universal – and reduce itself to mathematic measurements and proofs, and to the particular objectivism of separated facts, being the absolute, the “big science”¹³⁷ resulted from the development of quantity-ism. But this phenomenon has not only an inner ground in the historical logic of the development (means)

that in reality a cause is one thing, and the thing without which the cause could never be a cause is quite another thing”.

Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (Translated by G. R. G. Mure, pp. 221-325) in op. cit., about the “demonstrative sciences”: Book I, 6, p. 236: “demonstrative knowledge must be knowledge of a necessary nexus”; 4, 231; 10, p. 241; 11, p. 244; 31, 282; 31, p. 281: “Scientific knowledge is not possible through the act of perception”; 33, p. 284; Book II, 2, p. 290: “to know a thing’s nature is to know the reason why it is”; 3, p. 291.

The pattern of this position of Heidegger – and many others – emphasises a mistaken equivalence of the description of the present Western society and its technological mark with the cause of this situation (technology). of science, but also in the external constraint directing it as well as the whole society.

Therefore and focusing only on science (and philosophy), the authority of science and philosophy stands in their own articulation and the more reasonable is their narrative, the bigger is their authority. The value of science and philosophy is related to their originality, but this involves a high degree of critical and self-critical thinking without which there is no real advancement¹³⁸.

Science and philosophy declare their intention to focus on problems and thus they prove multi-awareness: methodologically – on different strata of the approach of problems, and analytically, at every moment of the research. Would in this manner their “mystery” disappear? Not at all, since mystery is the unknown and they emphasise and confront it at every moment.

In the objectivistic old meaning, daimon simplified things, reduced them within a simple framework when people do not anymore try to understand causes and responsibilities: since the Evil – as demons and the Devil – is ab origine, the “normal” counterpart of the Good, the only disposal of humans would have been only to protect themselves against the Evil (in fact justifying the status quo). But the Good is related to the search for truth¹³⁹ and thus we have no other solution than to question the existent truths and to challenge the unknown. Opposing to the Romantic daimon equated with the revolutionary No, the traditional representatives of the Evil – those which are taken over by the common conscience educated in the present society based on the justification of the intolerable – were not creative.

It remains to the humans to be creative, and science and philosophy endeavour to realise this need. The scientific spirit – pertaining

As we are the witnesses of this phenomenon, the avalanche of scientific papers in the last first to philosophy and characterising it – means awareness of the must of creation, and it should be protected, kept and developed. The particular means of the philosophical and scientific creation is rationalism, and rationalism all the way is their only path. Science and philosophy pursue the causes of phenomena, as long time ago Aristotle has showed – thus the understanding of the process –, and from this follows the demonstration, verification and logical justification of their results. Just this demonstrative character puts science and philosophy under the aegis of reason, rationalism. And this aegis is kept with all the hermeneutical and linguistics turns and trans-disciplinary studies searching for correlations, conditions and factors of not yet put under question phenomena: because, indeed, the end of a consistent rationalist approach is the questioning of phenomena and the change of existing theories about things. And the focus on causes leads to the awareness of consequences of existing or missing phenomena: an aspect neglected by the mainstream pattern of science and philosophy.

This means that the scientific and philosophical self-awareness – or self-criticism – does not consider their tools, as the abstract concepts in Aristotle or the ideas without referents (as the word “nothing”) in Bolzano¹⁴⁰, as absolute, but historical, allowing the possibility to change the point of view one thinks on the basis of some primary ideas/basic truths or paradigms: i.e. the possibility to assume a different point of view, obviously assuming the same criticism towards the new tools. Therefore, every standpoint should be addressed with the same criteria, and the dominant theories ought not to be considered as the “hyper-reality”¹⁴¹ to which one adapts researches (instead of constructing the theoretical reality from the objects).

Concretely, both philosophy and science should address the real problems of the human knowledge and society and treat them with their specific means. Au fond, this means to contribute in a decisive manner to the prevention of bad turns. This would not lead to the death of philosophy, and certainly not of science, since the “daimon” haunting them is mystery, the unknown. As Heidegger remembered us once more, a very important moment of the philosophical (and scientific) inquiry is the question. But it

Bernard Bolzano, Theory of Science, Attempt at a Detailed and in the Main Novel Exposition of Logic with Constant Attention to Earlier Authors (1837), Book Two, Part I, Chapter 2, § 67, p. 88.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Translation by Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 1: “Today, abstraction… is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal”; and Jorge Luis Borges, “On Rigor in Science” (1946), in J. L. Borges, A Universal History of Infamy, Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, London, Penguin Books, 1975, p. 141. is not enough, since it not only pertains to a more or less tacit general view grounding the whole approach, but also because its suggestions may be dissolved in an inadequate line of research. Rather, advancing openly the imagined projection of the problem and treatment – that includes anticipation – it is a way to contribute to the development of critical spirit: even by putting the problem “in an absolutely different light”¹⁴². This standpoint insisting on the importance of philosophy – but it is the same with science – to create “fulcrums in an effort of re-education of thinking” is highly suggesting the creative force of the rational intellectual endeavour, since “the most remarkable feature of (philosophical descriptions) is that they show us that the usual impulses and spontaneous leanings of our thought, the mental stereotypes are not at all necessities of thinking…”¹⁴³.

All the human manners of creation – from language to philosophy and science – dialectically balance the tendency to stability and that of evolution (said Cassirer). The proportion of these tendencies differs, language being a conservative force – besides, as myths and religion are – which, however, changes according to the spontaneous, active and productive attitude of children and people in the process of language acquisition. Science too “gives us the assurance of a constant world”¹⁴⁴, but it does this by its specific means. One is its logical standard of truth, which envisages a larger field than that of the immediate experience and relates the components of this large field in a coherent view. Coherency is given not only by analogy, but by order(ing), classification and abstract criteria verified in experiments, calculus, demonstration, verification. In this manner, the relational nature of things and their relative character generated by relations and evolution at all levels or structures allow us to understand the logic of systems.

This logic means laws of their behaviour: the teleological aim of science (and philosophy) is acquired not by speculation, but by experiments, calculus, demonstration, verification. The result is the scientific theory, comprising some general principles used as paradigms and permitting the development of new theories in the same line. From this standpoint, science – as biology – works with two kinds of concepts: concept by inspection “is one the complete meaning of which is given by something immediately apprehended”; concept by postulation “is one the

Mircea Flonta, „Înţelegerea filosofică: 'a vedea mai bine'” [The philosophical understanding: to better see] in Mircea Flonta, Gheorghe Ştefanov, Ludwig Wittgenstein în filosofia secolului XX, Iaşi, Polirom, 2002, p. 95.

Ibidem.

Ernst Cassirer, ibidem, p. 207. meaning of which is prescribed for it by the postulates of the deductive theory in which it occurs”¹⁴⁵.

A symbolic form of man’s creation, science uses metaphors too: but on the one hand, they are used rather in the first stages of hypotheses and demonstration, when things are not too clear, and on the other hand, they do not represent the ‘solution” or truth, but are only instruments to better suggest the meanings of digits, formulae, experiments, their theoretical unity.

Concluding remarks

The extension of the external world – and of our internal self, of course – is always huger than the representations of the world captured in scientific systems. But these ones are the only ones that offer the coherent, consistent and demonstrated image of the world: which is in fact the only one that supports the real development of society. All the symbolic forms have contributed to man’s self-understanding and progress in the world, but only science (with technology) and philosophy, solve real existential problems. This does not mean that, for example, the artistic standpoint in front of the world would not be necessary and vital, but only that the existential problems have generated specific means to solve them.

There are many daimons hiding both in the process of the development of scientific spirit – and of the reflective, philosophical one – as well as in man’s positioning in front of all the symbolic forms of his creation: in quarrels between forms (as between religion and science and philosophy), in the relations between goals, means and results.

From this point of view, we should observe the responsibility of communication and the weak performance of present science and philosophy communicators. But this aspect is already a question of social values and power relations, which are the environment of new daimons threatening the logos of man and its future.

Man’s consciousness is only fictionally an individually analysable entity. The Other, and the Third person – thus the near and far away humans – are our mirror (namely, not only I see them, they see me too from infinite angles): accordingly, my self-consciousness – which is an almost permanent element in science and philosophy – has no worth in a social ocean based on such social relations, education and manipulation that divert people from the exercise of their reason and substitute this exercise with malign demons.

Ibidem, pp. 216-217, quoting F.S.C. Northrop, “The method and theories of physical science in their bearing upon biological organization”, Growth Supplement (1940), pp. 127- 154. In such a social ocean, it seems that men became ghosts, appearances without consistency, while the world of demons seems to take the place of humans.

Every man must be taught to be self-conscious: to think to the consequences of his deeds and thoughts. This is quite possible, because knowledge means anticipation and this means to see not only what you want but also the results of that which you want. Because, indeed, we are like Rousseau: with “an ardent temperament, strong, impetuous passions, and a slow birth of ideas, puzzled and presenting themselves only after impulses”¹⁴⁶.

The human conscience is, in fact, consciousness: a “meta” judgement (on the self, on the world), a superior level of conscience which allows and constitute the moral “voice of conscience”; in fact, that which wants to not fritter away every man’s unique opportunity to express his creativity.

What we express is not tantamount with that which we know, lesser – with that which we think. In the epistemological lecture of Blaga, mystery is not considered first of all in an ontological manner, like a black hole that is huger than the visible being or the light thrown by the knowing of the world. But mystery – the difference between the existing meanings and the reference – is the name of the human epistemological shortcoming: that we always see lesser than that which exists, and that we must make effort in order to better express our grasping. In our (subliminal) unconscious there certainly are shapes of the old human experiences transmitted us through the seen images, sounds, gestures we possibly try to adapt to them. But our human victory to know, to freely act, to express our own spontaneity is only when we stamp our own rationality/rational affectivity on the course of things. For this reason, we cannot hind behind formulas: the unconscious never legitimates irrationality.

Science is the form par excellence to equiponderate mystery. Mystery never ends, but the specific of science is its so rapid rhythm of development that the light mystery throws in the world seems to shrink because the brightness issued from the logic of scientific discoveries is huger. But it really does not blind us: we are conscious about the power of

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Les confessions”, Livre troisième, in Oeuvres complètes de J. J. Rousseau, avec des notes historiques, Tome Premier, Paris, Chez Firmin Didot Frères, M DCCC LVI, p. 57.

And he has continued, as in a page of anamnesis necessary for psychologists: “I feel everything and I see nothing. I am hot-tempered, but stupid; I must be cold-blooded in order to think”, “my ideas arrange in my head with the most incredible difficulty”, pp. 57, 57-58. the unknown, but we should be determinate to come nearer to the reference, thus to act rationally, because otherwise there is no escape for humankind.

Blaga too has used the metaphor of daimon for the human creativity. Creativity is the human power suggesting that there always is something more and that the only manner to know this is to see from outside both the outer world and ourselves: critically, as the art critique. Creation, materialising creativity, arrives to become autonomous from its creator, but never annuls the feeling of insufficient, of the fact that there always is something more. And when – and this often happens – creation uses metaphors, the sentiment that there is something more is more vivid. In this sense, metaphor is living, open, permanently generates new meanings.

Creation is revolutionary in its essence. And science has a special revolutionary character: by expressing its postulate that the existing forms (theories, instruments, reasoning) are not enough. This is the reason science, and philosophy, always call into question its material and frame. Are they not more revolutionary than poetry? Are their daimons not more subversive than some resigned Romantic demons?

Why the ideas of mystery and unconscious are considered today so extraordinary, aside from their determination of the historical context¹⁴⁷? Because: they suggest the surpassing of the direct description of the object, as in the naïve ontology of both realists and nominalists. Then, by centring on mystery and the unconscious, the philosophical interpretation reveals the indirect, the openness and the meanings of multiple mediations. And for the sensibility to these meanings and mediations I am indebted to Dr. Geo Săvulescu.

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None (1883-1885), Translated By Thomas Common; Zarathustra’s Prologue, 3, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998h.htm#link2H_4_0004.

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[60] Plato, Apology, Translated by Benjamin Jowett, 31d, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html.

[61] Plato, Symposium, [209a].

[62] Plato, Gorgias, 506ª.

[63]Plato, Phaedo, 99a and b.

[64] Poem of Parmenides, English translation: John Burnet (1892), VI, http://philoctetes.free.fr/parmenidesunicode.htm.

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[67] Ricoeur Paul, Finitude et culpabilité: La symbolique du mal, Paris, Aubier, 1963.

[68] Ricœur Paul, The Rule of Metaphor (1975), London, Taylor &

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[76] [78] Spinoza Baruch, The Ethics (1677), III, Prop. VI, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm#chap03. [77] [79] Swinford Dean, Through the Daemon's Gate: Kepler's

Somnium, Medieval Dream Narratives, and the Polysemy of Allegorical Motifs, New York, Abingdon, Routledge, 2006.

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[80] Wittgenstein Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, London, Basil Blackwell, 1986. [81] Zabala Santiago, The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy:

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Note

13. Paul Ricoeur, Finitude et culpabilité: La symbolique du mal, Paris, Aubier, 1963.

14. Ibidem, p. 355.

15. Aram M. Frenkian, „De ce a fost condamnat Socrate”, Revista de filosofie, 3-4, 1942, pp.

205. -222 [Why was Socrates condemned?].

25. όνιον/δαίμων was just ; see the expression κατά δαίμονα – Actually, a meaning of δαιμ fate fortunately. In fact, the religious tradition is not clear, both (Elioud and Nephilim) being children of sons of God etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elioud, retrieved July 17, 2014. Book of Enoch, Book I: The Watchers, esp. 19, 20, http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/ethiopian/enoch/1watchers/watchers.htm.

29. th th Only in the modern existentialist philosophy – in the 19 century Marx and in the 20 the well-known currents – the essence of man is given through his existence which emphasizes his integrality, thereby the unity soul-body.

30. See Aristotle’s logic and psychology (Metaphysics, On the Soul).

50. : “Or if it be St. Augustine, Letter CLIX, A.D. 415, http://www.mrrena.com/misc/august.php some other higher spirit that assumes their form and visits our minds”. As dreams, visions etc. St. Augustine, City of God, Chapter 11.—Of the Opinion of the Platonists, that the Souls of Men Become Demons When Disembodied, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf102.iv.IX.11.html.

58. Zări şi Etape, Bucureşti, Editura Lucian Blaga, Daimonion, Societatea de Mâine, 1930; in pentru Literatură, 1968.

68. ΑΙΜΟΝΙΕ an inquiry into a mode of apostrophe in old As Elizabeth Brunius Nilsson, Δ greek literature, Uppsala, Almquist et Wiksells, 1955, has observed.

75. Carl Gustav Jung’s Collective – as Zeitgeist, in Hegel, or as origin of the archetype of the human being as such, or in Lucian Blaga – and individual (in Schelling, Goethe, Schopenhauer, again Jung), the unconscious is a philosophical metaphor, while in psychology it consists of “processes in the mind that occur automatically and are not available to introspection”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_mind. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Volume II (1844), Translated from the German by R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp, Boston, Ticknor and Co., 1887, Chapter XIX. On the primacy of the will in self-consciousness, p. 411: “The will, as the thing in itself, constitutes the inner, true, and indestructible nature of man; in itself, however, it is unconscious”. In a fine philosophical analysis, Sebastian Gardner, “Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious”, in Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought, Edited

84. “'The Consciousness Quotient': introducing the consciousness See Ovidiu Brăzdău, experience as a research variable in psychological assessment”, 2013, http://www.consciousness-quotient.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Consciousness-QuotientOvidiu-Brazdau-TSC-2013-Talk-on-CQ_2.pdf. In Blaga, the style is the transposition of mental structures containing an ancient and continuous logic of natural determinism over man, transposed within his unconscious psychical world; the style is thus a psychological universal, manifested through n creative and living processes; in this respect, it is an essence which precedes the everyday existence of people. Blaga was from this standpoint an anti-existentialist, an essentialist (thus pertaining to a premodern representation of the human ontos: where the ontological data/ideas prefigure and explain the real existence of man). For Blaga, this existence only strengthens the immemorial style framing the human – here, Romanian – life.

86. Orizont şi stil [Horizon and Style] Bucureşti, Fundaţia pentru literatură şi artă In Blaga ( “Regele Carol II,” 1935), the difference between the “major” and “minor” culture is not so much in quality, but in the provincial and somehow closed character of the popular culture/retired from the frame of a European/world language: briefly, the inexistent or low European recognition and influence. In Blaga, a “minor” culture is not necessarily inferior, as was the case in Emil Cioran, Schimbarea la faţă a României [The Transfiguration of Romania], Bucureşti, Vremea, 1936. Blaga’s „minor” culture is related to the “childhood” of a people.

87. Kant’s In the philosophy of knowledge, the unconscious has interesting functions, as Philosophy of the Unconscious, Piero Giordanetti, Riccardo Pozzo and Marco Sgarbi (eds.), De Gruyter, 2012, has demonstrated. As: “unconscious representations in objective cognition” (Patricia Kitcher, “Kant’s Unconscious 'Given'”), „differentiation of clear/obscure and distinct/confused representations” and “indistinct intuitions therefore define a type of nonconceptual content” (Dietmar Heidemann, “The 'I think' Must Be Able To Accompany All My Representations”), Leibniz’s unconscious as “‘the area of obscure perception” (Anne Pollock, “Kant’s defeated counterpart”) etc.

88. ”, in Sebastian Gardner, “Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious op. cit., has showed why the late 19th century German idealism was so well received by the cultivated public of the time: because he had offered “a representation, a Weltbild, to which that diffuse negative affect (of deep dissatisfaction) could attach itself, and in which it could be felt to have received expression” (p. 199). Von Hartmann’s Unconscious “might be considered an expression of cultural decay” (p. 196), also because it “fail to give articulate form to anything deep in the human situation” since it “demands a total self-transcendence for which no intelligible motivational root is (or can be) provided” (ibid.). The epistemological weakness is related to von Hartmann’s remoteness from the real social problems: he had considered the optimism-pessimism problem, central to (his) practical philosophy “as if it were merely an opposition within theoretical reason that simply poses a formal problem for the construction of a systematic, “scientific” conception of reality − a conflict of two rival natural-scientific or metaphysical hypotheses concerning the nature of the world” (ibid.). This is the reason of a psychological information and education absolutely separated from the critical judgement over the context where one should have a “positive thinking”, i.e. “affirmative”, and should “know himself” in a neutral and undisputable social environment.

93. L’évolution créatrice Henri Bergson, (1907), septième édition, Paris, F. Alcan, 1911, p. 14. Ibidem, p. 49. The lack of conscience associated with plants has led people to call a person in a state of unconsciousness, of insensibility – a vegetable. Somehow like the nonliving matter behaving in a determined and foreseeable manner. Henri Bergson, « L’énergie spirituelle » (1911), Henri Bergson, Essais et conférences, Paris, Félix Alcan, 1919, pp. 1-29 (p. 10). And this action excludes any effort, since it consists in

98. Kant et le chimpanzé. Essai sur l’être humain, la morale et l’art Georges Chapouthier, , Paris, Belin, 2009, pp. 61, 56. Henri Bergson, « L’énergie spirituelle », p. 16. Ibidem, p. 17. The philosophical demonstration of the ontological significance of the effort – Henri Bergson, « L’effort intellectuel » (1902), Henri Bergson, Essais et conférences, Paris, Félix Alcan, 1919, pp. 163-202 – is following : if the effort of conscience is painful, it is at the same time precious because only through effort may consciousness pull out from it more than it contains, and humans can raise above themselves; the effort of conscience is which emphasises the human, i.e. moral characteristic: not only the development of the self, but also the development of the human behaviour of the others; this is an “inventive heroism” and for this reason the moralist is superior to the artist; at the level of its constitution, the effort manifests when the mental processes move from a level of conscience to another (thus both automatism and reflection are used from the same goal, for example, the recall), and when the targets are successive, configuring a complex final purpose; the mechanism of the evocation is that of the succession of: the dynamic scheme (which is rather an indication of what the conscience should do in order to remember, so a scheme of the whole aimed at remembering, a scheme of the determinism of the desired phenomenon, a scheme of logical steps related to it, or a landmark or framework, or a supposed meaning, constructed hypothetically) which converts – because it calls them – into imagined representations of the purpose; more: this mechanism supposes the

105. Would this desire not be a manner of man’s conatus? Hence would it not be not only conatus but a will of life transposed through human values (this transposition being considered by psychoanalysts as refrains/inhibitions manifested in the preconscious and conscious)? See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams (1897), Translated by A.A. Brill, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1913, http://www.bartleby.com/285/.

110. : it suggests the triumphant “science” of the non-problematic, or the nonIt is again an irony problematic of the routine or fake science.

111. Cenzura transcendentă, Bucureşti, Cartea Românească, 1934 [The Lucian Blaga, Transcendental Censorship].

112. ἀρχή) – as the cause of things and of their explanation. The origin (Still in Sanskrit: if the mind (cetana) is necessary even to see what is shining (zobhana), it is much more the condition (yadvA, dhI – mind) to see the essence of things (sattva, dharmatA – essence). The First Philosophers of Greece, Arthur Fairbanks editor and translator, London, K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1898, http://history.hanover.edu/texts/presoc/pythagor.html, PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS: PASSAGES IN THE DOXOGRAPHISTS.: [Page 151] …Pythagoras et al.: “The sense-perceptions are deceptive”. iv. 9. Ibidem, [Page 151]: 405. “The followers of Pythagoras and of the mathematicians on reflections of vision: For vision moves directly as it were against the bronze [of a mirror], and meeting with a firm smooth surface it is turned and bent back on itself, meeting some such experience as when the arm is extended and then bent back to the shoulder. iv. 20”.

118. δος or δέα – came from the Sanskrit The Greek idea – εἶ ἰ to see – pazyati, vidarzyati, vilocayati – but with the power of mind, since the appearance is only which seems to be (bhAti – to shine; nirbhAti, sambhAti – seem to be) (I underlined). But let me quote again Pythagoras, The First Philosophers of Greece, Arthur Fairbanks editor and translator, [p. 151]: “Aet. Plac. v. 20; 432. Pythagoras, Plato: The souls of animals called unreasoning are reasonable, not however with active reasoning powers, because of an imperfect mixture of the bodies and because they do not have the power of speech, as in the case of apes and dogs; for these have intelligence but not the power of speech”.

120. This dependence means that the power of „resistance” of reality is connected with the levels/manners to express them. For the definition of reality in terms of resistance, see Basarab Nicolescu, “The Idea of Levels of Reality and its Relevance for Non-Reduction and Personhood”, Transdisciplinarity in Science and Religion, n° 4, 2008, Curtea Veche Publ., Bucharest, pp. 11-26 (“By 'reality' we intend first of all to designate that which resists our experiences, representations, descriptions, images, or even mathematical formulations… Of course, not everything is resistance. For example, the notion of angels is certainly connected with non-resistance. As are the powers of God, they do not resist our experiences, representations, descriptions, images, and mathematical formulations”). Since the author has mentioned that the definition in terms of resistance is “in a sense used by scientists”, it follows that the non-resistant realities are those expressed metaphysically. But see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, London, Basil Blackwell, 1986, § 428, p. 127: “This queer thing, 'thought'—but it does not strike us as queer when we are thinking. Thought does not strike us as mysterious while we are thinking, but only when we say, as it were retrospectively: "How was that possible?" How was it possible for thought to deal with the very object itself? We feel as if by means of it we had caught reality in our net”. Ibidem, § 109, p. 47.

123. : “There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away Ibidem with all explanation, and description alone must take its place”. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (1962), Second Edition, J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisā editors, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 3. Ibidem, p. 4. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language, Mouton & Co, 'SGravenhage, 1956, p. 56.

129. Ştiinţă şi raţionalism The Romanian philosopher, then the young Mircea Florian, (1926), Bucureşti, Editura Academiei RSR, 1968 [Science and rationalism] made the distinction between the cognizance I (the object interesting for man’s explanation) and cognizance II (thought about the object). Language was for him an imperfect and misleading mediation of

133. , 99a and b: “But to say that those things are the cause of my doing what I do, Plato, Phaedo and that I act with intelligence but not from the choice of what is best, would be an extremely careless way of talking. Whoever talks in that way is unable to make a distinction and to see

136. Michel Henry, Barbarism (1987), Translated by Scott Davidson, London, New York, Continuum Impacts, 2012, p. 21: “the disarray of the present time results from the extreme development of scientific knowledge and the technologies to which it has given rise and from its rejection of the knowledge of life”. See this image at Derek J. De Solla Price, Little science, big science, Columbia University Press, 1963.

25. years certifies the institutional situation of universities, academic journals and intellectuals – subjected to the mechanism of market economy competition –, but not the required higher degree of critical and self-critical view. See (even in non-humanities) Mark Bauerlein, Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Wayne Grody, Bill McKelvey, and Stanley W. Trimble, We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research, http://chronicle.com/article/We-Must-Stop-theAvalanche-of/65890/. Actually, this state of things is antagonist to the necessary scientific dialogue and constitution of truth only as a result of collective scientific control (Plato, Gorgias, 506a: “if any of you think the admissions I am making to myself are not the truth, you must seize upon them and refute me. For I assure you I myself do not say what I say as knowing it, but as joining in the search with you; so that if anyone who disputes my statements is found to be on the right track, I shall be the first to agree with him”). Alain Badiou, Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (1998), Translated and introduced by Peter Hallward, London, New York, Verso, 2001, pp. 9-10, 13.