Applied Social Sciences : Philosophy and Theology [1 ed.] 9781443867160, 9781443844048

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Applied Social Sciences

Applied Social Sciences: Philosophy and Theology

Edited by

Georgeta RaĠă, Patricia-Luciana Runcan and Michele Marsonet

Applied Social Sciences: Philosophy and Theology, Edited by Georgeta RaĠă, Patricia-Luciana Runcan and Michele Marsonet This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Georgeta RaĠă, Patricia-Luciana Runcan and Michele Marsonet and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4404-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4404-8

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables.............................................................................................. ix List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... xi Foreword .................................................................................................. xiii

Chapter One: Philosophy Seduction: Strategy and Concept via Postmodernity Mihaela-Meral Ahmed ................................................................................ 3 On the Logical Form of Institutional Creation from John Searle’s Perspective Ioan Biri‫ ܈‬..................................................................................................... 7 On Truth and Lie: A Philosophical Anthropological Analysis Ionel Bu‫܈‬e.................................................................................................. 15 Human Values in Applied Ethics: The Interpretative Models of Beings’ Fragility in Contemporary Ethics Alina-Daniela Ciric ................................................................................... 23 Moral Determinations in Public Life: An Application for the Current Romanian Environment Ion Hirghiduú............................................................................................. 31 Why the Brillo Box? The Recovery of the Aesthetic Gizela Horváth........................................................................................... 37 Phronetics: A New Way to Approach Social Phenomenology Adrian Jinaru and Andreea Bîrneanu ........................................................ 45 Social Therapy: Philosophical Niches Florin Lobon‫܊‬............................................................................................. 53

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Table of Contents

Is Marxism a Good Idea That Fails in Practice? Marius-Robert Lungu ................................................................................ 59 Social Aesthetics: Contemporary Approaches of a Schillerian Theme ‫܇‬tefan-Sebastian Maftei............................................................................. 65 Audience of Philosophy in the Periphery: Gerard of Cenad Claudiu-Marius Mesaro‫ ܈‬........................................................................... 71 Jung’s Phenomenological Ontology: Esse in Anima Iuliu-Mihai Novac ..................................................................................... 79 New Media: A Hermeneutic Approach Dorin Popa and Iasmina Petrovici ............................................................. 87 Is Globalization Meaningful? Bogdan Popoveniuc................................................................................... 95 Social Applications of Art: Art as Social Therapy Anca-Raluca Purcaru............................................................................... 103 Practical and Transcendental Philosophy: A Phenomenological Case Study Irina Rotaru.............................................................................................. 111 Causal Monism and the Issue of Mental Causation Cristinel Ungureanu................................................................................. 119

Chapter Two: Theology Church and Civil Government in Romania: Beyond the Byzantine Legacy Daniel Bărnu‫܊‬........................................................................................... 129 Antinomies of Church—In the World, but not of the World in Social Theology Remus Groze ........................................................................................... 137 Nae Ionescu’s Romanianism: “Being Romanian Means Being an Orthodox” Marius-Robert Lungu .............................................................................. 145

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vii

Divinity and Roman Provincial Administration upon Arrival of the First Colonists in Dacia Mihaela Martin ........................................................................................ 151 Religion: A Persistent “Illusion” Corina Matei............................................................................................ 157 Paul’s Letters and Communities: A Sociological Analysis of Key Contributions during the 1980s Alexandru Neagoe ................................................................................... 163 Model Par Excellence: Social Workers and Crisis Models Elena ùtefănescu...................................................................................... 171 Being of Diakonia: The Dialectic between Mystical and Social Nichifor Tănase ....................................................................................... 179 Contributors............................................................................................. 187

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1-1. Correlation between assessment of the political and local administrative system and the variable gender..........................................34 Table 1-2. How the inhabitants of the Jiu Valley perceive their civic sense.................................................................................................................35 Table 1-3. Harteloh’s table of competences (after Harteloh 2010) ................57 Table 2-1. Survey questions and answers (%) .................................................159

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 2-1. Main deities in Dacia according to their origin...................................154

FOREWORD

The book Applied Social Sciences: Philosophy and Theology provides readers with an important set of essays related to the two aforementioned fields of study. As for philosophy, many topics are carefully taken into account, and I limit myself to mentioning only some of them. Aesthetics plays a key role in contemporary philosophy and several authors examine its various aspects such as the question of identification of works of art, the concept of “social aesthetics,” the social therapeutic function that art can have, and the relationships among hermeneutics, aesthetics and communication sciences. Other chapters deal with ethical issues like, for example, the role of human values in applied ethics and moral determinations in public life. The meaning and role of postmodernism in philosophy and society is examined at length in various contributions to the book, and the same is true for phenomenology at large. Even the theoretical seduction and practical failure of Marxism are addressed, while anthropological issues are studied with reference to truth and other key philosophical concepts. John Searle’s theory of intentionality is seen as a factor for creating social institutions, and the true meaning of “globalization” is investigated in another article. Many chapters deal directly with theological and religious topics. For instance, the alleged “illusion” of religion versus its persistency is analyzed, along with the current relations between church and civil government in Romania, the presence of different forms of Christianity in the Romanian nation, the dialogue between social theology and anthropological research, the antinomic nature of the church. All chapters included in the book are original and open new perspectives on the many issues addressed by the authors. Even the philosophical styles are different, covering hermeneutics, analytic philosophy, historical approach, postmodernism, communication theory, and linguistic approach. Some chapters are theoretical, and others have a more empirical or historical flavour. There is, however, an underlying unity because they all purport to provide new ideas to professionals involved in the socio-humanistic field. This volume is addressed not only to specialists, but it is accessible to the wider public interested in an interdisciplinary approach. Michele MARSONET

CHAPTER ONE PHILOSOPHY

SEDUCTION: STRATEGY AND CONCEPT VIA POSTMODERNITY MIHAELA-MERAL AHMED

Introduction Seduction represents not only a postmodern discursive strategy, but also the ultimate discursive strategy. Baudrillard calls it the “fatal strategy.” Seduction represents one of the major themes of postmodern culture because it transforms the modern theoretical pattern in which the subject exerts its dominance on the object through knowledge. In the case of seduction, the object imposes its dominance over the subject at the first level, where the object is annihilated because of its destructive inner mechanism. Seduction is primarily opposed to interpretation, these two concepts illustrating the antagonistic conflict between the postmodern and the modern. The interpretation may lead, in its most extreme form, to transparency and even to obscenity.

Postmodernity is Interdisciplinary This chapter presents an interdisciplinary analysis specific to various research fields: linguistics, rhetoric, aesthetics, postmodern philosophy, and communication sciences, as we believe that postmodernity is interdisciplinary. This research relies on postmodern texts, especially the works of Jean Baudrillard. It is a postmodern theme analyzed from a postmodern point of view.

Discussions on Seduction: A Postmodern Approach Seduction is the opposite of manipulation. Manipulation requires the intention to conquer, to change, to estrange itself, while seduction does not take these elements into consideration. Seduction is innocent. According to the pragmatic theory of language, through repetition everything

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Seduction: Strategy and Concept via Postmodernity

becomes a concept due to its presence in all contexts. Thus, the more we analyse seductiveness, the more it seems like dislike because it is gaining significance, and postmodern thinking appreciates deficiency of meaning. The frequency of emergence of a term transforms it into a concept, through the same mechanism that transforms simple people into celebrities, or simple facts into events. Postmodern times are an era of constructed celebrities and fabricated events. We no longer simulate events, we create them. The work of art is not the only human creation— we create everything, and everything can be a work of art. All boundaries have been dissolved. We are in the POSTmodern age (Harvey 1990).

Seduction: A Concept? Seduction implies nonsense, and nonsense seduces us. Logic is never seductive—seduction can occur in things that escape the logical order of all occurrences. We are seduced by the “improbable” that is close to the “impossible.” The rhetorical strategy of seduction does not use evidence; it is not what we usually call a discourse, but quite the opposite. We are fascinated by signs without sense. This kind of sign has the potential to absorb people, to drive people from their path: “The attraction of the void lies at the basis of seduction … seduction begins in secrecy” ((Baudrillard 1979, 77–78). Information leads to an exacerbation of transparency that Baudrillard characterizes as obscene. Clarity and transparency do not lead to knowledge but to the absolute reverse, a deconstructed universe. The secret is the solution to the eternal proliferation of information. The limitation of the enigmatic role of language leads to tragic consequences for the entire society. Transparency means the cessation of this function. Baudrillard’s well-known figures of transpolitics—the obese, the hostage, and the obscene—can be applied in this game of transparency and secrecy. The obese involves transparency, and is linked to theory as information.

Seduction vs. Obscene There are two kinds of obscene: surface obscene and deep obscene. Surface obscene may occur at the image level, and image can be obscene. Image does not limit itself to being obscene only when it is used to manipulate. In this case, an image is not seductive, but quite the opposite—it is the cultural pattern of the postmodern age, and it is seductive. We cannot explain the means by which an image can alienate people from themselves. Image has its secrets, by which it seduces us. Baudrillard’s obscene is the figure that states for dissolution of the secret.

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Loss of distance is obscene, and also leads to transparency. When there are no more secrets in the world, everything we encounter is obscene, and so essence of science is always obscene, because discovery and research involve revealing secrets. The idea that the more we explore, the more we end up knowing everything leads to destruction. Therefore, we need to keep this vital secret of human thinking. Things cannot become fully transparent.

Seduction: A Strategy? Information can be an extreme phenomenon because it can reach the point where an overabundance leads to full transparency of all things. The insistence on an over-accomplishment of an aim leads to an opposed phenomenon (Baudrillard 2008). This is what made the rise of postmodernism possible, because it marks the nuanced distinction between postmodernism and postmodernity. Postmodern and postmodernity are both situated in the different theoretical approach of postmodernism. Postmodernism is an extreme phenomenon. Technology is seen by Baudrillard as the monstrous result of the over estimation of information. Seduction is a mechanism that reverses the modern hierarchy between subject and object—in this phase, the object dominates the subject, which is surface seduction; in deep seduction, the seducer is seduced themself because the mechanism of seduction is destructive.

Seduction vs. Theory and Manipulation To the assumption of command of reality (science), Baudrillard opposes the assumption of power of illusion (image) (2008). Art is not the ultimate hypothesis of mastery of illusion because illusion can be understood as a state located at the second level of the simulacrum (a simulacrum cannot pretend that it is an image because it deliberately imitates reality in order to be confused with it). Images procure pure pleasure that does not rely on moral, social or even aesthetic judgments. Their strength lies in the fact that images are immoral. Baudrillard’s idea is surprising because, in general, their moral and social dimension fascinate us less than their aesthetic dimension. Images have an objective existence but the fact that all images do not draw the attention has to do with subjectivity. The power of images to fascinate and ultimately seduce is not due to their meaning and representation but to the fact that meaning and representation tend to disappear in them. Images are non-representational, and they lack substance. Images not only have meaning, but they also produce and

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absorb it. Meaning cancels the fatal strategies, even dissolving the reality principle. Sontag (2001) shares the same views with Baudrillard concerning the critique of transparency. The main limit of theory is transparency. It raises the question of how far we can proceed with the interpretation of signs, by which means of interpretation we obtain too much information. We cannot use the information because it is too extended. The concepts are no longer distinguishable. The more information we receive from various disciplines about something, the more chances there are that the object of research will be dissolved as a concept. Therefore, transparency is the major risk of Baudrillard’s obese. Information in postmodern culture leads to transparency. According to Baudrillard, manipulation requires intention, while seduction is random and innocent. Manipulation represents the achievement of a goal while seduction is not even self-conscientious because seduction is the strategy of the object and manipulation is the strategy of the subject. The only problem is that any strategy requires intention.

Conclusion: Postmodern Culture, the Limits of Seduction Although seduction is one of the major acquisitions of postmodernity, we may wonder to what extent recognizing its academic strength does more than driving it away from postmodernity, turning it into a so-called strong and modern concept. The same issue occurs when we consider seduction as a postmodern mechanism, because any mechanism implies a construct, involves functionality, not just pure randomness.

References Baudrillard, J. & Witwer, Julia. (2001). The Vital Illusion. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Baudrillard, J. (1979). Seduction. Montréal: C-THEORY BOOKS. —. (1990). La Transparence du Mal. Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes [Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena]. Paris: Galilée. —. (2008). Fatal Strategies (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Harvey, D. (1991). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Sontag, Susan. (2001). Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York, NY: Picador.

ON THE LOGICAL FORM OF INSTITUTIONAL CREATION FROM JOHN SEARLE’S PERSPECTIVE IOAN BIRIù

Introduction This study relies on John Searle’s theory about the role of collective intentionality in the creation of social institutions. This theory is now seen as the most elaborated (Varzi 2010) conception about the explanation of institutional reality. This approach is one of applied logic. We are starting from the following fundamental ideas presented by John Searle: -

The logical form of institutional creation is the form of performative declarations The constitutive rule of social institutions has the form “X counts as Y in context C,” or simply “X counts as Y in C.”

What is a one hundred euro banknote? It is about money, the institution of money, a piece of paper with special signs as a result of a collective agreement (of a collective intentionality) through which one has agreed that the respective piece of paper is worth of one hundred euros in the present economic context. How does this piece of natural paper gain the status of social reality? Through the already-stated collective agreement, the decision that it should allow the person who possesses it to obtain, in return, different goods and services. In a condensed way, Searle’s theory tells us that the social institutions are the result of the application of a constitutive rule which can be expressed by the formula: X counts as Y in context C

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A further explanation is that the intended aim and intentionality can only have three situations: they can be aligned in the direction “mind-world,” the direction “world-mind” and the null case, without directioning.

Methods of Partitive Logic Given that Searle is concerned primarily with the ontology of social institutions rather than the logical aspects, we aim to establish the kind of applied logic suitable for Searle’s theory. To achieve this goal, we consider two aspects: -

-

The “social objects” are referentially opaque, which means to use an intensional logic that is adequate for the theorizing of the constructions which express propositional attitudes and intentions. The collective intentionality expresses a partitive relationship.

In his recent book, Making the Social World, Searle (2010, 19) announces that he plans to make a general theory of the social reality construction. In this theory, one must notice the centrality of Status Function Declarations. Thus, the formula up to now, X counts as Y in context C, must be seen only as one form of the declaration of the function of status, besides other forms of this type. The performance of a function assumes the existence of a collective recognition of the status which the persons or objects have. The status functions can be called deontic powers and these powers represent in effect the glue of society, of the entire civilization. (Searle 2010, 9). The deontic powers are created by the collective intentionality. Intentionality may know different directions of access, from the mind to the world (Ļ), or from the world to the mind (Ĺ). One must distinguish between two types of intention: -

The intentions that precede the performing of an action, which are prior to the action (“prior intention”). The intentions-in-action that is those which are parts of the action itself (“intention-in-action”).

What are the prerequisites for intentionality to be collective? For example, someone, in their quality as a member of a religious community, may think something only as “part” of a collective faith, or someone who is politically engaged may wish something as “part” of a collective wish. Searle is especially interested in cooperative collective intentionality.

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One must take into consideration Searle’s proposal to distinguish between intentionality and intentionality, the assignment of functions (the essential characteristic of intentionality) and the causal ascription being an intensional process par excellence. For Searle, intentionality is the property of sentences and of other representations that do not pass the extensionality test, that is they have “a referential opacity” and do not fulfil the substitution demand, while intentionality is a property of the mind, an orientation towards the objects and states of things in reality. In the assignment process of the functions, symbolization is essential. This symbolization function is achieved by the formula X counts as Y in context C. For Searle (2000, 200), the formula X counts as Y in context C serves as a useful mnemotechnic means to remember the idea that institutional facts exist only because people are prepared to consider or treat things as having a certain statute, and relate a function to this statute which they cannot exert only on the basis of the physical structure of objects. Thus, the formula is nothing but a simple summary of a complex thought. One could further ask how one can logically and methodologically imagine the passing—by assumed obligation—from individual to collective? Searle does not admit the summation method of the conjunction, and he is absolutely right to do this. We are therefore left with the partitive relation direction. This option is repeatedly confessed by Searle, since he constantly turns our attention to the fact that, in a collective intentionality, a personal ego does not operate by itself, and its action is not simply laid near another, is not totalled, since each individual action is part of the collective (this is what some of his critics have not understood). In this relation, an essential spot is taken by the status functions. This presents two specific features: -

They demand a collective intentionality, not only for their creation but also so they can continue their existence after being created. A person or another entity has these types of functions not only in virtue of its physical structure, but also in virtue of the collective enforcement and the recognition of a status.

Of all the speech acts, only declarations have a double direction of access. When I state “this is my house,” I represent my right of property over this house (the access direction being word-to-world), and when, in the same statement, I wait for other persons to accept my representation this means that I created the right only because there is a collective acceptance (the access direction being now world-to-word), having thus a simultaneous

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double direction (Ľ). That is why, in Searle’s conception, the logical form of the creation of the institutional reality is that of the performative statements, of statements with status functions, and the utterances about institutional facts are not always extensional. That is why, logically speaking, these facts do not pass the test of substitution (Leibniz’s law), being referentially opaque, in Quine’s terms. In other words, the part of the formula proposed by Searle, “… counts that …,” will create an intensional context, not extensional. In conclusion, the logical structure of the creation of all institutional realities is the same with the structure of the performative acts, respectively a partitive structure.

Results One should ask the following question: “What kind of partitive logic is right for Searle’s theory?” Our hypothesis is that for Searle’s conception, mereology or holology is not appropriate, but a form of partitive logic that can be called holomery. To determine this, the present study involves a nuanced analysis of how the logical principle of identity operates in Searle’s theory. One should have in the centre of attention the following ideas: -

In the formula X counts as Y in context C, the expression “… counts as …” may be understood as an equivalence, as a symbolic identity. The symbolic identity between X and Y is produced by the double access of the declarations (Ľ). Under the logical aspect, it remains to be established which is the form of identity in these situations. The partitive relation which expresses the collective intentionality is a symbolic-value, which implies a hermeneutical logic.

Let us take, for example, “this is my home.” This is a declaration about a physical object (this house), an object which represents my property (the institution of property). That is, the declaration has the form: “this object (house) X counts as my property Y, in this context C.” The institution of property is expressed and symbolically equated through the physical object which constitutes my house. In other words, it is not about a referential substitution “house-property,” but about a symbolical identification of the property (as institution) with my physical house. What kind of identity is the symbolical identity? As we know, identity is a form of equivalence and the relation of equivalence has the properties of reflexivity, transitivity and symmetry. Such a relation is too strong, and

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it allows the substitution operation. However, Searle turns our attention to the fact that we cannot have a substitution relation, so identity is weakened, attenuated, partial. In general, in any empiric scientific approach, one cannot appeal to a total identity, but to a partial one. What are the features of an attenuated identity? The weaker it is, the more an identity should assure certain continuity on the temporal side, which means that it could be used for the logical relation gender-species. But the identity from Searle’s formula lies in the value register, as from whole to whole or from part to whole, so one cannot use the relation gender-species. When talking about wholes, the philosophical tradition presents at least two modalities of analysis: the “mereologic” modality, initiated by Lesniewski, in which we have ascendant optics because it relies on parts and claims that any part is part of a whole, which, in turn is part of a successive whole, etc.; the “holologic” modality, a modality with distinct optics in comparison to the mereologic one, being a descendant one, starting from the holes to the parts, then from the parts to their respective parts, this theorizing being initiated by Brentano (Poli 2009, 216). Does this mereology help us express the weak identity from Searle’s theory? We think not, since the Lesniewski mereology type does not aim for the value register, respectively the hermeneutic-symbolic identity. Would Brentano’s holology be more useful? At a first look, it may seem so because at least with the organic wholes, we witness a series of nuances. Unfortunately, in the passages postulated between wholes, one cannot clearly see the identity mechanism. For this reason a third solution is presented, a “holomery” modality (Biriú 2012, 183), which, as we know, was tried only by Romanian philosophers (Noica 1986). Holomery is an alternative to mereology and holology, since it is about those exceptional parts which succeed in reaching the power of the whole. Therefore, this is not about a dominant ascendant passage from parts to the whole (as mereology proceeds), nor a predilection towards a descendant one, from the whole to the parts (holology), but about a double perspective (as in the case of the double access declarations from Searle’s theory); from the whole to the parts and the other way around, in the conditions in which the part gains the power of the whole (holomery) or is a wearer of the whole. What happens in the world of the spirit, in the social world? For Constantin Noica, a holomer has another potential over the other diverse ones through the fact that it represents an exceptional singularity, it rises to power, the potential of the whole. Noica’s identity is not thought to be logical or substantial (as persistence), but rather a value of a symbolic sense, as it happens in the cultural spiritual perimeter when, for example, a

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certain language (as a holomer) is able to express the logos in its totality (the part being on the side of the power of the whole, that is the part is identical to the whole, as a symbolic value). We believe that this pattern of thought suits Searle’s conception about the institutional creation. In the example above, the “house” can be understood as a holomer, that is a part of the whole can be called a “property.” Everything happens at a symbolical level. If I do not possess another property, then my “house” is, symbolically speaking, a “part” that rises to the power of the entire property. Let us look at this in detail to see how the weakening of the valuespiritual identity is logically explained. If we take into consideration the direction of analysis of whole-part, in the model proposed by Noica there is unilateral identity in the sense that, in the register of spiritual values, in the symbolic register, the whole passes totally in the part (the logos passes in its totality, without diminution, in a language; the institution of the property, as a social-value whole, passes into the totality in my “house,” when it is the sole property which I possess). Identity is unilateral since it is valid only from whole to part. In other words, in the relation whole ĺ part the identity functions in an absolute way, keeping its properties of reflexivity, symmetry and transitivity: reflexivity: (  x) (  y) ((Rxy › Ryx)ĺRxx)); symmetry: (  x) (  y) (Rxy ĺ Ryx); transitivity: (  x) (  y) (  z) ((Rxy š Ryz) o Rxz)). When we are in the direction of the analysis part ĺ whole, things are changed very much: here the relation of unilateral contradiction dominates. That is the part that will contradict the identity of the whole value, so that it establishes a new whole of the value. When my “house” is the sole property, it is for me the symbol of property as a whole, trying to substitute itself to the entire property. Respectively, when a “part” becomes a holomer, it will contradict one-sidedly the whole to which is related. The contradiction is unilateral since it functions only in the direction part ĺ whole and not the other way around. This unilateral contradiction will impose the following logical properties: ireflexivity: (  x) (  y) ((Rxy › Ryx) o ™ Rxx)); asymmetry: (  x) (  y ) (Rxy o ™ Ryx); intransitivity: (  x) (  y) (  z) ((Rxy š Ryz) o ™ Rxz)).

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Here, we are in a situation as interesting as it gets. Holomery allows a transmission of identity in the direction between whole ĺ part and, at the same time, a rejection of the old whole in the relation part ĺ whole, explicable by the new part’s potential to lift itself to the power of the new whole. The new whole of value will keep an identity greatly weakened in relation to the old whole, and at a pinch can annul that identity.

Conclusions Looking at the process as a whole, and the relation whole ĺ part and the relation part ĺ whole simultaneously, as one already knows, in partitive logics one does not have inclusion relations but compenetration ones. The parts and the wholes interact by compenetration and potentation. What happens in this process of institution of the weak identity from a logical point of view? Taken as a whole, the process of unilateral identity displayed together with the unilateral contradiction tell us that the compenetration must combine the reflexivity of the whole of value with the ireflexivity of part of value, the symmetry from the old whole with the asymmetry of the part becoming a holomer, the transitivity of the whole with the intransitivity of the new part. These compenetrations lead us to other logical properties: non reflexivity: (  x) (  y) ((Rxy › Ryx) š ™ Rxx)); non symmetry: (  x) (  y) (Rxy š ¬Ryx); non transitivity: (  x) (  y) (  z) ((Rxy š Ryz) š ™ Rxz)). These could be the logical properties of the weak identity, respectively of the symbolic holomer, as it functions in the institutional symbolic creation from Searle’s theory. It would often occur that one needed a particular context in order to create a function of the statute, but once created this function exists independent of the context. In addition, the perpetuation of the context is sometimes essential for a “social object” to continue to exist. We can probably explain these situations through the organization laws on which the values function. In Robert Poli’s opinion (2009, 8), the most important of these would be the following: -

The law of the values force The law of the height values The law of the resistance of values.

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The stronger the values, the bigger the force, the less sophisticated they are; conversely, the higher the values, the weaker they are, the less force they have. Though it may seem paradoxical, in conformity with the third law, though the high values may have little force, they oppose a considerable degree of resistance, because the higher they are, the harder they are to attain, a situation from which a negative component is derived, that is negative values, this being a structural characteristic of values.

References Biriú, I. (2012). Religious Violence and the Logic of Weak Thinking: between R. Girard and G. Vattimo. Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 11 (32). Noica, C. (1986). Scrisori despre logica lui Hermes [Letters on Hermes’ Logic]. Bucureúti: Cartea Românească. Poli, R. (2009). Între speranĠă úi responsabilitate: Introducere în Structurile ontologice ale eticii [Between Hope and Responsibility. Introduction to the Ontological Structures of Ethics]. Bucureúti: Curtea Veche. Searle, J. R. (2000). L’ontologie de la réalité sociale. Réponse à Barry Smith [Social Reality Ontology: Answer to Barry Smith]. In P. Livet & R. Ogien (Eds.), L’enquête ontologique: Du mode d’existence des objets sociaux, 199–207. Paris: Éditions de L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociale. —. (2010). Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilisation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Varzi, A. C. (2010). Ontologia [Ontology]. Paris: Ithaque.

ON TRUTH AND LIE: A PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS IONEL BUùE

Introduction The Dictionary of the Romanian language (1998) offers a comprehensive meaning of the term “cunning” as “a skilful manoeuvre by which one deceives another who is in good faith.” All other synonyms (perfidy, hypocrisy, deceit, etc.) stem, in one way or another, from this base meaning. From the various texts written on hypocrisy, perfidy, cunning, and lie (religious, literary, philosophical-moralist, etc.), we start from Homer’s Iliad as read by Plato in his early dialogue Hippias Minor or On Lying and further interpret a philosophical-cinematographic parable of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

From Truth to Lie as an Accident Plato’s dialogue Hippias Minor entails a discussion about truth and lies between Socrates and the sophist Hippias, starting from the Iliad and Odyssey and two legendary characters of the Trojan War, Achilles and Ulysses. Among Socratic dialogues, this seems unique through the contradiction that Socrates creates in the confrontation with Hippias, a man of knowledge in the field of arithmetics, geometry and astronomy. Everything starts from Hippias’ assertion “Homer depicted Achilles as the bravest of the men coming to Troy, Nestor the wisest and Odysseus the most versatile” (Plato 1976). Achilles is also a “righteous man, as honest as possible,” and Hippias recalls the scene of the “Supplications” from the Iliad. The versatile man (Odysseus) who “says one thing while thinking something else, which stays hidden in his mind” is, therefore, the liar. Later, through successive questions in his well-known manner, Socrates tries to show that Hippias actually protects a contradiction, not the truth.

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First, he demonstrates, helped by Hippias, that liars are intelligent people and are versatile due to their intelligence. In other words, they are skilful (they know the truth which they are aware they conceal). Liars are those who have both the skill and the capacity to lie, says Socrates. The philosopher takes an example, the sophist, who is good at arithmetics, geometry and astronomy. Beyond the discrete irony of the “recognition” of the incontestable skills of Hippias, there arises the irony of the art of forcing the interlocutor into conflict with themself, thus demonstrating their philosophical incompetence in a different way, in the sense that Hippias has knowledge of trees perhaps, but not of the forest. He is good at precision, not truth. How, then, could he be good at understanding lies if he does not know what truth is? If the one knowing the truth is the only one who can deceive, then the good one, i.e. the one who knows their subjects, can also be evil, since only they can be versatile, cunning, hypocritical. In this way, Hippias reaches a contradiction, almost amazed at what he had stated: “Then Hippias, the one who makes mistakes and commits shameful and wrongful acts intentionally, should there be such a man, can be no one but the good man.” “I cannot agree with you, Socrates,” replied Hippias. As a matter of fact, he cannot agree with himself, because he had followed without protest the Socratic reasoning directly implying it. Actually, the trap that Socrates set him was connected with the relationship between truth and will. Here, Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica performs a remarkable interpretation that we might consider—there is a truth as will and a lie as will. In other words, the gnoseological dimension is doubled by the ethical. “To be wrong,” arising out of ignorance (and Achilles seems to fall within this category according to Hippias), has nothing to do with the cunning of “to deceive” someone who is in good faith. Odysseus would fall into this latter category, just because the Trojan horse belongs to him. This does not mean that the one who knows the truth must undoubtedly be cunning (one who conceals it with a selfish goal in mind). If, in the beginning, Socrates speaks of a man confined to doing things well or poorly when he refers to knowledge and ignorance, in the gnoseological sense, in order to convince Hippias that only one who has knowledge can be cunning, versatile, a liar (in fact “the expert Hippias”), in the second part of the dialogue he tries, as Noica notes, to transcend the subject and approach the general nature of humankind, rather than the one confined to the quality of technical expertise. In other words, the very person who has full knowledge of values, not of some technical aspect or another, cannot do evil because they know and have the moral duty of responsibility.

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Because now, with Hippias’ protest against the thesis that the man who deliberately commits injustice would be better, a key-theme was reached in Platonism. There was a passage from values as means, we would call them so in modern terms, to values as purpose. Undoubtedly, human nature also characterizes a being that has knowledge. But it is more than that. When it is entirely at stake, it envelopes the aptitudes and knowledge in human purposes. (Noica 1976)

The dialogue suggests, apparently, two types of people: the Achilleslike person who, when doing evil, does it out of ignorance, supported by Hippias; and the Odysseus-like person, supported by Socrates, interested in argumentation. Plato stops at this aspect only to demonstrate the simple interpretation of Homer by Hippias. Although they do not speak of a third type—the sophianic person we could say, who knows the truth but who does not conceal it—the dialogue makes reference to the guardphilosophers of the Republic, those knowing the eidos, ruling the city while following the idea of justice or good, which are at the top of the hierarchy of ideas. In other words, those who actually have knowledge, know everything. Truth is the whole, as Hegel would say, not precision. At the end of his interpretation, Noica concludes that the dialogue unquestionably presents the person who has knowledge, the technician and expert of nature, of the hero beyond the good and evil of Nietzsche, who would anticipate something of “the man of all technicalities of nowadays.” This is the good and skilful person who loves the fragment of their own cage, who has no wish to fly to the height of the eidos and prefers the precision of science and technology to the symbolic truth which they decreed dead by perfecting their means to the detriment of their purposes. This dialogue clearly says how the human is concrete, not necessarily how they should be, with all the construing openness that we see in the perfect person of the later dialogues. The human, unlike god (and Achilles also falls into the category of gods), is good and evil, is ambivalent. From the perspective of intelligence, they are beyond good and evil. The problem occurs when intelligence is accompanied by will and feelings. The concrete person lives in a social environment where they come across symbols, prejudices, attitudes, rules, emotions, feelings and interests. They act within a complex of concrete circumstances. The one who knows can be cunning or not, according to their will, and will depends on truth only in Plato’s world of ideas. Here, the rational part leads the inferior parts. Cunning is an accident. That is why the city is ruled by the philosopher who obeys only the judgment of justice and impersonal ideas. Their deeds cannot be bad or cunning. The result: a just society ruled by philosopher

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kings who know the Good. The Truth is submitted to the Good. In the ideal city there is cunning, in the moral sense of the word, only by accident.

From Lie to Relative Truth A relatively different approach is proposed by the 1950 film by Akira Kurosawa, Rashômon. Produced after two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagwa, the cinema masterpiece of Kurosawa, which made him famous in the Western world, tells the story of a rape and a murder through several different witness-characters’ versions. It is also noteworthy that the testimonies of the witnesses are taken by policeman who never shows his face, a kind of impersonal justice of a Platonic nature, or better, an inner one. Under the shelter of a Buddhist temple, now destroyed, with the inscription Rashômon, of which we later find out that he is a kind of chief Demon, there were, at a certain moment, a woodcutter and a Buddhist priest who are later joined by a commoner, probably a tramp, to take refuge from a rainstorm. The woodcutter says, amazed, that he understands nothing of what happened. He is the first to tell the police what he found in the forest—a woman’s hat and a dead body. The Buddhist priest is also a witness, and he tells them how he met in the forest, before the murder, the samurai and his woman on horseback. It was true that he had a bow and arrows, a sword, and she was cloaked in a white veil. The two were allowed to be present at the depositions of the other witnesses. The alleged murderer is denounced by a witness who accidentally finds him on a riverbank, the samurai’s horse next to him. He was a notorious bandit, Tajomaru, whose role was performed by Toshiro Mifune. The bandit is tied up and admits that he killed the samurai. So that his story may be credible, he adds that he is aware he will die, so why should he lie? He makes use of his fame, then recounts how he acted. First, he drew the samurai’s attention by saying that he had discovered some swords and daggers in the forest. When they reached that place, he attacked the samurai and tied him up, then went to his wife, lying that her husband had been bitten by a viper, and raped her in his very presence. At first, the woman protected herself with a dagger, then consented. After the rape, she told him that one of the two must die, because she could not live as dishonoured by two men. The bandit untied the samurai, they fought, and he killed the samurai in a fair fight. In the meanwhile, the woman ran away. The bandit got the sword and the horse and stopped at a river

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because he had a stomach ache. He had not taken the dagger because he had not thought of it in the moment. The woman’s story is told against a special musical background: Ravel’s Boléro. According to the priest’s account, as a witness to the woman’s deposition, she seemed kind and inspired mercy. He tells how she was raped, how the boastful bandit had dishonoured her before her husband who was tied up and in a deep pain. After the bandit left, she set her husband free by cutting the rope with a dagger, but he gave her a look of utter contempt and she shuddered and fainted. When she came round, her husband was dead, the dagger in his chest. She was subsequently found by the police in a temple. The third version belongs to the dead man. Justice provides a medium that is the voice of the dead man’s soul, and through the shaman he gives his account of what happened. The woodcutter, who witnessed the deposition of the medium, says indignantly, at a certain moment, that the dead is also lying. The Buddhist priest replies that souls cannot deceive people. What else do they have to protect? It is a world where you start to believe you own lies, the commoner breaks in. People are all cunning out of selfishness. The suffering of the dead man is that he cannot have his wife there with him, even if, after she was raped, she asked Tajomaru to kill her husband. Even the bandit seemed terrified when he heard what she was thinking, which is why he asked him: “What should you do with such a woman? Should you kill her or forgive her?” He unties him and leaves. The samurai, speaking through the medium, says that he preferred to kill himself with the dagger. The second story of the woodcutter seems to be more successful as far as truth is concerned. He confesses to the Buddhist priest and the commoner that he concealed the truth from the police because he did not want any trouble. He had actually seen everything. He states that there is no dagger. After the rape, he says, the bandit asked the woman for forgiveness and proposed to her, promising that he would become an honest man. The woman said she could not decide as a woman, men must decide in a fight. The husband refused to risk his life for her, being dishonoured, and therefore demanded that she kill herself. “I do not need this whore, I’m giving her to you!” he told the bandit. In the end, she stirred them both, and persuaded them to fight: “The woman belongs to the man who sacrifices everything!,” she said. In the fight, the samurai died. In the meanwhile, the woman vanished, and the sword was taken. At the end of this story, the commoner starts laughing. The second story of the woodcutter does not resolve anything, and is also a lie. A crying can then be heard, and the commoner discovers a child somewhere

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in a corner of the old fallen temple. He takes the kimono the child is covered with. The woodcutter opposes vehemently, calling him a thief. The reply of the commoner is harsh. Who is judging him? “A thief betraying other thieves?” Who tells nothing to the police? Who conceals the existence of the dagger? The Buddhist priest seems desperate. He still refuses to believe that this world is hell. Finally, the woodcutter regrets. “I cannot understand myself,” he confesses after the commoner leaves. What for? Did he conceal the truth about the dagger? Is he a selfish man, too? Do we live in a world confronted with selfish acts only? The court judging the case is silent, and cannot reach a verdict. The “murderer” rapist was caught, but whose truth was taken into account? There are at least three “truths” and, if the truth of the woodcutter is considered as well, there are four. Each truth is relative, since it conceals something—they are ambivalent truths. Ultimately, the confession of the bandit seems the only grounds for the death penalty. But is it veridical? Does the bandit, who has no escape due to his life, want posthumous glory by concealing part of the truth? He confesses that he murdered the samurai because the woman wished so, in a fight, after twenty-three attempts. What if the woman, wishing to save what was left out of her honour and marriage, also conceals the truth? If the dead man does not accept the idea of being killed by a bandit, does he say that he committed suicide because he was dishonoured by his own wife?

Conclusion Justice has a guilty man who confesses the murder, but it does not have the truth. If the truth leads to justice, how can someone discover it among so much cunning? We might witness an event, but see it in a different manner. Let us suppose that each person has a selfish interest, just as in the situation described. Which is the best solution for the court? In the film The Balance, a character gives a “dissident” reply, which refers to the justice of the totalitarian regime. It weighs up lies and on this basis “builds” a “truth.” Today, what could we call it if it is commanded by a versatile man? What if the cunning of the political man determines the “truth” of justice, in a formal democracy where corruption reaches the state level? The Republic of Plato had many flaws. First of all, it was a utopia, but a utopia which made a philosopher of justice out of the political man, whose will was submitted to the good by a spiritualisation of senses and a repression of selfish interests. For this, the philosopher is considered, abusively, the father of totalitarianism. Truth and justice are, in one sense, totalitarian. The law cannot be discussed; the condition is that it should be

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built according to moral principles. It is subject to justice, not the other way round—but is justice known a priori? Plato seems to approve. Justice exists as an idea, as a value and a science of justice that the wise man possesses. It is enough to make then deductions for particular cases. Neither the metaphysical rationalism of Plato nor the Christian Decalogue seems sufficient. Plato admits, in Hippias Minor, that man is versatile because he is intelligent. He has the possibility of knowing, but also of concealing what he knows. The former belongs to reason, the latter to will, feelings, to the inferior part. It is nevertheless enough to focus on the dominating reason and everything goes well. Ideally, man attains the knowledge of truth and achieves it. Akira Kurosawa perceives things differently. Like Plato, the film depicts a man in his concrete condition, both intelligent and cunning at the same time, but, in order to ascertain justice, he does not appeal to a metaphysical court or to the philosophers’ guild. He acts inductively. From facts towards idea. In this sense, justice and truth are not data, they are built by gathering evidence, and evidence is always ambivalent. They bear both truth and error. The problem is not to find the truth, but, as Popper states, how to clean ourselves of errors, especially because they depend on the cunning of each “witness” to the truth rather than speaking about knowledge in the sense of exact sciences, but in a sense of a social science, which has extremely complex variables: both elaborating the human soul and the social welter of interdependencies. Starting from the idea that judges are also people and they do not live in the ideal conditions of Plato, they can be deceived, like Achilles, or they can deceive, like Odysseus, and it is more and more difficult to establish the “truth.” As a matter of fact, Kurosawa makes no reference to “judges,” but to the depositions of the witnesses, appealing to complex human nature, the contradictory unity between reason and intentions, reason and will, and reason and feelings. As a last resort, this ambiguity and complexity offers some salvation for humans. The woodcutter seems regretful. He wants to take the child and raise him, convincing the Buddhist priest by saying that he has six other children at home. The priest cannot know such a thing, but his reactions are positive with regard to the regret of the woodcutter, the protest against the bandit’s stealing of the kimono and sympathy for the abandoned innocent being. “Thanks to you, I was able to recover my trust in people,” he says. The woodcutter leaves symbolically with the “rescued” child. It is the only certitude of solidarity, of a series of stories about murder and rape, where each “witness” hides their own share of shadow, for reasons that only he or she knows. If we suppose that the

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woodcutter stole the expensive dagger, this seems to be the least “cunning” act of them all. As a matter of fact, the money that the woodcutter would have got for the dagger would be used for raising children. In this way, the Buddhist priest seems to have made the right decision by giving him the child. He knows that man is not perfect, and that absolute justice, just like the world, is an illusion. He does not search for the great good to all, like the philosophers of Plato’s City, but a relative truth under those circumstances. He finally trusts this ambivalent being, preferring the least cunning, as Karl Popper advises us, not to search for ideal rulers for the city, since they do not exist, but for those who do the least evil. More than any moral theory, literature has contributed, like cinema, to the “access” to feelings through sad and sentimental stories to an action in which the will is converted without an absolute rational force, for the purpose of rescuing the weakest. In a world of interests, where the landmarks of the metaphysical morality of identity disappeared “when God died,” man needs minima moralia in order to establish a truth relating to facts, which should render justice functional by the flexibility of a solidarity consensus, to paraphrase Richard Rorty (1989). The question is, how prepared is a community to discover that affective consensus which should build by imagination, as well as pragmatic rationality, the premises of justice which is not deduced from universal truths, but “induced” from the concrete cases of our ambivalent being? In accordance with “the moral progress” of a solidarity that is constantly being built, justice will find its expression in the functioning of justice as related to a moral truth, not to the precision that makes a technician out of a judge, easily weighing lies, behind the abstract formalism of the procedures or interests of one power or another.

References Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică “Iorgu Iordan.” (1998). DicĠionarul explicativ al limbii române. [An Explanatory Dictionary of the Romanian Language]. Bucureúti: Univers Enciclopedic. Noica, C. (1976). Interpretare la Hippias Minor [Interpretation of Hippias Minor]. In Plato, Opere II. Bucureúti: Ed. ùtiinĠifică ‫܈‬i Enciclopedică. Plato (1976). Hippias Minor. Opere II. Bucureúti: Ed. ùtiinĠifică ‫܈‬i Enciclopedică. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

HUMAN VALUES IN APPLIED ETHICS: THE INTERPRETATIVE MODELS OF BEINGS’ FRAGILITY IN CONTEMPORARY ETHICS ALINA-DANIELA CIRIC

Introduction The interpretation of modern ethical theories proving the fragility of the human being starts from the analysis of the subject-object relationship in the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas.

Emmanuel Levinas and Language as Capture of the Fragility of Being Human fragility is manifested in the work of Emmanuel Levinas in a language that captures and restores the relationship between the Same and the Other. We refer mainly to the theories of language from the two major works of Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond the Essence and Totalité et Infini, trying to capture the specificity of the relationship between the Same and the Other as manifested through language, opposed to the role of language given by Husserl. The common background of the two philosophers is the fact that they share the need to develop a descriptive phenomenology of the experience that gives meaning to the language this phenomenology itself expresses. For Levinas, there is an original ambiguity of the language because of its two dimensions theorized in Otherwise than Being: the phenomenological/ ontological “Said” and the ethical “Saying.” This ambiguity in language is registered as a criticism of the language conceptualization of Husserl. For Husserl (1989), the essence of language does not belong to language, but to the living being who gives the meaning of the “faculty of speech in the middle of a system of signs.” In his work, Husserl realizes a drastic reduction of the role of language in its expressive function, leaving aside its communicative function and the one who indicates the function of the

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sign. Thus, language serves, in Husserl’s phenomenology, to send to the objects to whose expression it plays. There is neutrality of what is expressed in relation to that which expresses it, neutrality that will come to postulate an ideality of the expressed already covered. Thus, the role of language will be restricted only to express the things signified and not to constitute them. The language of Husserl will propose a normative logic, because for Husserl each expression will send to the ideal unit of signification. The critique that Levinas brings to Husserl focuses exactly on the demonstration of fragility of such a freedom given to transcendental consciousness, as one that gives meaning against beings. To Husserl’s egology that includes an idealization of the logic-eidetic phenomena, Levinas will oppose the ethical difference revealed by the ontological Said, which will generate a call to responsibility. Ethical Saying, as an answer to this responsibility, portrays a different understanding of meaning in Levinas, thus reversing Husserl’s egology and temporality presupposed by the donation of meaning. We mention that, in Husserl’s work, the origin of language depends on a non-linguistic level for postulating the origin of meaning in what is felt, (le vécu), purified by its psychological causality, will send to consciousness, and not to the expression that it will take in language. The solipsistic experience of Husserl cancels the opening of the intersubjective act, in the manner in which the term behaves in the ethical discourse of Levinas. Because intersubjectivity plays no role in constituting the object, the material nature of the object will be played only in terms of appearance, remaining nothing more than a static description of feelings of consciousness and the objectivity arising from the structures of pure consciousness. Levinas tries to defend the autonomy of ethical language in relation to the Other subject that cannot be considered an alter ego, because he cannot be played using the same expression that we use for ego. The description of how the language of ethics lies in the ontological relation led Levinas to the formation of the conceptual group Dit-Dire, where Dire plays the pre-original ethic meaning of the language, and Dit its phenomenological-ontological significance. The coupling describes the initial ambiguity that the meaning possesses in a unique language. To the process of reducing the language to its denominative function used by Husserl, Levinas will oppose the initial apophansis that the verb “to be” incorporates in a predicative sentence. In this initial apophansis, the verb “to be” brings to sentence the event of having a pure appearance which does not designate a content that can be named.

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The occurrence of such a reduction transforms the ethical Saying itself, as language always implies the community which it contradicts. Language involves in its act a human subject, meaning a transitive object that is presenting themself primarily as someone who resists being understood. Phenomenology itself will strive to achieve objectivity through the mediation of intersubjective recognition of the constitution by the ethical Saying. For Levinas, the condition of the possibility for the existence of the ontological Said is dependent on the mediating recognition of the ethical Saying.

Transformation of Language Using observation and analysis of the language as a method, we show that the reduction of language to an initial meaning culminates in Levinas’s work with the arrival at the ethical significance of Dit sans Dire. An unequivocal language cannot support, according to Levinas, the emergence of the Other within the subjects’ own monadological sphere; this language shall stand as a testimony to the frailty of the being who uses language in such a manner. Although empathy plays the role of uniting individuals and creating concrete and cultural links between them, it must pass through the sample object in question, which involves language. Empathy for the other requires an understanding of their discourse regarding their own feelings. Thus, a new dimension of the body is emphasized, for the essence of language becomes the mediation between body and spirit. Inscribed in its bodily articulation, language shall lead to the fulfilment of the essence of the flesh (le corps du chair), the flesh of a united community via language’s transcendental vector (Mayzaud 2006, 139–154). Husserlian language annuls its proximity towards being, showing the lack of the essence of being, as the identity of terms stated through language proves merely an ideality of the intended—all that is involved in such a language is just an image, an appearance of what is spoken that does not involve the identity of the individuals that dominate the instances of image. For Levinas, this identity can only be assumed (Levinas 1988, 25). One can only claim to provide identity and then try to maintain it for their impressions. This way of engaging the Other, seen as targeted through language and relating with the objects of my world does not accomplish, in Levinas’s view, a real identity of them, given that the process of identification becomes merely a correlative of the understanding presupposed to them. Identity can never be accomplished by means of the

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identification proclaimed by it. Identity, realized on an object portraying multiple occurrences, by means of surrounding it and identifying it on the horizon in which its potential donations are spread, is, for Levinas, not a real identity, for it no longer belongs to a perceived given but rather to an already-given of consciousness. This manner of attempting to unify the multiple occurrences of the object targeting its identity no longer corresponds, according to Levinas, to an actual experiencing of it, but more to a Kantian object of intuition subsumed to the categories. I perceive the same object in the multitude of its appearances only because a concept of it is already given (the golden apple, which allows for the identification of the rest of the real objects portraying the same characteristics as apples) and preconceived, which will allow adequacy of the real object, subject to my perception, to the idea I already posses of it. The object that enters my perception is nothing more than a concordant system of appearances which targets the identity of an ideal object, on the grounds of possible meanings of that object. There is an incommensurable distance, for Levinas, between the ideality of the intended object and its sensible perception. The object identified in such a categorical intuition involves pre-predicative evidence which will target an identity of the object, but which will not be fulfilled through the identification synthesis. It will rather be proclaimed, presupposed by the logic-eidetic illegitimate idealization of the given (Szigeti 2004, 147–160). Thus, the external appearance of the object is determined by its inner meaning. For Levinas, ideality, as targeting identity, is the Husserlian intentionality, as a provider of meaning. Thus, an unravelling of meaning of being is accomplished, through the modality in which thought investigates its own object. The identity of the object and disclosure of its meaning are accomplished only by situating it in a perspective of thought (by determining an ontological locus of it). It will be an object only when it obtains a meaning that is no longer determined by what is termed “knowledge of the object.” The whole process of thinking will thus be a donation of meaning (the identification of an object). Intentionality, as a donation of meaning, proves independence of intention from the presence of the intended object, because the intention no longer relates to a phenomenal appearance, but rather to the significance of the object. The appearance of the phenomenon cannot be separated from its precontained significance. This is the freedom of the transcendental ego, which deploys an activity of consciousness that is independent of any exterior object. The freedom of the ego means the freedom by which it provides itself with meaning, through which it originates, given that the

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donated meaning, similar to intended objects, gives identity. If, by intending objects, the significant intention targeted a surplus of meaning that surpasses any intuitive filling, this original excess is no longer possible with respect to the Other, as the latter does not appear but “expresses” itself. What, for Levinas, stands as the “already said” character of the Said and exhibits exactly its temporal precedence he targets himself. Language, as an expression of the face in Levinas’s work, saves the reification which was proposed to the being by the univocity of the Husserlian language. The frailty of being, expressed in a normative language belonging to a subject eager to save its autonomy threatened by alien presence, is saved by the revelation of the Other. It is this that both expresses (the origin of a meaning) and is expressed (the particular meaning of its alterity). Thus, language leaves the logical domain in which Husserl placed it and ascends towards the metaphysical, as the spoken thus appears as being another, a form given to the Same in order to present itself as the Other. In this way, language portrays an ethical structure—the face of the Other which manifests itself in speech imposes on me an ethical resistance that forbids me from touching the Other (the universal interdiction of murder). We can, thus, see the conversion operated in opposition to Husserl—ethical resistance as a pre-ontological relation is the one that frames the entire donation of meaning. Understood as implying an ethical relation, language will engage freedom as a constituent in itself. Although intentionality as a donation of meaning is realized in language, due to the fact it targets something that it already contains in Husserl, we can state that it is at a prelinguistic level, in the antepredicative judgment that contains this already-said. This pre containment appears as an exact reflection of the ante-predicative, as its mirror-image (Richir 1990, 172). In this way, language presents itself as a donation of meaning through which the Other gives itself in speech. It questions the cognitive possibilities of the Same. This trauma of wonderment, at the moment of encountering the Other, comes as a consequence of the calling to responsibility realized by the Other. Providing significance, language gives the world to the Same as a gift, in this way creating a bridge, a common world, between them. Thus, the original relation with the world, which was thought to be sensible, is breached by language. The significance brought by language consists of an ethical event. The targeted object receives universality, a generality through which its possession by the ego is broken, due to the donation of meaning, the thematization of the world given to the Other. The inrush of the Other in the sensible real opens

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the possibility of a new dimension in the realm of the sensible. By provoking the freedom of the ego of violently approaching the other, the epiphany of his face that resists to this violent urge offers itself as a language that requires responsibility towards the Other. The crack in the real caused by the epiphany of the Other’s face determines an inrush of its transcendentality, framing it in the ethical structure of responsibility towards him.

Truth of Being This concerns something that long precedes the freedom that the Other institutes, it is a freedom built on an ethics of non-violence. The face of the Other already shows an injustice of the biological, historical and cultural totalization which already contains the Other (Critchley & Bernasconi 2004). We see now that there is a presupposed passivity of the subject—the giving of the Other in language does not imply its exhaustion in the process of reception realized by the Same. There is a characteristic duality concerning the act of thematization—the meaning of being is expressed in the structures of language, in predicative propositions, and this meaning (the ontological Said) does not exhaust the entire saying (the ethical Saying) that the Other brings forth. Everything that is thematized hides an essence of its saying. The entire philosophical discourse is, in Levinas, characterized by the existence of a Said that cannot be thematized (the ethical Saying) and is situated within the thematization of the Said (the ontological Said). This can be seen as an attempt at sublimation which leaves open the traumatic experience of the sublime, as it allows the ethical saying to pass freely through the ontological Said which it contains (Critchley & Bernasconi 2004).

Conclusion The radical movement traced by the philosophy of Levinas consists of a displacement form the Husserlian transcendental idealism to the ethical question concerning the being. The transcendental self consciousness shall lead only to a circular position of the subject—knowledge resulting from intentionality in direct relation to the real shall lead only to an increase of the self-identity of the subject, and any alterity nature shall be assimilated via identification. The will of the perceiving subject cannot control any reality presented to it. There is, for Levinas, a non-intentional aspect of the consciousness. We are talking about the “unhappy consciousness,” which

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exists without attributes or any other goals. As a result of the passivity of this mauvaise conscience, one affirms one’s being has to respond to one’s right to be. This responsibility towards the Other reveals that it precedes in existence any other consciousness. Thus, from the very beginning of the face-to-face relationship, the question regarding the being implies its right to be. Instead of answering to the Other by thematization, I will answer the epiphanies of their face, which will not produce a totalization of our relation, but will open the idea of infinity. The frailty of the ontological being is surpassed through the elevation of the relation on a metaphysical plane, which precedes any ontological programme. As I have already stated, the connection between knowledge as contemplation and being circumscribes the place of the intelligible, as the donation of meaning. The link between knowledge and being indicates a difference that is surpassed in truth—the known object that is internalized by knowledge and freed by its strangeness. Under the aspect of truth, being as a different form thought and being thought by it becomes through thought a property of it. We can therefore observe the formation of the ideality of meaning—the meaning of the real is provided by reason, for the otherness of the known object is already encumbered by the thought that thinks it. Any being becomes a specific property of thought, and only by the latter becomes known. The immanence of the known in the act of knowing is already the embodiment of seizure (Hand 1989). This is the circular motion that Levinas was referring to—the alterity of its object is consumed in knowledge, and it proves through knowledge the satisfaction to which it was condemned. For this reason, thought reduces any known object to the present, to its consumption. The future and the past appear only as modalities of representing it. The whole knowledge appears only as a representation of an identity of the known thing, which is already contained in thought, and this given representation cannot contain anything foreign. The Levinas project that seeks to draw attention to the ethical subject standing in a responsibility relation with the Other implies an inversion of temporality, and presupposes a diachronic temporality. There is an autonomous temporality of the ethical relation even though the Other comes from an immemorial past of infinity. The fact that there is an involvement in responsibility caused by the ethical Saying shows that there is a certain “an-anarchic appeal,” without a representable origin, which will imply in the ethical answer of the subject a donation of self. This metaphysics of absence indicates the passivity of the ethical subject before an appeal without origin (Verlag 2006, 51). The reason for this analysis was to show that there is still a meaning left in what escapes understanding. In the attempt to show how the frailty

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of the being manifests itself in phenomenological language and the manner in which Levinas saves the oblivion of the meaning of being, establishing an ethical relation with the Other, we are able to prove the testimony of a truth still resilient to being—“frail truth”—which can still provide shelter from the force of the objects in which the being is thrown in.

References Critchley, S. & Bernasconi, R. (Eds.) (2004). The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Hand, S. (1989). The Levinas Reader. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell Inc. Husserl, E. (1959). Recherches I et II [Research 1 and 2]. Paris: P.U.F. Levinas, E. (1961). Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité [Totality and Infinity: Essay on Exteriority]. La Haye: Livre de poche —. (1974). Autrement qu’être ou Au-delà de l’essence [Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence]. La Haye: Livre de poche. —. (1988). En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger [Discovering Existence with Husserl and Heidegger]. Paris: Vrin. Mayzaud, Y. (2006). Langage et langue chez Husserl et Levinas [Discourse and Language in Husserl and Levinas]. Studia phaenomenologica VII. Bucureúti: Humanitas. Richir, M. (1990). La crise du sens et la phénoménologie [The Crisis of Meaning and Phenomenology]. Grenoble: Jerome Millon. Szigeti, A. (2004). Dire ce qui ne peut pas être dit. La phénoménologie du language de Levinas dans “Autrement qu’être ou Au-delà de l’essence” [Saying What Cannot Be Said: Phenomenology of Levinas’ Language in “Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence”]. Studia Universitatis Babeú-Bolyai, Philosophia XLIX, 1–2. Verlag, G. O. (2006). “Temps par l’autre ou temps de l’autre? Temporalité génétique et métaphysique de l’absence chez Levinas” [“Time for the Other or Time of the Other? Genetic Temporality and Metaphysics of Absence in Levinas”]. Recherches phénoménologiques actuelles en Roumanie et en France. Studia Universitatis Babeú-Bolyai, Philosophia XLIX, 1–2.

MORAL DETERMINATIONS IN PUBLIC LIFE: AN APPLICATION FOR THE CURRENT ROMANIAN ENVIRONMENT ION HIRGHIDUù

Introduction For any researcher, the public life of their time can be very passionate. This possibility can remove them from the scientific purpose if it is not properly controlled. Leaving aside feelings, whatever they are, is the first sign of approaching scientific imperative requirements. The same requirements need an accurate reflection of what is good and what is bad. A scientific approach to determine the ethical implications of social life must be done at three levels (Miroiu & Blebea Nicolae 2001): (a) First, there is a level of rationality which contains behaviour in its various manifestations. These forms of behaviour belong to the social actors who may be institutions and/or individuals. (b) Second, there is a level of justness of laws and of how it acts in a discriminatory manner. (c) Third, there is a level of freedom of personal achievement of which state institutions are responsible. Determination of morality in public life is an attempt to apply a number of ideas that were grounded in the history of thought as courses of action. We must answer a fundamental question: Is a rational society a moral society? To answer this, we consider that moral freedom relies on a number of accepted constraints. The idea of this chapter is to reveal morality or immorality in Romanian public life and to detect possible conflicts of values as they are assumed by institutions and individuals. It is an attempt to present a possible conversion of philosophical ideas about morality into practical thinking. This conversion can be applied to determine the practical value of ideas. It is an approach which seeks to create a field of social action required as a buffer between immoral manifestations of social actors and the meanings of duty that each citizen has to the community in which they live.

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Moral Determinations in Public Life

A close examination of social life in Romania may reveal how it is tamed by the rules of reason. These rules are not necessarily moral ones because what is rational is not necessarily moral. When a society or an individual is at the limits of survival, there is a rational way to salvation, but it does not correspond to the rules that a normal society imposes at all times. The real problem is whether Romanian society is a normal society or if it faces a deep crisis of morality.

Behaviour of Social Actors and Limits of Rationality The principle of rationality is one of the principles of sociology action as represented in economic theory and the philosophy of science (Boudon 2005). Using the concept of comprehension from Dilthey to Weber is a possible solution in finding the causes of behaviour of social actors. These causes are extremely diversified, ranging from the passions and emotions of individuals to strong reasons. Only strong reasons represent an object of research because only through them the reasonable or unreasonable conduct of social actors can be understood. A rational social actor should not be confused with a rational person who behaves like this within the limits of normality. A broader understanding of rationality of social actors is proved by Popper: “the principle of rationality has not to do with the assumption that human being is rational in the sense that he always takes a rational attitude” (Popper 2000, 395). This is a minimum principle which is not the same truth, but close to it. The role of this principle is to “substantially reduce the arbitrariness of our models.” As a broad principle, it is possible to hide behind other forms that can be considered irrational by individuals. The simple presentation of reasons for action to stay within the field of rationality raises the difficulty of defining the notion of rationality. This calls for a threefold approach: (a) a narrow definition of rationality which takes into account primary reasons existing objectively; (b) a broad definition that takes into account any reasons, whatever their nature; (c) an intermediate definition: “any kind of behaviour for which can be offered an explanation such as ‘X has good reasons to do Y because …’ without exposing ourselves to protests and without feeling that we made a contradictory statement is rational” (Boudon 2005, 41). In this huge area full of reasons which govern the conduct of social actors, many conflicting situations based on contradictory statements can be found. What seems to be rational in a broad sense—in a Popperian sense—as manifestations of fanaticism or madness, is irrational in the strict sense referring to the objectivity of human actions. This is the most

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profound reason for which we must talk about pushing the boundaries of rationality through behaviour. The conduct of social actors seems to be predictable because it belongs to a model that we either accept, however patterns of behaviour are explanations given to settle an extremely diverse world. Deviation from models can be infinite, being the expression of all manifestations which disregard the rules and limits approved by the society. This deviation from the behaviour models can be called, according to Boudon, subjective rationality. If we issue an extended rationality, then we can consider the society is also rational in the broadest sense. This implies a reduction of “collective intentionality to individual intentionality” (Searle 2000, 33), but we still do not need to deal with behaviours. Intentionality, or rather intentional states such as beliefs or desires underlie the latter behavioural manifestations. In other words, intentional states precede behavioural manifestations. This is also true for moral behaviours concordant with a certain collective will. Collective intentionality cannot be considered as just a sum of individual intentionalities. Furthermore, individual intentionalities sometimes elude the will of collectivity, as happens with individuals out of order, with the notion of “order” being the most reasonable for the notion of “rationality.” The order is a state of things established between two limits marking an open distance (Foucault 1990, 100). When this “open distance” is put in order, it is the same as a rational conquest. At societal level, the extension of order requires the exclusion of hiatus and the rational control of “open distances.” The essential question is whether, in these circumstances, a society that recognizes itself as rational is, at the same time, a moral society. This question leads us to find an answer through a practical application in Romanian society.

Application at Local Community Level for Moral Determinations in Public Life This chapter relies on a field research on a sample of 517 people, all inhabitants of the Jiu Valley, an area representing many of Romania’s social problems, enlarged through the diminishing of mining work and salaries, and the subsequent rise in unemployment. This was expected to produce fundamental changes in mentality, including morality. We used the direct investigation as a research method, and we also used the sociological questionnaire as a research tool, consisting of fifty-five questions. We intended to obtain public opinion data on the action of moral values in public life. Data are relatively recent, gathered in 2010. Using statistics we made a qualitative analysis of the phenomenon of

Moral Determinations in Public Life

34

morality at local community level. These statistics are the result of field research that took place under the conditions described above (Table 1-1). Table 1-1. Correlation between assessment of the political and local administrative system with gender as a variable

Non-operation of laws

22 10.2%

77 35.6%

45 20.8%

41 19.0%

31 14.4%

216 100.0%

abs. %

21 7.0%

132 43.9%

74 24.6%

47 15.6%

27 9.0%

301 100.0%

Mal e Female

Gender

Total

abs. %

43 8.3%

209 40.4%

119 23.0%

88 17.0%

58 11.2%

517 100.0%

NR

Non-operation of administration

abs. %

Violation of separation of powers

Governors’ corruption

What do you think does not work well in the political system and local administrative system?

Total

I approached the issue of morality through various questions addressed to the subjects in our research. Some of these questions refer indirectly to the state of morality, but they are very suggestive. Table 1-1 above shows the correlation between assessment of the political and administrative system and gender as a variable. We can appreciate a certain state of morality by paying attention to how such a system works. We can begin with the assumption that, if the political and administrative system is corrupt, then the state of morality degrades at community level. In addition, it could not be otherwise since moral norms are social rules even though they may also have transcendental roots. Romania’s journey through a very long transitional period and its economic situation becoming more and more difficult have left deep scars in the collective mentality. Corruption has always been the biggest problem leading to the degradation of Romania’s image in the world, and this is also demonstrated by the research that underlies this chapter. To the

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question: “What do you think that does not work well in political and administrative system?” the response “governors’ corruption” shared the highest percentage, with: a general percentage of 40.4% at the local level; a general percentage of 46.2% at the county level, and; a percentage of 58.2% at national level. Table 1-1 shows only the local level statistics data because they belong strictly to a deprived urban area in Romania. There is a sensitive differentiation of responses depending on the variable gender which is valid for all three levels. Here we can draw a first conclusion— women are more demanding than men when it comes to assessing governors’ corruption. This corruption, also criticized by the European Union, leads to extremely serious moral situations. The boundary between morality and immorality has almost disappeared, as has the boundary between Good and Evil. Young people undertake the models of “overnight success” without making an ethical analysis. This is not specific to Romania only, and there is an increase of corruption in the European Union as a whole, as the Eurobarometer of 2012 shows (Eurobarometru: CorupĠia a crescut în UE. Pentru români rămâne principala problemă). A civic sense is a very important indicator of the moral state of a society. No matter how it is defined, the presence or lack of civic sense also marks the presence or absence of morality. Moral development was regarded as closely related to a psychological one, as seen in Kohlberg’s criticism by Laurence Thomas who challenges the parallelism between psychological development and moral development, even if there are “universal stages of psychological and moral development” (Thomas 2006, 504). Civic responsibility can be related to psychological development, but it is formed under the direct influence of education. Because we spoke to people aged eighteen and over, we can assume that they have gone through all educational stages leading to the development of civic responsibility. The data presented in Table 1-2 below speak of a critical self-perception of the respondents. Most of them (54.2%) believe their level of civic responsibility is nether high nor low (this is the middle level on the scale responses). Table 1-2. How do the inhabitants of the Jiu Valley perceive their civic sense Very much

Much

Appropriate

Little

Very little

Total

abs.

16

54

280

119

48

517

%

3.1

10.4

54.2

23.0

9.3

100.0

36

Moral Determinations in Public Life

Conclusion I intended to obtain public opinion data on the action of moral values in public life. Research subjects are critical of morality in public life and of how state institutions behave in relation to citizens. We compared these results with the theories that support behaviour and moral differences between Romania and Europe, in general. The differences between the moral behaviour of the Romanians and other nations of Europe are not consistent. Results reveal an acceptable state of morality of the attitude towards family values, society, and religion. However, there is potential selfishness of individuals in the public space and state institutional malfunction seen as corrupt. Corruption in state institutions implies a distorted perception of social fundamental values, including moral values. We have seen that women have a more critical attitude towards corruption in institutions than men. In addition, younger generations are more inclined to make certain moral concessions. In this way, there is a confusion between what should be moral with what is institutional.

References Boudon, R. (Ed.). (2005). Traité de sociologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Eurobarometru: CorupĠia a crescut în UE. Pentru români rămâne principala problemă [Eurobarometer: Corruption Increased in the EU. For the Romanians, it is still the Main Issue]. (2012). http://www.euractiv.ro/uniunea-europeana/articles%7CdisplayArticle /articleID_24030/Eurobarometru_Coruptia_a_crescut_in_UE._Pentru_ romani_ramane_principala_problema.html. Foucault, M. (1990). Les Mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Karl Popper. (2000). http://stanford.library.usyd.edu.au/archives/fall2000/entries/popper/. Miroiu, Mihaela & Blebea Nicolae, Gabriela. (2001). Introducere în etica profesională [Introduction to Professional Ethics]. Bucureúti: Trei. Searle, J. R. (2000). Realitatea ca proiect social [Reality as Social Project]. Iaúi: Polirom. Thomas, L. (2006). Morala úi dezvoltarea psihologică [Morale and Psychological Development]. In P. Singer (Ed.), Tratat de etică. Iaúi: Polirom.

WHY THE BRILLO BOX? THE RECOVERY OF THE AESTHETIC GIZELA HORVÁTH

Why live with dull anesthetic objects? Why not objects as beautiful as Brillo Boxes? —Arthur C. Danto

“Beauty Is Not the Default Condition for Art” The crucial development of the concept of art in the mid eighteenth century was establishing that art is organised around the beautiful. This point of view can also be seen in the naming of art in those times, for example: beaux-arts, fine arts, belle arti, szép mĦvészetek, arte frumoase. Up to the beginning of the twentieth century, it was widely accepted that the beautiful (the aesthetic) belongs to the essence of (fine) art while art philosophy was thought to be a sub-category of the aesthetic, and the “artistic” was studied as one of the cases of the aesthetic. The artistic and philosophical developments of the twentieth century questioned these theses as self-explanatory. Decisive in this respect was Arthur C. Danto’s position, an art philosopher influenced by Andy Warhol’s 1964 Brillo Box (Danto 2009). Danto thinks that Warhol reformulated the main question of art philosophy by exhibiting the Brillo Box, which seemingly is no different in any regard from the Brillo boxes found on the shelves of supermarkets. Thus, art philosophy primarily has to answer the question of how it is possible in the case of two perceptually indistinguishable items that one of them can be a work of art while the other is just a simple object. Warhol did not change the way we look at things, but the way we think about them—the key innovation is not a new kind of aesthetic experience, but a new philosophy of art. Starting from Warhol’s case, Danto reaches two conclusions: -

Perceptual features do not play a role in the defining of an object as a work of art.

38

-

Why the Brillo Box?

Works of art are made possible by theories of art: “What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art” (Danto 1964, 582).

The theory of art is, similarly to religion, that which ensures the transfiguration of everyday things into works of art. Just as the act of baptism does not only give a name, but regenerates the person, so the object changed by art theory also has a new ontological status.

“A Fairly Hostile Position on the Aesthetic” In the first half of the twentieth century, the generally accepted view was that artistic value is no more than aesthetic value. Formalism, structuralism and anti-intentionalism all thought of the aesthetic as the essential feature of art. Therefore, they insisted that the direct confrontation with works of art, the aesthetic experience, cannot be substituted with anything else. Because judgements about art are judgements of taste, they can only be based on direct experience and are embodied in statements operating with aesthetics terms. The important properties of works of art are formal properties, whose reception happens through the irreplaceable, direct aesthetic experience. As a result of Clive Bell’s, Roger Fry’s and Monroe Beardsley’s influential writings, it has become established that works of art are defined by the “significant form,” and studies focused on the structure and the peculiarities of medium, and the “how” of art. In fine arts this was on the lines, colour, and the composition, in literature on the sound of words, the rhythm, the rhetorical figures, and in music the sound, the rhythm, the tone of voice, the architectonics, etc. become important. Asking questions like “what is the work about?” or “what is the message of the author?” dealing with the contents of the works, with their aspects outside of art seemed dated and inaccurate. This theoretical framework, which saw the essence of autonomous art in the significant form, took shape in American art in abstract expressionism by the middle of the twentieth century. Abstract expressionism, with effective support from Clement Greenberg, achieved artistic monopoly in the 1950s, displacing representation. Thus, art turned into itself—as Bourdieu (1984) puts it, it became not simply l’art pour l’art, but l’art pour les artists. Jackson Pollock’s dripped canvases, or Barnett Newman’s large-scale metaphysical pictures were not about everyday life either, nor for everyday people. They are part of a highbrow culture. The power of abstraction was broken by pop-art in the middle of the 1960s, primarily through the works of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.

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The theoretical and critical tools so successfully used before proved inadequate when pop-art appeared, specifically Warhol’s Brillo Box. It was impossible to argue that the standard Brillo box does not have significant form, but Warhol’s Brillo Box does. It has become obvious that the supermarket Brillo boxes are not distinguished from Warhol’s work by aesthetic properties. The so far well-serving theories focusing on aesthetics had to be replaced by ones that could prove why the Brillo Box is a work of art, as opposed to its common counterpart. Thus, literature started to sever the aesthetic from the body of art. Danto (1993, 175) admits that his main work, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), “took a fairly hostile position on the aesthetic.” The anti-aesthetic message that often occurs in different writers’ work has two well-defined meanings: -

The fight against the beautiful moving the beautiful out of the centre of art. The exclusion of the aesthetic from the definition of art.

In its first meaning, the anti-aesthetic is typical of the Dada movement, unfolding in the context of the First World War. Danto (2004) calls this approach kalliphobia—the artists sacrificed beauty, in which they saw the symbol of the culture and perceptions of the ruling classes. They answered the cynical attitude of the ruling classes with the symbolic sacrifice of beauty when they sent the young to a war waged in the name of civilisation in a hypocritical manner. In protest, art ceased to be the art of beauty, instead presenting the ugly social phenomena with the help of ugly art. Hal Foster, the editor of the Anti-Aesthetic, issued in 1983 notes that this “surrealist revolt” is returned in postmodernist art, meaning that the rejection of the beautiful is just as characteristic of the postmodernism of resistance that he also promotes, as of the “pure” artistic efforts of modernism (Foster 1983). The anti-aesthetic in its second meaning soon grew into a dominant theory, owing to Danto. This theory, often called contextualism, can be summed up in the following way: works of art are not different from everyday things through their perceptual traits, but through their art historical context. Whether something is a work of art is decided along a theory of art. With this, we reached the end of art, when anything can be art if the right art theory is available. Following Hegel, art has reached its end: it has become one with its own philosophy. Danto’s complex theory has much simpler versions. These are set along a scale where from the simple sharp separation of the “artistic” and

40

Why the Brillo Box?

the “aesthetic” (Best 1982), we reach the influential institutionalist theory. Following this, George Dickie defines the work of art as: “… a work of art in the descriptive sense is (1) an artifact (2) upon which some society or some subgroup of a society has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation” (Dickie 1969, 254), noting that it all depends on the institutional setting. The problem with institutional theory is, on the one hand, that it is circular—it defines the “agent” of the artistic world and the work of art with each other. On the other hand, it lacks any quality criteria, while common sense suggests that the status of candidate for appreciation has to be somehow earned. We can meet this type of simplification in Timothy Binkley’s 1977 writing, which states that art need not be aesthetic. On the other hand, he protests against the kind of perception of “artwork” that expects of the work to be an aesthetic object, which has similar aesthetic qualities as beauty, repose, expressiveness, unity, and liveliness. As opposed to this, he comes up with a very modest proposal— he calls the work of art a “piece,” and states “to be a piece of art an item need only be indexed as an artwork by an artist” (Binkley 1977, 272). Anybody can be an artist if they use the conventions of art, states Binkley, and aesthetics has nothing to do with art. The question does not arise whether there are quality criteria of art or the definition of the artist. Binkley’s disarming example is Duchamp’s “piece” called L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved, where a common postcard, with Mona Lisa’s portrait, becomes a work of art when Duchamp, without changing anything on it, names it L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved, referring to his previous work entitled L.H.O.O.Q., where he drew a moustache and beard on a copy of a Mona Lisa postcard. L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved is a work of art while not being perceptually different from the common postcard.

The Recovery of Aesthetics It seems that Danto definitively resolved the issue of identification of works of art. A work of art is differentiated from its perceptually indistinguishable pair by the art historical and theoretical context, and these differences are not visible properties of the work. There are some signs, however, suggesting that it would not be salutary to resign ourselves to having bleached out the aesthetic from the artistic. The troubling aspects are linked to the phenomenon which meant the end of art—the Brillo Box. Reading Danto’s great book on Warhol, we learn that Since the cardboard cartoons actually used by the Brillo company … were not capable of achieving the visual effect at which he aimed, Warhol decided that the grocery boxes had to be made of wood, and fabricated by

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wood craftsmen, who were trained in cutting and fitting pieces of wood together according to specifications given them. (Danto 2009, 53)

In this case, not only thought is important, for example, “let’s exhibit something that is confusingly similar to the product made in mass production, suggesting a radical art-philosophical question,” or “let’s exhibit something that really reflects contemporary American society,” or “let’s exhibit a work that will be the most decidedly opposed to the abstract, spontaneous gesture-painting of abstract-expressionism,” etc., but its appearance too, the aesthetic experience which the Brillo Box makes possible. Warhol thought about the way he would exhibit the Brillo boxes, building them on each other, and the sight was not satisfying, insofar as the edges of the cardboard boxes may dent, or be pushed in, not bringing out the perfect cube shape. The author, Warhol, who expressed his wish to become a machine, calculates exactly the aesthetic aspects of his works, which should definitely make us think. Another puzzling question is, why does Danto not see the end of art in Marcel Duchamp, while Duchamp’s work is perhaps more suitable for this? Duchamp’s ready-mades are at least as suitable to change the way we think about art as the Brillo Box. Duchamp’s Fountain is equally indistinguishable from its ordinary pair as the Brillo Box from Brillo boxes. Danto gives an inexact answer to this question, which covers two aspects. One is that Duchamp could not, in principle, have made his readymades, while Warhol did. This cannot explain Danto’s preference, since Duchamp’s gesture announces “the end of art” more radically: it is not only about the difference between the work of art and the ordinary object, but the difference between the artist and the ordinary factory worker as well. The second part of the answer sees Duchamp’s stipulation unfounded that the ready-mades can only be objects which are aesthetically indifferent (but why do that unless someone has some animus against retinal art?), and closes the answer with the rhetorical question: “Why live with dull anesthetic objects? Why not objects as beautiful as Brillo Boxes?” (Danto 2009, 66). It seems that, in Warhol’s paradigmatic case, which proves that the difference between ordinary objects and works of art is not perceptual, and “highlighting” the works of art among everyday objects is not based on aesthetic criteria, the aesthetic qualities still count, as much in Warhol’s artistic experience, as in Danto’s art theoretical point of view. Is it possible to win back the aesthetic for art (philosophy)? The recovery of the aesthetic is difficult to achieve by returning to “significant form” as a principle. This requires the presence of the beautiful or some other positive aesthetic quality, which was already

42

Why the Brillo Box?

problematic in the case of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, not to mention Duchamp’s Fountain. On the other hand, it presupposes the identification of works of art by significant form, lacking any theoretical mediation. This is difficult to achieve not only in the case of the Brillo Box, but also in the case of such concept works as Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, or Ondák’s The Loop. Thus, Lind, who wants to put back the aesthetic object and the aesthetic experience in the centre of art philosophy, is not very convincing in this respect (Lind 1992). Danto’s argument that art theory is “so powerful a thing as to detach objects from the real world and make them part of a different world, an art world, a world of interpreted things” (Danto 1981, 135) is completely acceptable. “Transfiguration” happens to a common object through the effect of art theory—it only becomes a work of art in the context of the art world. However, this does not mean that: “aesthetics hardly touches the heart of art and certainly not of great art, which is certainly not the art that happens to be most beautiful” (Ibid., 173). I would like to oppose a critical comment and a proposal to this conclusion. The critical comment is that, in this passage, Danto, who in other instances deals with the difference between the aesthetic and the beautiful so scrupulously, here confuses these terms. Indeed, great art is probably not the most beautiful art, but we cannot state that it could not hold aesthetic value (even such that Danto lists in connection with the Fountain: ugly, surprising, daring, outrageous, witty, etc.). The proposal is to accept that aesthetics does belong to the essence of art, namely, the essence of art constituted by art theory. The aesthetic quality of works of art could generically be called “artistic,” and, by this, we mean the aesthetic mediated by art theory.

Conclusion Danto convincingly argued that works of art are not differentiated from common objects by aesthetic properties. With this, he broke down the system of aestheticism, which discussed art as a sub-category of the aesthetic experience, looked for the universal, historically and culturally unconditioned significant form in works of art. At the same time, Danto’s theory can also be read as one considering the aesthetic point of view irrelevant for the essence of art. The paradigmatic starting point of Danto’s theory is Warhol’s Brillo Box. In this text, it was Brillo Box that created the opportunity for the questioning of this anti-aesthetic consequence—both Warhol, when he created the Brillo Box, and Danto, when he chose it to be the starting point of his art philosophy, were driven by aesthetic motives.

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This inconsistency can be resolved by accepting that common objects are “transfigured” in the framework of an art theory, while adding that from the moment they have transfigured into a work of art, their (new) aesthetic properties become substantial. The above proposal maintains the independence and primacy of art philosophy over aesthetics, and solves the paradox that art becomes its own philosophy without being identical with philosophy. Kosuth raises the philosophical question of the modes of existence in One and Three Chairs, similarly to Plato. Still, it is not philosophy, because it does not approach the issue in a discursive manner, but makes it possible to be aesthetically experienced. Firstly, we need an art theoretical framework to decide that the chair in Kosuth’s work belongs to a different rank of existence from the chair found next to it, on which the guard rests. But, starting from this, such classical formal points of view become relevant as form, proportion, structure, colour, etc., which represent the traditional points of view of aesthetics. The aesthetic mediated by art theory therefore explains why Brillo Box is chosen as a paradigmatic work of art.

References Best, D. (1982). “The Aesthetic and the Artistic.” Philosophy 57 (221): 357–372. Binkley, T. (1977). “Piece: Contra Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35 (3): 265–277. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Danto, A. C. (1964). “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy 61 (19): 571–584. —. (1981). The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. (1993). “A Future for Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (2): 271–277. —. (2004). “Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art.” Art Journal 63 (2): 24–35. —. (2009). Andy Warhol. New Haven–London: Yale University Press. Dickie, G. (1969). “Defining Art.” American Philosophical Quarterly 6 (3): 253–256. Foster, H. (Ed.) (1983). The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. Lind, R. (1992). The Aesthetic Essence of Art. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50 (2): 117–129.

PHRONETICS: A NEW WAY TO APPROACH SOCIAL PHENOMENOLOGY ADRIAN JINARU AND ANDREEA BÎRNEANU

Introduction In simple words, phronetics represents a new way to investigate the diversity of social and human phenomena interpreted from the standpoint of axiological reference standards. Anticipated in a few previous articles, its birth dates back to approximately a decade ago, and its paternity belongs to Bent Flyvbjerg in his book Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again (2001a). Etymologically, the origin of its name is the Greek word phronesis, a term with multiple connotations (“practical reasoning,” “common sense,” “practical wisdom,” “prudence”). Used by Aristotle, it designates intellectual availability oriented toward everyday life and action, the ability to discriminate, deliberate and make decisions through the perspective of the “things that are good or bad for man,” the capacity to behave appropriately in particular situations. The Greek philosopher opposes it to episteme (theoretical knowledge) and techne (applied “art”), phronesis representing the most important of these virtues since it provides a counterweight to analytical and instrumental rationality by means of rationality found in the universe of values (Flyvbjerg 2001a, 128).

“Science Wars” The context of the appearance of phronetics is the so-called “science wars” (Flyvbjerg 2001b, 1112), the epistemological dispute over the distinction between natural and social disciplines frequently put in an irreconcilable opposition. In Flyvbjerg’s opinion, even if a substantial difference can be found with regard to the study subject, methodology, means of construction, and aims, the two categories are not mutually incompatible—they are

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complementary because they respond to different concerns and intentions. Both carry values and requirements more or less acknowledged and shared. By giving up the habit of borrowing foreign models, social sciences are invited to follow their own ways of unmistakable achievement. The epistemic/naturalist model prepared the professionals only as “technocrats” who, concerned with theories, norms and laws, will only advance solutions to cure the “illnesses” which affect society. The new model concerns the specialists as “analysts who produce food for thought for the ongoing process of public deliberation, participation and decision making” (Flyvbjerg 2005–2006, 39). Reorganizing social sciences on a phronetic basis allows them to demonstrate their strength and superiority precisely where natural ones confess their lacking and weaknesses, in particular with regard to the debate on values, interests and power relations. The assumed task resides in clarifying these matters as a mandatory foundation for the articulation of the community praxis. To support his argumentation in favour of the new vision, Flyvbjerg resorts to a series of theoretical sources, older or newer, trying to relate them to each other: the emphasis placed on value by Max Weber as a decisive factor for any social organization, the considerations of Michel Foucault with regard to axiological neutrality and the power relations, the assessments of Jürgen Habermas related to the “communicative rationality” and the persuasive force of good arguments, Thomas Kuhn’s concept of “paradigm,” the poignant critique by Pierre Bourdieu of structuralism as an allegedly detached and schematic approach, the learning stages exposed by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, the “double hermeneutic” as self-reflecting interpretation promoted by Anthony Giddens and assigned to social sciences, even suggestions from Niccolo Machiavelli’s Prince or the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Declared Intentions and Justifications Channelled in a strictly pragmatic manner, phronetics seeks to answer, as convincingly as possible, four fundamental questions: -

Where are we going? Is the evolution we follow desirable? Who wins or loses and based on what mechanisms? What must be done (if anything can be done) in the situation described? (Flyvbjerg 2004a, 283–284; 2002b, 356–357)

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The term “phronetic planning research” was also imposed: it refers to “technicized” science which, by accounting for the problems, solutions and risks, specifically dwells on the field of policies, administration, management and/or planning, setting who does what for whom and with what consequences. To avoid the deviations towards “utopia,” three main objectives appear as an imperative to achieve: -

-

Abandoning the typical theorisations promoted in the planning schools and their alleged “truths” which elude the power relations. The problems approached will be necessarily reported to the local, national, possibly global groups (communities) for whom they truly “matter.” Initiation of a broad social dialogue, so that the citizen will be aware of the results of the research (Flyvbjerg 2001a, 6).

Considering that certain scientific standards are imposed on social sciences (different from “natural” ones), a central matter from which Flyvbjerg cannot escape is the “validity” of his own approach. Phronetics relies mainly on the interpretation of the researched phenomena, so it is open to verification competing with other similar researches, being subject—based on rigorous and strict assessment criteria—to confirmation, rejection or review. This does not mean that it would be a mere interpretation among others, but that it proves to be a better option through the explicative strength, evidence and arguments it provides. Thus, the validity of the phronetic science will not be an “objectivist” one (formal, normative and analytical), but “hermeneutic,” not universally acceptable, but only “socially” and “intersubjectively” conditioned, practical, ethical and political. The new vision proposed will no longer be “contemplation with no interest”—it will engage a variety of perspectives and interpretations focusing the analysis of the values promoted on power relations, their holders, the practices carried out, the influences exercised, and the effects entailed (Flyvbjerg 2006b, 374–375).

Applicative Valences of Phronetic Social Science The ambition of phronetic social science is to develop a pragmatic vision by excellence; consequently, it attacks the actual problems the human groups are facing to find viable solutions. The instruments used are for the beneficiaries “as eyes and ears in the ongoing efforts to understand the present and to deliberate about the future,” and the final purpose consists

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in clarifying new circumstances and providing relevant means of intervention (Flyvbjerg 2004a, 285). Instead of asking the traditional gnoseological question (What can we know and under what circumstances?), phronetic social science is more interested in the how knowledge is actually achieved and in the associated abilities/capacities. Precious indications are provided on the scale of the five levels of learning belonging to the brothers Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus (1988) and, like them, Flyvbjerg agrees that we have to face an interactive process in which “a-rational” factors (such as intuition or experience) interfere. The hierarchical stages reviewed are novice, advanced beginner, competent performed, exercised performer and expert, the first two consisting of the mechanical observance of a set of rules prescribed and independent from the context, with only the subsequent ones bringing elements of free judgment, choice, decision and creativity (Falk, Rocha & Warrnick 2009, 5; Flyvbjerg 2001a, 10). Flyvbjerg makes no secret of clearly privileging the qualitative techniques of investigation to the detriment of the quantitative ones; without diminishing the role and importance of the latter, in principle, he assesses that within the boundaries of social sciences their contribution requires careful reconsideration. He pleads without reservation for the method of case study, successively inventorying and demolishing the main “prejudices” that incriminate it as subjective and arbitrary (Flyvbjerg 2006a, 241–242).

Phronetic Social Science at Work From a methodological perspective, Flyvbjerg considers that nine requirements (all found in a relationship of mutual interdependence) are worthy of being observed and promoted in the case of applied phronetic social science: -

-

Focus on values! They represent the starting point to elucidate objectives and (desirable) ways to achieve them in axiological terms. To cultivate them does not mean degenerating into the opposite poles of “foundationism” and “relativism,” but promoting contextualism and “situational ethics,” which credits particular circumstances. Place power at the core of the analysis! Being omnipresent, it is an indispensable criterion of analysis because it is the only way to decide between the multiple programs we are proposed under competitive conditions. This means investigating the holders of power, the interests it serves, the means of exercise and its dynamics.

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-

-

-

-

-

-

-

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Get close to reality! Do an investigation, “not from a desk with a pen.” This is an issue aiming at answering the question: If you proceed correctly or you are wrong, who will notice and who will care? In other words, the delicate matter of the relevancy of the study conducted, and of its purely theoretical or concretely applied character is raised. Emphasize “small things”! Address “small questions,” apparently insignificant, from the perspective of the whole and describe in detail their answers. An inestimable analysis of material will be gathered from heterogeneous sources—the factual richness accumulated proves to be beneficial from the standpoint of recovering the “life as such.” Look at practice before discourse! Speeches (oral or written) hide and deform reality and life; they wrap them in misleading words and express only “common” generalities. In return, everyday practices reveal unsuspected and highly interesting facts about the environment, the statuses and roles played by social actors. Study cases and contexts! This is a direct invitation to assume the concrete in its multiple and diverse instances, to experience, but without falling into narrow empiricism. By making unavoidable selections, the approach pays attention to examples, to “difference, conflict and power relations,” and to the instruments of “control” used. Ask “how?” of a narrative! This is an apparently banal question, but if it is not asked, the investigation will be condemned to multiple confusions and misunderstandings. The interrogation provides explanations for the phenomenon under study and is the only way to construct “honest stories” with regard to what must be actually performed. Move beyond agency and structure! The two poles—the social agent and the organization including them—must be considered in conjunction and without discrimination between the micro- and macrolevel, “subject” and “object,” “internal” and “external,” to valorise in full a complex study perspective, achieved dually. Create a dialogue with a polyphony of voices! Another major inconvenience in the field of contemporary social sciences is the gap between various parallel approaches. “Multiple eyes” catch details which are inaccessible from a single point of view, hence the invitation for transdisciplinary cooperation, unification and solidarity of perspectives (Flyvbjerg 2004a, 292–302).

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Promises and Criticism It is worth remembering that Flyvbjerg does not claim to “revolutionize” the field of social sciences; he does not prohibit deliberation and critical judgment, and he only asks to explore a new manner of investigation, which can prove to be pragmatically useful in clarifying certain phenomenal and technical aspects that are seldom taken into account. He accepts alternative solutions, but also projects to improve his own applicative version. The Aalborg Project to which he collaborated for several years—rewarded with an “urban and planning policy” award by the European Union and implemented in other Scandinavian states— consists in case studies approaching, among other things, the thorny problem of busy, polluting and accident-causing road traffic (Falk, Rocha & Warrnick 2009). Adopted as a guiding instrument of research, phronetic social science has found fertile applications in various social fields, such as political science, urban planning (even architecture), management (including organizational management), administration and planning, political science, sociology, law, anthropology, ethnography, medicine, bioethics and nursing, ecology, futurology, education, and sport coaching, all of them proving that sciences in this category of intellectual concerns may be practised in ways that are different from the traditional methods, close to their authentic purpose, in a more autonomous and convincing manner and not by copying the external achievement models. On the other hand, when debating the project, there were some oppositions, reservations and critical reactions, though no outright rejection. More or less accurate, here are some of the main reproaches made in regard to it: Aristotle’s texts are read in a superficial manner and interpreted in a biased one; instead of going past the “science wars,” he rather fuels them, providing to his opponents new ways to become engaged in the dispute; the desirable polyphony of voices he invokes risks degenerating into a “cacophony” in which the loudest voice becomes the “fashion” of the day; he uses terms the meaning of which is not accurately defined, hence multiple ambiguities and semantic possibilities; the analysis of the values, interests and relations of power (always circumstantial) cannot found a genuine theory; the insertion of the researcher in the reality under study (of which he became a “part”) fuels the subjectivism and relativism; the validity assertions he makes are not objective and rigorous, allowing a width of expression which is not characteristic for genuine science (Eikeland 2006; Adcock 2009; Flyvbjerg 2002a).

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Conclusions The entire approach of phronetic social science received a warm welcome, commended and supported by reputed scholars such as Pierre Bourdieu and Clifford Geertz (2001). Challenging through themes and intention, involving theoretical developments, methodological guidance and concrete examples of transposition to action, and richly documented and argued, phronetic social science immediately came to the attention of the academic or practitioner professionals. The proof is provided by the positive or negative echoes it has created, the reactions in its favour or against it, the start of so called “Flyvbjerg debate,” the translations into various languages, the attempts to apply it in several fields of community life, and the editing of special discussion books (Schram & Caterino 2006). Whether and the extent to which it represents a genuinely original theoretical repositioning compared to the tradition of some of the doctrinal elaborations which supported the previous researches is a matter still open to debate. However, the aspect of the pragmatic orientation it provides remains interesting and exciting, which is worth exploring carefully to determine the areas in which its exercise is opportune, and its characteristic values and limits. At the same time, the good intentions of methodological renewal, and the movement from the consecrated patterns to collect and analyze new data (the “hidden aspects,” which are relevant for certain states which are overlooked when choosing in favour of other techniques) are all worth mentioning. Through the suggestions he has made it may come to represent the basis of a more appropriate construction of the means of social inquiry (questionnaire, interview, and poll). Of course, despite any claims, the results and conclusions of phronetics need to be validated by alternatively resorting to heterogeneous investigation methods, more or less “classical,” either readapted and reconfigured according to the challenges already launched. As far as we know, as an instrument of investigation of the complex social phenomenology in its multiple manifestations, phronetics has not yet been approached, addressed and put to use in Romanian literature.

References Adcock, R. (2009). “Making Social Science Matter to Us.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 21 (1): 97–112. Eikeland, O. (2006). Book Review: Sanford F. Schram & B. Caterino (Eds.), Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge,

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Research and Method. International Journal of Action Research 4 (3): 314–319. Falk, T. M., Rocha, S. & Warrnick, B. R. (2009). Social Science and Its Discontents: An Essay Review of Bent Flyvbjerg’s “Making Social Science Matter.” Education Review: A Journal of Book Reviews 12 (4): 1–15. http://www.edrev.info/essays/v12n4.pdf. Flyvbjerg, B. (2001a). Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. (2001b). “The Science Wars.” Philosophy and Social Action 27 (2): 11–15. —. (2002a). “Response to Phil Hodkingson.” British Journal of Educational Psychology 72 (3): 452–453. —. (2002b). “Bringing Power to Planning Research: One Researcher’s Praxis Story.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 21 (4): 353–366. —. (2004a). “Phronetic Planning Research: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections.” Planning Theory & Practice 5 (3): 283–306. —. (2004b). “A Perestroikan Straw Man Answers Back: David Laitin and Phronetic Political Science.” Politics and Society 32 (3): 389–416. —. (2005–2006). “Social Science That Matters. Foresight Europe 2: 38– 42. —. (2006a). “Five Misunderstandings about Case-Study Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 12 (2): 219–245. —. (2006b). “Making Organization Research Matter: Power, Values and Phronesis.” In S. R. Clegg, Cynthia Hardy, T. B. Lawrence & W. R. Nord (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies I, 370–387. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Geertz, C. (2001). “Empowering Aristotle.” Science 293 (5527): 53. Schram, S. F. & B. Caterino. (Eds.) (2006). Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research and Method. New York– London: New York University Press.

SOCIAL THERAPY: PHILOSOPHICAL NICHES FLORIN LOBONğ

Introduction Counselling has become part of contemporary cultural phenomena. Philosophy has come a long way from its use as “medicine” and investigation of the soul by the Ancient Greeks, to its extreme specializations in the twentieth century. Recently, the representatives of philosophy in practice have increasingly employed these reflections and techniques in solving some ethical problems pertaining to the social and public realms such as cloning, animal rights and euthanasia. An increasing number of philosophers—the “philosophical practitioners”—took this evolution one step further and began to help ordinary people use philosophy in counselling, management and in various educational settings. As Brown (2011) rightly notes, the notion of “practical philosophy” carries oxymoronic overtones resulting in different attitudes, from confusion to derision, to misunderstanding, or to academic criticism, depending on the prejudices of the assessors. The adjective “practical” is more often than not associated with a “useful” or “goal-oriented” employment of skills as a means towards tangible achievement, whereas philosophy is usually regarded (including by many philosophers) as an exclusive academic discipline concerned with abstract matters, obstruse argumentation and the presentation of classical texts, an activity which does not come up definitive answers but produces, instead, even more unempirical theory. However, to an eye attentive to the contemporary debates, the naivety of such stereotypical critiques is exposed by an underlying and increasingly strong message carried by practical philosophy concerning its hands-on utility beyond the production of theory. Not even the Aristotelian distinction between the forms of wisdom or skill that correspond to the three main types of activity (theoria, poiesis,

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and praxis)—namely episteme (intellect), techne (craftsmanship), and phronesis (judgement)—can fully cast confusion away, as practical philosophy that underpins good conduct or virtuous living is ultimately classified as academic, for its value is judged by the quality of contemplation, not on skill in action. (Aristotle 2009). Confusion is raised by various spiritualist movements who claim to offer courses in “practical philosophy” aiming at the attainment of wisdom, happiness and love, and whose activities could be described as ritualized and systematic indoctrination, new-age spiritualism and exclusive healing practices.

Methods Unlike these types of approach, practical philosophers per se adhere to the critical methods of academic philosophy, particularly in the analytic tradition. Employing solid philosophical knowledge and general counselling skills, they … facilitate the thinking of a client or group of people. Their activity is philosophical, because it focuses on significant, but problematic concepts, the kind of concepts used not only for everyday thinking and communication, but also as a basis for actions. Practical philosophers can often identify hidden assumptions, theoretical frameworks, and world views. These inform the sorts of questions they ask. They use their training and experience to help others find their own philosophical insights. (The Society for Philosophy in Practice 2012)

Philosophy can help counsellors in at least three main ways—the analyticinformative work with clients, the solving of the dilemmas of counsellors themselves, and the assessment of the theoretical foundations and benefits of counselling. The various types of philosophical counselling resort on a regular basis to the most important elements of philosophy—its object, methods and systematic nature. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy defines it as “rationally critical thinking, of a more or less systematic kind about the general nature of the world (metaphysics or theory of existence), the justification of belief (epistemology or theory of knowledge) and the conduct of life (ethics or theory of value)” (Honderich 1995). The alleged disadvantages of the lack of scientific certitude, mainly “medical”— invoked especially by MDs in order to dismiss counselling—are balanced by the potential of the methods derived from philosophy and their general attitudinal outcome; the articulating and infusing of the enquiring spirit.

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Unlike the types of “medicalising” therapy or counselling (mainly psychiatry or psychology) that place, by means of diagnosis, their patients within the spectrum of a form of disease or pathology, philosophy in practice deals with types of problems experienced by individuals and groups which Marinoff (2003) calls “dis-ease.” In his view, some kinds of problems may require the cooperative involvement of more professionals. However, if one needs to talk to someone about their circumstances in order to make sense of them, or to discern their meaning, purpose and value in their life, a philosopher might be the right helper for them. Marinoff states repeatedly that philosophical practitioners or counsellors are not trying to replace or supplant psychiatry or psychology. They are simply giving philosophy its rightful place, where it can work in partnership with other helping professions in order to benefit from all forms of help, People should get to know themselves medically so as to preserve their physical health, including the proper functioning of their brain chemistry. Visits to physicians, including psychiatrists, are warranted for this purpose. Similarly, people should get to know themselves psychologically, so as to maintain their emotional well-being. Understanding the forces that condition and influence one’s personality, habits, likes dislikes, ambitions, aversions and so forth is required for personal growth.

Results But what should one do if they are medically stable, emotionally contained and yet experiencing dis-ease over a burning question? This is where philosophy can step in. “Enhancing your point of view can transform your dis-ease into ease. Making philosophical sense of your circumstances is like finding the eye of the storm: you’re in calm and collected state, even though many things may be swirling around you” (Marinoff 1999; Marinoff 2003, 11–12). Another proponent of philosophical counselling, Howard states that the big philosophical questions about life and its meaning are neither medical issues nor, primarily, psychological questions, for they “cannot be squeezed into the narrow therapy agendas of contemporary psychology” (2000, vii). In Harteloh’s (2011) inspired formulation, academic philosophy is characterised by objectivity and seeks to express thoughts in an impersonal way. Philosophical counselling’s target is the personal philosophical experience. With social utility in mind, it does not attempt to interpret the

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thoughts of an individual guest or client in terms of impersonal philosophy, but to link thoughts to actions in day-to-day life. This does not turn philosophical practice into an applied science, a technique (techne) like medicine or psychology. Philosophical practice does not have a fixed method. It actually requires a sense of purpose and a quality of mind (phronesis) based on competences acquired by the study of philosophy (Harteloh 2011, 39–40). The clients of various kinds of philosophical counselling are progressively involved in the dynamics of philosophical exploration of their lives which generates clarifications, reconsiderations and discoveries, sometimes surprisingly profound and radical, at a personal level. According to philosophical practitioners, philosophy needs to be demystified and be made more accessible to those (mostly non-specialists) for whose help it was invented. The attainment of this objective takes place, progressively, through the therapeutic engagement of philosophy via the five methods it generated— critical thinking, conceptual analysis, phenomenology, thought experiments and creative thinking. “Critical thinking involves testing whether arguments stand up to critical investigation and seeking whether we have good reason to accept them.” Conceptual analysis is “a way of becoming clearer about what we mean.” Phenomenology represents “a concern for the client’s own subjective meanings.” A thought experiment is “an experiment carried out in our minds,” whereas creative thinking methods (such as brainstorming and lateral thinking) create the arguments that critical thinking subsequently assesses (LeBon 2001, 5–6). Instead of a conclusion, we can bring one of the most convincing syntheses of the huge diversity of philosophical approaches to counselling, namely Harteloh’s. It narrows down the philosophical practitioners’ activity to three basic competences (or “arts”) which result from mastering techniques already acquired during the study of philosophy: -

Questioning (grounded in the sceptic tradition). Interpreting (grounded in the stoic tradition). Understanding (grounded in the source of philosophy itself with its search for wisdom and truth) (Harteloh 2011, 40–43).

Here, are the most important elements of Harteloh’s table of competences presented in relation to their corresponding tasks and requirements (Table 1-3):

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Table 1-3. Harteloh’s table of competences (after Harteloh 2010) Tasks: Facilitating personal change

Requirements: Reflective dialogue

Contemplating well being, facilitating choice Creating free space/room to think

Creating examples, use of examples To be open, without prejudice, not to know (Socratic attitude), transparency, creativity Questioning

Change thinking Make people think To think along Examine ways of thinking Creating meaning and sense, construction of lifestyle Philosophical diagnosis, localisation of a problem Translating questions or problems in philosophy Clear formulation of a problem or thoughts, reflection Analyse thinking/thoughts Exercise in thinking Making presuppositions explicit Applying philosophy Facilitating dialogue, moderating groups To deepen dialogue To explain philosophy To make speech more interesting Creating atmosphere

Questioning Empathy, philosophical understanding Logical skills Telling a story, giving (suitable) examples Listening, interpreting problem in philosophical terms Mediating philosophy To be present, attention, concentration, Knowledge of philosophy/philosophers Listening, questioning, interpreting, applying logic Confronting client with logic or examples Recognizing philosophical elements in speech, bringing in philosophical concepts Knowledge and skills from studying philosophy Alertness, listening, questioning, interpreting, being present Questioning, interpreting Knowledge of philosophy Using examples

Listening, understanding, empathy Giving examples of a Facilitating a philosophical way of life, integrating work, philosophical life, reading philosophy life and philosophy Stimulating the art of living Critical reflection, creativity, knowledge of examples

Abilities: AoU (Abilities of Understanding) AoU AoU

AoQ (Abilities ofQuestioning) AoQ AoI (Abilities of Interpreting) AoI, AoQ AoI, AoU AoI

AoI AoU, AoI

AoI AoQ AoI

AoU AoU

AoQ, AoI AoI AoI AoU AoI, AoU

AoU

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References Aristotle (2009). The Nicomachean Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, S. (2011). “The Meaning of ‘Counsellor’.” Practical Philosophy 10 (1): 17–34. Harteloh, P. (2011). “On the Competence of Philosophical Counsellors.” Practical Philosophy 10 (1): 35–46. Honderich, T. (Ed.). (1995). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howard, A. (2000). Philosophy for Counselling and Psychotherapy: Pythagoras to Postmodernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave. LeBon, T. (2001). Wise Therapy. London: Continuum. Marinoff, Lou. (1999). Plato, Not Prozac! New York, NY: Quill. —. (2003). Therapy for the Sane: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. The Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP). http://www.society-forphilosophy-in-practice.org.

IS MARXISM A GOOD IDEA THAT FAILS IN PRACTICE? MARIUS-ROBERT LUNGU

Introduction During recent years, a lot of opinion polls showed that nearly half of the Romanians regret the communist regime. But what exactly do the Romanians regret? Some people say that, before 1989, there was no unemployment. Young people got a job right after graduating from school and a small flat to rent uptown, and the conditions were not impressive. It is true that Romanians earned money back then, but they had nothing to buy with it because the food stores were empty almost all of the time, with only the first people in the queue having the chance to get something. Other people say that the communist rule would have survived even now if Ceauúescu had ensured “bread for the people”! I wonder if this is true—is bread all people need? Following 1989, Ion Iliescu said that Ceauúescu had “defiled the ideals of scientific socialism.” Scientific socialism is just another name given to Communism by Karl Marx in order to set himself apart from other socialists of his time. Iliescu was not the only intellectual who believed in this. Even today, this idea is pretty wide spread among Romanian intellectuals. In other words, Communism (Marxism) is a very good idea, and we, the Romanians, are guilty of applying it in the wrong way. What should we then do? Should we put Communism into practice again or not?

Method The issue is addressed from an interdisciplinary perspective via historical, philosophical and Jungian psychoanalysis.

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Interpretation What exactly makes an idea good? An idea is good when its enforcement results in positive effects: An idea is validated by its results. If an idea is good, but not applicable, if in any place it is put into practice the result is not good, then it cannot be called a good idea anymore, it is a utopia. Utopia is a good idea that cannot be put into practice. Or, if it can be put into practice, but it is applied wrongly, then you have to find examples when it was well applied and given good results, or, if there are no such examples, then I cannot call it a good idea anymore, I call it an illusion. (Pleúu 2007)

Karl Marx liked to say, “so far, all philosophers did was explain the world we live in, but it is important to change it.” We can say that Marx held his word. Communism was put into practice by Lenin, Stalin and Mao in two of the world’s largest countries, the Soviet Union and China. They thought it was necessary to execute tens of millions of people in order to build the communist society. Together with their repressive system, they had no hesitation to kill in the name of Communism for a better future without the bourgeois, villagers and priests. An illuminated future belonged only to the working class led by the communist party. One of the ideas of Communism is the elimination of religion from society because it is “the sigh of the tormented creature,” “the sensibility of a world without heart,” “opium for the people.” Karl Marx said that suppression of religion and morals would lead to true happiness among people. He considered the Christians guilty of searching for happiness in the other world instead of building a happy communist society on earth. It is true they managed to suppress religion in the Soviet Union by destroying the Russian Orthodox Church, but still there was no happiness. According to statistics, over two hundred thousand Russian monks, priests and bishops were killed during the twentieth century in the Soviet Union. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx openly declared that the purpose of the communists was to destroy the old social order: “The leading classes must tremble at the idea of the communist revolution.” (Marx & Engels 1998, 32) Here are some quotations in this respect from correspondence between Marx and Engels and an article published in the Reinische Zeitung: “Once they grasp the power, communists must look like monsters,” and “We must act like in 1793” (the year of the Great Terror during the French revolution). It was often said that Marxism is all about class struggle, as Marx said: “Classes and races that are too weak to

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face the new existential conditions will be defeated.” “Weak people are ethnic garbage” (Pleúu 2007). We can find a similar statement in Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism in social sciences, who said “people who cannot make history progress make up the garbage of history.” The people most knowledgeable about Marxism proved to be those that knew it from the inside. Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Leszek Kolakowsky and Friedrich von Hayek have preached Marxism for most of their life, especially in their youth, but thankfully have recovered its seduction. Popper, one of the greatest philosophers of science of the twentieth century, catalogues Marxism as “the most dangerous form of historicism” (Popper 1993, 93) Marxist historicism is the belief that the evolution of capitalist states towards communism is inevitable: The revolution in nature sciences has replaced the term of God with that of nature, but left everything else almost unchanged. Later, Hegel and Marx have replaced goddess Nature with goddess History. As a result, we have the laws of history – powers, forces, tendencies, purposed, plans of History – and the omnipotence and omniscience of historical determinism. (Popper 1996, 173)

Reality has invalidated this idea. Western capitalist states have not become communist, as Karl Marx predicted, but central and eastern European states with a rather feudal economy have become communist by way of brutal Soviet occupation. Communism could not be put into practice in Western states that had powerful working classes, but in central and eastern European states that consisted of large amounts of peasantry (almost two thirds of the population). Raymond Aron, one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, catalogues Marxism as a secular religion, “opium for the intellectuals,” and the intellectuals as the new priests of the modern world: Marxism prophecy corresponds to the typical diagram of the JudeoChristian prophecy. A society without classes, which will bring social progress without a political revolution looks like the empire at the end of time, dreamed by millenaries. The communist party becomes the Church assaulted by the pagan bourgeois who do not want to listen to the good word. (Aron 2001, 303)

Bertrand Russell, the father of analytical philosophy, although he was a great promoter of atheism during the previous century, identified the religious ideas behind the main concepts of Marxism as:

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Is Marxism a Good Idea Which Fails in Practice? Iahve = Dialectic Materialism; Messiah = Marx; The chosen ones = the Proletariat; the Church = the Communist Party; Judgement Day = the Revolution; Hell = Punishment of the Capitalists; the Thousand Years Empire = the Socialist Society. (Russel 1967, 379)

Mircea Eliade, one of the great historians of religions of the twentieth century, considers Marxism as one of the most successful modern mythologies: It is obvious that Marx revives and develops one of the great eschatological myths of the Asian-Mediterranean world: the redeeming role of the Right One (the chosen, the immaculate, the messenger—in our days, the proletariat), whose sufferings are called to change the ontological status of the world. The classless society of Marx and the disappearance of historical tensions find their exact precedent in the myth of the Golden Age. (Eliade & Mairet 1967, 19)

Where does this fascination with Marxism come from? We can try to answer this question from the Jung psychoanalysis perspective, although the main thesis of psychoanalysis according to which the greatest part of human behaviour is not determined consciously, but unconsciously, does not appeal to philosophers. The most important discoveries of Jung in psychology and psychoanalysis are the collective unconscious and archetypes. These two concepts are exactly the reason why Sigmund Freud repudiated Jung, although up to that point Freud considered him his successor as the head of the psychoanalysis school. The Swiss psychologist defines: … the collective unconscious as a part of the psyche that can be negatively differentiated from the personal unconscious through the fact that it does not owe its existence to personal experience. While the personal unconscious is made up of content that once was conscious but has disappeared from conscience (they were forgotten or repressed), the content of the collective unconscious has never been conscious or individually gotten, but they owe their existence strictly to heredity. (Jung 1981, 53)

In Jung’s analytical psychology, the archetype plays a very important role in the process of individualisation, of developing the individual personality, which lasts for a lifetime:

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… the main archetype is that of the Self, that of the totality of the human structure. Jung believed that in any culture man tends to achieve his Self (through what he called the individualisation process). For western civilisation, the symbol of the Self is Christ, and the achievement of the Self is redemption. (Eliade 1994, 44)

According to Jung, the human soul has four covers. In the centre is the Self, followed by the personal unconscious (called by Jung the “shadow”), the conscious ego and the socially projected ego. Archetypes lie in the most profound part of the human soul, the Self or Imago Dei as Jung calls it. Jung tells us that, in the traditional society, the movement of archetypes through all the covers of the soul was ensured through the practice of religion, while, in modern times, the hindering of this movement of the archetypes is the cause of many mental illnesses: Modern man does not exteriorize his archetypes but finds himself confronted by them in dreams and fantasies. But the part of the shadow that is not exteriorized takes its revenge; it has a negative and destructive influence. This influence has an evil bearing on the inside of the psyche. (Vianu 2006)

Maybe the most notable example in this respect is that of Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism in social sciences. When he published his Introduction to Positive Philosophy he said that the religious stage in human history was long gone. However, ten years later he said that “the religious feeling in man is eternal.” Moreover, Comte founded a church and preached in it (Comte 1988), showing how repressed unconsciousness came to possess him in the end.

Conclusion From a philosophical perspective, Marxist ideology is a combination of discourses: rational and irrational, truth and error. Therefore, people cannot live without putting their fate into something, even people who hate religion. If they do not believe in God, they will believe in something else. The communist utopia continues to be such a fate, even if putting it into practice meant killing tens of millions of people around the world. From the perspective of Jungian psychoanalysis, Marxism is a laic religion containing a range of religious archetypes. It is a reverse Christianism, hence its success, especially among intellectuals.

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References Aron, R. (2001). The Opium of Intellectuals. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Comte, A. (1988). Introduction to Positive Philosophy. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. Eliade, M. & Mairet, P. (1967). Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Eliade, M. (1994). Nostalgia originilor [Nostalgy of Origins]. Bucureúti: Humanitas. Jung, C. G. (1981). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1998). The Communist Manifesto. New York, NY: Signet Classics. Pleúu, A. (2007). A treia zi a comunismului? [Third Day of Communism ?]. ConferinĠă susĠinută la ùcoala de Vară de la Sighet. Popper, K. R. (1996). The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality. London: Routledge. Russel, B. (1967). A History of Western Philosophy. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone. Vianu, I. (2006). Jung, Guenon úi criza lumii moderne [Jung, Guenon and the Crisis of the Modern World]. Dilema veche 145.

SOCIAL AESTHETICS: CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES OF A SCHILLERIAN THEME ùTEFAN-SEBASTIAN MAFTEI

Introduction This study aims at exploring, historically and theoretically, the concept of “social aesthetics,” a notion much advocated since the rise of the alleged “public sphere” in eighteenth century Europe.1 Although the idea was suggested and debated throughout the second half of the eighteenth century by various authors, such as Rousseau, Schiller and Kant, the exact phrase “social aesthetic(s)” has been circulated only recently (Berleant 2005) by authors trying to rethink the importance of aesthetics for the social sphere in modern society. The phrase bears a particular historical reference to Friedrich Schiller’s famous considerations on the “aesthetic state” in his 1794 Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man (Schiller 1902). The philosophical background of Schiller’s Letters was recognized as Kantian (Berleant 2010). However, Schiller’s theory about aesthetic education is also reminiscent of Plato’s treatment of the soul and the state in his Republic and to a special kind of German Platonism that developed throughout the eighteenth century, according to Norton (1995). Fichte is also one of Schiller’s greatest sources, as Beiser (2005) explained in his analysis of Schiller’s philosophical works. This approach seeks to examine Schiller’s theory of aesthetic education, with particular reference to contemporary approaches on “social aesthetics,” considering the work of several leading authors in modern aesthetics such as Jacques Rancière, Arnold Berleant and Wolfgang Welsch. The major query in this study concerns the very possibility of “social aesthetics” as it unfolds in various discussions regarding “everyday aesthetics” (Leddy 2005; Berleant 2005; Berleant 1991; Sartwell 2005; Sartwell 1995).

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Clarification of the Concept Given the large number of current theories that could qualify as “social” theories about art and/or aesthetics,2 we may have to restrict the discussion on “social aesthetics” to just three main readings of the notion: -

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Social aesthetics, which theorizes aesthetic experience as an inherent social phenomenon, thus extending the possibility of addressing “aesthetic social situations” in relation to all kind of manifestations of human interrelationship (etiquette, ritual, fashion, prayer, dance) (Berleant 2005). Nevertheless, authors such as Welsch (1996), a proponent of a new kind of aesthetics or a new “aesthetic criticism,” do not include the situations quoted above (etiquette and fashion are examples also used by Welsch) among aesthetic objects as such. In his search for a new criteria of legitimating new aesthetic objects, Welsch does operate a significant difference between material aesthetic objects and objects which are merely subjected to aestheticization processes— aestheticization—which he defines as a process where “traditionally artistic attributes are carried over into reality,” “daily life being pumped full of artistic character” (1996, 3). Among “surface aestheticizations” or “sugar-coatings of the real with aesthetic flair,” he quotes the “aesthetic furnishment of reality,” “hedonism as a new cultural matrix,” the creation of an “aesthetic aura” through “economic strategies” (Ibid.). As “deep-seated aestheticizations,” he references the “transposition of hardware and software,” which takes place in the “new materials technologies” where the “material” itself (e.g., the image), becomes pliable, malleable, transformable and, therefore, capable of being “aestheticized” (Ibid., 4); the “reality as constituted through media” or “televisionary reality” and the “styling of subject and his ways of life” (Ibid., 6). In sum, he argues that aestheticization occurs where “the unaesthetic is made, or understood to be, aesthetic” (Ibid., 7). Thus, aesthetics is not a “passepartout word, which is suited to everything precisely because it says nothing” (Ibid., 8). Introducing new criteria for aesthetics does not invalidate the need for legitimating and backing these aesthetic criteria against a “universal aestheticization” of everything human.3 Social aesthetics as a visionary “politics of social aesthetics,” which has its origins in Schiller’s utopian idea of the “aesthetic state,” and correlates (but does not conflate) the Kantian model of the willing acceptance of the object in an aesthetic situation with its social or political equivalent, and recognition of the “intrinsic value of every

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person” (Berleant 2005), which is not the same thing as contemplating or merely using the person as an object. The major fault of this reading is that it does not specify why and how is it possible that a Kantian model of aesthetic contemplation should serve a moral or a political theory. More recently, Berleant (2010) offered a new reading of political theory through aesthetic concepts. This time, he appealed to the concept of “aesthetic perception” as well as to Jacques Rancière’s theory of “perceptual commons” (Rancière 2004).4 This reading of the “aesthetics” as everyday perception and of “perception” as “political” is exactly the same reading that Rancière applies to Schiller’s notion of the “aesthetic state” (Ibid., 23–24). Basically, Berleant contends that aesthetics is a “mode of experience” that rests on the immediacy of sensory perception, a perception which is defined as “the foundation of art.” However, perception is never a “pure” cognitive act, as pragmatism would consider, but is always biased by several factors— cultural, historical, personal, cognitive. (Berleant 2010, 188). Since it is never “pure,” even if immediate, Berleant raises the possibility of “a kind of radical phenomenology,” based on aesthetic perception, which speculates upon the “social uses” and the political predetermination of perception (Ibid., 207). Social aesthetics as a (Kantian) theory of beauty. Schiller’s own response to Kant’s “banishment” of morality from the realm of aesthetic contemplation.

Schiller’s “Social Aesthetics” Avant la Lettre In the following, we consider Schiller’s own theory of “social aesthetics,” which is best reflected in his 1794 Aesthetic Letters. Actually, Schiller’s ideas about beauty began to take shape a few years earlier, during the writing of the Kalliasbriefe (1791–1793). Schiller provides one of the most puzzling and most complex explanations of “social aesthetics” ever produced. Here, according to Beiser (2005), Schiller sketches a theory of aesthetic judgment which is quite different from Kant’s own account in his Critique of Judgment. There, Schiller insisted that reason could be defined as either theoretical or practical.5 Practical reason connects representations with the will for the sake of action. It also applies its forms to actions, which are necessary or free. Schiller considers that the application of practical reason to free actions is called moral judgment, whereas the application of practical reason to natural events or necessary actions is defined as aesthetic judgment.

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Different from Kant’s view, according to Schiller, aesthetic judgment is one form of practical reason, the form that applies its principles to events in the natural world. Thus, the principle of aesthetic judgment concerns the way in which freedom appears in the sensible world. Aesthetic judgment is, thus, the analogon of the moral judgment in the moral world. According to his theory of judgment, beauty is defined as a “freedom in appearance.” Consequently, the concept of beauty appeals to basic moral value, which is freedom. Nevertheless, in the Kalliasbriefe, Schiller explicitly states that the (practical) principle of beauty is only regulative, not constitutive (in Kant’s sense). It clearly says beauty “ought to” exist in the object, not that it actually exists. Accordingly, Schiller’s notion of “freedom,” derivable from beauty, relies only on a regulative principle. Schiller’s principle of beauty as “freedom in appearance” gets full recognition in his Aesthetic Letters. Schiller’s thesis on beauty is stated anew, albeit in a different sense: “it is through beauty that we arrive at freedom” (Letter II) (Schiller 1901, 7). In the Letters, Schiller speaks of beauty, not from the perspective of the spectator (beauty in appearance), but from the point of view of the moral person—beauty makes us free (Beiser 2005). This paves the way to the major thesis of the Letters— about the aesthetic education—which shows that the harmony between reason and nature in the individual is restored only when modern man acquires the experience of beauty (Deligiorgi 2005). Beiser (2005) also considers that Schiller advances a particular political (republican) idea: “a person has the right to civil freedom only when they demonstrate their capacity for moral freedom” (Ibid., 124). In other words, one cannot live in a moral state without each acquiring and educating their own moral virtue. In addition, according to Beiser (Ibid., 154), Schiller announces another notable thesis concerning the nature of freedom in the moral state—that freedom understood as autonomy is not enough; one must submit a new concept of freedom. Actually, Beiser discovers three forms of freedom in the Letters: freedom as autonomy, freedom understood anthropologically as “freedom of acting as a whole” and “freedom of choice” which results from the “indeterminability” of what Schiller calls the “aesthetic condition” or “disposition” (Letters XIX, XX, XXI). The “aesthetic condition” is “active determinability,” a determinability in which one is not determined by anything, but in a positive way. Schiller, thus, awards a much wider freedom to the “aesthetic condition,” a freedom in which one might not be constraint to act morally at all (Letter XXII). The “aesthetic condition” inherently generates a state of indeterminacy with respect to moral choice, but also unfolds that which sustains the moral choice in the individual, which is the very possibility of choice

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(Letter XXI). Thus, because it is indeterminate, the aesthetic condition “restores” freedom (Schiller 1902). Beauty does not produce by itself a moral result, but the freedom or the capacity to engender good actions: “beauty does not carry out a single intellectual or moral object” (Ibid.). As well as in Kant’s case, Schiller advocates the autonomy of art from both knowledge and moral feeling. The value of art is in its freedom (Beiser 2005), its freedom being not the power to act according to moral laws (which is in itself a form of constraint), but the freedom of moral freedom—the freedom of freedom as autonomy, the capacity to choose humanity in an absolute, infinite manner: It is, therefore, not only a poetical license, but also philosophically correct, when beauty is named second creator. Nor is this inconsistent with the fact that she only makes it possible to attain and realise humanity, leaving this to free will. For in this she acts in common with the original creator, nature, which has imparted to us nothing further than this capacity for humanity, but leaves the use of it to our own determination of will. (Schiller 1902, 75–76)

Conclusion We have identified three main readings of “social aesthetics” disseminated by recent scholarship. One reading, a classical one, is “social aesthetics” —it belongs to Schiller and seems the most comprehensive one. The other two readings, which refer to works of modern scholarship, do not address effectively the twofold issue of why and how is it possible that aesthetics could eventually be defined as “social.”

Notes 1. For the history of “the public sphere,” see Habermas’s seminal work (1989). 2. The notion of “social aesthetics” may well be considered as redundant in the case of subfields such as the sociology of art, which sees aesthetics and art theory as dominated by the concept of “artwork,” which, accordingly, appears as a product emerging out of a particular social and historical context and always considered endowed with a definite social function. 3. “Aesthetic thinking opposes the turmoil of aestheticization and the pseudosensitivity of an Experience Society” (Welsch 1996, 18). 4. Rancière (2004) redefines “aesthetics” by identifying it to a new sense of “politics,” presumably with the belief that art, like all other human activities has a common source, which is aisthƝsis, or perception. Surface and rhythm are the common (time-space) aesthetic categories which not only define, but also create or shape everyday perception (in Kant’s terms). In borrowing from

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Kant’s sense of the term “experience,” Rancière’s term aesthetics becomes the surrogate of “experience” itself, or a “distribution” of the visible and the invisible, of space and time, of speaking and noise, a phenomenon which is also identifiable as the “political.” Aesthetics is, at its most basic level, an everyday perception. 5. This account of Schiller’s theory of judgment follows Beiser’s review (2005).

References Beiser, F. (2005). Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berleant, A. (1993). Art and Engagement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. —. (2005). “Ideas for a Social Aesthetics.” In A. Light & J. M. Smith (Eds.), The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press: 23-38. —. (2010). Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Deligiorgi, Katerina. (2005). Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Leddy, T. (2005). “The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics.” In A. Light & J. M. Smith (Eds.), The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press: 3–22. Levinson, J. (Ed.) (2005). The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Light, A. & Smith, J. M. (Eds.) (2005). The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Norton, R. E. (1995). The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rancière, J. (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum International Publishing. Sartwell, C. (1995). The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. —. (2005). “Aesthetics of the Everyday.” In J. Levinson (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Schiller, F. (1901). Aesthetical and Philosophical Essays 1. Boston, Mass: Francis A. Niccolls & Comp. Publishers. Welsch, W. (1996). “Aestheticization Processes: Phenomena, Distinctions and Prospects.” Theory, Culture and Society 13 (1): 1–24.

AUDIENCE OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE PERIPHERY: GERARD OF CENAD CLAUDIU-MARIUS MESARO‫܇‬

Introduction Modern canonical views and many philosophers today consider professional philosophy as an exclusively systematic or analytical approach. Nonetheless, for a century philosophers have noticed that academic philosophy has begun to miss its audience—the so-called “end of philosophy” is, among other things, the end of its addressability. Contemporary debates on philosophical historiography methodology can support a re-evaluation of the audience of philosophy and may enable a fresh view on addressing philosophical literature, even in its marginal instances. We put forward a case study of Gerard of Cenad, a forgotten (or undiscovered) medieval philosopher that can be introduced as marginal in some sense and allows for good insights on the relation between author and audience in philosophy.

Audience and Authorship of Philosophical Texts One consistent stereotype concerning pre-modern philosophy claims that, once criticized, a philosophical idea is necessarily anachronic; one can ask whether historical philosophical texts transmit significant things today (Leiter 2004). Rorty had advanced the idea of philosophy as a “problem solving” task (in Rorty, Schneewind & Skinner 1984) or “rational reconstruction.” However, as Sorrell (2005) noticed, such an approach results in major historiographical fallacies. There is still another excessive outcome opposed to those of the analytical tradition, namely the commonly encountered premise that philosophical problems are eternal; it is at least as unwise, according to Sorrell (Ibid.), to regard old texts with religiosity. Although many systematic philosophers continue to use classic manuals, important innovating philosophical historiography literature was written over the years. Lavine, Tejera & Horowitz (1989) have dedicated weighty arguments to showing how much a new theoretical approach for

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the history of philosophy is needed. Another important contributor to the emergence of a new philosophical historiography is Inglis (1998) who incriminates the dominant models starting from Wulf and Gilson as inaccurate, because they did not honestly identify the research objects and genuine problems raised by historical authors, but rather projected an enlightenment lens on everything. Such a perspective can oppose any historiographical scepticism that would claim consequences from the accidental character of a historical text. Another instance of conclusively exploring the relation of philosophy to its audience (in a rational connection to Taylor’s suggestion, I think) is that of Veatch (1974), who reconstructed Aristotle’s thinking according to our own contemporary problems and common sense, bringing Aristotle to endorse the idea that classical projects of philosophy are still actual. Veatch’s book is also noteworthy for illustrating how the issue of communicability of philosophy can be answered. Charles Taylor (in Rorty, Schneewind & Skinner 1984) made similar remarks and proposed a new understanding of practising philosophy as a continuous “rewriting” of philosophical texts in order to put an end to the lack of communication between philosophers, traditions, and ages: rewriting is the only way for philosophy to create a new accommodation for itself. The representation of philosophy incommunicability can also be deconstructed through Baumgarten’s concept of “paradigm” (2005), assumed as: (a) relative (propositions are paradigmatic only to the interpreter who assumes the text to be so); (b) accidental (if the premises are criticisable, the theory stays relevant); (c) self-contradictory (permissive with multiple contradictory but coherent stories). Gracia (1996) will consider the product of textual rephrasing and annotating as a part of the text itself so that philosophical text (even historical) and philosophical practice must be taken as one and the same. Actual texts (outside the mind of an interpreter) include historical texts (as produced by a historical author, extant or not), contemporary texts (accessible in the original language) and intermediary texts (non-extant, non-historical but having existed at some moment as contemporary to someone). Intentional texts are never actualized and remain as ideas in the mind of an interpreter, and then ideal texts are those an interpreter believes should have been produced by a historical author. Rephrasing produces a legitimate component of the text itself in terms of ideal and intentional texts that can become actual if an interpreter instantiates text-related ideas, for example. However, the actuality of a text sometimes consists in oral expressions; Gracia insists that even mental texts are actual to the extent they have an audience like the author (1996). Ontologically this is sound and entails further claims such as the substance-feature character of the

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text, the dynamic nature of text as never-ending assemblage or polytext. Philosophical texts are, therefore, mental most of the time since they have counterparts consisting of images in authors’ and audiences’ minds. This account allows the conclusion that a general and non-specialized public become philosophizing agents, often but not necessarily through intention of the historical author themself; it is, then, a fact that a philosophizing audience is, in a broad sense, co-author of the text or, in Lore’s terms (2002), executant author (artifex). However, these are equally authors according to Gracia’s ontology of the text. This theoretical context serves as a methodological support for considering the philosophical problem of addressability of philosophy with particular respect to the concept or marginal philosophy.

Marginal Philosophy, Marginal Audience If philosophical texts in the broader sense can be legitimately addressed to larger categories of the public, then there are texts that could enter anew into the philosophical category even if they were traditionally considered to belong to different fields. Such texts could be, for instance, medieval texts considered by many historiographers as theological or, by others, as literary. Addressability of philosophy is, thus, a methodological insight for further questions. It is not only the problems and answers, but other categories that classify a philosophical text. I would consider, for instance, the public. Is there a category of audience interested in philosophical issues contained in a non-philosophical text? Such a text could be part of philosophy manuals since it possibly generated philosophical interpretations, debates, and secondary texts; a good example for this is the thirteenth century condemnation of 219 theses by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris. The main concern of such texts was theological, but one cannot acknowledge medieval philosophical debates of the time without them. One may call such a text marginal. We assume a study case is possible in order to illustrate an instance of marginal philosophy in terms proposed by either Derrida (1982) or Gobar (1991), whose original concepts were intended to refer to the contemporary philosophical scene overcrowded with claims that do not confront central philosophical questions. Marginal philosophy is described by features like: being linked to an epistemological crisis; the object of inquiry is no longer available to the inquirer; the theses have little clarity with regard to the crisis. To be marginal, a text must therefore rely on its recent character (focus on problems that are contemporaneous to the author and are not central). Because it is conceptually problematic, it allows a rich context of

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interpretation, larger than any canonical text. Authorship and audience become essential categories for discussing such texts because of their “rhetoricity.” If a canonical text usually addresses selectively to an equally canonical audience, a marginal text should aim at larger groups and tastes and will probably contain pragmatic objectives and, therefore, strategies to achieve its aims. The marginal philosophical text is equally argumentative and rhetorical. The intended audience defines such texts to a very large extent. A particularly useful instrument for understanding types of audience for philosophical texts again belongs to Gracia (1996). He defines five categories of audience: (a) author as an audience is the first instance of public and refers to a continuum process of writing, evaluating, rewriting, and defending one’s own text; (b) intentional audience (actual or imaginary, contemporary or not with the author) is the person or group of persons for whom the author writes a text; (c) contemporaneous audience is the public contemporary with the historical author and that can be familiarized with the text; such an audience can be instantiated by correctors, editors, commentators etc. who bring pertinent information regarding the author’s language, meanings, cultural context; (d) intermediary audience is the audience that have or can have access to the text but is not contemporaneous, produces interpretations or annotations, and is pivotal in transmitting the text; (e) contemporary audience is an audience that can be familiarized with the text but is different from the author and not contemporaneous nor intermediary, being the most remote from the historical text. Any of the above types can constitute “communities of interpretation” and can agree that their interpretation should be “added” to the original text. Audience is an active behaviour of interpreting and adding missing links to the text (Gracia 1996); therefore, it plays a role in composing the text itself. In consequence, the audience is “subversive” (it can divorce the text from its dominant meaning) and “repressive” (it imposes limitations) in relation to the text. We find it significant that the concept of audience is intensively enriched by the clause “it can be familiarized with the text”: the weaker sense of familiarization (not involving such things as understanding or interpreting) is permissive and realistic. I will proceed to consider a study case for discussing these categories of authorship within a medieval text that is remarkably little known, having, therefore, a small quantity of philosophical interpretations, and being “marginal” for an actual audience. The importance of applying these categories is immense in cultural terms—genuine philosophical texts and subjects adequately contextualized will contribute to identifying more features of cultural periphery or

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marginality in terms of problems (perhaps criteria for peripheral problems) and terms of local (regional) identity.

A Philosopher for the Periphery: Gerard of Cenad Such a historical philosophical author is Gerard of Cenad (or Gerardo Sagredo), an eleventh century figure of large religious and political symbolism in medieval Hungary (today the Banat region in Romania), and also the author of a lesser-known text called Deliberatio supra hymnum trium puerorum ad Isingrimum liberalem that survived as single manuscript copy and was first edited in 1790 by Ignatius Batthyány. The manuscript has not yet been attributed to a certain scriptorium; still, it is known to have belonged to the library of Freising (Nemerkényi 2004). Gerard of Cenad is a typical medieval author in terms of sources, vocabulary and method of inquiry but still raises significant difficulties regarding the clear objectives of his work, especially the public he was writing for. Cenad was a young Bishopric founded during his life, his mission as the first Bishop of the area consisting mainly in keeping, by all means, an avant-garde of Catholicism there. He was more like a pater, busy with hosting young students and spreading the teachings of the Church among a population still inheriting strong heretic views (Ibid.). One cannot assume he was writing for a large, literate audience but rather for some particular persons of political and ecclesial importance. The archaic style and uncommon use of resources denote remarkable school training as well as a significant issue regarding his work is identifying the kind of public he was addressing. The fact that there is only one manuscript copy surviving determines that only palaeographical resources related to the Glosses of Munich can be useful for such an identification, according to Nemerkényi (Ibid.). The presence of glosses in the manuscript supply information about the readers, correctors and any other type of additions. First, it should be noted that medieval readers were almost nonexistent or, at least, scholars did not prove any direct influence on other Latin texts in the Middle Ages. As there is only one copy of the manuscript to have survived, it is improbable that the text circulated in n ay notable way: -

The first types of glosses on the manuscript originate in the eleventh century, thus being contemporaneous and consisting in corrector insertions on abbreviations, orthography and syntax, and sometimes redundant morphological hypercriticism (Ibid.) showing that these glosses belong to the process of editing and not to a reader. Whether

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Gerard may have done the glosses himself is an unanswered question; still, it seems more appealing that Gerard was sending the manuscript to be corrected and copied to the closest scriptorium available at the time, i.e. Freising. The contemporaneous public is, if not void, still unknown and, therefore, irrelevant. It is only Gerard himself who must have evaluated, rewritten and reorganized his own text at the time. Then there is a possessor’s or librarian’s note from the twelfth century. at the top of a folio, attributing the book to the diocese of Freising. This confirms that the manuscript had been addressed to and entered into the possession of the Freising library one century or several decades after it was written, indicating most probably a personal filiation for handling the manuscript as an important object to be protected or multiplied (which probably did not happen); this note can belong to a librarian who built an inventory and should be regarded as both an intentional and intermediary audience like any corrector and editor. Another later medieval intermediary audience is a unique reader identified with the Bishop of Freising, Johannes Grünwalder (1392– 1452) who seems to have glossed the first part of the folios, most probably due to postponing the revision. Nemerkényi reckons that, for Bishop Grünwalder, the text served to satisfy meditation needs, therefore we can justly consider that the fifteenth century reader is the first audience interpreting the text. Grünwalder was a pious and meditative reader not caring about textual problems. Still, many key passages were left unglossed; therefore, neither Bishop Grünwalder nor the eleventh century corrector was a systematic commentator. Other intermediary audiences belong to the eighteenth century when the manuscript was discovered by some canonical readers beginning with Karl Meichelbeck, who encountered it in the library of Freising (1724), and a Hungarian Jesuit named György Pray. Another reader was probably Cardinal Giuseppe Garampi, an apostolic ambassador to Vienna, who sent the folios to the bishop of Cenad for editing. These readers indicate some sort of scholar-like concern regarding the text although they left no trace of content relation with it. Therefore, they belong to an intermediary but not intentional audience. Bishop Ignác Batthyány of Transylvania (Batthyány 1790) must have been the first scholar to read, transcribe and edit the full text in a printed form in 1790. This is most probably the first professional lecture of Gerard’s Deliberatio. Batthyány also edits and writes a Prefatio [Preface], gathering more texts related to Gerard’s life; therefore, he was Gerard’s first editor and commentator, still not an

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intentional audience but intermediary, as such with an unknown audience. Still, it is worth noting that it was not notably accessible and J. Migne did not print the text in his nineteenth monumental Patrologia Latina [Latin Patrology]; therefore, it was not deemed important. Modern scholarship was literally unaware of it, but only second-hand information helped modern scholars consider the text as regional and not worth reading. Batthyány’s edition is, then, a singlereader production and he himself an intermediary prolific reader who contributed enormously to the actual interpretation of the text. Silagi’s edition from 1978 (Silagi 1978) opened the modern history of Gerard’s work and another one followed (Karácsonyi & SzegfĦ 1999). There is a Romanian selective translation (Gerard din Cenad 1984) but only recently have scholars begun to pay attention to it (Cernătescu 2011). Nemerkényi (2004) produced the first valuable philological commentary published in English and contributed decisively to what we may call a contemporary audience of the text. A philosophical interpretation still waits for such a lecture that started with Batthyány’s Prefatio.

Conclusion Contemporary debates on philosophical historiography methods offer support for reconsidering the addressability of historical philosophical literature as a case study of contemporary concepts. Gerard of Cenad can be endorsed as a relevant case for the relation between author and audience in philosophy, as well as the concept of marginal philosophy.

Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Sectoral Operational Programme for Human Resources Development (grant POSDRU 89-1.5-S-63663).

References Batthyány, I. (Ed.). (1790). Sancti Gerardi episcopi Chanadiensis scripta et acta hactenus inedita cum serie episcoporum Chanadiensium [Saint Gerard Bishop of Cenad’s Unpublished Writings and Papers with a list of Bishops of Cenad]. Charleston, SC: Nabu Press. Baumgarten, A. (2005). “Conceptul de paradigmă filosofică în istoriografia filosofiei medieval” [“The Concept of Philosophical Paradigm in the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy”]. In I.

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Bârzescu & C.-M. Mesaroú (Eds.), Portret de grup cu Filosofia. Studii de istoriografie filosofică. Timiúoara: Editura UniversităĠii de Vest. 183–192. Cernătescu, R. (2011). Sf. Gerard de Cenad: O privire autobiografică [St. Gerard of Cenad: An Autobiographical View]. http://raducernatescu.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/unde-cand-si-pentrucine-a-fost-scris-deliberatio/. Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gerard din Cenad (1984). Armonia lumii sau tălmăcire a cântării celor trei coconi către Isingrim Dascălul [World Harmony or Interpretation of the Hymn of the Three Dolphins dedicated to Isingrim the Teacher]. Bucureúti: Meridiane. Gobar, A. (1991). “‘Truth’ and Marginal Philosophers.” Zeitschrift fur Philosophische Forschung 45 (3): 417–429. Gracia, J. J. E. (1996). Texts: Ontological Status, Identity, Author, Audience. New York, NY: State University of New York Press. Inglis, J. (1998). Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy. Brill Academic Publishing. Karácsonyi, B. & SzegfĦ, L. (Eds.). (1999). Deliberatio Gerardi Moresanae aecclesiae episcopi supra hymnum trium puerorum [Meditation of Bishop Gerard of Morisena Church on the Hymn of the Three Young Men]. Szeged: Scriptum. Lavine, Thelma Z. & Tejera, V. & Horowitz, I. L. (Eds). (1989). History and Anti-History in Philosophy. Berlin–Heidelberg: Springer. Leiter, B. (2004). The Future for Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lore, H. (2002). Attributing Authorship: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nemerkényi, E. (2004). Latin Classics in Medieval Hungary: Eleventh Century. Budapest: Central European University Press. Rorty, R., Schneewind, J. B. & Skinner, Q. (Eds.). (1984). Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silagi, G. (Ed.) (1978). Gerardus Sanctus. Deliberatio supra hymnum trium puerorum [Gerard of Csanád: Meditation on the Hymn of the Three Young Men]. CCCM 49. Turnhout: Brepols. Veatch, H. B. (1974). Aristotle: A Contemporary Appreciation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

JUNG’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL ONTOLOGY: ESSE IN ANIMA IULIU-MIHAI NOVAC Introduction Stated plainly, this is an attempt at a phenomenological conversion of C. G. Jung’s analytical psychology based on Heidegger’s philosophy as set out in Being and Time (1962). The steps of this endeavour are threefold: (a) as it is not the first attempt in this respect, we try to place our undertaking within the broader corresponding interpretive context; (b) we then discuss the epistemological pertinence and relevance of this issue; (c) we try to offer a sufficient determination of the basic concepts involved. Even though the relationships between the two schools of thought have initially lingered somewhere between reciprocal ignorance and a more or less outspoken hostility, during the last three decades, an increase in the degree of reciprocal interest became rather manifest. Some analytical psychologists (Brooke 2005; Romanyshyn 2000; Hillman 1977) became aware of the potential relevance of the phenomenological method, with respect not only to theoretical issues but also to therapeutic ones, and part of the phenomenological community grew more receptive to the possibilities that this new and peculiar field of study, namely the unconscious, entailed for the application and use of the phenomenological method. Of course, the setting of the unconscious as a field of study for phenomenology had already been heralded by names such as Ricoeur, Binswanger, Boss and so on. However, this had taken place under the auspices of Freud’s psychoanalysis, while the Jungian approach to the unconscious, though seemingly closer in spirit to phenomenology, was initially ignored. As stated, this article was conceived as a contribution in this latter regard, mainly from the standpoint of Heideggerian phenomenology as set in Being and Time. First, we would like to stress the fact that we am not claiming this to be a sufficient elaboration of the subject matter, but only a necessary determination of the discursive horizon and the main interpretative hypotheses. Now, more to the point, one of the main distinctions in Jungian psychology is the one between “archetypes,” on the one hand,

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“archetypal image,” on the other. Basically, archetype corresponds to the recurrent unconscious tendency of the Psyche to select and arrange certain (types of) experiences according to specific universal patterns, while archetypal images constitute the definite products of this process, which are specific to each epoch, culture and, ultimately, biography. Michael Vannoy Adams’ (2008) example in this respect is quite edifying: if Hermann Melville had never seen a whale he would have never written Moby Dick. On the other hand, he could have written some other novel about the archetypal experience of being engulfed. As a consequence, according to Jung, an archetype can never be described as such, only postulated, i.e. necessarily guessed behind certain images. (One might say, in an analogous manner to that in which the astrophysicists infer the existence of a black hole through its gravitational influence upon the neighbouring celestial bodies.) As we attempt to show later on, this fundamental dichotomy of classical analytical psychology is paralleled by an equally important distinction of Heideggerian phenomenology, namely the one between the “formal” and the “phenomenological” sense of the phenomenon. However, in order to properly grasp this latter aspect, further preparatory determinations are required. Hence, what is phenomenology after all? As a preliminary answer, we point out a pertinent analogy made by one of Heidegger’s interpreters (Guignon 2006). Just as objects in a room can become visible only providing the light making them visible stays invisible, he claims, so all things can become manifest only insofar that which makes them manifest stays unapparent. In terms of the classical Heideggerian distinction, objects represent “entities,” while the light corresponds to the “being” and phenomenology constitutes that specific existential undertaking by which, starting from the former, we can arrive at the latter. This is precisely the basic meaning of the aforementioned Heideggerian distinction between the formal and the phenomenological understanding of phenomenon. Clarifying the way in which phenomenology comes to do that requires certain methodological considerations.

Methodology Basically, our method would amount to a specific type of comparative analysis destined to point out the eventual epistemological convergence of the two perspectives. Obviously, this attempt is filtered through the socalled Seinlassen (“let-it-be”) principle which constitutes the methodological hardcore of Heidegger’s perspective. Basically, we do not try to force analytical psychology into the conceptual frame of

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Heidegger’s phenomenology but rather to emulate it as a psychological consequence of this sort of metaphysics. That is why the attempt at showing how Jung develops, willingly or not, a phenomenology of his own is a very important aspect of this study. The meaning and finality of Seinlassen result quite evidently from the following considerations on phenomenology. As such, we must take note of the fact that for Heidegger (as for Husserl), phenomenology constitutes first and foremost a method: “Phenomenology” neither designates the object of its researches, nor characterizes the subject-matter thus comprised. The word merely informs us of the ‘how’ with which what is to be treated in this science gets exhibited and handled. To have a science “of” phenomena means to grasp its objects in such a way that everything about them which is up for discussion must be treated by exhibiting it directly and demonstrating it directly … The character of this description itself, the specific meaning of the ȜȩȖȠȢ [logos], can be established first of all in terms of the “thinghood” [Sachheit] of what is to be “described”—that is to say, of what is to be given scientific definiteness as we encounter it phenomenally. (Heidegger 1927/1962, par. 35)

In light of these considerations, we can now throw a glance at a first aspect of the supposed latent phenomenological dimension of Jung’s work. In this respect, it is meaningful that the main critical arguments Jung brings to Freud are precisely the violation of the same kind of imperatives as those stemming from the aforementioned Heideggerian claim—the fact that the psychoanalytic approach defiles through its biologisticreductionistic method the specific and essential features of the phenomena it aims at clarifying. More precisely, for Jung, phenomena such as art, dream and religion no longer represent dissimulating sanctuaries for the recurrent and ever oppressed manias of the pleasure instinct, but spontaneous manifestations of the psyche as an autonomous existential field. The psychic phenomenon must not be deciphered, as a code, in order to find what lies behind it, for it carries with itself its own significationbackground in the very ingenuity it presents itself zunächst und zumeist (“first and foremost”), as Heidegger would put it. Of course, the language to which the unconscious appeals is always symbolic in nature, but the task here is not so much to find the symbol’s eventual reference in a socalled objective-material world, but rather that of unravelling as much as possible the signification system it is embedded in, while at the same time determining its specific place within it. Jung states it quite clearly: “Image and meaning are identical; and as the first takes shape, so the latter becomes clear. Actually, the pattern needs no interpretation: it portrays its own meaning” (Jung 1954, 204).

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Moreover, Jung himself repeatedly characterized his method as being “exclusively phenomenological,” that is “concerned with occurrences, events, experiences” (Jung 1970, 5). On the other hand, considering his implicit understanding of the term “phenomenon,” a certain ambiguity becomes apparent: “I am an empiricist and adhere as such to the phenomenological standpoint … I restrict myself to the observation of the phenomena, and I eschew any metaphysical or philosophical considerations” (Jung 1937, 5). A certain double paradigmatic loyalty of Jung becomes quite obvious here—a positivistic claim of the premises but bolstered by a phenomenological substrate. As such, our analytic hypothesis is that, from behind Jung’s own selflabelling as an empiricist, a rather phenomenological attitude and substance shines through, in the first stage understanding phenomenology in Husserl’s sense or along Heidegger’s formal meaning of the concept of phenomenon, i.e. as Erscheinung (“appearance”) or Sich-an-ihm-selbstzeigende (“that-which-shows-itself-in-itself”). Now, in a second stage (in his later work), Jung, despite his official rejection of any ontological or metaphysical elaboration of his considerations, slips precisely towards an ontological level of theorization that draws him close to Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology. Hereinafter, we make a few observations on this point.

Further Considerations As such, this section focuses on a more explicit ontological elaboration of the parallelism between Jung’s analytical psychology and Heidegger’s phenomenology. More specifically, we aim at providing a link between the former’s concept of archetype and the latter’s concept of existential. As indicated, with Heidegger phenomenology comes, from mere method, ontology. How does this happen? According to Heidegger, that which we generally call “phenomenon” essentially constitutes as a synthetic structure between a “formal-naive sense,” as das Sich-an-ihmselbst-zeigende (“that which shows itself in itself”), as a first glance, prima facie presence, and a deeper, specifically phenomenological sense, in which precisely that which is first and most often does not show itself becomes phenomenon, namely the relational background in which (without our explicit knowing) the respective thing is embedded and which makes it be precisely that which it is. As such, what a thing is is determined by the world to which it belongs, namely by the way it, with its specific role and function, relates to other things, themselves provided with their own specific roles and functions, in nuce by its “being-

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connection.” Any particular thing is made possible by a pre-existing world which, as long as it is understood, the thing “opens.” Thus, the entity becomes apparent in its being, and phenomenology, precisely as long as it is capable of bringing to Aufweisung (“light”) and Ausweisung (“legitimating”) its connection to the being, becomes, as said, ontology. Now, returning to the claim we made above, Jung slips, at a certain point, in a more or less voluntary way, from his experiential inclination that drew him close to phenomenology in the formal-methodological understanding of the term, to a genuine ontology grounded on the synthesis between the psyche and the world. The following fragment is edifying in this respect: A third, mediating point is needed. “Esse in intellectu” lacks tangible reality, “esse in re” lacks mind. Idea and thing come together, however, in the human psyche, which holds the balance between them. What would the idea amount to if the psyche did not provide its living value? What would the thing be worth if the psyche withheld from it the determining force of sense-impression? What indeed is reality if it is not a reality in ourselves, an “esse in anima”? Living reality is the product neither of the actual, objective behaviour of things nor of the formulated idea exclusively, but rather of the combination of both in the living psychological process, through’ esse in anima. (Jung 1921, par.77)

Though the dualist Cartesian ontology still echoes in this claim, we can already catch a glimpse of that double movement specific to phenomenology (of removal of consciousness from under the exclusive claim of the subject, on the one hand, of the world from under that of the object, on the other, and of placing them in an ontological relation of concrescence in which the two terms, consciousness and world, constitute reciprocal a priori preconditions of possibility). The actual shape this consciousness-world fusion takes with Jung is, as we have seen, this ontology of esse in anima, which, in fact, follows from that principle which is most deeply rooted in his vision, namely the autonomy of the psyche. As such, for Jung, at least in his latter perspective, consciousness as self is neither an epiphenomenon, an irisation of something more profound, of an eventual material-objective nature, nor a mere autonomous domain with a per se functioning, but the very generative principle and utterance background of that which we call existence, of which, eventually, we can say that it objectifies itself as world, and respectively subjectifies itself as ego. There are two notable consequences of this fact. First, for Jung, there is no Archimedean point with respect to the psyche, no non-psychic perspective from which it can be looked upon in

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an uninterpreted and unbiased manner. The psyche is always the one looking upon itself and, consequently, everything coming out of this contemplation is a reflection of the very psyche asking the question: there is no freischwebend (neutral) way of asking the question—every answer is a reflection of its question and every question is a projection of the (pre)answer it seeks to question. As noted, we are drawing very close to Heidegger’s interpretation of the question of being: “An understanding of Being is already included in conceiving anything which one apprehends as an entity” (Heidegger 1962, par. 3) Secondly, as, for Jung, the world becomes the very screen upon which the immanent drama of the psyche is projected, we can no longer have, except in a heuristic sense, a distinction between the exogenous and the endogenous aspects of the psyche. In this context, classical Jungian concepts, such as archetype or archetypal image, become, from regulative structures of the subjective inneity, existential stances with respect to or rather within the world, in the sense of Heidegger’s in-der-Welt-sein (“being-in-the-world”), ontic illustrations of the corresponding ontological existentials. In the words of Romanyshyn (2000), (the concept of lateral depth), the real depth of the depth psychology is the world. In this respect, Brooke claims, “… human light called consciousness is the capacity to awaken the world into its own Being” (Brooke 2005, 19). Of course, this would require a certain deviation from the Jungian norm, namely a mundane contextualization of the concept of archetype—its transformation from an acultural and hereditary regulative structure in a, shall we say, existential stance specific to the in-der-Welt-sein (“being-in-the-world”) of every culture. However, on the other hand, just how acultural is Jung’s archetype after all? He underlines the fact that the archetype is essentially inscrutable, namely that it cannot be directly observed but only somehow intuited, guessed if you will, behind certain (types of) images that instantiate it specifically in every cultural context. Culture is, for Jung, if not the source of the archetype, certainly its logos and its predilect environment of coming into being. And just as the phenomenon for Heidegger, the archetype essentially constitutes itself as a synthesis structure between an ever-apparent aspect, the archetypal image, and an overshadowed one: one could say that archetypal image on the one hand indicates the archetype, but on the other covers it, ensuring its essential condition of Verdecktheit (“hideness”).

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Conclusions This final section is dedicated to: (a) the conceptual refinement of the issue in light of all these considerations (the specification of the core-question); (b) the assessment of the potential epistemic benefits of this association between analytic psychology and phenomenology. Reformulating, the essential question one could ask here would be: Can the archetype be taken as an ontic stance with respect to that ontological determination of the Being of Dasein, called existential? In short, our answer would be that we have to keep in mind that the existentials represent not so much the “whats” but rather the “hows” of the existence (perpetual issues with which the Dasein implicitly or explicitly confronts itself along its life and which ultimately modulate its entire destiny). In this context, the destiny of the Dasein amounts to the specific existential stance resulting from the totality of answers it managed to provide to these essential issues. Here are some actual examples of existentials: being-in-the-world, being-with, being-there, being-towards-death, etc. Basically, in our view, this is precisely where the archetype comes in, respectively as a culturally (and ontically) determined answer to the question submitted by the corresponding existential. Bluntly put, the archetypes could be interpreted as a culturally determined way of being-inthe-world, -with (the other), -towards-death, etc. Now, on a more pragmatic note, what can phenomenology do for analytical psychology and what can analytical psychology do for phenomenology? The answer would be that, on the one hand, phenomenology can take analytical psychology all the way—it can make it fulfil its original guiding intention that grants analytical psychology its specific place within the epistemic field; on the other hand, the latter can grant phenomenology access to the domain of the unconscious, and it is more suitable for this task than other psychological approaches precisely because, as we have attempted to prove, it already latently develops a phenomenology sui generis. This would be the basic mutual gain of this potential, hopefully unintrusive, association.

References Adams, M. V. (2008). “The Archetypal School.” In Polly YoungEisendrath & T. Dawson (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Jung, 107–124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Brooke, R. (2005). “Introduction.” In R. Brooke (Ed.), Pathways into the Jungian World: Phenomenology and Analytical Psychology, 1–9. London: Routledge. Guignon, B. C. (2006). “Introduction.” In C. B. Guignon (Ed.), Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 1–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hillman, J. (1977). Re-Visioning Psychology. Chicago: HarperCollins. Jung, C. G. (1921). Psychological Types. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. (1937/1970). Psychology and Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. (1947/54). On the Nature of the Psyche. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. (1954). The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. (1976). The Symbolic Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Romanyshyn, R. (2000). “Alchemy and the Subtle Body of Metaphor.” In R. Brooke (Ed.), Pathways into the Jungian World, 24–44. London: Routledge.

NEW MEDIA: A HERMENEUTIC APPROACH DORIN POPA AND IASMINA PETROVICI

Introduction The present project intends to start an interdisciplinary analysis, specific for such fields as hermeneutics, aesthetics, and communication sciences regarding the aesthetic aspects of new media in visual and formal composition. The research develops on both a theoretical and a practical level. The theoretical level aims to reveal the aesthetic aspects specifics as they are found in new media, while, on a practical level, linked to the case study, it targets the research of the prevalence of web-design applied in artistic styles. From a cultural point of view, the issues concerning the aesthetic aspects of new media are revealed due to the following aspects: to begin with, by the impact of new media on the social environment, professional and personal life; secondly, by the complex artistic communication forms and their specific symbolic communication; thirdly, by the aesthetic function to reconfigure the individual inter-relational and interhuman communication forms, which, as we show in this study, from the hermeneutical point of view represents multiculturalism, openness to dialogue, and hyper-symbolic stylistic syncretism. The difficulties of approaching the problem are set forth in particular by the syncretic aspect of new media aesthetic aspects, which imposes the necessity for an interand trans-disciplinary analysis. In this context, we note that the aesthetic aspects of new media are theorized on a larger scale in humanistic and communication sciences or a narrower range of industrial design and digital art. Secondly, by the extremely rapid development of the new media aesthetic aspects, hereby involving a constant adaptation effort to the new presentation forms.

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Aesthetic Principles Specific to New Media This study is generated by the general acceptance of new media, in the sense that communication means using different digital channels— internet, digital television, digital phone networks, electronic paper (Gu‫܊‬u 2007). In general, all forms of computer- and internet-based communication and technology—websites, e-mail, wiki encyclopaedias, blogs, post casts, video games, computer games, virtual words, online bookshops, interactive televisions, social networks, etc. (Ibid.). From an aesthetic point of view, new media can be framed around the design of communicated visuals arts, and in recent years we have heard more and more talk about new media art. Aesthetic aspects are discussed in the light of the acceptance of new media, especially at the level of their image or form, as a variety of industrial design and digital art. Their planning must be done with consideration in equal measures to technical, functional, economic, and aesthetic principles. Composition, texture, and colour associating artistic elements must also consider the actual destined scope of new media as well as their capacity to be used in a comfortable and friendly manner. The fundamental aesthetic principle, which is mentioned in conceiving new media compositions, is that these must submit a beautiful shape, and generate emotions and aesthetic feelings. The aesthetic elements which compose new media as symbols, signs, colours, graphic effects, decorative motifs, and characters have an exceptionally well-defined function, more precise, to make the transmitted message or information more meaningful and friendly but also to engage the receivers attention, generating a form of aesthetic experience characterized by a certain period, extensiveness and intensity. This attempt proposes to establish itself as a continuation of some of the most recent aesthetic and communication science studies, which give life to a new interpretation criterion for aesthetic phenomena and several new digital art forms in the field of new media. The concern of new media aesthetic aspects is more and more apparent, sometimes becoming a decisive element for the utilitarian-functional or economic value. The tendency to bring in aesthetics, meaning image editing, formal and visual layout of new media, in other words, and combining practical aspects with aesthetic ones is a defining feature of new media. Expressiveness, creativity, quality and originality of the visual aspect in new media are due to the application of bordered aesthetic values. This aspect is particularly noteworthy, especially since the proliferation of different types of critic discourse in recent years takes into consideration the impact of new media in interhuman communication (Levinso 2009), reconsidering and integrating

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some artistic styles and aesthetic trends found in new media design, as well as the prevalence of new media commercial function (Fidler 2004) of the aesthetic aspects over the cultural. What’s more, the use of simplified decorative motifs in the composition and overall look of new media ensure that they are perceived as a dissimulated form of applied art, beyond its utilitarian functions. The aesthetics of new media are in accordance with the principle of accessibility, where one of the composition characteristics is to be financially, spiritually and affectively accessible, meaning for it to be relatively easily perceived and appreciated by the target audience, more or less favourable from an aesthetic point of view. Regarding the current approaches in new media, we can effectively identify two attitudes in this research. The first attitude, mainly positive, finds itself sympathetic to the importance of media aesthetic aspects, insisting on its role in reconfiguring the art-culture-public ratio (Bourriaud 1998). According to this theoretic attitude (relationist aesthetics, analytic aesthetics), the specificity of new media in general consists of the communications function (idea, feeling and emotion communication). The aesthetics of new media displays itself as a system of signs, being a form of language which communicates an informal content more or less coded, depending on its degree of addressability and acceptance. Thus, new media institutes an aesthetic reality by means of artistic image, the way in which it materializes through different artistic genres. Besides this, we could also include the informative-educational role of new media and the prevalence of aesthetic aspects now have a significant role in shaping the receiver audience’s aesthetic feeling and taste. Due to the aesthetic dimension of new media, the receiving public grasps its content in a specific manner—a significant and symbolic content, a plethora of potential stylized significances depending on the aesthetic ideals and taste of the artist but also depending on the targeted audience. The receiving audience is differentiated by aesthetic sensibility and taste, which explains the variety and content degrees of new media aesthetics. The second attitude, mainly negative, uses traditional interpretation standards and forms critical judgments on the legitimacy of using new media aesthetical aspects (critical aesthetics, aesthetic relativism). Theoreticians and specialists, insisting on the prevalence of the hedonistic and entertainment function of media in general (Babias 2004), bring into discussion factors such as mass art character, immediate satisfaction, lack of public aesthetic education, the prevalence of an inadequate communication model, the presence of inappropriate elements, very similar to kitsch in some forms of new media design, and the appreciation of the public and artist’s experiences being, thus, subjected to relativism. The audience, lacking

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aesthetic education and critical judgment, becomes a passive consumer of images with standardized reactions, attracted by superficial and brutish entertainment, and possible aesthetic characteristics which alter some aspects of new media in merchandise, a subcultural product and a simulacrum. At the level of new media, kitsch manifests itself by subordinating the aesthetic function to the commercial and entertainment, through transparency and by alleviating the symbolic function, and by habitual use of ethic-affective and biologic stimuli (sentimentalism, melodramatic, edulcoration, vulgarity, obscenity, triviality). The kitsch aspects of new media outbid frivolous attitudes of the receiving audience, setting off the taste for pseudo-artistic forms, and worst of all promote the disappearance of the critic spirit. The kitsch forms here are truly numerous and varied—chromatic inadequacy, direct figuratism, trivializing and disseminating modern artistic styles, improper usage of aesthetic principles, inadequate use of natural beauty elements, and counterfeiting. Regarding the aesthetic principles of new media, they implicitly show some presumptions of aesthetic postmodernism such as cultural relativism, multiculturalism as a means of communication and maintaining differences, incent or parodical revaluing of modern or pre-modern artistic styles, the tendency to fragment the image, revaluing traditional artistic styles joined by figuratism and post avant-garde deconstructivism.

Artistic Styles in Web Design Aiming to conclude the case study, we have opted for a qualitative research method, consisting of contextual interpretation of web-design specific artistic styles as a pragmatic aspect of new media aesthetics. Regarding the aesthetic principles of web-design, we can identify the use of several artistic styles: Minimalism—shape and motif simplicity, static effects, monochromic shapes (McNeil 2008); Abstract art—nonfigurative character, representation without referral to reality; Suprematism— exclusion of figure-background contrast, monochromatic colour trend, spatial depth; Cubism—structured surfaces, geometric shapes, angled fragments and facets, semicircles, geometric structure of plan; Expressionism —contrasting colours, composition prioritization, emphasis on expressive line graphism; Impressionism—contour relinquishing, brush stroke juxtapositioning, plain air mural elements, shape atomization, pastel colours, atmosphere effects, photographic effects; Suprematism—lack of objective representation, the elimination of figure-background contrast, using geometric shapes, checker board motif, colour degradation fields, overlapping surfaces; Baroque—accentuating volume spaces, dynamic

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effects, slanting lines, using curves and counter-curves, forward and backing impressions, chiaroscuro effects; Neo-gothic—vertical lines, broken bow motif; Art-deco—ornate elements, levelled images, chromatic richness; Art Nouveau—vegetal patters, simplifying rectangular shapes, systematically using the curve as a shape, Surrealism—oniric compositions; Pop-art—collages, combine-painting, advertisement posters; graffiti, graphic effects, Urban art, Street-art, Grunge. Certainly, most of the time, these styles are not used per se but are resignified and integrated into a new stylistic vision. What’s more, we often find not only one artistic style in web design, but the juxtaposition of various elements belonging to multiple and different artistic trends. Given this fact, we can discuss stylistic syncretism as being one of the defining traits of web-design. We have to mention that stylistic syncretism in webdesign, excluding numerous unsuccessful cases of improper synthesis and heterogeneous association, often uncertain, of some motifs and elements that belong to different artistic trends, easily pertains to the category of kitsch and can be expressed in successful artistic forms because of its unity in content and substance. Besides the aforementioned style trends, the chromatic scale is a prioritized component of new media. Together with the decorative elements, the creative utilization of chromatic elements is essential in obtaining a high quality web-design. In accomplishing web-design, the creation team uses a varied chromatic scale in the intent to draw attention, to convey a visual idea or message, to create positive associations or certain psychological states of mind (Gomez-Palacio & Vit 2012). Being familiar with the aesthetic principles of using colour, as well as some of their symbolic meanings, web-design can perform different mixtures to achieve a specific aesthetic response from the viewer. The colours constitute an essential element to sustain the shapes, lines and contours, contributing to balance, harmony, proportion, symmetry, size and angle of the visual shape of web-design (McNeil 2008). In addition, the creative use of colour stirs an emotional disposition to examine the message and highlights different visual elements of web-design. One can also mention that colours can be used as a powerful marketing instrument, making it easy to distinguish brands, facilitating their recognition power. The expressive function of colours resides in their main physical properties: luminosity (the brightness of colour and saturation) and the purity of the colour (Joannès 2008). Besides using some of the luminosity and saturation effects, to obtain a strong and attractive web-design the production specialists must consider some of the fundamental principles of design regarding the relationship between colour and the other aesthetic

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shapes (Iliescu & Petre 2004, 76), balance (a harmony between the consisting element must be present), dominance or stress (one of the elements it must draw attention to through certain characteristics), sequentiality or flow (arranging the elements in such a way that the viewer covers every step of the site), proportion (the ratio between the dimensional elements), coherence (harmony of elements), and unity (fitting all elements to a general overview). For web-design to be aesthetically perceived in an easy manner, it has to entail at most three chromatic shades, while the other elements that build the site must be in a unitary, solid configuration of structure and content. We can find in webdesign all six colour groups—primary, secondary, tertiary, achromatic, monochromatic, and complementary. Considering different artistic styles found in web-design, most of the time we see colours combined in the fallowing manner: primary colour with tertiary in-between (Expressionism, Cubism, Pop-art, urban art, Graffiti), shades and colour degradation with primary or tertiary colours (Impressionism, Art-deco, Art Nouveau), achromatic coupled with a primary or secondary colour (Minimalism, Abstractionism, Suprematism), achromatic with monochromatic scale (Surrealism, Gothic, Grunge), complementary, primary or tertiary colours (Pop-art). The chromatic palette in web-design represents a fundamental characteristic; it has a strong symbolic value, rendering the sent message more expressive and generates certain affective, sensorial and cognitive reactions, but also aesthetic dispositions such as pleasure, emotion, satisfaction, joy, delightfulness. For example, the colour purple conveys a melancholic state of mind, whereas yellow is a powerful and warm colour, expressing joyfulness and spontaneity. Regarding the symbolism of colours, it has been determined to be very complex and diverse depending on the cultural context (Joannès 2008). We have decided to present some of the relevant significations generally accepted in web-design: red symbolizes vitality, power, energy, action, love, joy, dynamism, heart, sin, forbidden; black symbolizes authority, power, distinction, elegance, mystery, death, fear, refinement; green symbolizes life, nature, youth, hope, spring, relaxation, fertility, harmony, rebirth; white symbolizes purity, peace, virginity, perfection, innocence, simplicity, virtue, initiation, revelation, grace; blue symbolizes calm, trust, devotion, responsibility, spirituality; yellow, happiness, dynamism, flexibility; purple symbolizes mystery, nostalgia, spirituality, melancholy; brown symbolizes retro, comfort, warmth, strength, satisfaction; grey symbolizes timelessness, demureness, austerity; orange symbolizes creativity, joy, optimism; pink symbolizes love, romanticism, affectivity.

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Conclusions The prevalence of aesthetic aspects in new media determines a resignification of the public space concept, in its virtual state. Public space receives new connotations, understood as the ethos of aesthetic trends where artistic intent does not only manifest itself as the interaction and relationship between receptor and artist, but also as plural experience, given its interactive valence. It is noteworthy that this acceptance of public space expresses the subversive role of aesthetics, its influence manifested by collective or individual construction of virtual inter-relational spaces, new media symbolically expressing socializing patters and communal participation to significance. Thus, beyond commercial and obvious communicative functions, the aesthetic aspects of new media also involve a socializing function, configuring a form of social interaction, meaning dialogue relationships between different categories of audience. The aesthetic character of new media, besides the communication of aesthetics, also allows building of the audience as a unitary social group, an aesthetic community. The aesthetic principles used in new media design represent the element that individualizes, making them look more attractive and meaningful. Regarding the prevalence of the stylistic syncretism, new media aesthetic aspects fulfil a hyper-symbolic function, supporting a fashion of artistic communication which expresses a model of cultural interrelation. Thus, new media, from a hermeneutic standpoint, in its artistic style diversity brings forth a kind of aesthetic communication under the sign of multiculturalism and social interaction.

References Babias, M. (2004). Subiectivitatea-marfă. O povestire teoretică [Merchandise-Subjectivity: A Theoretical Story]. Cluj-Napoca: Idea Design & Print. Bourriaud, N. (1998). Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel. Fidler, R. (2004). Mediamorphosis. Să înаelegem noile media [Mediamorphosis: Let Us Understand the New Media]. Cluj-Napoca: Idea Design & Print. Gomez-Palacio, B. & Vit, A. (2012). Graphic Design, Referenced: A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications and History of Graphic Design. Beverly, MA: Rockport Publishers Inc. Gu‫܊‬u, D. (2007). New Media. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Tritonic.

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Iliescu, D. & Petre, D. (2004). Psihologia reclamei úi a consumatorului II: Psihologia consumatorului [Psychology of Advertising and of Consumer 2: Psychology of Consumer]. Bucureúti: Comunicare.ro. Joannès, A. (2008). Communiquer par l’Image—Utiliser la dimension visuelle pour valoriser sa communication [Communicating through Images : Using Visual Dimension to Valorise Image Communication]. Paris: Dunod. McNeil, P. (2008). The Web Designer’s Idea Book 2: More of the Best Themes, Trends and Styles in Website Design. Cincinnati, OH: How Books.

IS GLOBALIZATION MEANINGFUL? BOGDAN POPOVENIUC

Introduction The chapter does not intend to present, as often happens, an image of globalization as an inevitable course, a prerequisite step towards the extinction of the world. This pessimistic and gloomy propensity just gratifies one of the most primeval cultural conceptions, congeneric with the human species as a conscious being, that of millenarianism. “The millennial impulse [which is] ancient and universal in human culture and is found in many contemporary, purportedly secular and scientific, expectations about the future” (Hughes 2008, 85). Although globalization is an end, it is another kind of end.

Global Risks and Global Future(s) The spectre of “global end” encompasses natural disasters, biological involution, unintended consequences of economic, politic or cultural activity, and hostile acts (Bostrom & ûirkoviü 2008). Physical extinction is an outer risk, unrelated to globalization per se but other types of risks and perils are closely related to (and some of them became possible because of) the expansion of human activity on a global scale, for example: climate change, global plagues and pandemics, technological and artificial intelligence evolution, social collapse, totalitarian threat, nuclear war, terrorism, or the unpredictable evolution of biotechnologies and nanotechnologies. We must be aware that evaluation of globalization, a totally new phenomenon, is very tricky within the categorical framework of the present state of affairs. As an illustration, a global pandemic was not possible in the past. I will not focus in particular on the extinction scenarios as such but only on those which depict unprecedented possibilities and phenomena of the future evolution of the human species. In a sense, they also represent ends, but only ends of particular ways of being. For example, the entirety human evolution could be seen as a saga “of two global brains in conflict—that of microbes and that of women and

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men,” and an extinction scenario will occur “if we don’t maximize our group mind’s speed and creativity” (Ibid.) This is war that we could certainly lose (Bloom 2000). Another future evolution scenario will try to imagine how the merging of human and microbial brains would be possible and what consequences it would have. However, if we could really connect, in the future, technological molecular computers with the bacteria genome and put them to work, the results would undoubtedly overpass the capacity of present imagination. This vision is definitely too much for the present level of understanding. However, this is already more than literary-fiction—it is science-fiction, and is fiction only for the present stage of science. Globalization, the planetary activity of the human species, is an unprecedented phenomenon, a new stage of development of the human race and, hence, the previous ways of evaluation, theories, and paradigms used in the past, prove to be insufficient. From an epistemological point of view, globalization is a sort of “singularity” for any social science; the point where all the laws which govern the processes, phenomena and object fail to apply. Hence, any postglobalisation scenario will imply the ending of things and the world as we know it today, the extinction of sameness, and the imposition of difference. Let us now look over some of the most fundamental.

End of Biological Evolution Firstly, human evolution has “largely come to a halt” because biological evolution requires at least three main elements, i.e. variation, which comes from mutation, natural selection, which comes from inherited differences between individuals and their ability to reproduce, and evolution, greatly promoted by isolation (Jones 2008). Hence, biological globalization entails the mixing of genes and averages them out. This represents the end of the biological evolution as we know it. From now on, humanity will biologically develop (!) as a whole. At this point, future evolution could depend on the self-directed development of global society. Two aspects seem to be decisive: the management of technological progress, and, related to the first, the relation with the environment. In the latter case, future biological evolution will depend, almost completely, on the relation of the human species with its environment. The environmental relation would test human’s ability to survive as a species. Here, we can distinguish three possible scenarios (Wills 2008, 48–72): drastic and rapid climate change without changes in human behaviour, which will lead to disappearance; drastic but slower environmental change accompanied by changes in human behaviour; and, the most fascinating possibility, the

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colonization of new environments (other planets) by the human species. Man will colonize other planets as a superior rational species that had destroyed, or at least severely damaged, its own environment!

Technological Extension of Evolution In the first case, if technological progress runs at the same rate (Kurzweil 2005), this could lead to a novel cyborg species, unimaginable at this moment. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) at the level of being able to create AI+, and soon afterward, AI++ (Chalmers 2010, 7–65) will lead to a self-sufficient evolution of technology out of human control and out of human biological evolution, whereby “the history of life were to continue by means other than life” (Stiegler 1998, 152). However, we could understand such a possibility only if we relinquished the misleading image of technology as device. Technological evolution is not restricted to the development and upgrading of mechanical tools, machines or devices. It is as much an epiphylogenetic factor of human evolution as it is a cultural and cognitive (noologic) element of genetic information evolution on Earth, the perpetuation of self-replicating units of culture, i.e. memes, through technological replicators (or technomemes) (Dawkins 1990). Technological cultural devices gradually replace the human’s abilities to initiate actions, deliberate and act consciously, but why has this happened and what are the consequences of this technological conquest?

End of Being(s) There are two aspects here: the technological way of thinking and the technological way of relating to things. Both rely on an objectifying, quantifiable, representation of beings. The technological way of thinking is deeply rooted within the pool gene of European civilization. Plato’s metaphysical doctrine of Eidos, as Heidegger points out, as the true nature of beings, requires rethinking them as quantifiable, mathematisable, ordered in an artificial manner, and this represents the beginning of the withdrawal of man’s openness to being. The technological relationship to beings relies on the subjective “lived-experience” of beings as the standard used to determine the truth. Technological representation and relation, and technological thinking and action, support the order imposed by technology on the world—enfraiming (Heidegger 2003, 258). This development of machination is just an undergoing process of withdrawal or forgottenness of being. Even if the source of the calculated worldview, which alienates from the things in themselves, is the self-identity

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representation (of the things) (Heidegger) or the over proliferation of rules to follow (Wittgenstein), in both cases, the human cognitive evolution brings us in the same place: the “increasingly unthinking determination of thinking by technology and calculation” (Livingston 2003, 326). Technological reasoning does not ensure objectivity and truthfulness, maybe only accuracy and accountability. However, its: boundless quantification and calculation grounded in self-identification and the proliferation of rule following is an excellent description of the essence of the meaning-blind. A concurrent examination of these ideas reveals the horrific possibility of machinations completion as the disintegration of man’s ability to understand and think, leaving behind nothing but the meaning-blind. (Kearns 2007)

End of Man This end of being represents therewith an end of man as an epistemological concept. Unfortunately, this end is not in the encouraging Foucauldian sense of awakening from the “doubly dogmatic anthropomorphic sleep,” the end of Copernican Revolution, which opens the possibility of thinking. Technological thinking will not unite the transcendental and the empirical, neither will it make unthought to fully materialize for the cogito, nor will it accomplish the conceptualization of the origins of meaning (Foucault 1994). On the contrary, the technologization of all aspects of human life, from material activity to social relations and the deepest intimate way of thinking and feeling, will disturb the fragile balance between the dynamic self-directed cognitive development of the human species and its natural existence. The benefits brought by technological evolution are shadowed by its perils. The progress of disciplinary science brought the advantage of the division of labour and deepening of knowledge, but also the inconvenience of overspecialization and fragmentation of knowledge; the technological progress fosters its specialized competent experts which are totally lost in the case of interferences and radical modification of their work environment conditions. All of this led to the loss of the right to knowledge, the concrete power to choose for itself and for its citizens. The absence of a comprehensive pertinent viewpoint to influence the political act and the overdevelopment of a self-directed bureaucratic system produces mentally and socially powerless citizens. “The more politics becomes technical, the more democratic competence backslides” (Morin 1999, 60). The men are destroyed conceptually, by irresponsible and

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exaggerated technological procedures of post-modern deconstruction and interpretations, and social and economic aspects submitted by positive technologies of the modern power exert “a positive influence on life, that [endeavour] to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (Foucault 1990, 137). The technology (cognitive, social and material) gains control over the life of the human and impairs its capacity of self-determination

Manifold Nature of Globalization We can see that undergoing globalization is not a monolinear, onedimensional phenomenon, but precisely a multidimensional and particular (!) one. It has an economic, political and cultural compound. All these different structured forms of globalization (economic, political, and cultural) are not self-directed; they are only the manifestation, in different media, of the same driven structure—the technological paradigm which underlies the globalization process. This is the same structure which underlies the economical process of globalization (postcolonial monopoles), the political (postcolonial self-reflexive ruling organization) and cultural (engineering mentality) one. Each recalls a specific type of end of the world as we used to know it. Economic globalization encourages the capitalist spirit, and the human being cannot be explained in a simple way. Its economic activities are driven by political and cognitive impetus, just as its epistemic performance is influenced and determined by ideological convictions and technological development. The irrational forms of thymos are required for the triumph of liberal economics (Weber 1930). The globalization of political liberal democracy—supposedly the best order able to fulfil in the largest degree and for most people the thymotic human drive—will not represent “the end of history” as such whilst “there can be no end of history without an end of modern natural science and technology” (Fukuyama 2002, 13). He also warns of the unpredictable and terrifying consequences on political democracy (and on the human race as well) of a human self-determined evolution by means of biotechnological progress. Last, but not least, the huge amount and rapidly provided information by the media and global network consume new raised cultures within the global cultural mainstream, far before their maturation. Globalised media saturation could mean the elimination of new subcultures and the end of creativity as a possibility of different creation. The global village develops toward social homogenization and an anaesthetized middle class through all sorts of technologies of normalization (practices and behaviours, feelings and

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emotions, or conceptions). In addition, this path, ceteris paribus, would lead to the end of creativity. Analogous with the reasons supporting the end of human evolution, human culture, because of its memetic mechanisms of perpetuation (Dawkins 1990), is doomed to end within the homogenized environment of a globalised world: “A culturally monotonic world would mean the end of creativity. Fostering creativity, then, becomes a priority for culture and development policies, and freedom to create, a priority for human development” (Arizpe 2004, 182). Of course, all these endings should not be represented as ends in themselves, but as the ends of things as we know them. As we have seen, among all these transmutations, the most prominent one is the cultural metamorphosis of the human being: History shows that a cultural deficit usually points towards the end of an epoch. A better understanding of the current difficulties of globalization requires acknowledging that … we are living through cultural transition. We believe that it marks the end of an epoch of forever expecting that alternative knowledge, technologies, philosophies, and art existed out there, in other culture, ready to be brought in to enrich western productions and markets or to be used as a mirror to better define the western sense of universality that leads the world. (Arizpe 2004, 182)

The need for understanding haunts the globalised world. Dislocated, disempowered and confused by its economic-industrialized-liberal(over)informed environment, the globalised human is in a quest to understand its own possibility, i.e. humanity. It still does not know that this one is about to be created, through this very quest. “The only globalization that would really serve mankind is globalized understanding, globalized spiritual and intellectual human solidarity,” although, in this enlightening vision, the risk of an end is embedded there: “understanding is both the means and the end of human communication. Our planet needs mutual understanding in all directions” (Morin 1999, 54).

The Closing Stage of Globalization: Humanity The last age of globalization will make possible and materialize some past desiderates. Some social ideals, theoretical claims or ideological predictions could become real. However, all these could be brought to existence only if the human species finds a way to preserve its own existence. Human species won, at least until now, in the evolutionary competition, due to its unique ability of self-directed, conscious and

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autonomous rational decision-making. However, this complex and dynamic capacity, human consciousness, is as advantageous and feeble as any complex system. Its greater autonomy and plasticity represents its quality and threat for its own future evolution. Human-induced changes, greatly empowered by rapidly developing technology, could provoke, by design or as unintended consequences, ravages in the global ecosystem balance that will reverberate for centuries. Only the rise of a planetary (species) conscience could give a chance to a more probable positive development of humanity as an economic, environmental, political and cultural unity: The community should strive to develop the human species, which remains the biological-reproductive instance of the human, and with the help of individuals and societies finally concretely give birth to Humanity as common conscience and planetary solidarity of the human genre … While the human species pursues its adventure under the menace of selfdestruction, the imperative has become to save Humanity by realizing it. (Morin 1999, 61–62)

The realization of humanity means the realization of global conscience. This process starts with small achievements at the level of individual consciences related in the global network—for example, being aware that the present chapter was made possible by this global network which linked us instantaneously with the ideas, the work, and insight of fellow beings. We started to think and work on this topic, and our own thinking was balanced and supported, and it took shape within this emergent collective conscience of a global network and information. In fact, this chapter is not so much an individual achievement as a collective accomplishment, a sample of planetary conscience at work. Through the human’s individual mind the ideas of many unknown fellows took shape and fused within this particular apprehension. The planetary mind is not yet self-conscious, but this is what realization of humanity is all about.

References Arizpe, Lourdes. (2004). “The Intellectual history of Culture and Development Institutions.” In V. Rao & M. Walton (Eds.), Culture and Public Action, 163–184. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Bloom, H. (2000). Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Bostrom, N. & ûirkoviü, M. M. (Eds.). (2008). Global Catastrophic Risks. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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Chalmers, D. J. (2010). “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 17 (9–10): 7–65. Dawkins, R. (1990). The Selfish Gene. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. (1990). The History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction. New York, NY: Vintage Books. —. (1994). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Fukuyama, F. (2002). Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. New York, NY: Picador. Heidegger, M. (2003). “The Question Concerning Technology.” In R. C. Scharff & V. Dusek (Eds.), Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology, 252–264. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Hughes, J. J. (2008). “Millennial Tendencies in Responses to Apocalyptic Threats.” In N. Bostrom & M. ûirkoviü (Eds.), Global Catastrophic Risks, 73–90. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Jones, S. (2008). The End of Evolution? http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/features/print/2676/the-endevolution. Kearns, J. (2007). Machination’s Proceeding towards the Meaning-Blind: The End of Being as Complete Interpretation. http://stout.hampshire.edu/~jsk06/Machination_Jon_Kearns.pdf. Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity is near: When Humans Transcend Biology. London: Viking Press. Livingston, P. (2003). “Thinking and Being: Heidegger and Wittgenstein on Machination and Lived-Experience.” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 46 (3): 324–345. Morin, E. (1999). Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future. Paris: United Nations Publishing. Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Weber, M. (1930). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin. Wills, C. (2008). “Evolution Theory and the Future of Humanity.” In N. Bostrom & M. ûirkoviü (Eds.), Global Catastrophic Risks I, 48–72. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

SOCIAL APPLICATIONS OF ART: ART AS SOCIAL THERAPY ANCA-RALUCA PURCARU

Introduction Social therapies support human development in and for the community (Holzman 2004), aiming at offering the experience of social integration, minimizing the effects of social alienation. One way of accomplishing this is the use of social creativity (Holzman 2004) and of art. The use of art as a form of social therapy has the advantage of entering the institutional space of scholar education and cultural institutions, as well as informal groups, touching numerous heterogeneous targets. This ability of art is called the “universality of the aesthetic experience” and is due to the fact that art is addressing us all in conversation. Art experience, as described by hermeneutical phenomenology, is a form of social therapy. In Gadamer’s analysis, the experience of art is understood as the unmediated living of the reality of art; the bringing into reality, apprehension, comprehension and spontaneous reception of the art work; direct communication with the work of art (Wurtz 1985); a nondogmatic conversation capable of re-signifying the world and people’s role in it. Gadamer’s aesthetics is “hermeneutical in character”; it carefully explains art experience without conceptualizing it (Davey 2007, 1). Thus, art experience is a dogma-free conversation with the artwork, through which we come to understand ourselves as belonging to the community. Conversation with the artwork also means communing with the community that shares the art experience.

Methods This research offers an interdisciplinary perspective at the intersection between social psychology and phenomenological hermeneutic philosophical studies of art experience. It relies on the conceptual analysis of the psychological recommendations regarding social therapy and art

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experience, as well as on the key logico-philosophical analysis of the phenomenological hermeneutical statements regarding art experience. Phenomenological hermeneutics is a philosophical paradigm and a descriptive method of analysis from which we valorised—for the purpose of the study—the contributions of philosophers Hans Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur and their followers.

Discussions and Results Conversational Perspective An important accent is placed on the social merits of the conversation initiated by art, which is “authentic conversation.” Authentic conversation (or dialogue) is not opinionated: it lacks dogmatism and is directed by an open-minded attitude. Gadamer’s analysis of dialogue finds it to be not a method of imposing one’s viewpoint, but a way of being. Gadamer shapes understanding as a negative experience in the sense that it is radically undogmatic and open to new experiences. This kind of understanding is an infinite dialogue in which there is no such thing as a last word (Marshall 2004). Dialogue consists of accepting the alethic claim of the other perspectives (Grondin 2009) and it begins when someone wants to understand (Marshall 2004). Comprehension means achieving a world horizon through language. There is no standpoint from which we can achieve absolute knowledge of the world, beyond these horizons. However, this does not mean that the view of the world we have from our standpoint is not genuine or correct. The world itself is given through these horizons, and we can continuously enlarge people’s perspective of the world. This does not mean abandoning our standpoint (and viewpoint) in favour of another. Expanding one’s horizon is a “fusion of the horizons” that takes place in conversation (Gadamer 2004, 306). Comprehension is improvable by confronting other interpretations, and this is how authentic experience remains open to new experiences and continues the conversation (Grondin 2009). The experience of art is a conversational experience. It is a language because it tells us something important, and it develops its own language beyond natural words, always in conversation (Marshall 2004). Through the conversational experience of art, we enlarge our view of the world. Art offers a new vision of the world, one transfigured by particular artistic means (Purcaru 2011). Through art, we learn to acknowledge the alethic claims of other perspectives and to empathize

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with them. Moreover, we enlarge our own horizon, gaining a new insight on things. In the practice of social psychotherapy, art could be used to increase empathy towards other perspectives. At the same time, art could improve conversation skills. Art experience is the experience of authentic conversation because it relies on understanding what the work of art tells us and relies on the fusion of the human horizon and that of the artwork. The secret of effective communication is the ability to understand the viewpoint of others, as neurolinguistic programming states. Once the other viewpoint is understood, the individual can resonate with its interlocutor at all the cognitive levels and relate to them efficiently (Szekely 2003). Communing and Community through Art Art illuminates relevant aspects for humanity, offers a Weltanschauung, a meaningful world vision. Ricoeur (1985) argues that, through the world that art projects, it offers a way of being the world. The new meaning that art is invested with redefines man’s place in the world, helping people to find their place inside the community. For Heidegger, art is a manifestation of the important and relevant aspects for a community. The entire community shares the meaning acquired by art, and it offers a new beginning and redefines history for future generations. Destiny, as a regulative idea, helps to understand history as an experience of cumulativeness and continuity through time by undertaking the task of forging our common destiny. Destiny implies giving a common meaning to history. History is a narrative schema, a shared, coherent story and depends on the manner in which a community undertakes the task of fulfilling the meaningful potential embodied in the artwork (Guignon 2002). Ricoeur, too, underlines the manner in which we define ourselves and the world around us through a narrative schema. Since a narrative is a mode of comprehension, it is possible to conceive the constituting of self as a story. This kind of self-constituting recurs at community level. Thus, the author claims an ontological status of the narrative. Considering that communities have a narrative existence, the author deduces that they exist only as they constitute themselves as narrative unities (unities of meaning). The social life of the communities can take on suggestions made by historians and artists only because the capability of understanding stories implies a mode of being that is already narrative. This narrative mode of being is the ontological faculty of art offering, though its

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imaginary richness, the meanings necessary to define oneself and the community one belongs to (Carr 1991). Self-defining through the narrative schema of art is already valorised in metaphor-based therapies. These therapies rely on implementing a narrative schema, a story that aims at the restructuration of the patient’s world, gaining a new perspective on their situation and foretelling of some solutions. The success of these narrative therapies is due to the identity that art builds, a type of identity suggested at an unconscious level in a way that people are more receptive to than they are to direct logicalargumentative suggestions (Dafinoiu 2000). Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutic explains the phenomena by the fact that art builds no arguments, but makes sense, opens people’s eyes, addresses them and makes them perceive a matter in a way in which no other means can. The truth of art is a lived one (that is why art is an encounter with oneself, as well) (Grondin 2009). According to Ricoeur, an artwork is a mediation through which we understand ourselves; self-understanding is only possible by appropriation of the artworks and what they reveal (Ricoeur 1991). At social scale, art is able to restructure social representations and develop social identity. Art can also serve as a remedy for the entire community by sharing an identity, identifying the problems society deals with and foretelling solutions. Through history, social-problem novels have had a great impact in determining the common destiny. Moreover, the case of Ancient tragedies is exemplary. Authors such as Gadamer and Ricoeur have already analyzed the role of “catharsis” in Ancient Greek society. Aesthetic experience is able to induce empathy towards the suffering character, to inflict eleos and phobos (the state of misery and that of shivering and fearing for the one endangered), both modes of ekstasis (being outside oneself). After that comes the return to oneself enriched in self-knowledge. Tragedy is the experience of authentic communing. The spectator receives the communion from the tragedy that also contributes to self-knowledge (Gadamer 2004). All aesthetic experiences, regardless of their artistic genre, provide the same meaning continuity that the Greek tragedy provides. For Ricoeur, too, catharsis is triggered by the arts’ surplus of meaning provided in the re-signification of the reader’s world (Kaelin 1996). But catharsis is just one of the re-figuration cases. All art is able to resignify the world that offers aesthetic pleasure (Ricoeur 1996). In all its forms, art determines a process of re-signification of that world that unites us in the meaning it suggests.

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Gadamer’s interpretation of the aesthetic experience underlined the power of art to bring us together, to unite us, the same power that celebration has. Celebration is the essence of regained, universal communion; it is the event of an encounter with tradition. In the mutual interaction between past and present, we understand ourselves as belonging to a tradition (Gadamer 2000), to the past that is still active (Wurtz 1985). The encounter is not a mere repetitive one: it is dynamic, since celebration makes sense only for the one who celebrates it, who participates in it, who receives through the event the vital order, whose temporality is fundamentally redefined by the event. Living the experience of art is communing with others (Gadamer 2000). Taking part in the transsubjective event of the art generates a certain disposition towards community, because the time given to the aesthetic experience suspends everyday work activities and a new shared temporal order emerges. As every celebration unites its celebrants and every festival brings together its participants, artwork, too, has the power to make its spectators become a community. The communicative capacity of art awakens the understanding of the self as being addressed by and belonging to a community of meaning. Art’s ability to communicate relies on the belonging to a community. Art has the distinctiveness of forging communities (Davey 2007). In postmodern aesthetics, the dematerialized character of the aesthetic experience and social event phenomenality is better underlined. As in the case of the festival, whose existence depends on its participants, art requires a public to experience it, to understand its message, to converse to and to commune with. The cases of Performance Art and Happening are exemplary, since, in these art forms, the spectator plays a more active role. Performance Art is a form of artistic manifestation shaped by a set scenario in which the spectators voluntarily become performers of the event. Unlike Performance Art, Happening does not follow a set scenario, being an unplanned event. Both can take place in unconventional settings and involve a large number of different spectators and participants (Bejan 2009). These art forms can contribute to developing a sense of social cohesion because their audience is not already community-shaped, such as the public of the institutional space of art whose spectators already have the consciousness of belonging to a particular cultural community. These two types of artistic events stimulate interaction between different inhabitants who come to be united by the shared artistic act. Psychosocial studies also support these phenomenological conclusions. The classification made by Guetzkow (2002) reveals the fact that the art forms in which the public is directly involved contribute to the making up

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of the sense of social belonging, of a social network and of social interaction abilities. These types of interactive art forms may have a greater social value than classical art forms, but the effectiveness of the latter is also of great importance. Direct involvement of the public in the artistic performance contributes to the increase of tolerance, identity formation and community pride. The presence of artists and art institutions in the community improves the image of that community and even reduces criminality in the neighbourhood. Art also determines an increase of the social capital; therefore, the author argues that art has a positive impact over economy (Guetzkow 2002). In other words, although interactive art is more suited for social therapies, public witnessing of any art form has a therapeutic value. Using art in particular social therapy programs would be lessened by its play structure. Through the play structure of art, the tasks (rules) inherent to the artistic representation must be respected with “sacred seriousness” (Gadamer 2004, 102). This means that, while playing, we have no consciousness of the fact that we are solving tasks and the world of the game is not real. On the contrary, when we play the world of the play takes over us and becomes real. The identity of the game is given by the movements of the play; the rules, together with their inherent task and the order imprinted by the movement of the play, constitute the essence of the play. The purpose of the play is not solving its tasks, but the carrying out of its specific movements. The player plays a game and does not play themselves, performing the play’s tasks but not as the methodical action of a subject. Rather, the play is the subject, but it requires players to play it. In this process of play presentation, the player also achieves selfpresentation (Gadamer 2004). Play as a social activity is also a form of self-knowledge. The play is accessible to everyone, makes no social discriminations, and frees us from all conditioning imposed by the outside world. The play tasks (rules) must not be considered a form of constraint, but a way of entering in communion through play participation, namely by solving the play’s tasks and by following its rules. Players also enter in communion as builders of the common play world. Play and art know the intimate collaboration shared in building the common world, to which we all belong in equal measure, in a vital way. As the world of the play would not exist without its players, nor would the life world exist without the people that live in it. The play experience is a lesson in building a world together.

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Conclusions and Recommendations Art experience, starting with the private experience of art, has an inherent therapeutic value. Any aesthetic experience has an inter- and transsubjective feature because it is a conversation with the artwork, implying accessing the art work’s set of meanings through which self-understanding improves, the awareness of belonging to a community takes place, reality is re-signified, and new ways of relating to alterity are found. As the degree of participation to the art presentation rises, from the mere presence at the art performance as audience, to the active involvement in the artistic process, so does social solidarity and the degree of social integration. Using art as a technique of group interaction in social therapy programs would maximize the social benefits inherent to the act of art experience, such as: growth of self-understanding, acceptance of alterity, integration of different reality perspectives, cultivation of dialogue disposition, understanding oneself as belonging to a community and to society, development of social awareness and a sense of social belonging, and tendency towards contributing to the creation of the common world and social destiny.

References Bejan, P. (2009). Estetică Юi comunicare [Aesthetics and Communication]. In Comunicare socială, relaаii publice – asistenĠă socială. 223–290. Ia‫܈‬i: Editura Universită‫܊‬ii Al. I. Cuza. Carr, D. (1991). Épistémologie et ontologie du récit [Epistemology and Novel Ontology]. In J. Greich & R. Kearey (Eds.), Paul Ricoeur, les métamorphoses de la raison herméneutique: Actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, 1er-11e août 1988. Paris: Éditions du Cerf. 205–214. Dafinoiu, I. (2000). Elemente de psihoterapie integrativă [Elements of Integrative Psychotherapy]. Ia‫܈‬i: Polirom. Davey, N. (2007). Gadamer’s Aesthetics. Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadameraesthetics. Gadamer, H.-G. (2000). Actualitatea frumosului [Actuality of the Beautiful]. Ia‫܈‬i: Polirom. —. (2004). Truth and Method. New York–London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Grondin, J. (2009). Înаelegerea ca dialog [Understanding as Dialogue]. Vox Philosophiae 1 (2): 150–174. Guetzkow, J. (2002). How the Arts Impact Communities: An Introduction to the Literature on Arts Impact Studies I, 1–27. Princeton University,

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Centre for Arts and Cultural Policies Studies, Working Papers Series, 20. Guignon, C. (2002). “Truth as Disclosure: Art, Language, History.” In H. L. Dreyfus & M. Wrathall (Eds.), Heidegger Reexamined 3: Art, Poetry, and Technology, 47–62. London: Routledge. Holzman, Lois. (2004). Psychological Investigations: An Introduction to Social Therapy. http://www.eastsideinstitute.org/socialtherapy_assets/Psychological%2 0Investigations%20An%20Introduction%20to%20Social%20Therapy.pdf. Kaelin, E. F. (1996). “Ricoeur’s Aesthetics: On How to Read a Metaphor.” In L. E. Hahn (Ed.), The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: The Library of Living Philosophers, 237–255. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court. Marshall, D. G. (2004). “On Dialogue: To Its Cultured Despisers.” In B. Krajewski (Ed.), Gadamer’ Repercussions, 123–144. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Purcaru, Anca-Raluca. (2011). Ipostaze ale adevărului în creaаia artistică [Hypostases of Truth in Artistic Creation]. Ia‫܈‬i: Junimea. Ricoeur, P. (1985). Time and Narrative 2: The Configuration of Time in Fictional Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. (1991). From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II. Evanstone, IL: Northwestern University Press. —. (1996). “Reply to Eugene F. Kaelin.” In L. E. Hahn (Ed.), The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: The Library of Living Philosophers, 256– 258. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court. Root, Wanda. Social Therapy, The Fellowship, Youth Guidance. http://www.anthromed.org/Article.aspx?artpk=492. Szekely, A. (2003). Introducere în programarea neurolingvistică [Introduction to Neurolinguistic Programming]. Bucureúti: Almatea. Wurtz, B. (1985). Hermeneutica lui Gadamer—o încercare de depăЮire a crizei de încredere [Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: An Attempt to Overcome Trust Crisis]. Timi‫܈‬oara: Mirton.

PRACTICAL AND TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL CASE STUDY IRINA ROTARU

Introduction In this chapter, we draw attention to some consequences that might arise from granting practical philosophy priority in what regards philosophical research. For this, we analyze the interpretation the contemporaneous philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels—advocating the primacy of applied philosophy and drawing from Husserlian phenomenology—that advocates the primacy of transcendental philosophy. Husserlian phenomenology claims the status of a model for philosophical research based on the high level of objectivity the transcendental method can attain. Authors like Waldenfels interpret the method and assertions of transcendental phenomenology ethically, declaring it subjective and violent, not able to get over the traditional metaphysical presuppositions that support the subject. Hence, they say the ethical attitude, according to which the “I” and the “other” must be given equality in the order of research, should replace the transcendental. Assuming a transcendental method means that the phenomenologist tries to give up all presuppositions, including those regarding what accurate research means, to properly investigate the conditions of the potential for meaning, to draw the ontological map of reality. Therefore, if ethics demands priority and starts with the idea of equality, as noble as this idea can be, it means it asks for the ontological to be adapted to match practical normativity, and this means conducting research by presuppositions. Practical philosophy that aims at beginning philosophical research imposes its view as if describing the whole reality, but, in fact, it picks up its examples preferentially and ignores the ontological portrait the world would have had its view described reality. We want to show that, if one begins with the ethical standpoint as proposed by Waldenfels, the objectivity of the research is prejudiced.

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Husserlian transcendental research has indeed an ethical foundation, being the request for the philosopher to assume total responsibility for the results of their research. The transcendental domain describes evidences that are prior to striking attitude on meaning; it is indifferent to the relationship its discoveries have with ethical principles, while ethics is never indifferent to what it states. So, the most fundamental ethical requirement proves to be that of starting with the things themselves, not with one particular ethical view. To judge human interaction ethically and to draw principles for practical action, one has to be acquainted with the ontological conditions of the possibility for action and interaction. If applied philosophy ignores ontological limits, it can fall into idealism and is tempted to associate with transcendental phenomenology. Consequently, theories dealing with the practical level should take into account the indications of ontological theories if they are to be developed into responsible research and are to make sense. We argue all this according to the idea that practical philosophy research results do not exclude or oppose transcendental philosophy, but complement it. The two different attitudes should not be in conflict, but should try to cooperate. .

A Case of Misunderstanding Waldenfels seems to believe that asserting transcendental subjectivity implies asserting a strong rational or psychological subject. However, this is not the case in what regards Husserlian transcendentalism; the phenomenological transcendental subjectivity is not the mark of rationality as much as the mark of reflexivity. Unlike the Kantian transcendental ego, a generalization meant to have no definite determinations, the Husserlian is bodily determined; consequently, the phenomenological transcendental categories are subject to continuous change. Asserting the transcendental subject does not amount to asserting pure reason or the possibility of attaining absolute truth, but only the possibility of reflection. The transcendental ego is often seen as an isolated, out of this world entity. It is thought that the primordial ego does not need to have any idea of the others for defining its own fundamental meaning—the transcendental approach is described as if the reduced ego can have no idea of its fellows. They are taken into the equation when the ego comes back to his worldly social status, to realize that they contribute equally, alongside with him, to the construction of natural, social reality. This equality that the ego concedes to others is no authentic equality, says Waldenfels, since things do not happen like this in Husserl’s theory.

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Let’s see to what extent we can talk, regarding Husserlian transcendental phenomenology, about the existence of an isolated transcendental ego, having no idea about others. It should be said from the start that, contrary to the Kantian transcendental theory, that does not allow a plurality of transcendental egos, the Husserlian theory not only admits the idea of a plurality of egos, but finds it necessary (Zahavi 2005, 367): “… subjectivity is what it is—an ego functioning constitutively—only within intersubjectivity” (Husserl 1970: 172). Moreover, Husserl considers that we cannot even imagine what the world would look like for an ego characterized as singular, with no idea of others (Husserl 1959). We do not have the possibility to remove the intersubjective way of perceiving the world, as intersubjectivity fundamentally determines our constituting of the world. This is what the transcendental reduction emphasizes. Still, selfconsciousness is singular and represents the only direct way to the world that can be analysed in order to find out how it is constituted. Transcendental intersubjectivity is the original structure of all meaning, but the ego, self-consciousness, is the core condition of the possibility for intersubjectivity. The examination of transcendental subjectivity reveals subjectivity and intersubjectivity to be simultaneous. The constitution of the subject cannot take place regardless of intersubjectivity, but at the same time the lack of ontological autonomy for the subject takes theoretical impossibility to the concept of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity can occur only as a relationship between individual subjects. There is actually inequality between the first person perspective and the perspective of the other, but this is ontological inequality that has nothing to do with principially attributing priority to the self or to the other. On the other hand, if the ego has a kind of ontological priority, it does not mean that in what concerns the constitution of meaning it conserves its priority, it just makes meaning possible; only secondarily does the ego contribute to the shaping of the meaning content. Stating a primordial unity as a condition of the potential for genuine interaction and communication leads to the impossibility of stating a plurality of individual subjects. If unity is the basis, what can lead to differentiation and individualization resulting in a plurality of subjects? It would mean that, at the most rudimentary level, the constitution of the subjective flow is not intersubjectively determined. Consequently, we cannot speak of anteriority and posteriority in the constitution of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, but for the constitution of intersubjectivity the condition of an ego scheme is preliminary. According to Waldenfels, in the Husserlian theory there is only room for a rational mediated relationship between me and you and this does an

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injustice to the other: “But so, as a member [Glied] of the world, and as a member [Mitglied] of the world of monads designed by myself, the other is from the outset caught in a mundane and social order system … Uniqueness remains forbidden for him” (Waldenfels 1971, 48–49). However, the place in Husserl that determines these Waldenfelsian reflections proves to mean something different: “Further, the fact that ‘I exist’ anticipatively determines if and which other strange for me monads exist; I can only find them, but I cannot create those that must exist for me” (Husserl 1973a, 167–168) The fact that “I am” pre-establishes the difference between me and others refers to the fact that self consciousness can only be singular and accessible to the first person perspective. I cannot avoid this perspective and replace it with another. Nothing is said here about pre-establishing the other’s meaning. Therefore, talking about “my own,” Husserl refers to one’s natural determinations, to one’s body. So the “own” is not, as Waldenfels suggests, the meaning content of the ego, an order it establishes to then judge everything resorting to it. One’s own is just the body, the possibility of reflection and, consequently, a world of naturally-determined meaning. There is no subjectivity in one’s own meaning, just the possibility to develop subjectivity though interaction. Husserl does not describe the relationship between self and world, self and other, as if the self builds an order on principles proved to be valid, and then judge everything on this order. Indeed, the other and the world are perceived by means of a horizon. However, all the horizon means is that the ego does not have absolute liberty. The perception of the other is described as an analogical apperception, not because I can understand the other only as a duplication of me, but because “The perception of the others (that are empathised, and not really and actually perceived by me) … has a part in perception and [in the constitution of] the objects of the other, given according to perception [Wahrnehmungsmäsig] that are not really perceived by me, and probably not even perceivable” (Husserl 1973b, 498). It is absolutely clear that the world does not equal the meaning I have for it and that it cannot be understood in an absolute manner. Still, it does not mean that everything outside of me is a dark mystery that I cannot disclose. We hope to have made clear that transcendental phenomenology does not describe the transcendental ego as a unity that establishes the correlates of the world, and respectively to what extent others can accommodate into the pre-established order.

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Paths for Reconciliation I have the chance to understand and deepen my understanding, starting from the things that are familiar to me and broadening my perception by means of mediation and reciprocity until I come to the worlds with strange meaning for me: “But all these only in a generality that leaves wide incomprehensibility behind” (Husserl 1973b, 433). This idea could be just as well attributed to Waldenfels, but the two authors consider the fact that our understanding is limited differently. Husserl emphasizes our readiness to provide general knowledge, to approach the unknown by means of the familiar. This is a consequence of the ontological feature describing the relationship between mind and the world, according to which the mind has no direct access to the absolute new, to the absolute other, as it cannot escape its horizon. He does not acknowledge this feature as being a positive or a negative one, nor can it be valued in this manner, as long as it is a constitutional given fact. He only describes it and emphasizes that we must be aware of our constitution if we are to counteract the tendency to duplicate familiar meaning. If knowledge goes on normally, as in the natural, everyday attitude, taking things for granted, superficiality and error prosper. Husserl introduces the transcendental reduction to go beyond superficial knowledge. On the other hand, in what regards the tendency to generalization, Waldenfels also emphasizes that there is always a rest to the understanding of what is strange and new to us. But he values negatively what Husserl describes as the constitutional tendency to generalize familiar knowledge, and eliminates it in the attempt to replace intentionality with responsivity. He ignores that our understanding is ontologically conditioned and that this conditioning cannot be valued negatively or positively. Only the effects of inertial understanding can be negative. The main belief of Waldenfels is that there are data outside of meaning and norms and if something is perceived “as something” it does not mean it is that something, but that a meaning was attributed to it in order to provide us the chance to manipulate it. Any order is limited and artificially constituted to serve out theoretical and practical needs. (Waldenfels 1987). The myth of an all-encompassing order being overcome means that the subject loses its privileged place. Alterity does not originate outside of us, but within us (Waldenfels 1997, 27). The presupposition of an original, identical with itself ego is considered unsupported. Before thinking, says Waldenfels, we respond. (Ibid., 51) What is known as the “subject” appears at first as patient and respondent, as participating in something, but not initiating it. Let’s see now what intentionality means and what ethical consequences are

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envisaged by replacing it with responsivity. For Waldenfels, the problem with intentionality is that “Die Initiative geht einseitig von mir aus, der ich intendiere, nicht von etwas, das mir von sich aus begegnet” (“The initiative starts unilaterally from me, the ‘I’ that intends, not from something that encounters me by itself”) (Waldenfels 1971, 47). Moreover, intentionality is held to mean goal-oriented activity. Therefore, the discussion is moved from the ontological level to the practical one. However, goal-oriented activity, describing the property of intentionality at the practical, natural level, is just an effect, an instantiation of the transcendental property of intentionality, called “operative intentionality” (fungierende Intentionalität). In Husserlian terms, “act intentionality” represents only a secondary form in respect to operative intentionality, the objective form of the fact that consciousness is essentially object-oriented (meaning that the self can exist and evolve only in a relation to something exterior). Operative intentionality is a prelinguistic way of being in the world and cannot be reduced to a mental state. It describes the fact that the experiencing agent is engaged in the world through its actions and projects. Husserl also calls it bodily intentionality. According to Husserl, intentionality has a passive and a dynamic component. Each action is passively determined by something, but it also contains an active reaction, a transition into action. (Husserl 1973b, 492–493). I am affected by the world, but I do not just passively undergo external stimuli; I can convert them significantly for my life. Therefore, Husserl also spoke of affections, and this did not prevent him from asserting intentionality or the transcendental ego. Waldenfels is familiar with the Husserlian theory of affections, but claims Husserl did not properly understand what his discovery meant, as long as he did not give up the transcendental self once he started talking about affections. We uphold that this has nothing to do with a lack of understanding, but with the fact that asserting a transcendental self does not exclude asserting a responsive, narrative or any other sort of psychological self. Intentional thinking means for Waldenfels thinking that puts in the first place what is one’s own and the correspondent expectations. However, Husserl’s main concern, that determined the turn “to the things themselves,” was that presuppositions take over objectivity. Still, transcendental reduction and transcendental research do not have as a foundation the belief in the possibility of absolute adequacy between interiority and exteriority. Despite what most interpreters believe transcendental research to mean, one of Husserl’s concerns was to make clear that there is an essential inadequacy between interiority and exteriority. According to the Husserlian phenomenology, perception of an object is always unfulfilled, and direct perception of the

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other is not possible even in principle: “But this experience offers only a core of adequate experience … while beyond it lies an undetermined general, presumptive horizon” (Husserl 1973a, 62). This does not deny the fact that consciousness is intentional, but warns us against the fact that the meaning we determine at a certain moment does not exhaust all possibilities of meaning of a situation. To uphold intentional consciousness does not lead to a transparent and all-mighty consciousness. As for the idea that intentionality means that my intention necessarily precedes the voice of the other, it is far from the spirit of Husserlian phenomenology. There is no contradiction between the essential feature of consciousness of being intentional, and the fact that it can only be about something that previously affected it. We can have something in intention only in response to alien affection.

Conclusion The ethical attempt to remove transcendental research does not reach its goal, as: (1) an ontological argument (as that concerning the transcendental self) cannot be counteracted by means of a normative argument; (2) even if the de-centred subject described the reality about the subject, this would not clear the way for non-egoistic relations (understood as equality of perspectives in what regards meaning constitution). As long as centred subjectivity disappears, it takes perspectivism with it, and we are left with an ontologically absolute subjectivity. This is because centred subjectivity, meaning the delimitation between self and alterity, is associated with the idea of perspectivism. Meeting the other, I become aware that my view on things is but a perspective, and I can eventually come to understand that I must make room for other perspectives, as they cannot be judged as one being better than the other. Therefore, the fact that there are differences between self and alterity one cannot overcome indicates a centred subjectivity and the transcendental self. The responsive and the transcendental theories do not exclude each other but describe two different dimensions of subjectivity. The transcendental is a condition of the possibility for the human subject, a fundamental dimension in respect to the practical, while the responsive dimension describes the way our identity is constituted at the practical level of interaction. Ontological determinations of the human can be understood as limiting facts in what regards practical behaviour. The responsive image of the subject describes only half of reality. Even if all our actions are triggered by affections it does not mean that our entire relation with the world is limited to responding. In addition, only an identity can respond to affection, and we

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do not assimilate anonymously alien solicitations. We do not respond to everything that supposedly solicits us, we do not all respond to the same affections, and we do not all respond in the same way. If we would not be but respondents, our acts would contain nothing that could be called our own. However, differences in reacting are a fact. We are not pure rationality and pure will, but it does not mean we cannot resort to rationality and free will.

References Husserl, E. (1959). Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion [First Philosophy (1923/24). Second Part: Theory of Phenomenological Reduction]. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. —. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. —. (1973a). Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge [Cartesian Meditations and the Paris Lectures]. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. —. (1973b). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil: 1929–1935 [On the Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity. Third Part: 1929–935]. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Waldenfels, B. (1971). Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs. Sozialphilosophische Untersuchungen in Anschluss an Edmund Husserl [The Intermediary Kingdom of Dialog. Sociophilosophical Investigations Following Edmund Husserl]. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. —. (1987). Ordnung in Zwilicht [Order in the Twilight]. Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp. —. (1997). Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden I [Studies on the Phenomenology of the Alien 1]. Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp. Zahavi, D. (2005). “Husserl’s intersubjective transformation of transcendental philosophy.” In R. Bernet, D. Welton & G. Zavota (Eds.), Edmund Husserl: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers IV, 359–380. London: Routledge.

CAUSAL MONISM AND THE ISSUE OF MENTAL CAUSATION CRISTINEL UNGUREANU

Introduction Contemporary revolutions in technology help us gain deeper insights into the underlying neural basis of mental states. At the same time, ever more cognitive theories refer to neural properties when explaining mental states, making problematic the scientific status of psychology. We are often told that science individuates itself, not just by specific concepts and theories, but also by specific entities. So, what is left for psychology to explain, if neurobiologists and radical philosophers (Bickle 2003; Kim 2005) tell us that mental states are reducible to neural states? In this chapter, we intend to argue in favour of the ontological autonomy of psychology. Using causality as a realistic criterion, that something exists if it can produce something else, psychology could be considered a genuine science only when psychological entities are causally potent qua psychological entities. A psychological explanation that utterly neglects psychological aspects and resorts only to neurobiological processes (like firing neurons, synapses, neural columns) is no longer a psychological explanation.

Causal Closure of the Physical World In the philosophy of mind, mental causation faces a strong objection called “causal closure of the physical world.” This is usually expressed as follows: – - Each physical event is sufficiently caused by other physical events (causal closure of the physical world). - Mental events cause other events and behaviour distinct from physical events (mental realism). - Therefore, mental events cannot affect physical events (epiphenomenalism) (Yablo 1992, 247–248).

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This is a very strong argument against the existence of mental causation. Curiously, the causal closure principle is usually asserted by certain upholders of the causal efficacy of mental states, upholding the so-called irreducible physicalism. Within this theory, there are many strategies to make mental causation compatible with physical causal closure. In this chapter, we discuss Davidson’s account of mental causation because in his texts we clearly view the source of the causal closure argument, the monism of causation. According to Davidson (1970, 222), the ascription of mental states to intelligent beings is ruled by other criteria than those used in natural sciences. The expression of a belief is justified by the presence of other beliefs, intentions, desires, etc. The interpretation of mental states has to take into account this holism regulated by the principles of rational coherence while the physical counterpart is described by means of the extensional strict laws. Given this categorial difference, the reduction of the mental domain to the physical domain is not possible because there are no necessary bridge laws. Hence, mental events will be explained only in mental terms. This is the anomality of the Davidsonian monism—there is only one substance in the universe (monism), but one part of its events is not describable in terms of physical sciences (anomality of the mental). Following this account, mentalist explanation has a lot of independence, but how can we reconcile this with the extensional character of causation—an event c causes another event e regardless of its mode of description? Davidson admits causal interactions between mental and physical events, but this interaction is not an ontological fact because, according to his monism, all events are concrete particulars.1 “Mental” and “physical” are our descriptions, our representation of events implied in causation; causation as such is an objective process, independent of our projections. If this is true, and given the second principle of anomalous monism, “events related as cause and effect fall under strict deterministic laws” (Davidson 1970, 208), then causality is bound to the physical domain. Strict laws are possible in the field of physical interactions because a law is strict when it is picked out with the minimal vocabulary of a “closed comprehensive theory,” or when it is derived from such a theory by means of bridge laws (McLaughlin 1989, 115–116). “Closed” means here that the events within the domain of that theory interact with events of the same theory. “Comprehensive” means that every causal relation that holds among the events of the theory falls under the laws of that theory (Ibid.). Given this meaning of strictness, it is clear that only within the domain of physical science is it possible to construct strict causal laws. Only in this domain can we say that a physical

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effect has a sufficient cause within the same domain. Only physical laws do not supervene upon laws and theories of other domains, so it is possible for physical causal relations to fall only under physical laws. Other domains, supervening upon the physical domain as the physicalist paradigm asserts, are not closed and comprehensive. It follows that causation is restricted to the field of physical processes. Mental events have no causal role as such. The conclusion is (though Davidson would not accept it) that mental events are epiphenomenal. For example, behaviour is a physical fact, and mental facts play no role in producing it because any physical fact has a strict physical determination which will render any mental causation futile.2 Davidson may reply that causation holds between events no matter how they are described, that there is a concrete causal relation between events and it can be described in different ways (Davidson 1993). The event c causes the effect e not because it is mental or physical. The way we describe a causal process has no influence upon that process. In the case of causal explanation, the description of c, say C, together with the law L entails the sentence E which picks out the effect e. However, the strictness condition is fulfilled only in the domain of physical science, but the strictness is the sine qua non condition for every causal relation. Thus, if the mind is credited with causal relevance, it must be explained as physical causation. How can this anomality, physical causing events, but intentionalist description, express a distinct property of the mental? Davidson’s theory amounts to the following representation: given two events c1 and c2, picked out in two corresponding explanations M1 and P2, c2 represents the physical basis of c1, but c1 is such an event that can be described only in M1’s way; c1 cannot cause by itself, but through its basis, c2. To understand c1 as causally potent, we have to conceive it as c2 because in this respect c1 is another name for c2, though we know that c1 behaves anomalously since M1 is irreducible to P2. As a consequence, c1 has a specific feature picked out by M1, but this makes no difference in the world. Hence, we conclude that, though Davidson’s irreducibility argument is true, it is not, however, an argument for mental causation.

Causal Relevance of Properties In what sense is causality limited to the physical domain? According to the reductionist view, an event is causally potent through its physical microstructure: psychological events’ causation is reducible to neurobiological causation, neurobiological causation is reducible to biochemical causation and so on until we reach, probably, the ground of quantum physics

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(Penrose 1994). The consequence will be an extended epiphenomenalism—only microphysical particles are properly causally potent (Ruder-Baker 1993; Humphreys 1997). In order to dismantle Davidson’s monism of causation, we have to start from the fact that he conceives causal relata as concrete particulars (coarse-grained events). We can avoid extended epiphenomenalism if we include properties in the process of causation. The causal closure principle relies on the metaphysical thesis concerning the monism of the physical substance— there is only a substance in the universe and only a form of causality derived from it, namely, the causal potency of micro particles. That is why the reductionist accounts, when trying to translate the laws of an upper level into the laws of a lower level, are generally forced to go deep into the microstructure of things. However, it is a trivial truth that all facts are, ultimately, physical things, but it is false to assert that there is only a single form of causation. In practice, we always include properties in causal explanations, saying that c caused e because of the property, or set of properties, F. If we decrease or increase the speed of the throwing of the stone, we obtain different events that may generate different effects. Hence, the causal relata are events instantiating properties; causation does not concern the events alone (Kim 1976; Bennett 1988; Lombard 1998). According to this new view, different causes individuate themselves, not by different substances, but by different properties. Only if we accept the pluralism of properties, can we have the pluralism of causation, and the pluralism of causation is an empirical fact. The problem now is how to identify the properties that matter in the process of causation. In literature they are called “constitutive properties,” and Braun (1995) offers a detailed discussion of the causal relevance of properties. Given the counterfactual ~Fc ĺ ~Ge (“If c were not F, then e would not be G”), F is a constitutive property of the cause c, if the effect e would not occur as G, without c being F. If the stone had not had the speed X, the window would not have been broken. However, the event c supports many other properties. For example, the properties of being self-identical or of being F or ~F are essential for every event. According to the counterfactual above, they must be causally relevant, though good common sense tells us that they are not (Braun 1995, 455–457). After discussing many ways of identifying the constitutive properties of the causing events, Braun proposes the following definition (Ibid., 461): causally relevant properties are natural properties,

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that is, they are subsumed under a genuine causal law, ceteris paribus laws included. Through this analysis, problematic properties like negative, disjunctive properties, or universally essential properties are excluded. Braun takes into account the fact that this method of identifying natural properties is circular: in order to be natural, a property must be picked out by a causal law; in order to appear in a causal law, the property must be natural (Ibid.). Braun accepts that this circularity is rather epistemological and that this is the best we can get. However, we can go on with the reasoning and improve Braun’s strategy of identifying the constitutive properties of the causing events. There is another stipulation in his text where he says that natural properties are “properties that make for genuine resemblance and significant kinds” (Ibid., 458). This observation can lead to a better explanation of the nature of causally relevant properties. The individuation of natural properties, based on causal law criterion, shows how we reached the ground of the fundamental ontology. The circularity between causal laws and natural properties shows something important about the nature of constitutive properties. We often conceive properties in connection with our ability to predicate something about the things about which we speak. But not all such predications, as Kim (1976, 162–163) also says, are constitutive properties of events. Events are real things, real spatio-temporal portions of the world. They represent actions in this world. These actions imply that an agent or a thing acts in a certain manner because it has a certain property. Our hypothesis is to take these constitutive properties for ways of action. These properties are responsible for the occurrence of the events. Different constitutive properties presuppose different ways of action. For example, a neural event differs from a sub-neural event because each event instantiates a different constitutive property, that is, a different way of action. If we think that all neurobiological terms are fundamentally wrong because they do not fit the underlying sub-neural processes and, consequently, we advance a sub-neural theory in sub-neural terms to describe and explain what was picked out before by the neurobiological terms, then we have to accept that there is no neurobiological level with specific processes. Only thus can we accomplish an ontologically radical elimination. The result of this is what were previously called neurobiological events and states now better described in subneurobiological terms and theories. The same reasoning can be applied to all other constitutive properties. Physical properties presuppose actions which are different from the biological actions, or from psychological actions. Within the domain of physics, there are also different ways of action depending on how many constitutive properties there are—

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mechanical, electromagnetic, atomic action, and so on. Therefore, natural or constitutive properties represent certain real ways of action. Given this, they represent causal potencies of things. They are natural not because they are subsumed under causal laws, but because they represent causal potencies that fall under causal laws. The laws are linguistic devices, but these potencies are real. Therefore, we cannot ground their existence on our devices. Of course, the mind-world separation is problematic because not only the laws are mind-dependent, but also what we consider to be real causal potencies. However, ontologically, it is evident that there could be no causal law without causal potencies without the specific action to be subsumed under. The circularity between causal laws and natural properties does not exist at this level. In addition, we think that it does not exist at the epistemological level either because we start to subsume the events under the causal laws after we are assured that there is a genuine causation. Progress in science is due to the fact that we can observe the difference between ways of action. When Maxwell could not explain certain electrical phenomena by means of Newtonian mechanics, he asserted the electromagnetic force. Starting with this assumption, he was able to advance the electromagnetic causal laws, and the electromagnetic cause is an event which has the electromagnetic force as a constitutive property. Psychological action is based on intentional content. Let us take an example. We say that John goes to the bus station since he wants to visit his mother, and we explain his behaviour by pointing to his desires, thoughts, etc. According to the reductionist accounts, we should point to John’s neurobiological states. But John’s walking to the bus station on account of his firing neurons represents a mechanical determination which is far from what we suppose is happening in that case.1 John follows an intentional fact (his decision) and, as such, he might have turned back or he might have chosen in the last moment to visit a friend. In a word, if we describe what caused his behaviour appealing to mechanical determination, saying that the bulk of neurons in C100 caused his behaviour, then we will transform John into an automaton. The relevant property for John’s action is not the firing of neurons as such (we can imagine a world in which this firing has no effect), but the intentional content, the desire to visit his mother. Some explanations are constrained to refer to mental properties; without this reference, they would be unintelligible. Intentional content is a relational property; it connects things such as John, John’s mother, etc. However, according to one of physicalist assumptions, causal relata must be located in space and time, and causal potency be non-relational,

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intrinsic to physical forces. This is upheld by philosophers mainly to keep magic explanations away from science.4 The notion of intrinsicity should be discussed depending on the entities to which it refers. For example, biological processes consist of many chemical and physical processes. From the chemical perspective, what we call “cell” refers to a huge number of molecules. However, what is at the subcellular level a heterogeneous chemical collection is a coherent whole at the cellular level; cellular action, regulated by the presence of other cells, is not intrinsic to chemical molecules. From the macroscopic perspective, the cellular processes are intrinsic to the living body, being integrated in the collective pattern of action of the body. In the same way, from a neural perspective, mental states designate relational properties. However, from a social sciences perspective, psychological properties are intrinsic to an embodied organism, embedded in its environmental niche (Keijzer & Schouten 2007, 119; Ungureanu 2012).

Conclusion In this chapter, we have shown that understanding causal relata as “coarse-grained events” (Davidson) is the basis for the monism of causation and, given this closure, we are facing the extended epiphenomenalism and the futility of psychology. Afterwards, we have tried to dismantle this monism by introducing the properties in the process of causation. The chapter ends with our hypothesis about the nature of the constitutive properties, which is supposed to make mental causation possible.

Notes 1. “The principle of causal interaction deals with events in extension and is, therefore, blind to the mental-physical dichotomy” (Davidson 1970, 215).

2. This is one of Kim’s reproaches to anomalous monism (Kim 1993). 3. Neuronal determination is, after all, a mechanical determination, like the circulation of blood or the functioning of the liver.

4. Or, as Fodor (1987) says, to prevent “spooky action at a distance.”

References Bennet, J. (1988). Events and Their Names. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bickle, J. (2003). Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Reductive Account. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

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Braun, D. (1995). “Causally Relevant Properties.” Philosophical Perspectives 9: 447–475. Davidson, D. (1970). Essay on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —. (1993). “Thinking Causes.” In J. Heil & A. Mele (Eds.), Mental Causation, 3–18. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fodor, J. (1987). Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Humphreys, P. (1997). How Properties Emerge. Philosophy of Science 64: 1–17. Keijzer, F. & Schouten, M. (2007). “Embodied Cognition and Mental Causation: Setting Empirical Bounds on Metaphysics.” Synthese 158: 109–125. Kim, J. (1976). “Events as Property Exemplifications.” In M. Brand & D. Walton (Eds.), Action Theory: Action Theory: Proceedings of the Winnipeg Conference on Human Action, Held at Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, 9–11 May 1975, 159–191. Dordrecht–Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company. —. (1993). “Can Supervenience and ‘Non-Strict Laws’ Save Anomalous Monism?” In J. Heil & A. Mele (Eds.), Mental Causation, 19–26. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —. (2005). Physicalism, or Something near Enough. Princeton–Oxford: Princeton University Press. Lombard, L. B. (1998). “Ontologies of Events.” In S. Laurence & Cynthia Macdonald (Eds.), Contemporary Readings in the Foundations of Metaphysics, 227–294. Oxford, Mass: Blackwell. McLaughlin, B. (1989). “Type Epiphenomenalism, Type Dualism and the Causal Priority of the Physical.” Philosophical Perspectives 3: 109– 135. Penrose, R. (1994). Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ruder-Baker, Lynne. (1993). “Metaphysics and Mental Causation.” In J. Heil & A. Mele (Eds.), Mental Causation, 75–96. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ungureanu, C. (2012). “The Logic and the Metaphysics of Emergence. A Processual-Organic Look at Mental Properties.” In T. Frunzeti & A. MustaĠă (Eds.), Systems and Processualities: A Critical Approach of Two Attempts to Explain Existence. Geneva: Tricorne Editions. (In print). Yablo, S. (1992). “Mental Causation.” The Philosophical Review 101 (2): 245–280.

CHAPTER TWO THEOLOGY

THE CHURCH AND CIVIL GOVERNMENT IN ROMANIA: BEYOND THE BYZANTINE LEGACY DANIEL BĂRNU‫܉‬

Introduction This chapter examines the way in which the Byzantine paradigm of church-state relations has influenced society in modern Eastern Europe, especially in countries of the Orthodox tradition. We focus particularly on Romanian history, suggesting a new, evangelical way of defining churchstate relations. This exploration of the history of church-state relations begins with the Constantinian period because: “in the history of Europe there is no more dramatic moment than the reign of Constantine” (Kee 1982, 1).

Something happened at that time, and it transformed both church and society in Europe. Some patterns for church and state also emerged which continued to function in countries of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and the new political and social life of Eastern Europe indicates the need for a re-evaluation of these patterns, not only for the benefit of religious life but also for society’s sake.

Sociology and Theology It is widely recognise that theology and sociology are connected, and conventional ways of conceptualizing the relations between the two suggest that ethics provides the link. However, this is by no means the only way that theology and sociology are related, and at least two theories try to explain this relationship (Moltmann 1967, 192; 1988). The reflection theory holds that Christian doctrine is socially conditioned by virtue of being a product of its time and describes beliefs in

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a way that often contains an element of definite historical thinking (Meinecke 1972). The structure of society, as well as economic interests and political relationships, are reproduced in the area of Christian beliefs and experience. For the proponents of this theory, theology (like all other ideologies and explications of beliefs) is purely a human product or as a social construction. Even in traditional approaches it is a human product as well as a divine one. On the basis of this approach, it becomes possible to use techniques developed in the sociology of knowledge in order to study the ways in which differing theological positions correlate with differing social structures (Gill 1996). The second theory is that of the secularization of religious ideas. It tries to demonstrate that religion has determined society, economics and politics (Mickem 1941). All the important concepts of the ancient and modern theory of the state are but secularised theological concepts, and: “the theologians, St. Thomas Aquinas, Luther and Calvin have influenced political history quite as deeply as Hobbes and Rousseau” (Micklem 1941, 38).

Both the theologian Ernst Troeltsch and the sociologist Max Weber treated theology not as an independent variable within society, recognizing that theological symbols and concepts are socially significant. Max Weber gave classic expression to this social understanding of theology in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber suggested that one of the cultural factors enabling capitalism to arise in the West may have been Calvinist theology (Gill 1977, 66).

Birth of a Hybrid: Byzantine Paradigm (Roots and Development) Ian G. Barbour, in his Myths, Models and Paradigms (1974, 155) argues that there are four models of God used regularly: monarchial, dialogic, deistic and agent. The monarchial model of God as a king appears both in the Old Testament (God as Lord, King of the Universe) and the New Testament with its emphasis on divine omnipotence, where God is a divine ruler to whom all events are totally subordinate. This is a strictly asymmetrical, one-way relation: God influences the world, but the world does not influence God. It was not only the image of God as supreme king or almighty sovereign ruler that shaped political philosophy in the first centuries after Christ, but also Greek philosophy. Aristotle ended his Metaphysics (XII,

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1076a, 212) by quoting from the Iliad (II, 204): “A plurality of leaders is not a good thing. Let there be only one.”

It is worth noting that Christian apologists of the second and third centuries followed the way traced by Aristotle and many of them wrote, as a critique of the polytheism of the time, about the monarchy of God. At the beginning of the fourth century, Christian thought in the Eastern Roman Empire relied on Hellenistic political theory and what appealed most forcibly to the imagination of Christian writers was the concept of divine monarchy. This concept reached its full measure during the reign of Constantine the Great. As soon as Constantine revealed his sympathy for the religion, Christian thinkers, familiar with both the monotheism of Judaism and the concept of kingship in Greek philosophy, were ready to find not only God in the reflection of an earthly monarchy but also the Emperor as a reflection of divine monarchy: “Monotheism and monarchy were tied together by apologists for the Christian establishment such as Eusebius, who saw in the Caesars the earthly rule corresponding to the divine rule of the One confessed by Christian faith” (Parker 1980, 165).

Eusebius of Caesarea as panegyrist and biographer of the Emperor, speaking on the occasion of the thirtieth jubilee of Constantine the Great, said, he [the Emperor] directs his gaze above, and frames his earthly government according to the pattern of that Divine original, feeling the strength in its conformity to the monarchy of God … Monarchy far transcends every other constitution and form of government … Hence there is One God, and not two, or three, or more … and one King and royal Law. (in Stevenson 1987, 369)

Here, they clearly state the political philosophy of the Christian Empire for the first time, namely, the philosophy of the State which was: “consistently maintained throughout the millennium of Byzantine absolutism” (Baynes 1955, 168).

Just as one God rules in Heaven, so an Emperor who is His mimesis should rule on earth and carry out His commandments. This is the final

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formulation of the monarchic argument. This new anthropology secured its legitimacy in a theological and metaphysical era because it was theologically promoted (Milbank 1995, 14), as power could only become the human essence because it was seen as reflecting the divine essence. This system saw in the Emperor a representative of God on earth, almost the vice-regent of Christ or friend of God. According to this political conception, the Christian Emperor not only had the right but also the duty to watch over the Church, to defend the Orthodox faith, and to lead his subjects to God. It is from this point of view that we have to look at the development of Eastern Christianity and the impact of its ideas on the relations between the Church and the civil powers. From this position, the role of the Christian Emperor in the entire life of the Eastern Church becomes understandable. Eusebius of Caesarea did not foresee the dangerous weapons he was arming future theorists with in their efforts to combine earthly monarchies with God or to identify empires with the Church. In Francis Dvornik’s opinion, Eusebius is “responsible for the wholesale acceptance of Hellenistic political thought by the Christians” (Dvornik 1981, 616).

Implementation of Byzantine Paradigm in Romania from the tenth Century Over the centuries in Romania, the Orthodox Church had both power and influence in the society, but only because of accommodation indirectly resulting from of an unorthodox theology. It was almost always at the service of the political power that was either in place or to be installed. It went on to serve the Roman Empire and political leaders in the communist countries, as well—it is republican under a republic, and monarchist under a monarchy. There are always irrefutable theological arguments (Ellul 1986, 125). Once the Church is ready to associate itself with the instituted power, it has to associate itself with all forms of the state. The real problem is that, on every occasion of conflict, religious leaders were ready to justify both its accommodation and the existing power. Being a department of the state will legitimize it and become an instrument of its propaganda. Starting with the tenth century, the Romanian population adopted the Byzantine Church dedication ceremonies (Giurescu 2011, 80). They implemented the Byzantine model of the “imperium-sacerdotium symphony”

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in the Romanian Principalities, influencing the political, social, and, undoubtedly, religious life. The integration of the Romanian Principalities in the Byzantine Commonwealth, as well as the setting-up of the Metropolitan Chairs depending on the Constantinople Church Patriarchy, resulted not only in the consolidation of the status and position of the great Prince, but also in a qualitative change in his authority. Although the Prince did not have the advantage of his investment in Constantinople (Hungarian and Bulgarian kings had this privilege), they recognised his absolute power as having a divine origin. Observing the Byzantine paradigm down to the smallest detail, the Church recognized the Prince’s divine sovereignty. He was to be called Domn (“lord”), dominus in Latin, or “autocrator” (a Greek term meaning “absolute ruler”). Through anointment, he became absolute ruler, “by God’s mercy” (Dei gratia, in Latin, or Bojiin milostin, in Slavonic texts). The introduction of the word “Io,” short for Ioannes—“God’s chosen one,” before the name, in the title of the Prince, states the divine source of his power (Pippidi 1983, 16). The Prince acquired this quality through religious ceremonies; the anointing and the coronation that transferred the holy gift and confirmed the divinity’s support of their power. As a descendant of the Great Constantine, and in his quality of “episkopos ton ektos,” the Prince had powerful religious authority in matters of dogma, as well as in establishing the Church hierarchy (ibid.: 38). The Prince held supreme authority when appointing and dismissing the Church’s hierarchies. The Prince’s power increased considerably after the fall of Constantinople and other Balkan states under the rule of the Turks. They considered Romanian Princes the followers of the Byzantine tradition, having the title of “defenders of the Church” (NegruĠ 2000, 39). Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga mentions that the Byzantine Empire did not perish with the fall of Constantinople (Iorga 1971, 10). Not only the appearance, but also the “essence” of the Byzantium has never ceased to “live” in the SouthEast of Europe.

The Quest for Reshaping Ecclesiology in Modern Romania There are no absolute relationships between church and state, religion and politics, and perhaps no ideal ones either (Mickem 1941). Limited to the conditions and ideas of its time and place, the Byzantine paradigm seems

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plainly unsuited to today’s world (Cohn-Sherbok & McLellan 1992, 17). It was not compatible with the realities of its own time, and contemporaries were unable to appreciate how much the corrupting consequences of human nature and the instability of human social and cultural contrivances are not promising materials for the construction of a celestial city. In the new setting of post-revolutionary Romania, the church has to give up with the Byzantine paradigm of church-state relation and to undergo an exodus from its fixed social roles and the temptation to stabilization, and get political power to assume a critical, conflict-laden and, therefore, fruitful partnership with society (Moltmann 1967, 324; 1988). The deification of the state, as it happened in countries affected by the Constantine paradigm of the church-state relation, did not end with the fall of Byzantium. Yoder suggests that Constantinian assumptions are not dead; the establishment simply assumes new shapes, which he called “neoConstantianism.” (Yoder 1984, 141) Today, especially in those countries where the Eastern Orthodox Church is the majority, there are regimes or established churches demanding unconditional allegiance from their members which Christians cannot possibly give. The disciples of Jesus are to respect the state, and within limits submit to it, but they will neither worship it, nor give it the “uncritical” support it covets. Consequently, discipleship sometimes calls for civil disobedience (Ex.1:15–17, Daniel 3, 6, Acts 4:19, 5:29). It arises naturally from the statement that “Jesus is Lord.” We are to submit to the state, because its authority derives from God and its officials are God’s ministers (Romans13:1–7), right to the point where obedience to the state would involve us in disobedience to God. At that point, Christian duty is to disobey the state in order to obey God. For, if the state misuses its God-given authority and presumes either to command what God forbids or to forbid what God commands, we have to say “no” to the state in order to say “yes” to Christ (Stott 1992, 97). The new generation of Christians in Romania should be encouraged to engage with society rather than withdraw into isolated, defensive and inwardlooking enclaves. Such engagement runs many risks but, if Christianity is to remain a positive force and influence in post-revolutionary Romania, all Christians need to be present within society, as salt and light, to heal the materialistic society life and light up the light. To remain safely behind the barricades may seem more secure, and a lot less risky, but it denies any chance of reforming, renewing, and recalling one’s culture. The legacy of Christ and of those who are Romanian martyrs from the time of communist darkness invite one to engage the world and instruct on how to do it with integrity.

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References Barbour, I. G. (1974). Myths, Models and Paradigms: The Nature of Scientific and Religious Language. London: SCM Press. Baynes, N. H. (1955). Byzantine Studies and Other Essays. London: The Athlone Press. Cohn-Sherbok, D. & McLellan, D. (Eds.). (1992). Religion in Public Life. New York, NY: St. Martin Press. Dvornik, F. (1981). Early Christians and Byzantine Political Philosophy: Origins and Background. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ellul, J. (1986). The Subversion of Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: W.E. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Gill, R. (1977). Theology and Social Structure. Oxford: Mowbray & Co. Ltd. —. (1996). Theology and Sociology. London: Cassell. Giurescu, C. C. (2011). Istoria românilor [A History of the Romanians]. Bucureúti: Alpha All. Iorga, N. (1971). Byzance après Byzance [Byzantium after Byzantium]. Bucarest: Association Internationale d’Etudes Sud-Est Européennes. Kee, A. (1982). Constantine versus Christ: The Triumph of Ideology. London: SCM Press. Meinecke, F. (1972). Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mickem, N. (1941). The Theology of Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milbank, J. (1995). Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Oxford: Blackwell. Moltmann, J. (1967). Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implication of a Christian Eschatology. London: SCM Press. —. (1988). Theology Today: Two Contributions towards Making Theology Present. London: SCM Press. NegruĠ, P. (2000). Biserica úi Statul. O interogaĠie asupra modelului “simfoniei” bizantine [Church and State: An Inquiry into the Byzantine “Symphony” Model]. Oradea: Editura Institutului Biblic Emanuel. Parker, T. (1980). “Political Meaning of the Doctrine of the Trinity.” Journal of Religion 60 (2): 165–184. Pippidi, A. (1983). TradiĠia politică bizantină în ğările Române în secolele XVI-XVIII [Byzantine Political Tradition in the Romanian Provinces in the 16th–18th centuries]. Bucureúti: Editura Academiei. Stevenson, J. (Ed.) (1987). A New Eusebius. London: SPCK.

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Stott, J. (1992). The Contemporary Christian: An Urgent Plea for Double Listening. Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press. Yoder, J. H. (1984). The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame University Press.

ANTINOMIES OF CHURCH: IN THE WORLD, BUT NOT OF THE WORLD IN SOCIAL THEOLOGY REMUS GROZE

Introduction That the church is an integral part of the texture of contemporary society is not an issue for debate. Challenged, tolerated or encouraged, the church continues to make its presence felt in the diversity of the existing domains—social, cultural, economic, political, medical, educational, etc. Instead, the current debates concern the role of the church in the public sphere in an attempt to establish the limits of influence and the direction of its involvement in the areas mentioned previously. Thus, this chapter aims to outline a pastoral solution to the current dilemma: how can the church maintain a realistic and relevant perception of its role in contemporary society?

Understanding the Church and Its Antinomic Nature Wayne Grudem (1994, 853) defines the church as “the community of all true believers for all time.” The church is invisible, yet visible. Grudem offers two definitions that are more specific: “the invisible church is the church as God sees it” (2 Timothy 2:19) (Grudem 1994, 855) and “the visible church is the church as Christians on earth see it” (Ibid., 856). In this sense, the visible church includes all who profess faith in Christ and give evidence of that faith in their lives. The church is local and universal. The universal church is made up of all the believers saved through faith in Jesus Christ’s work in the past, present and future. The local church is made of any group of believers gathered together to worship God in spirit and truth. The church is more than an institution; it is a community and a spiritual organism. The church is one of the positive human institutions in society, together with the state, school, and the institution called family,

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etc. This does not concern its institutional aspect alone. In his Epistles, Apostle Paul presents the church as a real spiritual organism in which, metaphorically speaking, Jesus Christ is the Head of the Church and the believers are members in his body (1 Corinthians 12:27). Theologian Stanley Grenz underlines the aspect of the church as community: New Testament writers referred to the church as a new nation, a body, a temple. Although this people transcends spatial and temporal boundaries, according to the Scriptures it is chiefly manifested in a visible, local group of believers who covenant to be the local expressions of the church. All of these images point to the same fundamental idea: the church is a community. (Grenz 1994, 624–625)

Antinomy of the Church: “In the World, but not of the World” The expression “in the world, but not of the world” is an implicit expression from Christ’s prayer (John’s Gospel: Ch. 17). This expression represents a hypostatized identity of the Disciples of Christ and His church in this world. John Stott introduces the concept of the church’s double identity: “the church is a ‘holy’ people; called out of the world to belong to God … it is a ‘worldly’ people, in the sense of being sent back into the world to witness and to serve” (Stott 1984, 24). He refers to Apostle Peter who describes the Christians as “aliens and strangers in the world” and who need to be conscientious citizens in it (2 Peter 2:11–17). Stott explains that Christians “cannot be totally ‘world-affirming’ (as if nothing in it were evil), nor totally ‘world-denying’ (as if nothing in it were good), but a bit of both, and particularly ‘world-challenging’ recognizing its potentiality as God’s world and seeking to conform its life increasingly to his lordship” (1984, 25). Thus, the antinomy in the world, but not of the world captures a real tension in which the church of Christ is caught here on earth. On the one hand, by the fact of being in the world we understand that the church must manifest in the world, but without compromising through secularization. On the other, by not being in the world we understand that the church must dissociate itself from the world’s corrupted spirit without isolating through sectarianism. Professor Rogobete (taking as a starting point Peter Berger’s perspective) identifies five different options that religious people and religious institutions (especially the church) have today:

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Compartmentalization, in which “the religious field is restricted to the churches that focus on teaching individual morality and which promote family values” (Rogobete 2002, 48). The role of religion, respectively the role of the church, confines to the private sphere through a separation from the society public sphere. Theological relativism or liberalism, through which there is a gradual abdication from the religious norms and values and their adaptation to the norms and values of the liberal societies dominated by relativism. In this case, “the borders limiting religious institutions from secular behaviour are more and more blurred, to the eventual collapse of the religious to the secular” (Rogobete 2002, 48). Traditionalism, characterized by the systematic rejection of the new and orientation particularly to the past. Sectarianism, the option of the religion who builds its own social world, with its own alternative culture. Sectarianism refers to “movements which do not trust the state institutions and organize their own schools, businesses, concerts and performances, alternatives to those offered by the secular world” (Rogobete 2002, 49). Fundamentalism, which “aims at totally removing any distinction between religion and the public world, cancelling the latter and advocating (often by force) to implement the former” (Rogobete 2002, 49). This extremist option leads to a collapse in the religions of both the public and the private life.

The Jesuit theologian Avery Dulles discusses five basic models that have operated throughout history: the church as an institution, as mystical communion, as sacrament, as herald, and as servant (Snyder 1977, 36). Peter Savage suggests four models for today’s church: the church as a lecture hall (where they expose the Bible), as a theatre (witness the drama of the sacrament), as a corporation (efficient and highly programoriented), and as a social club (where people join to have certain needs met) (Snyder 1977, 36). In addition, Robert Webber, in his book The Role of the Christian in the Secular World, presents three historical patterns of relating the church to society: separation, identification and transformation (Webber 1979, 20): -

Separational models include all attempts to withdraw from the world, either by refusing to participate in the structures of society or by actively creating a counter culture.

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Identificational models advocate participation in the structure of life either by compromising with culture or by recognizing the tension with it. Transformational models, according to which the structures of life can be changed either now, through the application of the gospel, or in the future, as the ultimate goal of history.

The initial question still remains—how can the church keep a realistic and relevant vision about its role in contemporary society? Being in continuous tension because of its very paradoxical, antinomian nature—visible and invisible, local and global, sacred and secular, institution and community—the church can find its balance in fulfil its vocation by acting as an embassy of the Kingdom of God.

Analogy of the Church as an Embassy of God’s Kingdom Since the starting point was an antinomy, the point of arrival is an analogy: church-embassy. First, we need to show that this creative analogy is fully anchored in the biblical doctrine of the church and the Kingdom. Only then, it will become clear that this analogy offers an actual solution to the tensions arising from the antinomian identity of the church—in the world, but not of the world—and contains potential to open new horizons about the role of the church in today’s society. The Kingdom and the church: relationships and implications George Eldon Ladd, one of the most quoted scholars of New Testament Theology on the subject of God’s Kingdom, defines the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the church in a remarkably comprehensive way: The Kingdom is primarily the dynamic reign or kingly rule of God, and derivatively, the sphere in which the rule is experienced … The church is the community of the Kingdom but never the Kingdom itself. Jesus’ disciples belong to the Kingdom as the Kingdom belongs to them, but they are not the Kingdom. (Ladd 1994, 109)

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The church is not the Kingdom. Jesus and the early Christians preached that the kingdom of God was near, not that the church was

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near, and preached the good news of the kingdom, not the good news of the church: (Acts 8:12, 19:8, 20:25, 28:23, 31) (Grudem 1994, 863). The Kingdom creates the church. Entrance into the Kingdom means participation in the church, but the entrance into the church is not necessarily synonymous with entrance into the Kingdom (Ladd 1994, 111). The church witnesses the Kingdom. The church cannot build the Kingdom or become the Kingdom, but the church can be a witness to the Kingdom, to God’s redeeming acts in Christ both past and future. Therefore, it is the church’s duty to display, in an evil age of selfseeking, pride and animosity, the life and fellowship of the Kingdom of God and of age to come (Ladd 1994, 113). Jesus said, “this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world” (Matthew 24:14). The church is the instrument of the Kingdom. The disciples, as instruments of the Kingdom had seen people released from bondage, sickness and death (Matthew 10:8). This messianic struggle with the powers of death, which had been raging in Jesus’ ministry and had been shared by his disciples, will continue in the future, and the church will be the instrument of God’s Kingdom in this struggle (Ladd 1994, 114). The Church is the custodian of the Kingdom. This appears in the saying about the keys (Matthew 16:19). The authority to bind involves the admission or exclusion of people from the realm of the Kingdom of God. The final destiny of individuals will depend on the way they react to the representatives of Jesus. Through the proclamation of the gospel of the Kingdom in the world, they will decide who will enter into the eschatological Kingdom and who will not (Ladd 1994, 115–117).

In light of the theological understanding of this relationship between the church and the Kingdom of God and its implication, it is possible to state that the analogy of the church as an embassy of God’s Kingdom is biblically valid. The Kingdom creates the church, works through the church, and is proclaimed in the world by the church. In a similar way, the role of the church as an embassy of God’s Kingdom is to pursue only those purposes of God’s Kingdom agenda. Role of the church as embassy of God’s Kingdom Collin Smith defines the role of an ambassador as “a government representative commissioned to serve in a foreign country for the purpose

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of accurately communicating the position of the policies of the government he represents so that the people to whom he speaks will be brought into, and kept in a good relationship with the government of the country he serves” (Carson 2000, 180). Firstly, the role of the church is to proclaim the message of the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. The message of the reconciliation of the world with God, the message of the restoration of all creation in Christ and a message of reconsideration of ethics in the light of age to come (Eschaton). The community God is creating is a reconciled people concerned with compassion, justice, righteousness, and love. It is a community interested in social fellowship. Reconciliation is a social reality as the gospel is essentially social in application. It demands that reconciliation with God must be embodied in social relationships, even in earthly social institutions such as a family, business and government (Grenz 1994, 661). Secondly, the church’s role is to be a reflection of the living presence of Christ on earth. The church must follow the example of Christ and his willingness to serve. This means, as Millard Erickson (1990, 1068) states, that the “church will not seek to dominate society for its own purposes.” On the contrary, as Jesus cared about needs and sufferings, the church is to be engaged in the same form of ministry. The parable of the Good Samaritan represents one of the many biblical examples where Jesus is expecting his church to be concerned with people’s needs in the world. Thirdly, as an embassy of God’s Kingdom, the church has “a prophetic and pastoral role to play in shaping a social vision” (Hessel 1993, 18–19). The prophetic role of the church includes the condemnation of the unrighteousness and evil. The prophets in the Old Testament spoke out emphatically against the evil and corruption of their days. John the Baptist condemned the sin of Herod, the ruler of his day, even though it cost him his liberty and, eventually, even his life (Mark 6:17–29) (Erickson 1990, 1058). Violeta Barbu (2002, 33) argues, “that public denunciation of the ‘structures of sin’, namely all forms of abuse, injustice and violence, is part of the public duty of the church and the moral obligation of each of its sons.” With respect to the pastoral role of the church, it follows as an immediate consequence of its prophetic message. When the church takes the responsibility of being the voice that cries out, because it is the voice of the silent (e.g. the poor, the marginalized, the alien, the immigrant, the unborn, the sick, the disabled), it will notice that: “the cry is not enough, but as Pope Paul IV said, one must seek the causes of a disadvantage, to analyze the circumstances, to propose projects, good practices, in an attitude of responsibility and solidarity” (ibid., 34). In other words, the pastoral and the prophetic dimensions are complementary and inseparable for an effective ministry of

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the church. Grenz (1994, 662) argues that service to the world demands the church to move beyond binding wounds to become the advocate of the wounded by attempting to foster structural changes in society: “by changing structures, we seek to lessen the likelihood of injury in the future … the fostering of structural change mandated by fidelity to the kingdom.” The church, as an embassy of God’s Kingdom, desires to reflect to an increasing extent, in society, the principles that characterize the reign of God. From this perspective, the church’s public role and responsibility as an embassy of God’s Kingdom on earth becomes a transformative one. In his book, Ancient-Future Faith, Robert Webber (1999, 171–172) states that when the church is a prophetic and a priestly (pastoral) ministry in society, the gospel will be applied to every area—personal, social, moral and national, and the church will exert an influence on society by being an alternative culture within society. The Christians identify with the everyday pattern of existence and they create an alternative community by acting as the soul to the body. Through the church, they will generate a transforming presence in the world (ibid., 170).

Conclusions As an embassy of the Kingdom of God, the church must act in the world, but it will never belong to the world by its supernatural nature. Thus, the church carries in its DNA structure the reality and the authority of God’s Kingdom through its organic connection (spiritual) with the head, Christ. The church’s social involvement will bear the prophetic mark in confronting all the society’s injustice, inequity and its immorality, but also the pastoral mark in showing compassion to all society’s sufferings, crises and needs. Thus, the church becomes a mediator between the two opposing realities—the spiritual and the physical—because the church represents the reality of God’s Kingdom, but serves in the midst of the human society.

References Barbu, Violeta. (2002). Expoliatio Egyptiorum: Asupra utilizării valorilor adversarului în comunicarea valorilor [Expoliatio Egyptiorum: On the use of the values of the opponent in the communication of the values]. In Pentru o democraаie a valorilor: strategii de comunicare religioasă într-o societate pluralistă. Bucureúti: Colegiul Noua Europa. Erickson, J. M. (1990). Christian Theology. Grand Rapids, Mi: Baker Book House.

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Grenz, S. (1994). Theology for the Community of God. Nashville, Te: Broadman & Holman Publishers. Grudem, W. (1994). Systematic Theology, An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine. Grand Rapids, Mi: Inter-Varsity Press–Leicester, England: Zondervan Publishing House. Hessel, T. D. (Ed.). (1993). The Church’s Public Role, Retrospect and Prospect. Grand Rapids, Mi: William B. Erdmans Publishing Company. Ladd, G. E. (1994). A Theology of the New Testament. Grand Rapids, Mi: William B. Erdmans Publishing Company. Rogobete, S. (2002). Religie ‫܈‬i schimbare socială. Câteva reflec‫܊‬ii asupra rolului religiei în societatea contemporană [Religion and Social change: Some reflections on the role of religion in contemporary society]. In Pentru o democraаie a valorilor: strategii de comunicare religioasă într-o societate pluralistă. Bucureúti: Colegiul Noua Europa. Smith, S. C. (2000). The Ambassador’s Job Description. In D. A. Carson (Ed.), Telling the Truth. Grand Rapids, Mi: Zondervan. Snyder, A. H. (1977). The Community of the King. Downers Grove, Il: Inter-Varsity Press. Stott, J. (1984). Issues facing Christians today. Basingstoke: Marshal Morgan & Scott. Webber, E. R. (1999). Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World. Grand Rapids, Mi: Baker Books. —. (1979). The Secular Saint: The Role of the Christian in the Secular World. Grand Rapids, Mi: Zondervan Publishing House.

NAE IONESCU’S ROMANIANISM: “BEING A ROMANIAN MEANS BEING AN ORTHODOX” MARIUS-ROBERT LUNGU

Introduction Nae Ionescu was one of the foremost intellectual figures of inter-war Romania. Unfortunately, his exegetes have two extremes: “public execution” or apology. If he had been a mediocre intellectual figure, he could not have contributed to the formation of a glorious generation of inter-war intellectuals—Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noica, Emil Cioran, and Mircea Vulcănescu. Theologian Wilhelm Dancă demonstrated, in his book Mircea Eliade. Definitio sacri (1998), the influence of Ionescu on Eliade’s interpretation of religious phenomena. The intellectual relationship between Ionescu and Eliade was doubled by a close friendship, hence his deep loyalty to Nae Ionescu; for example, in 1927 Nae Ionescu took young Eliade onto the editorial staff of Cuvântul (the famous Romanian newspaper), and in 1928, Ionescu supported Eliade with a large sum of money for his travel to India. He also hired Eliade as an assistant at the University of Bucharest and shared his teaching classes in metaphysics with him. At Ionescu’s funeral, Eliade was among those who carried his coffin on their shoulders. Another example of the strong friendship that Ionescu could evoke among his disciples is the case of Noica. Noica elaborated his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of P. P. Negulescu, but when he published it, he dedicated it to Nae Ionescu. It is true that the influence of Ionescu was both positive and negative! His vision of the philosophy of national identity transferred to his disciples was rather negative, and the reason for this is explained below.

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Method The object of the present research is mainly Nae Ionescu’s inter-war journalistic writings, which are addressed from a historical philosophical and theological perspective.

Interpretation Like most Romanian intellectuals in the inter-war period, Nae Ionescu paid tribute to the German concept of nation, which sprung from Herder’s philosophy. Nae Ionescu overbid on the importance of the religious factor in the definition of national identity, and the results are well known. In 1930, in a series of controversial articles published in Cuvântul, Nae Ionescu defined the Romanian spirit through orthodoxy. This is how he supported this theory in his article “We and Catholicism”: ... as soon as confession, the historical reality become part of the other historic reality— the nation—in the definition of the notion of ROMANIAN and the reality of ROMANIAN orthodoxy it becomes an essential component (Ionescu 1990, 201). Surprisingly, Nae Ionescu saw a difference between being “a good Romanian,” meaning to be a loyal citizen of the Romanian state, but being of a different denomination (catholic, protestant) or having a different ethnic background, and being “simply a Romanian.” For Nae Ionescu, Greek-catholic Romanians such as Samuil Micu and Iuliu Maniu were not Romanians; at most they could be “good Romanians”: “Because being a good Romanian is, from a spiritual and ethnical point of view, less than being simply a Romanian” (Ibid., 194) Ionescu’s exclusivist approach can easily be invalidated from a historic point of view because the actions of the two personalities prove the contrary. Although Nae Ionescu calls him “a catholic priest,” Samuil Micu played a hugely pivotal role in rekindling the national conscience of the Romanians from eighteenth century Transylvania with his Эcoala Ardeleană (The School of Ardeal “Transylvania”). Iuliu Maniu, leader of the Romanian National Party in Transylvania, was one of the most prominent promoters of the 1918 Union with Romania. For Nae Ionescu, none of this was important, just the fact that they were guilty of being baptised as Greek-Catholics. During the same polemic, Nae Ionescu promoted Ionel Brătianu, the former leader of the Liberal Party, from the quality of Romanian to that of “good Romanian.” Nae Ionescu asked about the modern state built by Brătianu: “What if our modern state is not really Romanian? Then things

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change: Ion Brătianu was a good Romanian, meaning that he had the best intentions for our people and our state, but certainly was no Romanian” (Ibid., 197). For the director of Cuvântul, Western values such as the multiple party system, democracy, capitalism, and industrialization are foreign to the Romanian souls: “All the falseness and artificiality of Romanian culture during the last 100 years are the result of our efforts to move here, in the Moldavian and Wallachian reality, certain Western life forms” (Ibid., 216). Only native values can lead to national revival: “the Romanian state and civilisation can grow only based on native values, on valuing the Romanian specificity. They have only one supply source—peasantry (Ibid., 191). For the influential philosopher, it is not accidental that the East is Orthodox, and the South-West of Europe is Catholic, because he thinks that confession is “determined by the inner substance of those regions.” (Ibid., 205) In other words, some nations have been destined from birth to be consistent with Orthodoxy and others with Catholicism. For Nae Ionescu, nation is not a community of citizens, of political rights, but an organic spiritual structure—he uses the formula of Saint Augustine who defined church as a community of love: “Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by love of God even to the contempt of self” (Saint Augustine 1994, XIV). Nae Ionescu unifies the two entities of church and nation. He says “people are the organic reality that stands at the basis of the nation. A nation is the people who are conscious of themselves, of their past and historic destiny” (Ionescu 1993, 40). Although we can accept up to a point a relationship between people and nation, in the sense that, in modern times, nations are the continuation of medieval peoples, in Nae Ionescu’s opinion these two concepts coincide. For Ionescu, nation is “an organic and spiritual community” that runs according to its own laws: “The truth about these laws is not in us, as individuals, but in the collective agreement, in what the nation thinks” (Ibid.). As far as the Romanian people are concerned, one of its fundamental identity components is Orthodox Christianity. This statement is true up to a point, in the sense that Orthodoxy has played a pivotal role in the history of Romanian culture and in keeping national identity. But to categorize people who are Romanians but are not Orthodox as “traitors,” as Nae Ionescu does, takes us straight into ideology: “a nation lives in time and space, in history and century. The largest community that a person is part of is the nation. The man lives in various communities: family, church,

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profession, etc. The church and the nation are the same thing for us, Orthodox people” (Ibid., 41). The notion of Church used here by Nae Ionescu is reductionist. By identifying the church with the nation, the church is reduced to its ethnical component. In an article published in Predania in 1937 titled “Nationalism and Orthodoxy,” Nae Ionescu responds to Radu Dragnea’s objection that “being a nationalist is a serious sin from which we hope to redeem ourselves through Orthodoxy” (Dragnea 1937). Here is Ionescu’s response: … each of us is not just each of us, but is just like the structure of the community and destiny makes us, how the nation we are part of makes us. In other words, there are no individual ways in history, but only national ways of living the word of God. That is why the community of love of Church is structurally and spatially covered by the community of destiny of the nation. This is Orthodoxy. (Ionescu 2003, 407)

He does not use the notion of church in its spiritual meaning, as “God’s kingdom on Earth,” as it was precisely defined by Saint Augustine. Although, in the above article, we find Saint Augustine expression of church as a “community of love,” for Nae Ionescu it is not the community of believers or community of the chosen ones, but it is that identity nucleus that becomes the binder of a nation. The limits of the church are the same as those of a nation. Those who break free from the national and religious community are considered traitors by Nae Ionescu in The Iron-Guard Phenomenon: Treason is breaking from the community. An individual is defined by the collective and community. There is only one absolute individual truth: the truth of community (in destiny and in love). To break from the community is to stop talking, feeling, thinking and working like the community, which is to stop acknowledging the only absolute truth. (Ionescu 1993, 39)

Another incorrect employment of the concept of church that Nae Ionescu uses is the confusion between people as an ethnicity and “the people of God” (the Christian church). This means that, if belonging to a people is a natural fact, then belonging to a faith or a confession is for Nae Ionescu a given birth right that cannot be changed in later life. Thus, people who are not born in a Christian community are sentenced to live forever in the religion in which they were born, or, in this case, we have to deny the entire history of conversions to Christianity. We can mention here the first

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great conversion to Christianity, with highly significant historical consequences, of Apostle Paul who, from the most influential persecutor of Christianity as a Jewish rabbi, became its greatest preacher in the Roman Empire. The result of such confusions is nothing more or less than ideology, the use of the idea of God in order to justify various nationalist ideals: “If the nation makes God on Earth, I am only interested in the God that I live in, not the one of the Hungarians, of the French, etc.” (Ibid., 5). From the perspective of Saint Augustine’s philosophy, the concept of Nae Ionescu is a rather pagan one. The Christian God is thus nationalized, reduced to some sort of divinity of the nation. For His glory and praise, nations must fight among themselves. This is because this deity of the nation manifests Himself externally and expansively. As a result, “one who wants to do God’s will makes it only by conquering from outside, strangling another person, so that the nation is dynamic, is lively, offensive and imperialistic” (Ibid., 31) We can see in Ionescu’s philosophy some accents from Hegel’s philosophy, for which progress of the absolute spirit in history is made through the embodiment of Volksgeist of certain civilisations and nations, such as the Persian Empire, Greece, the Roman Empire, the medieval Christian civilisation, or Prussia.

Conclusion This idea is a distortion of Orthodoxy and is considered to be a heresy ever since the nineteenth century by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. It is a seizure of Christianity by nationalism, especially in the nineteenth century. This idea is promoted not only by Nae Ionescu but Nichifor Crainic as well in Gândirea (the famous Romanian newspaper). Nae Ionescu, through the positions he held—the editor and then director of Cuvântul as well as professor at the University of Bucharest during the 1919–1938 period—managed to convey this idea to a large part of the young generation. Professor Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, who promoted Nae Ionescu as assistant at the University of Bucharest in 1919 but from whom he distanced himself after 1930, saw the danger of mixing Orthodoxy with the Romanian spirit and religion with nation: The Romanian spirit and Orthodoxy cannot be unified without harming each other because the spiritual nature of one is decidedly different from the other. Orthodoxy cannot go further in the service of a nationalist spirituality without losing its character of Christian religious spirituality. (Rădulescu-Motru 1996, 99)

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In 1935, Eliade published an admiring article of Rădulescu-Motru in which he pities the faint reflection in Romanian journalism of the latter’s Romanian spirit. Eliade thought that was because of professor Motru’s dominant position: “he was a nationalist without being a chauvinist and believed in the Romanian spirit without adhering to the fighting side of the right extremists” (Eliade 1990, 105). We can ask the question of whether any speech about the Romanian national identity is necessarily a nationalist speech. Professor RădulescuMotru is an example that invalidates this hypothesis. It is very possible that one can talk about national identity without being a nationalist.

References Dancă, W. (1998). Mircea Eliade: Definitio sacri. Iaúi: Ars Longa. Dragnea, R. (1937). Ortodoxie ‫܈‬i na‫܊‬ionalism [Orthodoxy and Nationalism]. Buna Vestire 77. Eliade, M. (1990). Profetism românesc 2: România în eternitate [Romanian Prophetism 2: Romania in Eternity]. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Roza vânturilor. Ionescu, N. (1990). Roza Vânturilor [Wind Rose]. Bucureúti: Roza Vânturilor. —. (1993). Fenomenul legionar [The Legionary Phenomenon]. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Antet. —. (2003). Teologia. Integrala publicisticii religioase [Theology: Integral of Religious Publishing]. Sibiu: Deisis. Rădulescu-Motru, C. (1996). Românismul. Catehismul unei noi spiritualităаi [Romanianism: Catechism of a New Spirituality]. Bucureúti: Garamond Saint Augustine (1994). The City of God. New York, NY: The Modern Library.

DIVINITY AND ROMAN PROVINCIAL ADMINISTRATION UPON THE ARRIVAL OF THE FIRST COLONISTS IN DACIA MIHAELA MARTIN

Introduction This chapter aims at depicting the principal religious and administrative realities and their impact on the Daco-Roman population, leaving the way open to the process of thinking and reflection. Immediately after the end of the war and the province’s organisation, besides the administrative, fiscal or economic personnel and the troops that remained for the conquered territory’s protection, Emperor Trajan brought to Dacia many Roman citizens from throughout the Empire, to whom he gave territories, and used them as organisers and workers specialised in the exploitation of gold and other national riches of the province. The massive colonization of Dacia was determined, on the one hand, by the conditions in which its conquest had taken place, after two harsh wars had ended with the Romans’ victory and, on the other hand, by the particular interest represented by the conquered territory for the Empire due to its never-ending riches. The colonization process of Dacia had an official character, the main beneficiaries being veterans and Roman citizens. The first step was the foundation of the Ulpia Trajan Colony. The city gained the title of colony at its foundation (ius Italicum) which situated it, from a legal point of view, at the same level as other cities of Italy. The employees of the province’s administration and then various troops, together with craftsmen, merchants and slaves (used mainly in the province’s administration) joined the official colonists brought to Dacia. The historian Eutropius speaks of the demographic aspect of the province Dacia: “as soon as Trajan subdued Dacia, he brought a neverending number of people, so that they could cultivate and populate the cities (Tudor 1969, 21). This statement proved to be true following the epigraphic studies made on the religious mosaic. According to statistics

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from Pippidi & Russu (1980, 1983, 1984), 74% of the 2,700 names from the inscriptions are of Italic origin, 13% are Greek, 4% are Illyrian, 3% Oriental, 3% Gaeto-Thracian, and 2% Celtic. Dacia’s colonists were all carriers of the material and spiritual Roman culture no matter their remarkably diverse origins. The colonists brought with them their traditional religious beliefs; thus the imperial religious propaganda spread throughout the province (as it happened in the entire Roman Empire), the personification of abstract concepts and moral values. An interesting aspect of the administrative life in the province Dacia is religious manifestations, a rather vast subject involving bibliographical documentation, knowledge of historical sources, and survey of featured monuments; sculptural pieces, mostly votives, ranked first and their number rose to almost a third of the total number of representations of all kinds.

God vs. Roman The word “religion” has, in Latin, an external procedural meaning (Montanelli 1995, 79) and sacrifice literally means to make a sacred thing, something offered to divinity. The gods represented the sacred element; they expressed the needs, wishes and aspirations of humans and their essence all at once, beyond the mediocrity of their condition, beyond the limits and chaos of their actions. The wish of the divinity represents a reflection upon a reality that cannot be exposed to strict legal patterns. The god is not just a witness, but also actively present, because he gives the oath (Oancea 2008, 24). The Roman religion maintains the heritage of a mythology common to that of the conquered people especially by assimilation (Bloch & Cousin 1985, 76). From the fourth and third centuries B.C., Roman cults began to be influenced by the Greek Pantheon. The official Hellenisation of the Roman religion began after the Cannae disaster (216 B.C.) when the Romans, after having consulted the Sibylline Books, adopted the Greek rite for defending the territory. The Romans’ concern for everyday life and individual and social efficiency made them permanently search for pax Deorum (Ibid., 75) on which their fate lay. Agreement with divinity could be maintained only through the fulfilment of certain rituals. The ritual consisted of a gift offered to the gods, either to attain their goodwill or to quench their anger. Ovid’s remark, “Rome is the most worthy place of meeting of all the gods” (Berstein & Milza 1998, 267), represents a religious reality that can be found in the Roman religious horizon and which hints at the Roman capacity of accepting, forced or

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willingly, the external influences of Orphic and Dionysian mysteries from the Greeks, as well as Oriental cults (Mommsen 1998, 314) that invaded the Roman religious universe, conferring to it new valences such as the cult of Isis and Cybele (Great Mother) or Mithraism. They came to answer the crucial existential questions regarding human life, hope, and life after death that the rigid, conservative, and formal Roman religion could not satisfy. The most widespread religions shown by studying the votive representations are those from the classic Greco-Roman Pantheon, which comprises both old Roman deities di indigetes and novensides, of Italian or Greek origins, together with abstract deities and personifications. The main deities of the classical Greco-Roman Pantheon, dii consentes, formed the Divinity Council: Jupiter and Juno, Minerva, Diana, Pan, Bacchus, Ceres, Amor, Venus. Venus, for example, was tightly connected to the fate of the Roman Empire, and it is clear that the spiritual sphere was under the direct influence of the political (Benea 1999, 11). Lucius Cornelius Sulla chose her as a protector and Gaius Julius Caesar, to whom the goddess ensured apotheosis “the moment it is about to melt into the air,” promoted her intense cult considering himself a descendant of Eneas, who, according to the myth, was the son of Venus and Anchises (Ovidiu 1965, 118). What characterises Roman religious phenomena is, first of all, the existence of a great number of deities. Each of these gods had his own will and power, and this is why the Romans considered strictly following certain rules or perform certain rituals, taking care not to make mistakes before the gods. The remarkable availability of the Roman Pantheon and its ability to receive an ever-growing number of deities could only predispose it to more external influences. With the military expeditions, the conquest of the Oriental world and the multitude of colonists from all horizons, beliefs and religious practices were permitted, having a more vivid success as they answered certain needs and anxieties that the formal character of the Roman religion could not. The individual’s religion contained several different deities, chosen according to the individual’s ethnic origin, occupation, social status and aspirations. Each person creates their own group of deities for different reasons. For the Romans, three categories of actions and attitudes could be established depending on their place in society, and they had an intimate circle of personal deities considered to protect them. They also participated in official, public manifestations of the Roman cults because of their civic spirit, and respected and tolerated the neighbouring deities, which could be

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different from their own. Bărbulescu (1984) mentions one hundred divinities present in Dacia, which he divides, taking into consideration their origin, into Greek and Roman deities, Oriental deities, micro Asian deities, Syrian deities, Egyptian deities, Celtic deities, and other deities (see Figure 2-1 below). Figure 2-1. Main deities in Dacia according to their origin

Greek and Roman deities

Oriental

Celtic

Dacian deities

Egyptian

MicroAsian

Syrian

Tolerance governed the whole of the religious life, facilitating the coexistence of many cults and different trends in a rich spirituality (Bărbulescu 2001, 256). Myths for some, realities for others, these mysteries left their fingerprints on human beliefs and penetrated, more or less, the spirit of every devotee eager to best decipher the mysteries of deities.

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Roman society observed, from the beginning, strict rules. Moreover, between divinity and the Roman there are connections almost comparable to those that unite employer and employee, a trust almost economic and contractual. This trust does not, however, exclude gratitude because the formula with which most dedications end does not omit to mention their realisation—uotum soluit libens merito (Bloch & Cousin 1985, 269). The presence of so many deities enhances the idea that, in a world dominated by gods and goddesses, their presence in all administrative branches probably represents attempts at gaining their goodwill, at reconciling these forces superior to man, thought to control the course of natural and human events.

Conclusion To sum up, an essential feature of the Roman religion was the presence of an agreement, of a convention (Bărbulescu 1984, 169) between man and divinity, a promise, an arrangement which obliges. At the centre of the Roman provincial religion was the person whose religion took shape according to their needs. Thus, the emphasis was not on the cult itself, but on the motivation of the belief (Bărbulescu 1984, 130), the spiritual life being seen through one’s own eyes. Roman religion was not just a component of the daily administrative activities of the Roman province, but a sine qua non condition for the smooth running of the entire administrative apparatus.

References Bărbulescu, M. (1984). InterferenĠe spirituale în Dacia Romană [Spiritual Interferences in Roman Dacia]. Cluj- Napoca: Dacia. —. (2010). “Cultură úi religie” [“Culture and Religion”]. In D. Protase & A. Suceveanu (Eds.), Istoria românilor 2. Bucureúti: Editura Enciclopedică. Benea, D. (1999). Dacia sud-vestică în secolele III-IV (InterferenĠe spirituale) [South-West Dacia in the 3rd and 4th Centuries (Spiritual Interferences)]. Timiúoara: Editura de Vest. Berstein, S. & Milza, P. (1998). Istoria Europei I [History of Europe 1]. Iaúi: Institutul European. Bloch, R. & Cousin, J. (1985). Roma úi destinul ei 1 [Rome and Its Destiny 1]. Bucureúti: Meridiane. Mommsen, Th. (1998). Istoria romană III [Roman History 3]. Ia‫܈‬i: Polirom.

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Montanelli, I. (1995). Roma–o istorie inedită [Rome: A Genuine History]. Bucureúti: Artemis. Oancea, C. (2008). Trei tratate politice din antichitate úi însemnătatea lor pentru sesizarea fondului juridic úi teologic al legământului sinaitic [Three Ancient Political Treaties and Their Meaning in Seizing Legal and Theological Funds of the Sinaitic Commitment]. Revista Teologică 1: 14–25 Ovidiu. (1965). Fastele [The Festivals]. Bucureúti: Ovidiu. Pippidi, D. M. & Russu, I. I. (Eds.). (1980, 1983, 1984). InscripĠiile antice din Dacia úi Scythia Minor I-III [Ancient Inscriptions in Dacia and Scythia Minor 1–3]. Bucureúti, Ed. Academiei. Tudor, D. (1969). Romanii în Dacia [Romans in Dacia]. Bucureúti: Editura Enciclopedică Română.

RELIGION: A PERSISTENT “ILLUSION” CORINA MATEI

Introduction This chapter briefly conveys several philosophical and anthropological considerations on the results of an ongoing ethnographic research. The questionnaire we have used focuses on a comprehensive review of political, ethical, aesthetic, and religious values in the Romanian rural environment and has been applied to a study sample of two hundred respondents from the village of BogaĠi (in Argeú County, Romania), within a research project launched in 2010 by the Department of Philosophy of the Spiru Haret University in Bucharest (Romania), developed in partnership with the local town hall. My considerations in this chapter aim at the relationship between religious and moral values as well as at their potential impact with the new values proposed (or enforced) by the trends of cultural and political change at the global level. The approach that proved to be efficient in this case starts programmatically in the spirit of the researches of “anthropology at home,” as the Romanian anthropologist Gheorghe Geană conceives them (1996; 1999). Given the complexity of the phenomena and the necessity of approaching them from an interdisciplinary standpoint, the work methods include both questionnaire-based ethnographic field study with some initial philosophical and axiological assumptions, and the subsequent phase of the anthropological and philosophical interpretation of the collected data, implying certain general visions stemmed from subfields such as philosophy of culture and political philosophy.

Relevant Data and Results We have employed the following general research questions and subjacent questions:

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How does the value of good and the non-value of evil fall within the respondents’ general conception about the world? Subjacent questions are: x Regarding the good and evil in their lives, do the subjects have a rather pessimistic, optimistic or neutral view? x Is the kind of moral which the respondents adhere to a deontologist or a consequentialist one? x Is the dimension of good and evil in their overall vision metaphysical, religious or just laic? Which moral values dominate the axiological hierarchy of the respondents? Subjacent questions: x Which relations can be identified between key values? x How important is the role of the family, of religion (faith) and school in the spiritual and social life of the respondents? How do ethical conceptions correlate with religious, artistic or political ones? Subjacent questions: x What kind of relationship is there between ethical and religious values? x Is there evidence of some potential axiological problems or conflicts in village life? If so, what solutions can be foreseen?

Identification data concerned the following categories: -

Gender: male = 53.3%, female = 46.7%. Age: 8-40 = 23.3%, 41-60 = 60%, 61+ = 16.7%. Civil status: not married = 22%, married = 60%, widow = 18%. Profession: farmer = 16.5%, worker/craftsman = 23.3%, military = 13.2%, retired = 10%, other = 23.3%. Last graduated school: no training = 0, primary and middle school = 27%, vocational school = 13.5%, high school = 50.2%, college = 9.3%.

The questions and the values I have selected as relevant for the subject of this chapter are shown in Table 2-1 below.

Interpretations and Conclusions I shall hereinafter summarize my considerations on these outcomes. First of all, it is clear that the main values that articulate the subjects’ perspective on the world and life are spiritual. Along with family, only faith, religion and church represent, in a significant proportion, viable moral support points for the respondents (answers 4.b, 6.a, and 7.a).

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Table 2-1. Survey questions and answers (%) Questions and Answers % 1. Which of the following statements comes closest to your opinion? a. There is good and evil in all people 65% b. People are, in general, good 5% c. People are, in general, evil 17.5% d. I do not know/I will not respond 45% 2. Apart from your family, is there someone else for whom you think you could sacrifice yourself, putting your own life at risk? a. The country 20% b. To save a life 40% c. Justice 17.5% d. God 45% 3. Which statements of the following pairs are correct? a1. There are distinct differences between what is good and what is 55% evil a2. There are no discernible differences, the distinctions are made 37.5% according to specific circumstances b1. If the man and the woman are in love, they do not need to be 37.5% married in order to be together b2. A man and a woman that live together without being married 57.5% are committing a sin c1. A family is not complete without children 55% c2. A family does not need children to be happy 17.5% ‘I don’t know’/’I won’t answer’ 4. How important are for you the following things? FI (very important) or I (important) a. Family.........................................................................................FI 95% b. Religion (faith)............................................................................FI 94.5% 5. How much do the following count for you? (1 – not at all, 2 – a little, 3 – a lot, 4 – very much) a. Romania………………………………………………………..4 94% b. Europe…………………………………………………………..4 94% 6. You have acquired religious education mainly: a. In the family 70% 7. How much do you rely on the following institutions? (1 - not at all, 2 – a little, 3 - enough, 4 – a lot) a. Church…………………………………………………………..4 94% b. Government; c. Parliament; d. Justice; e. Police; f. Bank system; 87% g. NATO; h. EU..........................................1-2 (for each institution)

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Second, we can observe the substantiation of moral values on religious ones, which triggers the prevalence of deontologist morals, with principles that do not change depending on the situations and consequences, morals based on commitment and standard norms (answers 1.a, 3.a1, as well as 3.b2 and 3.c1). Third, we have detected a well-defined lack of confidence in State institutions as well as in the superstate integrating structures, such as the European Union and NATO, although the country and the European continent present great importance for the respondents’ lives (corroborate answers 5.a,b with 7.b). Thus, the philosophical queries that this applicative study arouses are closely related to the potential problems that might arise in the process of a future globalizing integration of rural Romanian culture in a more extended European context. For instance, it is a matter of fact, in today’s Romania, that fifty years of atheist totalitarian regime has failed to eradicate the religious faith from the people’s consciousness, especially in the rural world. It seems that this “illusion,” this “opium for the people” (as Feuerbach called it), has been and still is more persistent than all ideologically and politically organized “realities” imposed through force. Romanian scholar Victor Kernbach predicted the role of religion as a “shelter for bad weather” given that there would be no other shelter left (Kernbach 1995, 224). Answer 2.d indicates a touching availability toward sacrifice for the religious value (God) compared to other values such as country or justice, even if answer 5.a points out a significant share of the patriotism value. This current situation makes us wonder whether the predictions launched in anthropology in the 1970s by the American culturologist Leslie White regarding the inevitable collapse of the national states and the fact that the source of conflict represented by religion in this perspective remain viable, at least for the near future (White 1976). Furthermore, we may wonder whether Samuel P. Huntington’s vision rendered in his Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order regarding the potential international conflicts triggered by the diversity of civilizations, of their persistence and resistance to globalization and Westernisation, are descriptive or normative. For Huntington, civilizations are “the biggest ‘we’ within which we feel culturally at home as distinguished from all the other ‘them’ out there” (Huntington 1998, 60). As regards White, my belief is that he introduces the idea that the nation-states are obsolete as forms of organization in contemporaneity by means of an unsupported historical comparison; he names cultural systems (and treats them indistinctly) both nation-states and the empires and great

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civilizations of the past: Sumerians, Hittites, Babylonians, Egyptians, Romans, Mayans. He underlines their resemblance to the species of ancestral saurian that have become extinct because of their incapability of coordinating their oversized body. He argues: Empires tend to be ephemeral. Reflexes and tropisms have guided cultural systems in the past, but are they—will they be—sufficient to develop and conduct a stage of political evolution beyond that of the sovereign state (a global system)? Again we are confronted by the fact that the cultures of the modern world are locked in by the cultural systems of sovereign states, and until and unless they can be “unlocked”—emancipated from the sacred bonds of national sovereignty—the prospects for the future of civilization are rather grim. (White 1976, 178–179)

The solution of the global system that the American anthropologist anticipates seems paradoxical—following the same logic, this system would be extremely challenging since it is oversized to global scales and contains certain “seeds of self-destruction” such as the different and irreconcilable religions. In addition, the perception of national sovereignty as an obsolete value during the Cold War comes as a surprise since nothing in international politics showed any sign of it. With respect to Huntington’s vision, we shall also consider his hypothesis formulated in 1993: The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future. (Huntington, in Georgiu 2001, 59)

The conclusion developed in the book suggests that the solution to these clashes is a world order based on civilizations for the avoidance of the world war (Huntington 1998, 480). If we were to address these allegations in the current situation with the results of these researches, we could argue that, although the perspective of globalization is widely propagated through the media and announced as a quasi-objective historical phenomenon, it does not really seem to be so. Applied studies, at least in the researched areas, reveal another set of values of the respondents that establish patriotism as fundamental in their vision on the world and life (85% of them are Orthodox), along with family. As a result,

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the pattern of cultural integration of globalization does not seem, at least for the next decades, to emerge naturally, through the course of events, from the popular will, from the social consciousness of the masses and their unity in action. Defaulting such social resorts, the perspective of globalization through cultural levelling cannot be a descriptive, but rather a normative one, as a model imposed from top to bottom, and these premises shall most likely trigger social, religious, ethnical and political clashes.

References Geană, G. (1996). “ùcoala monografică úi antropologică. O relaĠie interdisciplinară úi devenirea ei” [“Monographic and Anthropological School: An Inter-disciplinary Relationship and its Becoming”]. In M. Larionescu (Ed.), ùcoala sociologică de la Bucureúti. TradiĠie úi actualitate, 211–229. Bucureúti: Metropol. —. (1999). “Enlarging the Classical Paradigm: Romanian Experience in Doing Anthropology at Home.” Anthropological Journal on European Cultures 8 (1): Hamburg: LIT. Georgiu, G. (2001). Filosofia culturii [Philosophy of Culture]. Bucureúti: Comunicare.ro. Huntington, S. P. (1998). Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York, NY: Touchstone Books. Kernbach, V. (1995). Mit, mitogeneză, mitosferă [Myth, Myth Genesis, Myth Sphere]. Bucureúti: Casa ùcoalelor. White, L. A. (1976). The Concept of Cultural Systems: A Key to Understanding Tribes and Nations. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

PAUL’S LETTERS AND COMMUNITIES: A SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF KEY CONTRIBUTIONS DURING THE 1980S ALEXANDRU NEAGOE

Introduction Scholarly interest in the social reality of early Christianity has a history of over one hundred years (Campbell 1993). However, it was only in the final decades of the twentieth century that the sociological study of the New Testament became a full-blown discipline in New Testament studies (Campbell 1993; Tidball 1985). Carolyn Osiek writes: “The current popularity of the encounter between the social sciences and biblical study needs no demonstration: the mounting bibliography in this area is indicative of its increasing popularity” (1992, 86).

The primary focus of scholarly contributions in this area seems to have been the letters and the Christian communities associated with the name of the apostle Paul (Harrington 1988). Given the amount of literature in this field (Hung 1994; Malina & Pilch 2006; Schreiner 2011), we shall limit the present chapter to an analysis of the key contributions offered during the 1980s, a period which registered particularly notable publications on the subject. More specifically, we shall focus on two areas of scholarly interest (the social status of Pauline Christianity and the sociological character of Paul’s letters) and review what some of the main voices in the field have argued. Next, we shall endeavour to identify some of the strengths and weaknesses of the sociological approach to New Testament studies in general and Pauline studies in particular. Finally, a concluding section brings together some of the main findings of the chapter.

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Social Status of Pauline Christianity Traditionally, the general agreement among scholars was that first century Christianity (Pauline included) was entirely a movement of the lower social strata (Meeks 1983). During the 1980s, however, a number of scholars started to come to quite different conclusions. The first significant contribution belongs to Gerd Theissen. He takes Paul’s letters to the Corinthians as a study guide in his attempt to explore the social level of early Hellenistic Christianity, of which Paul’s communities were a part. Firstly, he considers the statements of the community as a whole. Secondly, he looks at Paul’s statements about individual members of the congregation, which leads him to the conclusion that most active members of the church belonged to the small percentage of upper-class Christians. Thirdly, this picture of a socially mixed community is verified by the references to various conflicts, generally based on the difference of social status. Thus, for Theissen, Paul’s Christianity, like the larger society, is stratified (Theissen 1982). Wayne Meeks, another important voice in the field, starts his study of the social status of Pauline Christianity by trying to define a system of “measuring” social level. His main criticism of those who had tried this before him is that they had done it “along a single scale.” Consequently, he argues for a “multidimensional” measurement which takes into account “each of the relevant dimensions”—power, occupational prestige, wealth, knowledge, etc. (Meeks 1983, 54). The result of his study is summarized by himself in the words “Mixed Strata, Ambiguous Status” (Meeks 1983, 72). What he means by “mixed strata” is “people of several social levels are brought together” (Meeks 1983, 72–73), while when he talks of “Ambiguous Status” he means that: … those persons prominent enough in the mission or in the local community for their names to be mentioned or to be identifiable in some other way usually … exhibit signs of high ranking in one or more dimensions of status. But that is typically accompanied by low rankings in other dimensions. (Meeks 1983, 73)

Similar conclusions to those of Theissen and Meeks are also drawn by Derek Tidball and Abraham Malherbe. Tidball argues for a “socially mixed” rather than “homogeneously proletarian” image of the Pauline Christianity (Tidball 1983, 94). He does this by listing a number of Paul’s converts shown in the New Testament as having some wealth or influence (Ibid., 94–98). In a similar vein, Malherbe sets out to investigate the social

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level and literary culture of early Christianity and on the social makeup of early Christian communities. His conclusion is that Christianity includes a smaller number of well-to-do merchants and scholars and a larger group of people belonging to the lower social classes (Malherbe 1983; 1987; 1989).

The Sociological Character of Paul’s Letters With such a mixed makeup of the Pauline communities, it is not surprising that problems started to appear. Who was going to deal with them? No doubt, as their “spiritual father,” as Paul liked to think of himself, he would have been in most cases the most appropriate and responsible. But hundreds of miles often separated him from his communities and their problems. Therefore, the “second best” was for him to try to answer these problems through letters. In this way, his letters came to have not a purely religious but also a sociological character. The way Paul’s letters sought to deal with such problems has been a matter of serious debate over the last twenty years. In his study on the Corinthian community, Theissen arrives at the conclusion that Paul’s response to the conflicts in Corinth was “the ethos of primitive Christian love-patriarchalism,” which “… takes social differences for granted but ameliorates them through an obligation of respect and love, an obligation imposed upon those who are socially stronger” (Theissen 1982, 107).

T. Engberg-Petersen disagrees with this representation of Paul’s solution on the basis that: … it presents a formula for a feeling that seems widely shared: that there is a gap somewhere between Paul’s radical presentation of the Gospel and his application of it in his discussion of certain specific problems in the Corinthian congregation. (Engberg-Petersen 1987, 560) Thus, Engberg-Petersen argues, the Gospel that Paul presents at the beginning of the epistle is one of agape, which conveys not the idea of equal rights but that of selflessness (seeking no rights on one’s side). Therefore, such a radical Gospel cannot be consistent with a “static” social application of it (to not “offend” the weaker brother), but it requires a much more “dynamic” one—to have “concern” for the brother (EngbergPetersen 1987, 574–581).

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For Meeks, the weight in Paul’s response is on the symbolic power of the ritual of the Lord’s Supper as a key factor in preserving the unity and equality of the Christian community, regardless of social position (Meeks 1983). Moreover, Meeks also attributes an essential social function to Paul’s teaching on the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ (Meeks 1982). This teaching, he says, is often connected in Paul’s letters with references to suffering and persecution in order to “enhance attitudes of group solidarity by emphasizing the dangers from without” (Ibid., 273). On a slightly different topic, Francis Watson questions whether the theology of Paul’s epistles can be properly understood from the purely theological point of view of the Reformation (Salvation by grace vs. Salvation by works), or it should preferably be understood from a sociological perspective. Paul created sectarian groups of Gentile Christians who were not required to obey the Jewish law and who were separated from the synagogue. In order to justify what he was doing, he had to develop an intellectual explanation for such a separation. Consequently, Paul’s “antithetical terms” such as faith, works, flesh, spirit, law, promise, etc., are not to be understood as the starting-point for the understanding of Paul’s epistles, but rather as different features which describe the sharp contrast between his communities and Judaism (Watson 1986). Another important dimension of the sociology of Paul’s letters is that of social ethics. The perspective J. A. Ziesler takes on this issue in his book Pauline Christianity (1983) seems to be very much grounded on the general description which he initially gives to Paul’s Christianity: “A people of the future living in the present world” (Ziesler 1983, 67). Thus, on the matter of citizenship, Ziesler’s assessment is of “apparently quietist, advising subservience to the ruling authorities” (Ibid., 119), but this is said in the light of the fact “there can be no thought of refashioning social structures whish are in the process of passing away.” On the position of women, as compared to that of men, Ziesler says: “What I suspect Paul means is that in the Lord, there are no distinctions … but that in the present world there are” (Ibid., 120). The same perspective is argued in relation to slavery: “the distinction between slaves and free is declared defunct in Gal. 3:28. In the present world, however, it is not defunct, doomed as it may be” (Ibid.). The summary of Ziesler’s assessment of Pauline social ethics is given in his own words: “the state and society remain, but the theological realities of the New Age are already undermining their inequitable, discriminatory and hierarchical foundations” (Ibid.).

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A final contribution to be reviewed in this section is that of Georgia Masters Keightley. Her social analysis of 1 Thessalonians explores the collective memory theory of Maurice Halbwachs according to which “the memory of Jesus is understood to be constitutive of Christian community and to be normative for the collective self-definition” (Masters Keightley 1987). She concludes that Paul’s first epistle to the Thessalonians indicates how the whole social life of the Christian community in Thessalonica, both as a group and as individuals, was shaped by their collective memory of Jesus. At a corporate level, the memories of Jesus serve, on the one hand, as a point of unity and, on the other, they help both those inside the Christian community and those outside it to define the identity of this community as being rooted in its founder’s life. At an individual level, the identity of the Christian is defined as a member of a new society, having a new “set of relations”—God as Father, Jesus as Saviour and the fellow Christians as brothers and sisters” (Masters Keightley 1987, 155).

Value and Limitations of the Sociological Approach of the New Testament The main benefit of such an approach is that of bringing New Testament texts alive. The New Testament is no longer an empty systematic theology, dealing exclusively with concepts, but it helps the reader “feel” the atmosphere behind these writings, as one realizes that he/she/it is dealing with real human beings, acting in a particular social setting. Looking at the perspective of this kind of approach, Thomas F. Best asks: “What then is the promise of NT sociology?” and his answer is: Negatively it denies the tendency … towards an idealistic, theological understanding of the texts divorced from the real – world experience of the early beliefs. Positively, it hopes to bring us closer to that experience and thus to the full reality of the early Christian movement—including its theology. (Best 1983, 184)

Without seeking to undermine the value of such a sociological approach of the New Testament, it is necessary to mention some of the limitations and potential pitfalls which need to be remembered. Tidball’s analogy with “wooing a crocodile” should serve as a good warning that such a study needs to be undertaken with great care (Tidball 1985). In the article by Carolyn Osiek, she identifies some of the main problems regarding the sociological study of the New Testament. Her observations seem particularly relevant at this point.

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First, Osiek notes that: “…social science models formulated from the study of living contemporary cultures cannot be validly used on ancient cultures to which we have no access except through selective written documents” Osiek 1992, 89–90).

Two further doubts spring from this: -

Are there enough similarities in the basic cultural structures to enable us to draw a fair picture of a common Mediterranean type? If the answer is yes, can the modern Mediterranean type give us an accurate image of a Mediterranean culture of 2,000 years ago? (Osiek 1992, 89–90).

Second, the validity of the social assessment of the early Christianity is also challenged by the fact that, as we have seen, the majority of its members (although by no means all) belonged to the lower strata which left little recorded evidence (Osiek 1992). Third, little recorded evidence is also available concerning women, as a result of the male-orientated society (Ibid.).

Conclusion Interest in a sociological study of the New Testament during the 1980s has led, over the last two decades, to an important shift from the traditional view of a homogenous proletarian Pauline Christianity to a socially mixed image of it, basically mirroring the makeup of the wider society. Such mixed communities soon started to face different kinds of social challenges: -

Conflicts among themselves Attacks from outside (especially mainstream Jewish groups) Uncertainties regarding social ethics, etc.

Through his letters, the apostle Paul addressed such issues. In doing so, he seems to concentrate on a number of key aspects from Christ’s ministry, such as the Lord’s Supper, His death, resurrection, return, and establishment of a “New Age.” Such “memories of Jesus” seem to have had a significant impact on the social life of the Pauline communities.

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Thus, a major benefit of the sociological approach of the New Testament is that of bringing people into focus rather than concepts, even if the image we get is at times rather blurred due to factors like time or lack of recorded memories of certain social strata.

References Best, T. F. (1983). “The Sociological Study of the New Testament: Promise and Peril of a New Discipline.” Scottish Journal of Theology 36 (2): 181–194. Campbell, W. S. (1993). “The Sociological Study of the New Testament: Promise and Problems.” Journal of Beliefs & Values: Studies in Religion & Education 14 (1): 2–10. Engberg-Petersen, T. (1987). “The Gospel and Social Practice according to the 1 Corinthians.” New Testament Studies 33 (4): 557–584. Harrington, D. J. (1988). “Second Testament Exegesis and the Social Sciences: a Bibliography.” Biblical Theology Bulletin: A Journal of Bible and Theology 18: 77–85. Hung, P. Y. K. (1994). Sociology of Pauline Epistles: Annotated Bibliography & My Response. http://philenid.tripod.com/biblestudy/NT/SociologyPaulineEpistles.htm. Masters Keightley, Georgia. (1987). “The Church’s Memory of Jesus: A Social Science Analysis of 1 Thessalonians.” Biblical Theology Bulletin: Journal of Bible and Culture 17 (4): 149–156. Malherbe, A. J. (1983). Social Aspects of Early Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. —. (1987). Paul and the Thessalonians: The Philosophic Tradition of Pastoral Care. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. —. (1989). Paul and the Popular Philosophers. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Malina, B. J. & Pilch, J. J. (2006). Social-Science Commentary on the Letters of Paul. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Meeks, W. A. (1983). The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. New Haven–London: Yale University Press. —. (1982). “The Social Context of Pauline Theology.” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 36 (3): 266–277. Osiek, Carolyn. (1992). “The Social Sciences and the Second Testament: Problems and Challenges.” Biblical Theology Bulletin 22 (2): 88–95. Schreiner, T. R. (2011). Interpreting the Pauline Epistles. Grand Rapids, IL: Baker.

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Theissen, G. (1982). The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Tidball, D. (1983). An Introduction to the Sociology of the New Testament. Carlisle: The Paternoster Press. —. (1985). “On Wooing a Crocodile: A Historical Survey of the Relationship between Sociology and New Testament Studies.” Vox Evangelica 15: 95–110. Watson, F. (1986). Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ziesler, J. (1983). Pauline Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

MODEL PAR EXCELLENCE: SOCIAL WORKERS AND CRISIS MODELS ELENA ùTEFĂNESCU

Introduction Because I felt God’s love and I answered his call, I decided I must go in search of His love together with my students, so that no one can say after completing their years of study that it was sheer chance that brought them to study social work. Together we let ourselves be shaped by the lodestar of the divine social worker, who entreats us every day: “look at me.” To meet the standard of the social worker’s dignity, we must be well prepared. Constantin Cucoú (2008), a dedicated master of pedagogy, says, “We must return to the Pedagogy of the Gospel.” In doing so, we can think of Jesus speaking the parable of the Good Samaritan. To the question: “What can I do to inherit eternal life?” asked by a Teacher of the Law, Jesus answers by another question: “Love the Lord with all your heart and all your soul, with all your strength and with your entire mind and your neighbour as yourself. You have answered well. Do this and you will have eternal life.” “But who is my neighbour?” asked the Teacher of the Law. Then Jesus spoke again and said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. By chance, a priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. In the same way, a Levite also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he travelled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, and gave them to the host, and said to him, ‘Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.’ Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbour to him who fell among the robbers?” He said, “He who showed mercy on him.” Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

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This Gospel shows the reality of the social work act as a collaboration of many elements. We find in the Gospel and reality that the whole process of social work is a concerted action of several factors. Jesus gave us the Sacrament of Holy Eucharist by saying “Take and eat of this all” and “Drink of this all” (Mt. 26, 26–28), He established the Sacrament of Penitence and of the Confession—“whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be considered lost in heaven” (Mt. 18, 18), established the Sacrament of the Holy Priesthood saying “Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Mt. 28, 19). In the same way, He told us “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” The reason of Christ’s first coming on Earth was the saving and healing of God’s Creation, which had fallen because of sins affecting both physical and mental health. The Lord made the poor and the sick a priority, aiming at giving them back to their families and communities. This is the reason behind the truth of this new vision of the social worker, whose work is born from the Divine Will, the will of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who established the Seven Sacraments, recognized by both Oriental and Western Churches. The Parable of the Good Samaritan thus becomes a commitment model for all those involved in the complex process of social work. The merciful attitude of the Samaritan has become a benchmark for the Christian Church, which is the Mystic Body of the Lord. From its beginnings, the church has manifested a practical social caring attitude, which later on became the Social Doctrine of the Church, through which Christ’s church reveals itself as the Church of Love. In fact, this is exactly what is requested from us by the Lord that is the return to the love shown through deeds of the first Christians, about which the pagans said: “Look how much they love each other!” That manifested reciprocal love has transformed the first Christians into role models even for the pagans, and the concrete manifestation of Love is mercy. The pedagogy of love must be applied, thus being also a lesson for our hearts. We receive the same answer from our Lord for the question “what must we do to inherit eternal life?” This way, social love becomes the basis of social theology. The new law of unconditional love, brought to us by Jesus, encourages us to stay with the physically or spiritually fallen one, the one suffering from the attack of “thieves” that nowadays may very well be drugs, alcohol, internet addiction, lust, hate and so many more. This is a direct request by our Lord Jesus Christ. We recognize in the Good Samaritan the image of our Lord, the Son of God. Therefore, if He, the Good Teacher, is also the Good Samaritan, we must pay attention to the fact that the social worker cannot also be

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separated from their role as a teacher. What is in the “job description” of a social worker is what is actually requested from us to reach redemption. Jesus Christ, our perfect divine model, reminds us that we too are part of the holy priesthood, a general priesthood which somehow invests us with the three powers that the priest receives at ordination: -

The power to lead: the social worker has the power and the mission to lead the fallen from their physical or spiritual crisis. The power to sanctify: through their deeds, people can sanctify the place and the circumstances they live in. The power to teach: the social worker must also be a source of love and teaching for God’s children.

Role of the Social Teaching of the Church We cannot speak of Christianism without referring to the concept of love in its entire complexity and the many ways it influences and touches human lives within social life. Luke’s Gospel promotes the ideas of charity, mercy and forgiveness through the parable of the Good Samaritan, which thus becomes “The Gospel of Mercy, of forgiveness or universal redemption,” just as much as St. Luke was called “The Evangelist of the Poor” (Brown et al. 2008). The life and behaviour of Christ established a new benchmark for the conduct of the church in its interactions with society and the world. As part of the moral teaching of the church, its social teaching is “an expression of the way in which the church understands society and places itself within social structures and changes” (Compendiul Doctrinei Sociale a Bisericii 2006, 50–51). Thus, the church plays an active part in social life, love and justice relationships, in promoting the dignity of the human being, providing values and evaluation criteria, but also paths to follow in the process of guiding and forming the social consciousness. The centre of all social projects of the church is “the human being which has been called to redemption,” who “has been entrusted by Christ to the care and responsibility of the Church” (John Paul II 1991): A caring mother and teacher for all people, the universal church has a double task, not only to give birth to children of God, but also to educate, support and guide with maternal love the path of individuals and nations. It is called to be active in sanctifying the souls, but also to take care of the way people lead their daily lives, not only in what concerns the support of minimal everyday life standards. (Compendiul Doctrinei Sociale a Bisericii 2006)

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The first Encyclical concerning the social doctrine, Rerum novarum by Pope Leon XIII, opened the way to projects in the area of the sociology of religion, social philosophy, politics, theology and other parts of the social doctrine of the church in the contemporary world. There are many documents of the Second Vatican Council, and more recent ones too, in which the church shows that the Christian message is essentially a social message (Conciliul Vatican II. Constituаii, decrete, declaraаii 1990). The life of the church and the fundamental values the family rely on matrimonial love, the role of man in the family and the community, etc. The social doctrine of the church is therefore centred on the fundamental features of the human being living in a society—individual rights, freedom, and equality. In addition, the interactions of people within society (in work and social management, as presented in the encyclical Rerum novarum) represent the permanent corner stone of this social doctrine. Everything is nourished from divine love and charity, “Deus caritas est!” of Benedict XVI (2006). Charity encompasses complex social valences, starting with love for “thy neighbour” and ultimately reaching the entire human family. This way we remember and constantly work with human communion, the responsibility for the common good, participation and democracy, solidarity in life and Christ’s message, promoting the fundamental values of society (truth, freedom and justice), the educational mission of the family within society, and marriage as a corner stone of life. Work is an essential element in society, as shown in Rerum novarum. More recent documents have added some new focus points: the right to be employed, workers’ rights, workers’ solidarity, private initiative, economic institutions for the benefit of man, and need for a complex educational and cultural project. The contemporary social doctrine is much wider than the mere borders of social groups, its goal being the entire world as a complex human family, based on and inspired by Christ. In this wider context, the Church establishes many relationships with the international community, in its political, environmental, peace-related features. In all these, there is a common ground: love as a fundament of relationships between people, but also as “a commitment to organize and structure society in such a way that our neighbour does not have to live in misery anymore. This has become the case for many people and even nations nowadays and has become a real global social problem” Compendiul Doctrinei Sociale a Bisericii 2006). The church offers principles and values that support human society in its development towards a society of love. From the perspective of its social doctrine, the distinctive sign of the community is charity. Jesus teaches us that the fundamental law of human

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and global completion is the new law of love. The behaviour of the human being is fully human only when it is born of love, when it manifests love and is led by love. This truth is valid also in the social field. Christians must be testifiers of this truth and must show through their life that love is the only force which can lead to personal and social development and accomplishment and also turn the course of history to the right path. Christian love can be called “social love,” thus involving love in social, political, economical, cultural life. Love is, thus, shown to be “the highest and most noble relationship form between human beings” (Ibid.), particularly in the context of globalization. The church promotes a genuine culture of love, the only force that is able to fully transform man and human kind, leading them towards the communion with God. “It is only a civilization of love that can enjoy authentic peace” (Compendiul Doctrinei Sociale a Bisericii 2006).

Social Doctrine of the Church: Confirmed Love The entire history of the church mirrors the manifestations of social love— charity, merciful love, spreading of the Gospel as the inspiration of the social work, projects in education and health, building schools, hospitals, and shelters for elderly, orphans and single mothers; all these institutions being supported by consecrated persons. There are numerous examples of this, one of which is the Order of St. Basil the Great (fourth century), a groundbreaking philosophy for the monastic orders and their active involvement in social projects, also through the establishment of the “basiliadas,” charity institutions built next to monasteries (Corneanu 1987). We also cannot forget about the fruitful activity of St. John Baptist de la Sale and St. John Bosco in the field of Christian education and charitable love, and also Mother Teresa of Calcutta, one of the key figures of the contemporary world, who has been a role model of genuine social work for the poorest and the dying. The social worker is an apostle of love who addresses all people in physical or spiritual need, no matter their nationality, religion or political beliefs. They need to have an ecumenical education based on love and accomplish unity with Christ through concrete actions, according to the directives of the Second Vatican Council (Pope John Paul II 1991, in his encyclicals Ut unum sint and Orientale lumen). In these documents, we are urged to start from the prayer. Only the interior transformation and conversion of each individual can lead to the real ecumenical attitude.

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The Maltese Relief Service’s activity relies on three basic principles: confession of the faith, help for the poor and Christian unity. This is a concrete example of life lived within the borders of charitable love. St. John’s Order was created around 1047 by St. Gerard and was initially a monastic community. The order has become better known due to the hospital for pilgrims founded in the Holy Land. The Romanian Association and Embassy of the Order were created in 1933 in Bucharest. Today, the Order is represented by Ambassador Franz Alfred Reichsgraf von Hartig from May 13, 1997 and the hospitalier Tibor Graf Kalnoky. The ideals of the Order, Tuitio fidei et obsequium pauper (“Defence of the faith and assistance to the poor”) are lived and practiced by the members of the Order and the Maltese Relief Service. The order has various branches in Romania, among which is in ReúiĠa (from May 1995) within the Greek-Catholic parish. Unity of Christians is among their purposes, so the services target people in need no matter their religion, as suffering and poverty can and do not have any political, religious or ethnical colour. I have been the leader of this service in ReúiĠa for sixteen years, during which time I have tried to involve students majoring in social work from the Eftimie Murgu University in ReúiĠa in our projects. This has provided them the opportunity to learn and grow in respect for the human being, based on our mutual affiliation to the family of God. Christian education is manifested, not through planning, but through living and communication. Christian pedagogy must be perceived as a vital feature of the community (Drobot 2008). On various occasions, Pope Benedict XVI (2006) referred to the urgent need to focus on the education of young people in the context of the global crisis. The Holy Father considers that we are facing a “crisis of the truth,” which is, in fact, based on a deeper “crisis of faith.” Ecclesiae munere docenti is a high priority for the church in focusing on the education of the youth. The Code of Canonical Law has been renewed after the Second Vatican Council. Canons 793–821 dedicated to Catholic education state this priority from the very beginning of the document: “the utmost importance of education in the life of people and its growing influence on contemporary society are a point of substantial interest for the Holy Council” (Conciliul Vatican II. Constituаii, decrete, declaraаii 1990). The methods of the Divine Pedagogy, which is a teaching of love, touches the hearts of students and inspires them to social work. We look up to the divine model of the social worker, which is Christ, who at the Last Supper kneeled in front of the apostles and washed their feet saying

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“Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet” (ğigla 2003). The work of a social worker is not at all humiliating, but is one of the most noteworthy activities in the community, as it is a serving activity.

As a Conclusion We aimed at presenting a new dimension of the social worker and stress the importance of their activities in the complex process needed for the healing of individuals and communities. A social worker is a role model who can bring relief in our world full of needs. Their mission is the Imitatio Christi. First, most students in social work say that they ended up at this college by chance. After completing their studies, they understand that this has been a calling from above and that through fulfilling this mission they are being given a way of putting into force the social doctrine of the church, a way of showing their love of Christ. “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all” (Mt. 20, 26–28) Considering the above, our goal is to educate genuine social workers in our universities, people who can then act as models of social love and conduct between God and humanity.

References Benedict XVI. (2006). Deus Caritas Est [God is Love]. Ia‫܈‬i: Presa Bună. Biblia [The Holy Bible]. (1994). Bucure‫܈‬ti: Societatea Biblică Interconfesională din România. Brown, R. E, Fitzmyer, J. A., Murphy, R. E. & Cann, O. (2008). Introducere Юi comentariu la sfânta Scriptură VII: Literatura paulină [Introduction and Commentary on Holy Scripture 7: Pauline Literature]. Târgu Lăpuú: Galaxia Gutenberg. Catholica. http://www.catholica.ro/. Compendiul Doctrinei Sociale a Bisericii [Compendium of Social Doctrine of the Church] (2006). Bucure‫܈‬ti: Editura Universită‫܊‬ii din Bucure‫܈‬ti. Conciliul Vatican II. Constituаii, decrete, declaraаii [Second Vatican Council. Constitution, decrees, declarations]. (1990). Nyiregyhaza: Editura Arhiepiscopiei Romano-Catolice Bucure‫܈‬ti. Corneanu, N. (1987). Patristica mirabilia [Patristica Mirabilia]. Timi‫܈‬oara: Editura Mitropoliei Banatului. Cuco‫܈‬, C. (2008). EducaĠia. Iubire, edificare, desăvârúire [Education: Love, Construction, and Accomplishment]. Ia‫܈‬i: Polirom.

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Drobot, Loredana. (2008). Pedagogie Socială [Social Pedagogy]. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Editura Didactică úi Pedagogică. Pope John Paul II. (1991). Centessimus annuus 53 [Centessimus Year 53]. ğigla, E. J. (2003). SpălaĠi-vă picioarele unul altuia: Ecumenism, între istorie úi prezent la ReúiĠa. [Wash Each Other’s Feet: Ecumenism, between Past and Present in ReúiĠa]. ReúiĠa: Intergraf.

BEING OF DIAKONIA: THE DIALECTIC BETWEEN THE MYSTICAL AND THE SOCIAL NICHIFOR TĂNASE

Introduction The social crises and current ideological challenges of the postmodern and post-secular society need an important analysis of the dialogue between the church and civil society. In this sense, social theology, viewed in the context of a theology of history, aims at identifying signs and their sociotheological reading. Social theology’s dialogue with anthropological research or social philosophy will always report the patristic foundations of social theology: dual citizenship of the Christian and the conflict with profane power, the dynamic, realistic character of the Patristic vision, from eschatological imminence to historical accommodation. The diakonia being is intimately linked to the Christology of the sacrificed love, of the sociability of person and dialogue as “means of spiritual healing” (Mada 2010, 21). Considering the secularized affirmation of an “output of religion,” the church will try to answer, with the help of the binomial secular existence-liturgical life, the purpose of recovering the social mystagogic and catechetic role of the profane, as well as the Christian recovery of the Communication (Communion) throughout working faith with reasonable actions in postmodernism. As G. K. Chesterton said as far as “religion vanished, the rationality will also vanish,” because “religion is the mother of all energies on earth and her enemies are the fathers of all confusion on earth” (Chesterton 1908, 39, 182). The research methods we have used are: The interpretative method, based on certain social and humanitarian projects implemented in the Romanian Orthodox Church, the separation of the phenomenological significance of the spiritual and social dialectics. The structuralist, systematic method, necessary to the knowing of social thinking of the church, as well as the ecclesiastical function of a system of social organization, represented by all social and ecclesial body as the body of Christ. The epistemological method, with an important role

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in checking the true Christian way, seeking the basis of concepts social theology subjected to the interpretation procedure. Here, we should note that the elucidation of this concept has a particular importance in capturing the essence of cultural and social dimension of faith as an act of communication and/or communion. As a means of interpretation and analysis of social phenomena, we will use the phenomenological method and its application in the study of spiritual and social facts of modern diakonia. Phenomenology as “comprehensive knowledge” is seeking the significance of religious charitable acts based on its historical manifestations. The search for spiritual phenomenon and social structure of diakonia, the noteworthy Christian structure, will be made by finding the deliberate aspect, noesis, in the objective aspect, noema (Velasco 1997, 39) as entelecheia, such as the internal law of the development phenomenon of Christian philanthropy, the discovery of operating intentionality, and the schemes expressing self-consciousness of modern man. Thus, phenomenology is “a kind of return from the scientific fragmentation to the lived wholeness” (Ibid., 52). This turning allows the living contact with the phenomenon of diakonia at a different level from the prereflexive experience and also allows for the recovery of this lived, subjective, human character of the religious phenomenon.

Biblical-Patristic Grammar of the Christian Social Doctrine Orthodox Christian spirituality was simultaneously defined by the coexistence of two trends: the hesychast-mystical spirituality and liturgical-communitarian spirituality. The anthropologic-doxological reflex claims its iconic ontology in the Holy Trinity revelation as a unit of beings and trinity of persons. Thus, in God exists a “fundamental form and source of all social existence (sociability): God Himself, as Trinity, is a social reality, quite different from any pre-existing form of polytheism, because it does not explain the sociality as a ratio between the different deities, but as that very interiority of God the One” (Ică Jr. & Marani 2002, 283). In this regard, Baggio can talk about a “social doctrine” meaning a “category of self” in which reason and revelation find their unity. Meanwhile, as owner of the searched truth, “the Christian makes the truth, doing the good in history” (Ibid., 289). It is about social engagement, but with a spiritual foundation determined by bipolarism. In patristic thought, social and economic inequality in society is a consequence of the original sin. Early Christianity could see that a “renewal of the mind” (Rom. 12:2) does not necessarily lead to changing

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the structure of society, as social differences still exist. We find the dialectical coexistence of two different attitudes towards social issues, according to the Gospel’s space of enculturation: (1) the Kerigmatic theme of the radical renunciation of the monastic life becomes defining (Syriac space); (2) the ethics of property of a Christianity that is no longer foreign and migrant, but installed in the world (Greco-Roman space). In an unstable economic situation, defined by a “social gap,” the social-patristic personalism came from Christological and triadologic meditation, and the Church contributed and still contributes to the development of human dignity, rights and destiny. The social dimension of Patristic thought, as Luigi Padovese shows, resulted from preachers’ rhetoric where social issues were developing “the ethical teaching is, therefore, related to the liturgical time and it is almost always based on biblical pericope carefully reviewed to their update” (Ică jr. & Marani 2002, 278). The inseparable connection between spirituality and social statement was exemplified in the history of the Orthodox Church by personalities who were not only apologists of the faith, but also active advocates of social injustice (John the Merciful, Zadonsk Tiron, Nectarios of Aegina, Calinic of Cernica). The fathers were speaking not only of the interior liturgy of the heart, but also of the “brother’s mystery,” as serving of the fellow in which Christ is hiding: passing from Orthodoxy, meaning the right worship of God (in theoretical thinking) and, the orthopraxy, meaning the serving of fellow and world (the Eucharistic liturgy). The profound Liturgy of heart, Eucharistic liturgy and brother’s liturgy or liturgy after liturgy, as it is called today, all these are links to ensure the unity and integrity of Christian spiritual life. (Bria 1987, 289–290)

As Bria remarks, there is a tendency for separation between spiritual and secular, between sacred and profane, for which the passing from personal spirituality to social morality is not easy: “Often, after the pattern of Martha and Mary (Luke 10: 38–42), there is an improper distinction between active Christianity and contemplative Christianity” (Bria 1987, 290). Another distinction in Western Christianity is between “sacred” (sacer) and “holy” (Sanctus), which relies on the Hebrew kadoú (English kadosh) (Stăniloae 2004, 47). The whole world is called on to become partaker to the holiness of the Spirit. Thus, “the social message of the Church is centred on the concept of holiness,” which, in Biblical terms, means justice, God’s will, and “the Orthodox Church is practicing the ritual of breaking bread (Artos) in remembrance of blessing the five breads in the desert (Matthew 14: 14–21) for the hungry crowd” (Bria 2002, 132–

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133). Separation between church and state, between shape or world’s image and parish boundaries leads to an amputated space without the Church’s social presence. It is precisely the Church’s social nature of a body that determines the denial of any form of monophysitism which limits a parish’s life to pure spiritualism, to a liturgical diakonia without social extension. Serving of the Word and the Sacraments and serving at tables were entwined in early Christian community life, pointing out the dialectics between the spiritual and social. The actual diakonia is also required to socially achieve the hic et nunc liturgical ethos of the Eucharistic sinax, which discovers the social richness of spirituality. Being a liturgy extended beyond the walls of the church, diakonia has no other option than prayer, avoiding, in this way, the transformation of faith into ideology: “Community in Orthodoxy is the fruit of spirituality,” said Gheorghe Metallinos commenting on the hagiological scheme Life & Politeia: “For the deified saint life, is its struggle for personal, spiritual life, or politeia is his way of life among his fellows’ (Metallinos 2004, 106). St. John Chrysostom extended Ecclesia into society by extending the mystery of the church into that of the brother’s sacrament, thus maintaining the balance between spirituality and sociality, balance that could be designated as the charisma (“grace”) that illuminates the social space, filling it with spiritual life. We define, therefore, the being of diakonia as synergy or cooperation with God’s grace and the energy of this diakonia is the dialectic between spiritual and social which is moving the following framework: diaconate of truth, diaconate of love, diaconate of judgment (Ibid., 94–97).

The Phenomenology of Diakonia According to Philanthropic-Social Projects Developed under the Romanian Orthodox Church The community social model of the early church would come close to what anthropologists call societies that have no history, which “function near absolute zero of historical temperature.” Instead, reduction of social conflicts produces entropy: “our societies gradually lose their scaffolding and tend to disperse, to reduce the individuals from which they are composed to the condition of interchangeable and anonymous atoms” (Lévi-Strauss 1998, 119–121). The social perception of poverty was expressed as: “poverty is mute, taboo, disarming” and as “poverty has no lobby; the social sciences should lend a voice to poverty” (Bloemers 1999, 46, 49). The concern for social justice is not an outsider from spirituality and practice of the Orthodox Church, being a community of mutual

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service: “Bear one another’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2). Participation of God Himself to human suffering, despite a “nervous insistence on God’s utter impassibility” (Keating & White 2009, 119), makes the church therapeutically rather than legalistically engage in social issues, having the certainty that in society, although “suffering remains, its meaning is being transformed” (Engelhardt 1996, 410). This is a third form of suffering: “active suffering, the voluntary opening to damage the other, meaning the pain of passionate love” (Moltmann 1981, 44). After October 2, 2007, when the Protocol of cooperation between state and church for social inclusion was signed, the following year, on July 24, 2008, the Romanian Patriarchy and the Public Health Ministry signed a cooperation protocol called Health and Spiritual Care to regulate the actions of cooperation in health. On the other hand, the social and philanthropic sector of the Romanian Patriarchy Administration, throughout Decision no. 4727/2010, proposed a “Pastoral and social program in times of economic crisis” with the main objectives of: (a) helping older families with small pensions; (b) helping poor families with many children with low incomes; (c) helping poor patients. According to the report of the social and philanthropic patriarchal sector (whose statistics we will use) regarding social and philanthropic activities developed in Romanian eparchies in 2010 (Cornel 2011, 1–3), in the social and philanthropic work of the Romanian Orthodox Church have been involved 3,492 persons as follows: 29 eparchial councillors, 33 diocesan inspectors, 148 licensed social workers, 433 people with higher theological and professional education (doctors, psychologists, advisors, economists, project managers), 65 social workers, 2,192 volunteers and members of humanitarian committees. Also, a significant philanthropic-social project is the Meal of Joy, held in cooperation with Selgros Cash & Carry, which each week donates food and sanitary supplies for social centres, the cost of goods donated in 2010 approaching 400,000 Euros. During 2010, a number of 450 social and charitable institutions functioned, including 83 institutions for children, 58 institutions for the elderly, 116 health centres for families and individuals in need, 102 social canteens and bakeries, 39 medical and social centres and clinics, 27 centres for diagnosis and treatment for people with special needs, 6 centres for the homeless, 7 centres for victims and of domestic violence and abusers, two centres for trafficking victims and 10 kindergartens and educational centres. Social and charitable institutions are established and administered in partnership with 29 associations and philanthropic foundations of diocesan social profile and cooperation with local authorities. In the eparchies, a total of 559 social programs are ongoing, of which 62 have external funding, 41 are publicly funded, 443

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are financed by private funds and 89 organizations are funded from other sources. The number of beneficiaries of social projects developed in the diocese was over 1,028,715 people and families. In 2010, the Romanian Patriarchy spent 49,584,926.88 RON to promote social and philanthropic activities.

Mystical-Social Dialectics from “Liturgy after Liturgy” A decidedly eschatological and disincarnate ecclesiology is likely to ignore the participation or to confuse the historical church with the kingdom of God. However, on the other hand, the Church’s social doctrine states that social morality cannot substitute personal faith. Cultural pluralism with trends of religious syncretism ties the relativization of church to a stage of an event, of a personal search of a biographical journey of faith. In this respect, there is an anti-institutional position towards the church and “one of the radical changes that the sociologists observed is the spirituality’s emergence against religion” (Bria 2002, 127). To this false inner opposition between the mystical and the liturgicalsacramental corresponds another external conflict manifested in a tendency “to separate contemplative, asceticism, philokalic spirituality of that social, public, active spirituality” (Ibid., 131). Recently, Yannaras has referred to the term ekklesia (“meeting”) does not designate a new religion, but a social fact of the relationship of communion, a common way of receiving-giving of food-life as the gift of love: “There is not a religious character. Greeks’ ekklesia gathered in the agora, the Christians at a dinner held in a private house” (Yannaras 2011, 40–41). What is needed is the lighting of the social horizon and its separation of the morphology of secularism. If, on the one hand, the “believer’s salvation is made according to our peers that make up the social” (Smith 1998, 24), on the other the spirit of worldliness as a “Trojan Horse” introduced in the church would lead to loss of the true life of homo adorans and to the “rejection of ecclesial ethos” (Vlachos 2004, 9). The perspective should be reversed, of the Spirit’s social expiration which we inspire in the church. This should be the missionary meaning of the word “liturgy after the liturgy” (Bria 1996, 17–34). Therefore, a theological task of the future should be “systematization of such liturgical ethics” (Henkel 2003, 360– 361), to overcome, through transparency of the gifts, “the abyss between saeculum and liturgia” (Felmy 2007, 91). The social implications of grace confirm the continuity of exitance before and after redemption: “Paul asked that Onesimus be received back not only as a brother in Christ, but also as a brother from a socially point of view (sarx “flesh”) and as a work

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partner (Flm. 16–17)” (Reid 2004). Despite differences, Martha and Mary have a common element (Lazarus, their brother resurrected by the Saviour): “That meeting contemplative-liturgical dimension of Mary with rational-serving dimension of Martha is sublimated in the person of the resurrected one, of Lazarus, prefiguring the Resurrection of Christ” (Preda 2009, 202–203).

Conclusion In contrast with individualistic tendencies of neo-humanism, Eastern spirituality created the community human type. The gap between moralpersonal dimension of virtues and ethics-communitarian dimension, or between the inside of faith and its external expression can be overcome through the social dialogue of gifts, through the others to themself—an hermeneutics of resurrection.

References Bloemers, Wolf. (1999). “Dimensiunile psihosociale ale sărăciei” [“Psychosocial Dimension of Poverty”]. In A. Neculau & G. Ferréol (Eds.). Aspecte psihosociale ale sărăciei. Iaúi: Polirom. Bria, I. (1987). CredinĠa pe care o mărturisim [The Faith We Have]. Bucureúti: EIBMBOR. —. (1996). Liturghia după Liturghie. O tipologie a misiunii apostolice úi a mărturiei creútine azi [Liturgy after Liturgy: A Typology of Apostolic Mission and Christian Faith Today]. Bucureúti: Athena. —. (2002). Spre plinirea Evangheliei. Dincolo de apărarea Ortodoxiei: exegeza úi transmiterea TradiĠiei [Towards Evangelical Accomplishment. Beyond Defence of Orthodoxy: Exegesis and Transmission of Tradition]. Alba-Iulia: Reîntregirea. Chesterton, G. K. (1908). Orthodoxy. London: John Lane Company. Cornel, I. (2011). Darea de seamă a sectorului social-filantropic al administraĠiei patriarhale cu privire la activitatea social-filantropică desfăúurată în cuprinsul eparhiilor patriarhiei române în anul 2010 [Report on Socio-Charitable Activity of Patriarch’s Administration on the Activity within Romanian Eparchies in 2010]. http://www.patriarhia.ro/_layouts/images/File/AchizitiiSF/sinteza%20 Social-Filantropic%20CNB%202011.pdf. Engelhardt, H. T. Jr. (1996). The Foundations of Bioethics. New York– Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Felmy, K. C. (2007). “ExistenĠă seculară úi viaĠă liturgică” [“Secular Existence and Liturgical Life”]. In P. Ocoleanu & R. Preda (Eds.), ViaĠă liturgică úi etos comunitar. Preliminarii la o teologie socială ortodoxă. Craiova: Mitropolia Olteniei. Henkel, J. (2003). Îndumnezeire úi etică a iubirii în opera părintelui Dumitru Stăniloae [Identifying with God and Love Ethics in the works of Father Dumitru Stăniloae]. Sibiu: Deisis. Ică, Ioan I. Jr. & Marani, G. (2002). Gândirea socială a Bisericii: Fundamente–documente–analize–perspective. [Social Thinking of the Church: Bases, Documents, Analyses, Prospects]. Sibiu: Deisis. Keating, J. F. & White, T. J. (2009). Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering. Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1998). Anthropologie structurale deux [Structural Anthropology Two]. Paris: Plon. Mada, T. (2010). Sociabilitatea persoanei úi dialogul terapeutic spiritual [Person Sociability and Therapeutic Spiritual Dialogue]. Cluj-Napoca: Vremi. Metallinos, G. D. (2004). Parohia–Hristos în mijlocul nostrum [Eparchy: Christ among Us]. Sibiu: Deisis. Moltmann, J. (1981). The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. New York, NY: Harper and Row. Preda, R. (2009). Cultura dialogului. Pledoarii & exerciĠii [Dialogue Culture: Pleadings & Exercises]. Cluj-Napoca: Eikon. Program pastoral úi social în vremuri de criză economică [Pastoral and Social Programme in Times of Economic Crisis]. http://www.patriarhia.ro/_layouts/images/File/AchizitiiSF/filantropic.p df. Reid, D. G. (2004). The IVP Dictionary of the New Testament: A OneVolume Compendium of Contemporary Biblical Scholarship. Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press. Stăniloae, D. (2004). Spiritualitate úi comuniune în liturghia ortodoxă [Spirituality and Communion in Orthodox Liturgy]. Bucureúti: EIBMBOR. Velasco, J. M. (1997). Introducere în fenomenologia religiei [Introduction to Religious Phenomenology]. Iaúi: Polirom. Vlachos, H. (2004). Secularismul. Un cal troian în Biserică [Secularism: A Trojan Horse in the Church]. GalaĠi: EgumeniĠa. Yannaras, C. (2011). Contra religiei [Against Religion]. Bucureúti: Anastasia.

CONTRIBUTORS

Mihaela-Meral AHMED currently works as a teacher at the Banat National College in (Romania). She has a BA in Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the West in Timiúoara. Her main areas of interest are epistemology, philosophy of language and techniques of conflict solving. She has published widely in the field of philosophy. Daniel BĂRNU‫ ܉‬currently works as pastor of the First Baptist Church in ReúiĠa (Romania) and professor at Baptist High School in the same town. He has a BA in Theology from the Baptist Theological Seminary in Bucharest (Romania) and an MA in Applied Theology from the University in Cardiff (England). His main areas of interest are applied theology and bioethics. He co-authored Greek Romanian Dictionary (1999). He has published widely in the field of theology. Ioan BIRIù currently works as a Professor at the West University of Timiúoara (Romania). He has a BA in Philosophy and a PhD in Sociology from the Babeú-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (Romania), and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Academy of Socio-Political Studies in Bucharest (Romania). His main areas of interest are concepts of science, social ontology, logic of social sciences, philosophy of language. He has published widely in the field of Philosophy. Andreea-Georgiana BÎRNEANU currently works as an Assistant at the West University in Timiúoara (Romania). She has a BA in Social Work and Psychology from the XXX, an MA in Clinical Psychology and Management in Social Work and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the West University in Timiúoara. Her main area of interest is child protection. She has published widely in the field of Psychology. Ionel BUùE currently works as a Professor at the University of Craiova (Romania). He has a BA in Philosophy from the University of Bucharest (Romania), an MA in Philosophy from the University of Bourgogne in Dijon (France), a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Bucharest (Romania) and a Ph.D. from the University of Bourgogne in Dijon. His main areas of interest are philosophical hermeneutics, political philosophy,

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Contributors

and aesthetics. He authored Logic of the Pharmakon (2003), Metamorphosis of the Symbol (2004), Philosophy of the Imaginary (2005), Introduction to Romanian Philosophy (2006), From Logos to Mythos (2008). Alina-Daniela CIRIC is currently a Ph.D. Student in Philosophy at the “ Babeú-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (Romania). She has a BA in Philosophy from the West University of Timiúoara (Romania) and an MA in Antique and Medieval Philosophy from the Babeú-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. Her main areas of interest are Antique philosophy, modern philosophy, psychoanalysis. She has published widely in the field of philosophy. Remus GROZE currently works as a pastor at the Golgotha Baptist Church in Timisoara (Romania) and is a Student in Philosophy at the West University of the same city. He has a BA in Theology from the Theological Baptist Institute of the University of Bucharest (Romania) and an MA in Pastoral Theology from the TCM International Institute of Haus Edelweiss (Austria). His main areas of interest are social and political theology, counselling, ethics, and Christian apologetics. Ion HIRGHIDUù currently works as a Lecturer at the University of Petroúani (Romania). He has a BA in Philosophy and History from the Babeú-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (Romania), a BA in PsychoSociology and an MA in Human Resources Management from the University of Petroúani, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the “BabeúBolyai” University in Cluj-Napoca. His main areas of interest are philosophy, epistemology, logic, and anthropology. He authored Introduction to Noica’s Ontology (1999), Studies and Philosophical Essays (2005). Gizela HORVÁTH currently works as an Associate Professor at the Partium Christian University in Oradea (Romania). She has a BA in Philosophy and History and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Babeú-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (Romania). Her main areas of interest are philosophy of art, aesthetics, and theory of argumentation. She authored The Basics of Debate (2002), Maine de Biran: The Life and Work of a Philosopher (2005), Argumentation at Work (2008), The Salt and Pepper of Communication (2011). Adrian JINARU currently works as an Associate Professor at the West University of Timiúoara (Romania). He has a BA and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaúi (Romania).

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His main areas of interest are epistemology, (social) psychology, and social assistance. He authored Logics and Psychology in the Era of Cognitive Sciences (2007), Psychologism and Antipsychologism: Historical Hypostases (2007), and Meeting Deep Reality (2011). Florin LOBONğ is currently a Visiting Professor at the West University of Timiúoara (Romania). He has a BA in Philosophy from the University of Bucharest (Romania), an MA in Jewish Studies from the Oxford University (UK), a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Babeú-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Wales University in Newport (UK). His main areas of interest are philosophical counselling, intellectual history and cultural criticism. He authored From Hellenism to Scholasticism (1992), Basic Problems of Philosophy of History (1997), New English Metaphysics: A Regrettable Unknown (2002). Marius-Robert LUNGU currently works as an Assistant at the Banat University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Timiúoara (Romania). He has a BA in History, an MA in History and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the West University of Timiúoara (Romania). His main areas of interest are history, philosophy, theology and Jungian psychoanalysis. He has published widely in the field of philosophy and theology. ùtefan-Sebastian MAFTEI currently works as an Assistant at the BabeúBolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (Romania). He has a BA in Philosophy, an MA in Philosophy of the Human, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Babeú-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. His main areas of interest are philosophy of art, rhetoric, hermeneutics, philosophy of culture, German aesthetics, avant-garde aesthetics, and contemporary rhetorical theory. He authored “The Artistic Genius.” Nietzsche and the Problem of Artistic Creation. Between Romanticism and the Avant-Garde (2010). Mihaela MARTIN currently works as an Assistant at the Eftimie Murgu University of ReúiĠa. She has a BA in History and English, an MA in Oriental Romanity – History of South-East European Provinces, and a Ph.D. in History from the West University in Timiúoara (Romania). Her main area of interest is Roman history. She has published widely in the field of history.

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Contributors

Corina-Sorana MATEI currently works as a Lecturer at the Spiru Haret University in Bucharest (Romania). She has a BA in Philosophy, an MA in Moral and Political Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Bucharest (Romania). Her main areas of interest are cultural and interpretive anthropology, ethics, axiology, and communication studies. She has published widely in the field of philosophy. Claudiu-Marius MESARO‫ ܇‬currently works as a Lecturer at the West University of Timiúoara (Romania). He has a BA in Philosophy, an MA in Philosophy of Science, an MA in Cultural Studies and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the West University of Timiúoara. His main areas of interest are History and Historiography of Philosophy, Philosophy of Imaginary, and Communication theories. He authored Philosophies of the Sky: A Critical Introduction to Medieval Philosophy (2005), co-authored A Dictionary of Basic Terms of Romanian Philosophy (2004), Pierre Abélard. Comments to Porphyre. On Universals and Corresponding Fragments from Porphyre, Boetius and John Of Salisbury (2006), and edited Knowledge Communication. Transparency, Democracy, Global Governance (2011). Alexandru NEAGOE currently works as an Associate Professor at the West University of Timiúoara (Romania). He has a BA in Theology from the Brunel University in London (UK), an MA in Theoretical Philosophy and Logic from the University of Bucharest (Romania), and a Ph.D. in Theology from the Brunel University in London. His main areas of interest are social work with families and the relationship between social work and spirituality. He authored The Trial of the Gospel: An Apologetic Reading of Luke’s Trial Narratives (2002), Consciousness and Phenomenon: The Concept of Ego Cogito between Kantianism and the Phenomenology of Husserl (2011). Iuliu-Mihai NOVAC currently works as an Assistant at the Nicolae Titulescu University in Bucharest (Romania). He has a BA in Political Science from the National School of Political and Administrative Studies in Bucharest, an MA in Analytical Philosophy and Logic and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Bucharest. His main areas of interest are phenomenology, philosophy of culture and psychology. He authored Consciousness and Phenomenon: The Concept of Ego Cogito between Kantianism and the Phenomenology of Husserl (2011).

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Iasmina PETROVICI currently works as a Lecturer at the West University of Timiúoara (Romania). She has a BA in Philosophy, an MA in Philosophy of Science and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the West University of Timiúoara. Her main areas of interest are hermeneutics, aesthetics, semiology, social sciences, and social medicine. She has published widely in the field of philosophy. Dorin POPA currently works as an Associate Professor at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaúi (Romania). He has a BSc in Physics, an MA in Journalism and a Ph.D. in Philology from the same University. His main areas of interest are mass media, public communication and advertising, journalism. He authored Eucharistic Dialogues (1992) and Dialogues with Father Galeriu: Between Genesis and Apocalypse (2002). Bogdan POPOVENIUC currently works as a Lecturer at the ùtefan cel Mare University of Suceava (Romania). He has a BA in Philosophy, a BA in Psychology, an MA in Philosophy, an MA in Psychology and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaúi (Romania). His main areas of interest are Anthropological Philosophy (Technological Evolution and Globalization, their effect on social relations and impact over human personality). He has published widely in the field of philosophy. Anca-Raluca PURCARU currently works as an Assistant Researcher at the “Petre Andrei” University of Ia‫܈‬i (Romania) and Associate Professor at the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Ia‫܈‬i. She has a BA in Psychology, a BA in Philosophy, a BA in Management, an MA in Philosophy of The Art and Cultural Management and a PhD in Philosophy from the same University. Her main areas of interest are aesthetics, hermeneutics, phenomenology of art, psychology of art, and cultural management. She authored Truth Aspects of the Art Creation (2011). Irina ROTARU currently works as a Lecturer at the Apollonia University of Iaúi (Romania). She has a BA in Philosophy, a BA in Law, an MA in Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the from the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaúi. Her main areas of interest are phenomenology, ethics, psychology, and philosophy of mind. She has published widely in the field of philosophy.

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Contributors

Elena ‫܇‬TEFĂNESCU currently works as a Lecturer at the Eftimie Murgu University in ReúiĠa (Romania). She has a BA in Theology from the University of Bucharest (Romania), an MA in Socio-Psychology from the “Spiru Haret” University in Bucharest and a Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Bucharest. Her main area of interest is social theology. She has published widely in the field of theology. Nichifor TĂNASE currently works as a Lector at the Eftimie Murgu University in ReúiĠa (Romania). He has a BA in Theology, an MA in Theology and a Ph.D. in Theology from the Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu (Romania). His main areas of interest are French theological phenomenology, patristic, social theology. He authored Ontology of Incarnation: The Being—Essence—Phenomenon Triptych (2008), Logic and Spirituality: The Rhetoric of Becoming into God in Saint Gregory Palama’s Vision (2012), Christ and Time: Ontodonology and Temporality (2012). Cristinel UNGUREANU currently works as a Lecturer at the Apollonia University of Iaúi (Romania). He has a BA in Philosophy, an MA in Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaúi (Romania). His main areas of interest are philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology. He has published widely in the field of philosophy.

INTERNATIONAL PEER-REVIEW FOR THIS VOLUME

Greg SANDERS, PhD, Professor, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND, USA Georgeta RAğĂ, PhD, Associate Professor, B.U.A.S.V.M., Timiúoara, Romania Michele MARSONET, PhD, Professor, Vice-Rector, University of Genoa, Italy Marilen PIRTEA, PhD, Professor, Rector,WestUniversity, Timiúoara, Romania Maria-Nicoleta TURLIUC, PhD, Professor, “Al. I. Cuza” University, Ia‫܈‬i, Romania Hasan ARSLAN, PhD, Associate Professor, Onsekiz Mart University, Çanakkale, Turkey Patricia RUNCAN, PhD, Lecturer, West University, Timiúoara, Romania Károly BODNÁR, PhD, Professor, University of Szeged, Hungary ‫܇‬tefan COJOCARU, PhD, Associate Professor “Al. I. Cuza” University, Ia‫܈‬i, Romania Ali AKDEMIR, PhD, Professor, University of Trakya, Turkey ùtefan BUZĂRNESCU, PhD, Professor, West University, Timiúoara, Romania Levente KOMAREK, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Szeged, Hungary Monica IENCIU, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Timiúoara, Romania Mihai-Bogdan IOVU, PhD, Researcher, Babeú-Bolyai University, ClujNapoca, Romania Florin SĂLĂJAN, PhD, Assistant Professor, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND, USA