BOOK REVIEW

The Ontological Pathologies of Constantin Noica

Constantin Noica: Six Maladies of the Human Spirit. Translated by Ian Blyth.Plymouth: University of Plymouth, 2009. 192 pages; $30.00 hardcover.

Besides the somatic maladies, identified for centuries, and the psychical maladies, identified forbarely a century, there must also be maladies of a higher order, of the spirit let us suppose. Noneurosis can explain the despair of Ecclesiastes, the sentiment of exile on earth or of alienation,metaphysical ennui, the sentiment of the void or of the absurd, the hypertrophy of the I, rejection ofeverything, and empty controversy.

—Noica

Constantin Noica (1909–87) was one of the most original thinkers ever pro-duced by the nation of Romania. Unlike many Romanian intellectuals who fled tothe post-War West, Noica lived all his life in Romania and wrote in the Romanianlanguage. For this reason his work is less well known than the work of Romanianemigrés like Paul Celan, Mircea Eliade, Eugene Ionesco, or E. M Cioran. SixMaladies of the Human Spirit is Noica’s masterpiece; this is the first Englishtranslation.

Six Maladies is a depressing book, written in depressing circumstances. From1945 to 1948, an increasingly oppressive Stalinist regime clamped down onRomanian intellectual life. In 1948, strict censorship was imposed on authors whodid not adhere to the party line, enforced by extensive blacklisting, censorship,and book banning of uncooperative authors. The greater the author, the greater therisk, and in 1949 Noica was arrested, tried, and sentenced to 10 years in theCampulung-Muscel labor camp in Wallachia. He served his full term and wasreleased in 1959.

In 1960 Noica was rearrested on charges of conspiracy against the state, ofreading illicit texts by Goethe and Hegel, and of corresponding with the émigréphilosopher E. M. Cioran and his followers. Noica responded, “I am guilty, not infront of your laws, but in front of those in the jury box. I am asking for justice thatI cannot contest, i.e. supreme justice. In what it concerns me, I am asking for themaximum sentence which I will not appeal.” His fellow defendant Nicu Steinhardtsaid, “my only thought is that I am proud to stand with these people.” When Noica

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was released in 1964, he begged Steinhardt’s forgiveness for provoking the court.Steinhardt knelt and said, “From you I was born again of water and the spirit.” Thethreat of prison and the atmosphere of a police state permeate Noica’s later workand provide its tone but not its content.

Noica’s philosophical development falls into three stages. Before the war,Noica’s interests ranged across the whole history of philosophy. From 1944 to1978, he began to work on what he called “a national ontology,” somewhat in thespirit of Heidegger. From 1978, he worked on a general ontology, in the spirit ofHegel. Given the political upheavals of Eastern Europe, the later ontology isastonishing, since, as in Schopenhauer, it provides an account of human sufferingderived from logical and ontological categories, not from human malevolence orhistorical forces. The maladies of the human spirit stem from the structure of theworld, of life as it must be lived by the finite beings that men are.

Six Maladies of the Contemporary Spirit was initially published in 1978 byEditura Universe, Bucharest; the text was published in the same year as Noica’sother work Sentimentul. The text is a continuation of a thought Noica first devel-oped when writing an unpublished work on Being. Six Maladies of the Contem-porary Spirit embeds the ontological model into universal features of culture andhistory, with numerous references to world literature. The bottom line is clear:Given the nature of finite being, a fulfilled being is rare. Most suffer fromontological deficiencies, either of a passive or an active sort. The three passivedeficiencies belong to accepting the general, the individual, and the determinate;in contrast the three active deficiencies stem from rejecting the determinate, theindividual, and the general (Noica’s favorite term for “universal”). Noica namesthe first three passive maladies: Catholitis, Todetitis, and Horetitis, and their activecousins, Ahoretia, Atodetia, and Acatholia. (Like Heidegger, Noica has no fear ofneologisims.) The maladies are ontological in nature and unlike somatic maladies;they are uniquely constitutive of Geist. They are incurable even when their causesare known. In Noica’s world, the truth will not set you free.

CATHOLITIS

Catholita, Catholitis, derived from the Greek word katholou, is the maladymarked by “a deficiency of the general.” The malady is revealed by the obsessionof the being to escape his individual existence in order to reach some form ofuniversality. The individual resents the fact that although everything has generalqualities, nothing has a unique set of them. The individual shares general qualities,and Catholitis reminds the individual that he has no general quality that fits himalone. It’s not a fixed essence that the victim of Catholitis seeks, but rather, theindividual searches for something general that is a manifestation of his ownindividuality. “The human being wants ‘to be,’ wants to be for the others, for

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himself, in the absolute, in history, wants to be like a monument, renowned, likejustice, like truth, an achiever, a destroyer—all for the sake of being.” The struggleis found in the knowledge that there is an “other” general, and the acceptance ofthe individual of his inability to achieve it. The individual is constantly reposi-tioning himself in the prism of his life, not as a universal but as a general.

Catholitis is therefore, according to Noica, the juggling of the individual’smany general qualities and his search for a particularity in generality. The dis-equilibrium, unbalanced nature of the search for this particular generality—thesearch among the many generalities—is derived from the multiple manifestationsof the individual. Sometimes the individual seeks a level of being correspondingto the preexisting natural order of things “the meaning of things in nature prior tous, their historical justification.”1 These things are prior to us, and in most cases themany forms of manifestation of the individual are obtained from the order ofnature of things—history, culture, and other forms of existence—while nevercoming from nothingness.

TODETITIS

Todetida, Todetitis, is derived from the Greek tode ti, “this thing.” Todetitis isinflicted by a deficiency of individuality, a deficiency of “this particular thing,” alack of singularity marked by the individual’s need to capture individuality. Themalady is found in the individual’s theoretical disposition and in his inability tofind his own individuality.

Noica writes that both nature and the divine suffer from Todetitis. The religiousconsciousness of the individual is said to resent, often, the abstract perfection ofdivinity, so the religious man seeks the divine personified. Christianity has sur-vived because it has individualized the divine, who arrives from nowhere to formhis own identity from imperfection and turn himself into man. Nature is also saidto suffer from this malady, and in order to surpass the struggle human beings faceagainst the abstract, men invented myths to individualize natural forces.

Todetitis is often present in the religious man (divinity) and in those beingsendowed with reason (knowledge), as Todetitis is associated with all supremedisciplines. The spiritual malady of Todetitis is reactivated, under the form ofsuffering, and inner conflict; the hardship arises from the inability to revealindividuality. Man reproduces the hardship—in order to cope and eventuallyeliminate his obsession with perfection—in a symbolic world, in which absoluteexactitude, and the affirmation of logos, captures the imperfections—the contra-dictions and paradoxes—of natural language and mathematics:

1 Constantin Noica,�Sase Maladii Ale Spiritului Contemporan (Bucuresti

�: Humanitas, 1997) 35.

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Symbolic logic, allied with the machine and mechanization to the point of automation, which matchit and in whose service it places itself, expresses in its pure state the primacy of the General overall that which can be individual, and thus the primacy of rigor, of exactitude, of mechanistic-rationalperfection, beneath which the nonetheless natural being of man risks deregulation through anexcess of regulation.2

The predicate calculus, in which individuals are instances, also suffer from Todeti-tis. But Noica writes that modern man, through the degradation of the “supremeinstances (the divine, being as such, absolute time and space),”3 and using theinductive method of knowing general entities, has ridden himself of “his obsessionwith perfection, and one form of Todetitis.”4

HORETITIS

Horetita, Horetitis, derived from the Greek horos, translates as determination,the disorder of an action, its defect and outcome. It’s a deficiency of determina-tions, an agony of the will. The sufferers of Horetitis suffer from a disorder givenby the determinations the individual assigns to himself. Thus, Catholitis relates tosentiments, Todetitis to the intellect, and Horetitis to the will.

Horetitis is best exemplified when actions and thoughts are not in harmony,when the individual is tortured by his inability to act in accordance with his ownthoughts. The malady leads to the precipitation, if not fully, to the diminution ofdeterminations. The malady embodies an “acute” form of impatience. The maladyis also present in non-human entities, such as “the Luceafarul (morning star),angels, and the saurian species.” The “morning star” reference requires someexplanation for non-Romanians.

In Eminescu’s5 Luceafarul, the Morning Star character represents an instance ofthe general. In his search for individualization, he encounters constant impedi-ments. In order to achieve a permanent state of individuality, the general has toreceive determinations.

2 Constantin Noica, Alistair Ian Blyth, and Florin Stoiciu, Six Maladies of the Contemporary Spirit(Plymouth: University of Plymouth, 2009) 20.

3 Noica (1997): 54.4 Ibid: 54.5 Romanian national poet, Mihai Eminescu, wrote a poem titled Luceafarul; the poem is said to derive

from a Romanian folktale that was published in Berlin by a German writer, J. G. Kunisch, in 1861.The poem can be described as a romantic poem that looks at the destiny of man. The poem is a seriesof metaphors, with epic nuances and symbols that suggest philosophical ideas. It’s equally aphilosophic and a love poem. It’s perhaps the most known and admired poem in the Romanianlanguage. It’s Eminescu’s most valuable literary creation, not only from the point of view of aperfection of form and continuation of ideas, but due also to the poetic, language, and syntax, whichmake the poem an example of an extraordinary artistic creation.

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He cannot give himself earthly Determinations, thus interweaving his todetitis with acute horetitis.The Demiurge will reveal to him that he might nonetheless be able to acquire Determinations, if hedesired them in consonance with general nature; but Luceafarul desires the Determinations ofhuman love, which is naturally interwoven with abnegation and death, whereas what is generalcannot enter into the night of individual abnegation and death.6

Luceafarul cannot remain under the limits denoted by the boundaries of individu-ality, because he cannot assign himself determinations fitted for the boundaries.With impatience he wants the determinations of love, in this case a cause of death,but the general refuses to be subjugated to death. The conflict is an acute case ofHoretitus. Luceafarul dies as an individual, while remaining in eternity a univer-sal, a being with no image and no human determinations.

The second example given in relation to Horetitis is that of angels, strangebeings half individual, half general. The Horetitis of angels stems not fromimpatience in giving or receiving oneself determinations, but rather in the delay ofreceiving assigned determinations. Angels are in a perpetual state of nothingness,they have a general nature, and each angel is a single species. Angels have nodeterminations, neither of time nor of space. Every individual must have a hic etnunc, a “here and there,” and angels, until they receive assignments, have no suchdeterminations of time and space.

The third example that Noica discusses is that of saurian. The “saurian” (i.e., thedinosaur) represents the example of a species that has not received the determi-nations necessary to ensure their survival. There is a species; there existed indi-vidual examples of the species, but no determinations now subsist. This is the oldAristotelian problem of whether a species subsists when all its members haveceased to subsist. In Noica, the species survives, seeks to create new instances, andfails. In such cases the will exists, but it lacks potency. From Western literatureNoica enumerates other individuals that suffer from Horetitis, that is, DonQuixote, Nietzsche, Zarathustra, Louis XIV, and Pygmalion!

AHORETIA

The maladies of lucidity start with Ahoretie, Ahoretia. Ahoretia is the con-sensual refusal, for the sake of individuality and to raise oneself to the level ofgeneral, of particular determinations. Noica enumerates three types of suffers ofAhoretia: (1) elements that have the property to attract and pull others withintheir own order (i.e., electrons), (2) cosmic bodies that capture in their orbitother bodies (earth pulls the moon toward itself), and (3) biological assimilation.

6 Noica (2009): 82.

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The individual is the one that assimilates the general found in the exterior. Herewe are dealing with the description of Horetitis in reverse. As in the words ofScheler, “every genuine love, is love for God,” or a biological interpretation,given by Noica, of the same thought, is that when one is in love with an indi-vidual, he or she is engaging in the act of loving the species the individualbelongs to.

ATODETIA

Noica writes that Plato is a sufferer of the fifth malady, Atodetie, Atodetia, asPlato is in constant search of an individual reality under which he can apply hisgeneral ideal of the state. Atodetia is a disease of the aging manifest traditions,rituals, and any team action in which the individual (part of the individual) is leftbehind. Noica attributes this malady to the great idealistic philosophers. Appro-priately in this chapter, Noica discusses his conception of (freedom) and necessity:“Liberty does not belong to the individual, neither to the determination accordedto the individual. The so called freedom of the individual to give himself anydetermination doesn’t represent the true freedom, and rather the emptypossibility—the freedom of determination to not subdue itself to a certain general(freedom, to the plural) deserves even less the name of freedom, as it’s the chaosof pure diversity.”7 Freedom doesn’t belong to the individual because one cannottalk of freedom unless Noica’s ontological model is met, that is, where everymalady is eliminated and the becoming of being is manifested.

ACATHOLIA

Acatholie, Acatholia, is a disease of civilization. Acatholia is a negation ofthe general—dissecting and disciplining—a malady that leads to lassitude andprogress. “It is the malady of the slave who has forgotten his master, andinner self.”8 The general is categorically denied, in the name of exactness,of practicability (pragmatism). Acatholia serves pride and the grounding ofsociety through respect for self and others. Acatholia can be a virtue because ofits ability to establish etiquette and determining (ordering) proper behavior(civilized).

The alienation of this orderly society is illustrated by Noica by quoting part ofchapter 38 from Tao Te Ching:

7 Noica (1997): 121.8 From

�Sase Maladii Ale Spiritului Contemporan “Acatholia este maladia sclavului uman care a uitat

de orice stapân, pâna si de cel launtric.”

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Therefore, the Tao is lost, and then virtueVirtue is lost, and then benevolenceBenevolence is lost, and then righteousnessRighteousness is lost, and then etiquetteThose who have etiquette are a thin shell of loyalty and sincerity

Acatholicia requires the conscious and voluntary refusal of the general. In thismalady, there is a denial of meaning. For Noica, this is the dominant malady of thecontemporary civilization despite its many scientific and technical successes.People live in this contemporary society well, but everything is here and now, hicet nunc. The spirit of Empiricism, Positivism, Pragmatism, and the Anglo-Saxontradition are all forms of contemporary Catholitis.

THE TRANSLATION

Alistair Ian Blyth gives a good literal translation of Noica’s text. The wordsused in the translation match quite well the Romanian words used by Noica in theoriginal. Though, as a native reader of Noica’s work, I find it difficult to ignore thelack of fluidity in the translation of Six Maladies. The translation is deficient incapturing Noica’s overall method of doing philosophy. For Noica doing philoso-phy cannot be detached from the consciousness of the place, the people, and thelanguage in which the act of doing philosophy takes place. More precisely, IanBlyth’s translation doesn’t capture the Romanian consciousness and the suffusionof Romanian history into its words.

Only in the words of your language can you remember things that you have never learned. Becauseevery word is a forgotten recollection of an agglomeration of meanings that have been buried withineach word. How could we otherwise continue giving meaning to words? In every word there existsa part of forgetting, and is our recollection that gives meaning to words. This is the act of culture;to learn what is new, as it has first arose from within us.9

For Noica the birth of Romanian philosophy is found within the Romaniancommunity and cannot be generalized.

We engage consciousness itself; philosophy doesn’t exist for the sake of the individual, but ratherit unravels steadfast towards an enlarged self (community, sprit, consciousness in general, theabsolute I, reason, the dialectic form). Any movement towards this enlarged self in its intention isa philosophic gesture [. . .] Having the consciousness (one’s sentiment, intuition of one’s exist-ence), of the enlarged self, philosophy overturns things; speculatively you don’t depart from the

9 Constantin Noica, Cuvînt împreuna despre rostirea româneasca (Bucuresti: Editura Eminescu,1987) 7.

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individual self toward the enlarged one, rather you understand the first in relation to the second [. . .]you philosophize the enlarged self; the end is the one with which you must begin. Philosophy startssteadfast from the end, the taking from the beginning, respectively from the end of things. In herheart there can be no progress, no summary, no result.”10

Similar to being, a nation is the opening of a closing, a movement from the generalto the less general, an opening of a closing that has not closed. There is a word inthe Romanian language that best illustrates that idea, that is, the preposition intru,a word not easily translated. But one who speaks the Romanian language has thebenefit of understanding, without additional explanation, the nuances, differentdegrees, and manifestations of the word intru. The word comes from the Latinadverb intro, meaning inside. In Romanian the preposition intru gives the sense ofin the direction of, of spiritual movement; it implies the presence of an existencethat moves (without a being) toward a thing.

A concrete example taken from the text is the translator’s choice to use the wordtumult to translate the Romanian word furor. The original text uses the word furor,and even though in the context of the English text the word tumult appearsappropriate, the Romanian word furor denotes an extreme state, a word whosedefinition encompasses a peak that has been reached. In the context of Noica’stext, Noica uses furor to establish the aggravation of culture and economics; asculture and economics live in the context of history—history is represented by(peaks of) achievements and failures.

Throughout the book there are several cases of words being translated as adirect translation of the Romanian word. For some writers it might not make a bigdifference, but in Noica’s case, the etymology of words, their provenience andusage over time, are very important, as they can make all the difference whenattempting to acquire an eloquent image of the world, a mode of philosophy, anontology, and an epistemology of its own kind (sui-generis).11 Western Europe isjust beginning its appreciation of this unusual oeuvre.

Andreea Prichea, Baruch College, CUNY

10 Constantin Noica and Marin Diaconu, Despartirea De Goethe (Bucuresti: Humanitas, 2000)161–62.

11 Constantin Noica, Sentimentul Romanesc al fiintei (Bucuresti: Editura Eminescu 1978) 5.

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