Six Maladies of the Human Spirit. By Constantin Noica. Translated by AlistairIan Blyth. (University of Plymouth Press, 2009. Pp. 176. Price £20.00.)
2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 63; Issue: 253 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-9213.12062
ISSN1467-9213
Autores ResumoThis book, now translated from its Romanian original and lavishly illustrated by Florin Stoiciu, first appeared in 1978. Noica (1909–1987), one of Romania's most original philosophers, was briefly involved with the Iron Guard, but he nevertheless remained in Romania after World War II and paid for his youthful indiscretion with a period of house arrest (1949–1958) and imprisonment (1958–1964). He was therefore isolated from the mainstream of European philosophy, though he was well acquainted with the works of major philosophers, such as Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Sartre, and influential on younger Romanian philosophers, such as Gabriel Liiceanu and Andrei Plesu. Martin Luther is reported as saying that humanity is like a drunkard on a horse: he first falls off on the left side, then remounts and falls off to the right. Noica finds no fewer than six maladies of the ‘spirit’. More generally, the maladies are also maladies of ‘Being’, reflecting the ‘six possible situations of the precariousness of Being’, in a sense of ‘Being’ that hovers between Heidegger's sense of it and Hegel's. The maladies are classified in accordance with Hegel's tripartition of Being into the universal or ‘general’, the particular or ‘determinate’, and the ‘individual’. Three of the maladies are related positively to these three aspects, and three are related to them negatively. To each malady Noica assigns, ‘not without a smile’, a Greek‐derived name on the model of the nomenclature of physical and psychical maladies: catholitis, horetitis, todetitis, acolathia, ahoretia, and atodetia. The relationship between a positive malady and its negation is not straightforward. Catholitis, for example, is not the possession of an adequate general meaning or order; that would hardly be a malady. It is rather the lack of such a meaning, a deficiency of which one is either unaware or is seeking to repair. Acolathia, by contrast, is the lucid rejection of universal meaning. Don Juan, for example, suffers from acolathia, because he rejects universality, just as Tolstoy in War and Peace rejects individuality (atodetia) and the characters in Waiting for Godot reject determinations (ahoretia).
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