Chapter V

Alexandru Dragomir:

Notebooks from the Underground

Gabriel Liiceanu

On 15^th June 1944, a postcard from Freiburg arrived at number 45 Strada C.A. Rosetti, Bucharest, addressed to Alexandru Dragomir. On it was a single sentence, followed by eleven signatures: Lieber Sănduc, verdient haben Sie einen Gruß nicht, darum viele Grüsse. (Dear Sănduc, you don’t deserve a single greeting, so here are many greetings.) One of the signatures was Heidegger’s; the others were those of the doctoral students with whom Heidegger customarily drank a beer at the end of each semester in the Zum Roten Bären pub – “the oldest in Germany” according to the imprint on the postcard, which shows an imposing bear and above it the year from which the Red Bear pub had functioned without interruption: “erected around 1120”. The card was postmarked 16^th May 1944 and had taken a month to arrive. One can easily imagine how it had been passed from hand to hand around the long table of varnished oak, gathering the signatures of those ten young people, some of whom, probably only recently, had reached the age of 25, and their professor, who, at 55, was at the height of his university career. “I wonder what Sănduc’s up to?” one of them had called across the table. Or perhaps Heidegger himself, taking out the black notebook in which each member of his doctoral seminar was listed, had asked: “Und Herr Dragomir? Haben Sie Nachtrichten von Ihm?” (Is there any news of Mr Dragomir?) Obviously there was none.

THE START OF THE RACE: FROM TRANSYLVANIA TO THE OLD KINGDOM AND ON TO FREIBURG IM BREISGAU

Alexandru Dragomir had left Heidegger’s seminar, and thus ceased to be a part of the Zum Roten Bären ritual, six months earlier, in October 1943. He had clearly been very dear to his colleagues and especially appreciated by Heidegger himself, whose seminar reports (Scheine) – carefully preserved among Dragomir’s papers as traces of his passage through a world that in time had become unreal – record each time the doctoral student had participated in such and such a “seminar exercise” “mit großem Fleiß und ausgezeichnetem Erfolg”(with great enthusiasm and exceptional results).

Dragomir had arrived in Germany, at the University of Freiburg, in September 1941. He was 25 years old, and had already graduated from two faculties in Bucharest – the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, the former in 1937 and the latter in 1939. He had come to the capital from Cluj, attracted both by the resonant names of the professors of the University of Bucharest, and by the need to get over a certain “provincial complex” which more than a few young Transylvanian intellectuals felt after the creation of the Greater Romania.

Dragomir came from an excellent family of Cluj intellectuals. Both his paternal grandfather, who came from Gurasada, and his maternal grandfather, from the village of Domini, were notaries. The latter was particularly well off. He owned a veritable country estate, with vineyards spread over the hillsides, a large orchard, and a tennis court in the garden. When the young Sănduc came with his brother Virgil (Bubu), his elder by one year – later a professor at the Polytechnic – to spend vacations there, at Domini, a carriage would be waiting for the children at the station. Not long after the birth of the two boys, their father, Alexandru Dragomir, was appointed advocate to the Central Bank in Cluj, and a few years later he became head of the Cluj Bar. Sănduc’s uncle, his father’s brother, was the well-known historian Silviu Dragomir. His mother (“Maya”, as her husband called her in his letters) was heir to her family’s property, so in 1940, when Transylvania was partitioned after the Vienna Diktat and many Romanians from Cluj took refuge in the south, the Dragomirs were well able to buy two apartments in Bucharest: that at 45 Strada C.A. Rosetti (where the whole family, the parents and their two children, were to live for a while, and where the postcard from Freiburg was to arrive), and another at 3 Strada Arcului, in his mother’s name, which was to become Dragomir’s home from 1974.

The young Alexandru, who had received his high school education between 1926 and 1933 at the “University Pedagogic Seminary” in Cluj, where he was graded “exceptional” in Romanian, Latin, Greek, French, German, History, Physical-Chemical Sciences and Gymnastics, arrived in Bucharest at the age of 17 in 1933. He had some difficulty in adapting to the atmosphere of irreverent frivolity that characterized the student community of the Old Kingdom. That Bucharest style of knowing superficiality, as he once told me, put all Transylvanians, at their first contact with this world, into a state of acute stupefaction. Mihai Şora, who knew him at the end of his period of philosophical study, and especially during his military service at Craiova (which Dragomir completed between November 1937 and November 1938), describes him as a reserved young man who was then living through his first important sentimental experience. (Later, in the 1940s, echoes of an agonizing amorous sequence appear in the journal of Jeni Acterian – Journal of a Being Who is Hard to Please – where, towards the end, there appears a mysterious “S”, whose dazzling irruptions, followed by prolonged absences, filled the young author with anguish and perplexity.)

1939, the year of Dragomir’s graduation from the Faculty of Letters, was also the year of his first call-up. He managed, at the end of 1939 and the beginning of 1940, to pass his examinations for a doctorate in law, but was called up again in July 1940, and remained “under arms” throughout the flight from Transylvania. Realizing that because of these repeated call-ups he would not be able to complete his doctorate, he came to the conclusion that the only solution was an extended period of studies abroad. His first stop was at Breslau (Wrocław), where for four months, from March to June 1941, he attended lectures and seminars in Greek, Latin and German. His aim was to obtain certification of his knowledge of Greek, without which he could never aspire to become a member of Heidegger’s doctoral seminar.

He returned to Bucharest for the summer, and in September 1941 we find him a doctoral student of Heidegger, enrolled in the Philosophisches Seminar (Faculty of Philosophy) of the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg, where Heidegger had been giving lectures and holding seminars every year since 1929. On 31^st October 1941, he received his “Studienbuch”, or student record book, in which all the classes attended by the student are recorded, with the professor’s signature alongside each subject. His philosophical studies in Romania were recognized as equivalent to four semesters (two years), so he was enrolled in Freiburg in semester five. He lived at number 52 III Schillerstrasse and held a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

THE PARADISE OF FREIBURG

What did Dragomir study at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Freiburg? In the first place, the lectures and seminars of the “master”, as Heidegger’s doctoral students called him. In the two years (four semesters) that Dragomir spent in Freiburg, Heidegger delivered a lecture of one hour and held a seminar of two hours every week. Dragomir’s student record book records his attendance at the following courses, in order: Hölderlin’s Hymnen (two semesters), Parmenides und Heraklit (one semester) and Heraklit (one semester). What were Heidegger’s seminars? Winter semester 1941-42, Einübung in das philosophische Denken; summer semester 1942, Hegel, “Phänomenologie des Geistes” I; winter semester 1942-43, Aristoteles, “Metaphysik” IX; summer semester 1943, Hegel, “Phänomenologie des Geistes” II. The seminars were particularly useful to Dragomir, as the thesis that he was going to write under Heidegger’s supervision was precisely about Hegel’s concept of mind.

What did the Heideggerian seminar look like? How many people took part? Were they all trained in philosophy? Did they come from all corners of the world? Was there any other Romanian in the seminar? What became of Dragomir’s colleagues later on?

Neither from Dragomir’s archive, of which I shall speak more later, nor from our discussions after I came to know him can we find an answer to all these questions. The truth is that, since we can never imagine our future curiosities, we do not know how to take full advantage of the time with the people we meet. There is in any relationship with contemporaries a sort of inertia fed by the way in which we have become accustomed to spontaneously prolong the present, as if those with whom our destinies intersect are going to last indefinetely. We are basically unable to decipher in the present the consequences of a future absence, and the disaster brought on by the silence of those who depart from the stage before us always takes us by surprise. Sometimes we are even inclined to accuse them of not answering our questions and of not fulfilling, in their lifetime, the duty of witnesses, not having written their memoirs in time.

Fortunately in our case, one of the leading members of that seminar, who set out for Freiburg almost at the same time as Dragomir, has spoken at length about the period in which we are interested. I have been able to ask him all the questions that, from lack of imagination, I failed to ask Dragomir. The man in question is Walter Biemel. A native of Braşov, Biemel arrived at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy in Bucharest a year after Dragomir. They got to know each other only in Freiburg, but the fascination of the adventure in which they shared quickly brought them together. Being on the spot, it was they who made the first translation into Romanian of a Heideggerian text – the 1929 lecture What is Metaphysics – which was published in the 50s in a journal of the Romanian exile in Paris.[i] After the war, Biemel worked for some years in Belgium as a researcher in the Husserl archives, before returning to Germany, where he became for a time a close associate of Heidegger, and one of the most authorized commentators on the latter’s work. In the last year of his life, Heidegger established with him the general lines of the more than eighty volumes that were to make up his famous Gesamtausgabe (“Complete Works”).

I had the good fortune to meet Biemel in 1971, in Aachen, where he was professor in the Philosophisches Seminar, when I was sent to him with a recommendation from Noica. He later agreed to be my Betreuer (supervisor) in 1982-84, when I was in Heidelberg with a Humboldt scholarship. In the meantime, I had read his text The Professor, the Thinker, the Friend, written in 1977, a short time after the death of his master, for Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie and reprinted in 1983 in the issue of Cahiers de l’Herne dedicated to Heidegger. In these pages there was an excellent evocation of the atmosphere surrounding Heidegger’s lectures and seminars at the beginning of 1942, when Biemel arrived at Freiburg for doctoral studies, as Dragomir had done the semester before.

Yet I was still missing the details. And so I decided to write to Biemel. I did so as I prepared to start writing about Dragomir, at Christmas time, with dozens of questions in my mind about that moment in their lives that seemed more and more to me to have been the paradise of Dragomir’s life, or in any case the place from which the fall was soon to come. Together with that text from the German philosophy journal, the pages of the letter that I shortly received back from Biemel at last opened up for me this world that had begun to occupy my thoughts, and from which, after exactly 60 years, that postcard from the Red Bear pub had reached me as a unique sign. Those eleven collegial signatures, which – apart from that of Heidegger himself – had hitherto lacked any real correspondent for me, were now instantly transformed into beings of flesh and blood, and, by a miraculous reflex, they conferred on Dragomir, isolated in the abstraction of his solitude, that identity that an individual can only obtain through relating to others, and through his particular way of emerging from the communal being in which he resides.

From Biemel’s letter, I discovered that Heidegger’s seminar was made up of fifteen members, and was a veritable closed community, for express admission and constant attendance were obligatory: occasional participation and sitting in were not permitted. The “fifteen” took up their places around three tables arranged in a horseshoe, while for Heidegger himself there was a small table placed in the open side. Behind this table there was a blackboard, on which from time to time he would write an important word. When Biemel first saw Heidegger, at the beginners’ seminar, the latter’s clothing took him by surprise: “Against the background of murmuring that filled the room, there appeared a man of small stature, with a sun-tanned face, dressed in trousers fastened under the knee, three-quarter length stockings, and a traditional jacket, in other words the costume of the Black Forest, which I was quite unaccustomed to…” The seminars were based on a text announced beforehand, but each time the emphasis was not on previous knowledge and cultural references, but on the capacity of the participants to think for themselves and to express themselves beyond the level of clichés and conventional terminology.

Who, apart from Dragomir and Biemel, were the other thirteen participants at the seminar? First of all there was Heidegger’s assistant, Therese Gisbertz, who was preparing a doctoral thesis on Kant and whom Biemel described as a “sensitive and discreet” person. After the war she became a teacher of philosophy in a high school in Ruhrgebiet. Then there was Georg Picht, the director of the Plato archive in Birklehof Hinterzarten, whose signature appears in Dragomir’s student book for a seminar on Plato in the seventh semester. Picht’s wife, Edith Picht-Axenfeld, a well-known pianist, also attended from time to time – the only exception to the rule. Later, in his evocation of Heidegger, Picht would tell how, immediately after the war, in his “retirement” from Freiburg to Meßkirch, he stopped briefly with the Pichts. “At Heidegger’s request, my wife played Schubert’s Sonata in B Flat Major. When the final chords of the music had died out, Heidegger turned to me and said: ‘We, with philosophy, are not capable of such a thing.’”

Perhaps the most brilliant member of the seminar was Margherita von Brentano, who occupies a special place in the letter, perhaps due to the fact that she was the best friend of Marly Wetzel, another member of the seminar and Biemel’s future wife. Thus it was that Biemel himself would remain close friends with Margherita until her death in 2001. Among the papers that Dragomir kept from his Freiburg period are two superb photographs of Margherita von Brentano. Her face, dominated by a smile at once friendly and distant, is framed by her chestnut hair, which pours wildly over her shoulders after it has been prevented by tight clasps from falling on her forehead. Margherita von Brentano came from an elect family. Her father, Clemens von Brentano, had been German ambassador to the Holy See. Sensing already in 1932 the disaster that was about to fall on Germany, he resigned from his post, and was able to return to Rome after the war in the same function and with his dignity intact. Her uncle, Heinrich von Brentano, would become Foreign Minister. The doctoral student herself, who was working under Heidegger on a thesis on Aristotle, “had an acute mind”, according to Biemel, and “an excellent capacity to formulate”. After the war, she worked for a while as a radio journalist at Südwestfunk, and then at the end of the 1950s she was invited by Weisschedel to be an assistant lecturer in the Freie Universität Berlin, where she made a special study of anti-Semitism and became active in left-wing politics. Biemel describes her as “a fascinating person”, unhappy in marriage, smoking heavily, and living her last years in total dependence on an oxygen tank.

The other members of the seminar were: a Dutch doctor in love with philosophy, Jan van der Meulen, who later published a book about Heidegger and Hegel; a Yugoslav (Biemel had forgotten his name), who remained in Germany after the war as a forestry worker; a Catholic priest, Schumacher; an art critic, Dr. Bröse; a Hellenist; a young assistant lecturer from the Department of Germanic Studies; a philosopher who was preparing his doctorate and later became professor in Vienna; a Japanese diplomat, Takesi Kanematsu; and finally another Romanian, Octavian Vuia.

It is worth noting Octavian Vuia, as a reminder that even Heidegger did not work miracles, that mere presence in the vicinity of his mind could not transform a mediocrity into a genius. Certainly in Paris, where he became a researcher at the Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques, Vuia made much for a time of the capital of excellence with he was automatically endowed by his membership in the Heideggerian seminar. He entertained Romanian émigré circles with his well-told tales of how Heidegger used to ski, how he put on his coat, or how he coughed. His 50-60 page booklet about the pre-Socratic philosophers which once came into my hands was, at best, of secondary school level. He was tall and good looking, and according to Virgil Ierunca, the Parisian Romanians with whom he came in contact nicknamed him “Vuia-the-Majestic”. Heidegger once told Biemel how, long after the closure of the Freiburg seminar, he received a letter from Vuia. Since he liked to follow the progress of his students and to know their destiny, he eagerly opened the letter, hoping that he would learn of Vuia’s development in the philosophical environment of Paris. He was disappointed.

As far as Dragomir was concerned, Biemel confirmed for me that he enjoyed Heidegger’s special appreciation. He was in any case one of the leading figures of the seminar. When a prolonged silence reigned in the room after a difficult question had been addressed to the participants, Heidegger would turn his head in Dragomir’s direction and say: “Na! Was sagen die Lateiner?” (“Well, what do the Latins say?”) And “Dragomir the Latin” loved to provoke Heidegger, and, whenever he got the chance, to contradict him. When, for example, the master affirmed, along the lines of the paragraphs on “readiness-to-hand” in Being and Time, that there are no such things as pure objects, but only objects given significance in a context of use – a chair, for example, is “something for sitting on” – Dragomir retorted: “How can you explain then, Herr Professor, that there are chairs in the museum with the inscription ‘Please do not sit here’?”

I often wondered, in his late years when I knew him, why Dragomir almost never felt the need to return, in a commemorative sense, to his Freiburg period, and to tell us stories of “back then”. He was probably afraid that the almost mythical proportions of the moment that had constituted his life might fix him, in the eyes of others, in that single determination of the beginning. He did not want to remain “the one who was lucky enough to be in Heidegger’s proximity for a while”. And yet, how had he felt then, caught in the ray of the personality of a thinker like Heidegger? Once only, he told us with a laugh: “At the start of one lecture, Heidegger said to us: ‘To think means compromising yourself.’ That put me at ease: right, I said to myself, I can manage that, sir!”

Apart from philosophy, students in the Philosophisches Seminar also studied art history and European literature intensely, with a special emphasis on Greek culture. In his first semester (Semester V), Dragomir’s Studienbuch mentions Professor Paatz’s course of Kunstgeschichte (Art History) – four hours per week – and a course of one hour per week on Don Quijote with Professor Carvallo. In his second semester (Semester VI), Paatz has a two-hour course on “Roman Art”, and Professor Schuchardt, a two-hour course on classical Greek sculpture (Polykleitos und Phidias). The next semester (Semester VII) is dominated by Paatz’s course on Geman gothic and Picht’s seminar on Plato. Finally, in Dragomir’s fourth semester (Semester VIII), there is a one hour course with Schuchardt on the Greek temple, and a three hour course with Professor Nestle on Sophocles. Apart from Heidegger’s lectures and seminars and the Plato seminar, the philosophy programme also included, in Semester V, a synthetic course of two hours per week on the history of modern philosophy with Professor Reiner. That was all. There were never more than eight hours of lectures and seminars. The rest of the time was devoted to preparing seminar reports (at the start of a seminar, one of the students, à tour de rôle, had to present an account of the preceding seminar – in this way the texts of Heidegger’s seminars have been preserved), hours of individual discussion with the professor (Sprechstunden),[ii] and reading for one’s thesis.

There was of course, also plenty of free time. And Dragomir loved walking, swimming, tennis, skiing, dancing. Three photographs from the Freiburg period show him in emblematic sporting postures: either in a spectacular turn on the ski slope, or taking a backhand stroke on the tennis court, or in the middle of a trampoline jump, projected into the air, with his arms wide open, his body impeccably arched. One photograph shows him standing at the pool, in a black swimming costume (trunks and tee-shirt in one piece), beside Margherita von Brentano. He is short, extremely supple, with well-formed muscles. In another photograph he is dancing, très assuré, with his hair combed back over his temples – he is seen in profile – a high forehead and a prominent nose, looking solemnly and dominantly at his partner, who seems to let herself be completely taken possession of, as though hypnotized. All the photographs give a feeling of something lively and agile, the air of a wild cockerel, a sort of well reined-in frenzy that knows that it must submit to an intelligence sure of itself and ultimately capable of controlling everything. This explosion of proud vitality, spiritually diverted, probably explains the impressive power of seduction that Dragomir enjoyed. If to this portrait we add the gaze of blue eyes with a metallic inflexion, a permanently good disposition (er strahlte Fröhlichkeit aus, according to Biemel) and the witzig quality of his personality (that ease with which he could always come up with a witty turn of phrase), then we can well imagine what his presence for two years meant in a Germany almost emptied of its male population. Among the photographs are two “artistic” portraits (by Kunst-Photo, Lemberg, Akademiestrasse 12) showing a feminine beauty of the Ingrid Bergman type, severe and warm at the same time. On the back of one of them is written in blue ink: Ich bin immer Dein. Weihnachten ’43. Rosita (“I am ever yours. Christmas ’43. Rosita), and on the other Für Alex, zum Weihnachten ’43, von Deiner Rosita (“For Alex, at Christmas ’43, from your Rosita”).

Strangely, for all Dragomir enjoyed participating in the group life of his little academic world, he was quiet and reserved when it came to his own work. They all knew that he was working strenuously, that he was preparing a thesis on Hegel, and that he considered it a veritable godsend that Hegel happened to be the main focus of Heidegger’s seminar just in the period when he arrived at Freiburg. But while other members of the seminar let it be known what they were reading and kept talking about the themes of their papers, Dragomir showed an almost pathological discretion when he was asked how his work was going. He would become suddenly bashful, and whoever had been imprudent enough to ask about the stage of his research would get a vague answer and be left feeling that they had unknowingly penetrated his space of supreme intimacy. This particularity, which was to find its theoretical expression in his description of life as a territory sharply divided between the “secret” and the “common” (the “intimate” and the “public”), would last until the end of his life: he never spoke to anyone about “what he did”, and until his death noone could answer the question whether Dragomir had ever practised any of the generally known genres of writing, either philosophical treatises, studies, essays, or simple notes.

FAREWELL, HEIDEGGER! THE CLOSING OF THE WAYS

From this paradise, at once academic, sporting and erotic, Dragomir was snatched in October 1943, when he was recalled to Romania for mobilization. In vain Heidegger provided him on 26^th September with a Bescheinigung, an attestation that “Mr Alexandru Dragomir has progressed significantly” with his thesis on Hegel’s metaphysics, and that only “a few months would be sufficient for him to bring his paper to a fitting conclusion and to end his studies in Freiburg with a doctoral examination crowned with success.” He was enrolled in the 7^th Army Corps, and later in the Battalion of Guards. He was demobilized, with the rank of sergeant, in November 1944, having served, immediately after Romania’s volte-face on 23^rd August, on the western front from Dumbrăveni to Cehul Silvaniei. He would find the postcard that his seminar colleagues sent on 16^th May waiting for him in the house on Strada C.A. Rosetti six months later, as if putting a seal on a period which, as time passed, would become like another life for him.

In 1945, a strange period began for Dragomir, as for most of the Romanian intellectuals who remained in the country, a period in which, cast in a new play on the stage of history, they tried to preserve the reflexes of life that they had hitherto acquired, without having much idea of the sort of world they were heading for. Obviously there was no way back to Freiburg. A letter send by Walter Biemel to Dragomir on 26^th August 1946 from Louvain in Belgium (where had had started working on the Husserl archive) gives a very clear picture of the way in which, a year after Dragomir’s departure from Freiburg, the glittering world that surrounded Heidegger and his students had fallen apart for ever. On the night of 27^th November 1944, Freiburg was bombed by the British and 80 percent of the town was destroyed. The 800-year-old cathedral escaped by a happy combination of circumstances. (It was in a dead angle for the bombers, which always appeared abruptly over a hill.) The last seminar, dedicated to Leibniz, which Heidegger had started in the autumn of 1944, was interrupted when the professor was called up into the Volksturm (“people’s army”). However he managed to take ill after a short time, and when he was demobilized he withdrew to the castle of the princess of Sachsen-Meiningen, who had been his student. Meanwhile, the university too had moved into a castle, on the other side of the Danube, where Heidegger went from time to time to read extracts from his works to a handful of students. At the beginning of 1945, Freiburg fell within the French occupation zone, and as a result of intrigues and denunciations set in motion by some of his colleagues, the French occupying authorities launched an investigation centred on Heidegger. The case was to be judged in Paris, and the philosopher, permanently removed from his university chair, withdrew to his chalet in Todtnauberg. In his letter to Dragomir, Walter Biemel quotes some lines that Heidegger had written to him not long before in Louvain: Ich denke gern an die Zeit unserer gemeinsamen Versuche zurück. Es war ein Teil jenes unsichtbaren Deutschlands, das die Welt wohl nie erfahren wird. (“I think back with pleasure on the time of our common efforts. It was a part of that unseen Germany that the world may never know.”)

With the way to completing his doctorate with Heidegger permanently closed, Dragomir turned for a while to the philosophical preoccupations that his native setting offered. Noica had opened (in 1946?) a “school of wisdom” at Andronache (the forest that started on the edge of the Colentina district of Bucharest) and he invited him there to give some presentations on Hegel. To this period belongs an essay by Dragomir, On the Mirror, preserved in a typewritten copy with notes and observations by Mircea Vulcănescu. There is also a surprising letter sent to Heidegger early in 1947 (the draft of which survives), probably in response to Biemel’s encouragement in the letter quoted above, in which he assures Dragomir that Heidegger remembers him perfectly and asks after him from time to time. Surprising, because Dragomir here tells Heidegger (giving details) that he is working on a doctoral thesis on Plato – but with whom? – entitled Über das Verhältnis von Anschauen und Dialektik bei Plato (“On the relation between intuitive seeing and dialectic in Plato”). Heidegger’s reply is dated 7^th May 1947. In it he gives Dragomir some indications and references relating to the new theme (with not a single question about the Hegel thesis!), and says that he is glad Dragomir is able to work. He announces that he is no longer at the university and does not know if he will ever be able to publish again, and that his two sons are prisoners in Russia. With the letter is a photograph of Heidegger, with the following dedication on the back: Für Alexander Dragomir zur Erinnerung an seine Studienzeit in Freiburg im Breisgau, Martin Heidegger (“To Alexandru Dragomir in memory of his period of studies in Freiburg im Breisgau, Martin Heidegger”).

Heidegger’s letter of May 1947 and the photograph enclosed with it represent the last “item” in the Heidegger-Dragomir file. “The time was out of joint”, and the two men would henceforth belong to worlds that would never again meet, until Heidegger’s death in 1976. The imperatives of the new period of history in which Dragomir had entered required him to forget “his period of studies in Freiburg” and as far as possible to deny it. It would undoubtedly be the hardest burden to bear in his curriculum vitae, the capital sin to be purged by successively adopting professional hypostases as remote as possible from the philosophy with which he had started. Officially, all his later life would be one long effort to “wipe clean his tracks”, and thus an uninterrupted professional travesty. For the next 31 years, Dragomir would in turn work as an apprentice welder, a sales clerk, a proof-reader, a copyreader, an editor, a quality controller and an economist. In the first thirteen years after the war, he had to change his job seven times. Each time his “personal file” was revised, his employment contract was terminated. Thus from “apprentice welder at the Tilcam workshop at 70 Strada Pantelimon” he became a clerk at Romanian Anchor, and then a welder at Wire Industry in Cîmpia Turzii. Then from “head of sales at Metarc”, proof-reader at Editura Tehnică, “literary editor at Editura Energetică”, and as crowning glory “principal editor” at Editura Politică in the Encyclopedic Dictionary department (1956-58), he ended up as “head of the supply services office” for the V.I. Lenin Hydroelectric Power Station at Bicaz. For the last fifteen years of his working life, until his retirement in 1976, he worked as an economist for ISCE Exportlemn, travelling the world (he got as far as Nigeria!) alongside his director, who needed Dragomir’s knowledge of English, German, French, Italian and Russian in order to settle contracts for the sale of timber with foreign partners.[iii]

It is clear that from 1948, Dragomir knew that in Romania philosophy could no longer raise its head. And in his own case, he understood that he was entering this world in which philosophy was forbidden bearing the mark of his studies in Hitler’s Germany. The Freiburg years, the association with Heidegger, which in a normal life would have propelled him into a brilliant academic career, had suddenly become a curse. Since everything that could draw attention to that past had to be suppressed, nothing could henceforth link Dragomir, officially, to philosophy. And on the outside, as we have seen, nothing did.

ENTERING THE UNDERGROUND: NOICA AND DRAGOMIR

But how strange! An authentic vocation cannot be liquidated overnight, just because history claps its hands. And moreover, a philosopher can enjoy the benefit of the discretion that accompanies the vocation of thinking. Unlike a pianist, who is annihilated if his piano and concert hall are taken from him, a philosopher can go on thinking perfectly well without publishing, content to spend his life close to the essential books of philosophy and well able to limit his needs for a few notebooks and a pencil. Driven from the world, threatened, harassed and mocked, could philosophy not become once more “commerce with the dead” (as one Greek philosopher liked to say when he was asked how he spent his time) and withdraw into the intimacy of its essence? Cast out into the incommunicable, could it not become a secret preoccupation, which, far from diminishing and weakening it, would only serve to nurse all the more its essence, its madness and its pride? Thus it is that what might easily have become a disaster was to transform itself, in the case of Alexandru Dragomir, into one of the most fascinating adventures of philosophy in the history of Romanian culture: philosophy as pure solitary thought, as infinite soliloquy, as the joy of thinking all that surrounds one for oneself. For this to take place, Dragomir had to fulfil a single condition: to make cultural clandestinity a profession of faith. And he fulfilled this condition so well that for 55 years nothing was known publicly about him.

As I write today for the first time about Alexandru Dragomir, I am inclined to explain him as the product of a microclimate of history, as a cultural aberration, a “wandering”, a deviation from the mould in which culture takes shape in normal ages and worlds. Arriving in 1831 in the Galapagos Islands, Darwin was faced, as a result of the special conditions which had been created and preserved there, with species that did not exist in other parts of the globe. Darwin in the Galapagos had come upon a biological enclave. In the same way, in totalitarian worlds, when the spirit does not accept the rules that the meteorology of the new history dictates to it, veritable cultural microclimates are born, Galapagos Islands of the spirit that flagrantly contradict the species and specimens of the mainland of official culture. Embarking on a long exile, the spirit is obliged to find strange ways of functioning through which, to the extent to which it preserves its freedom, it also manages to protect itself from the vicissitudes of history. In fact it buries itself, goes into the trenches, disappears from the public surface of culture where there is room only for the display of an ideology with which no negotiation is possible.

However this operation of folding inwards is not without risk: who can guarantee the person who has hidden so well in a cranny of history that his spirit will emerge one day into the light, that he will be recovered, and that others will be able to say of him what Hamlet says about the ghost of his father: “Well said, old mole”? Who will guard him from the danger that he will disappear unknown, buried alive with the work he has generated in secret, of which noone has ever managed to find out anything? Emergence from assumed clandestinity of culture is possible only through chance, or through the existence of a God who loves culture.

In the underground space that he had entered, Dragomir was not alone. On his return from Germany, with the halo of these two years spend in the proximity of Heidegger, he had immediately been taken up into a “gang” of intellectuals with philosophical preoccupations. He became close friends with Mihai Rădulescu, three years younger than himself, the future music critic of Contemporanul.[iv] Then there was Mircea Vulcănescu, twelve years older, whom Dragomir met at the swimming pool in the summer of 1945, the very day in which he had collected his essay On the Mirror from the typist. His former teacher, Tudor Vianu, had requested it for a “Notebook” of the National Theatre, where Vianu had recently been appointed director. The next day, Vulcănescu gave him back the text with his observations written in pencil on the back of one of the pages. It was Dragomir’s first (and last) commissioned work.

And above all, there was Noica. The drama of Noica’s life could be reduced to the desire, eternally unfulfilled, to hold a teaching post. He had failed in this when he finished his studies in philosophy and was only offered a post in the Faculty library, and he had recently failed again, in February 1944, when he lost the competition for Gusti’s post (in “philosophy of culture”) to the mediocre Ion Zamfirescu. Noica had three qualities that would have made him an ideal philosophy professor. Firstly, he had the quality of availability, the rare ability to enter into the needs, aspirations and troubles of the other, and each time to propose solutions for their cultural transfiguration. In the second place, he had a huge didactic vocation, the gift of being able to make the inaccessible friendly and to convince the other that what he “had to learn” concerned him directly, that his very life was at stake in this learning, and not some abstract book knowledge. And finally, Noica possessed the “magic” quality of investing the philosophers’ thought with his own thought, of appropriating them for himself, teaching the technique of becoming you at the end of your journey through the others and how, ultimately, you could take possession of the world by your own one idea. At the end of Noica’s didactic method, the system was lying in wait, and each of his pupils was “prepared” to end up a philosopher in his own right.

The problem was that, as I have said, Noica had never managed to get a university post. His thirst to teach others, to take them by the hand and lead them towards the goal of philosophy as he in fact imagined it, had to be quenched in a different way, in informal settings that departed from the usual academic ritual. Hence the “school of wisdom” in which, it would appear, noone studied anything, and all that was taught was “states of mind”. When Dragomir returned from Germany at the end of 1943, Noica was about to send to the press his Philosophic Diary, in which the project of the School floated over the world like a restless spirit, impatient to settle somewhere and to acquire a body. The book came out in 1944, and the following year saw the start of the construction of the chalet at Andronache, intended as the “base” of the school, where Noica was to move with his wife Wendy and their two children, leaving three rooms free on the first floor for pupils. From then on, everything seemed ready for the opening of the School. All that was missing was the pupils, or more precisely, those who would have, according to Noica’s scenario, the vocation of becoming pupils, of responding fittingly to the vocation of their teacher and the strange requirements of the school. The net that Noica had thrown far and wide had, of course, made some catches: there was Mihai Rădulescu, who, although initially trained as a lawyer, had agreed in 1942 to translate with Noica Augustine’s De Magistro (the text appeared the same year in Izvoare de filozofie); and the actor Omescu, a complex personality who was open to theatre directing, acting and philosophy alike, and dreamt of a “kalokagathia” which Noica systematically censored. There were others, too, for example the actor and theatre director Dan Nasta. But the “big fish”, those with purely philosophical training and aspirations, were missing from Noica’s net. We can easily imagine how Noica must have felt when Dragomir, seven years his junior, arrived from Freiburg with all his panache, with engines fully revved up, with Greek, Latin and German, with a good knowledge of Hegel, with summary notes on Plato and Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz and Kant – the very authors Noica was interested in! God had thrown into his net the golden fish that would grant his burning wish of recent years, by actually offering himself as the ideal disciple.

All the greater was the disappointment! Dragomir was invited periodically to Andronache, where he did all he could to upset the ritual of the “school”. What probably irritated him about Noica, just as it had irritated Mihai Rădulescu, too, at first (as he confesses in The Game with Death), was a certain “outward clumsiness” of the master’s, the spats that he wore almost all the time, the affected smile with which he would greet one, the detailed stage-managing of every meeting, the programmed discussion that would only touch on serious subjects, the obligatory “musical moment”, in short the lack of improvisation, of pointless conversation, of gratuity.

As far as discipleship was concerned, Noica had clearly got things wrong in Sănduc’s case. Psychologically, in the first place, it is hard to imagine that, after his time with Heidegger, Dragomir would have agreed to start a new period of training under Noica. Certainly, Noica had translated Latin and German texts, and had published five or six volumes. He was “someone”, he was the philosopher of the younger generation, and his work was already substantial. Dragomir, on the other hand, had not published a single line, his body of work consisting only of the four or five pages of his essay “On the Mirror”. However Noica, with his “mild mastery”, with his roundabout manner, his smile and his muted tones, implicitly called for a “mild submission”. And this hardly fitted the personality of Dragomir, who was disinclined to model his judgements on anyone, and very much inclined – published work or no published work – to think for himself, cutting in his assessments. He was sure of what he knew, using his intelligence sometimes to strike sharply like the end of a whip and sometimes like a scalpel to dissect mercilessly the discourse of the other, exposing their haste, inadequacy and pretension.

Shortly after his return to Romania, thanks to the sharpness of his mind and the philosophical culture he put at its service, Dragomir became something of an adjudicating authority, and often a troublesome one, in any intimidating case. In 1946, to get access to him, Jeni Acterian resolved “to reread Kierkegaard and to read Heidegger”. In the name of the demands of “adequate thinking” (as opposed to “beating about the bush”), Dragomir was tough, hard, even merciless. Mihai Rădulescu gives a superb portrait of him in a letter of 8^th November 1956: “You are always ‘in things’ […], never for a moment on the outside, illuminating them from within, giving them the foundation of meaning and truth that afterwards seems always to have been in them: nothing conjunctural, circumstantial or ‘interchangeable’. The words say this, but behind them lies the guarantee of your being: you do not lie, you do not spare for the sake of comfort; you are strong, often rough, and just.”

But above all, Noica and Dragomir were totally incompatible in that they belonged to different ages in the history of philosophy. This meant that their ways of “doing philosophy” and of understanding the mission and embodiment of philosophy in the world were also different. Noica belonged to “traditional philosophy”. He breathed its categories, had a prejudice towards the system (of German idealist type), and practised subjectivizing hermeneutics, the opposite of the “ethos of neutrality”: at the end of every undertaking of knowledge and interpretation, the thinker was destined to meet his own image. Noica’s god was Hegel. Although Dragomir had worked intensely on Hegel, seeking to make explicit the sense of wir (“we”) in the latter’s discourse, he was a philologist in philosophy; when he dealt with the thinking of a philosopher, he wanted to find out what exactly the writer had said in the letter of his text, and when he dealt with a determined “thing” (the mirror, for example), he wanted to find out what its “is” was, its intimate and irreducible way of being. While Dragomir wanted to understand, Noica “Noica-ized” everything; he was subtle inventive and “feminine”. Dragomir would gather up all his strength, philosophically speaking; he was lacking in grace and set out to conquer his objective as if on a tough winter campaign, cautiously weighing every step and every stage of the journey. Since 1948, when the first wave of repression had broken over the country and especially over its intellectuals, Dragomir had been unable to see what could be achieved by “making culture” in the traditional manner; for him, “being a writer” had lost its sense before it had even acquired one. While Noica, in forced domicile from 1949, wrote volume after volume and hurried towards the first form of his system, with the vague intuition that public recognition would come later, Dragomir limited himself to plain notation and rare philosophical commentary, occasioned more by the doings of his friends. Dragomir seemed to “lose his way” in the new world of history, to “adapt”, to give up and “change his trade”, while in Noica’s case, the greater the adversity of the new world, the more philosophically focused he seemed to become, to the point where he would be willing to do philosophy standing on one leg. When Dragomir emerged from underground, the surprise was total, precisely because there had been no suspicion of the “harvest” to come, while for Noica emergence to the surface came naturally, as if Noica had gone willingly into the nooks and crannies of history in order to seek there the form of his future work.

I only understood how dramatic was Noica’s attempt to catch Dragomir in the net of his philosophical model, when, a few days ago, there fell into my hand, as if by a miracle, from a corner of Dragomir’s writing desk the six letters that Noica wrote to him in the first three years (1949-51) of his forced domicile in Cîmpulung. Distance made Noica see his relationship with Dragomir as if projected on a screen, and thus, by this distant contemplation, to evaluate it. Everything is said here.

Noica was at a turning point in his life. His wife Wendy, née Muston, had managed, thanks to her British citizenship, to return to England and so escape the horrors of history. Their two children, Răzvan and Dina, would follow her in 1953. In the meantime, all Noica’s wealth was confiscated. (He had recently inherited a stud farm. “I felt it as a blessing,” he told us later, “when the Communists relieved me of the burden of those hundreds of horses!”) He lost all his “rural castles”, as he would later refer to them (his country house at Chiriacu, and of course the newly built villa at Andronache). Now he lived in Vişoi in the periphery of Cîmpulung, at “Madame Veta’s”, occupying one room in a peasant house with a verandah. He ate what he could get by giving private cramming lessons: milk, a piece of cheese, eggs, maize flour. In this way he was freed from the burden of money. On 8^th May 1950, he began a letter to Dragomir, but he interrupted it after a page, realizing that he did not have enough money for stamps. He picked it up again on 18^th May, explaining the circumstances, and warning “Sănduc” that there was no reason to pity him. “You might even envy me. Up to a point, this means being free, that is to say living in the state of nature. Everything I earn is given to me in kind, and this fact of being able to satisfy basic needs directly, and not by the elaborate route of “means” of exchange, may constitute a privilege for the spirit, inasmuch as it is no longer engaged in anything else.”

With his spirit at last free (in fact liberated by the Communists), because of his release from the burden of money, and having met, on the very day in which he reached the age of 40 (on 24^th July 1949), the woman who was to become his second wife in 1953 (Mariana Noica) – “In the meantime,” he wrote to Sănduc on 18 December 1949, “I have found a girl to patch my socks and my soul.” – Noica was free to undertake one last siege of the Dragomir fortress. His tone becomes frequently pathetic, and sometimes desperate (“But I want what’s good for you; don’t you believe me?”)

First of all, there is a review of the exceptional qualities of the person in question. Dragomir is, above all, the vocation of philosophy incarnate: “You ‘live’ the philosophical in its purest form and, at least for me, you are the most gifted philosophical mind I have ever met.” This is why, Noica tells him, “I have asked for your hand in marriage (in this case, you are the only person I would really like to collaborate with).” Elsewhere (on 7^th October 1949) Noica claims: “You have managed with us – and I see this once again from Mihai [Rădulescu]’s letter – to be both what you are and what you ought to be; and the latter “haunts” us, for you are in a way, our best conscience. It was in this sense that I told you before that you are for us a Begriff.”

Thus Noica sees in Dragomir what he will and perhaps should become, this final and ideal form that both justifies the others, grounding them deeply (“our best conscience”), and serves them as model. Only that Dragomir hesitates to bridge this gap between “what you are” and “what you ought to be”. And at the same time it is Noica, who stands to profit (together with “the others”) from this “fulfilment”, who can take Dragomir along this still unmade path. On the one hand, Dragomir is declared to be the “best conscience”, and on the other, Noica proposes to be his master. What is it that separates Dragomir from his ultimate fulfilment? Certainly no lack of the power of performance (since he is already what he ought to be, the announcement of future perfection), but the incapacity to realize it. In fact, to Noica’s despair, Dragomir, a philosopher to the marrow of his bones, refuses to do philosophy, meaning that he refuses to construct a system. And the “system” means “committed intelligence”. Dragomir’s intelligence, on the other hand, is “free, dizzyingly free. Somewhere, above you, there is a meaning that attracts you; but you want to climb vertically, instead of believing, like me and like modest Hegel, that the shortest route is the roundabout one” (7^th October 1949). This “roundabout route” is the bypass through your own mind towards the being of things. In vain does Dragomir stubbornly believe that metaphysics means “calmly seeing what is”. Our mind is not a mirror that moves over things, but one that brings together, integrates and includes its own movement in the image of the final “reflection”. In this sense, the mind is dialectic; it does not fix. Things fall into line – and they always find their order – along the thread that the mind holds out to them. “Without a system, and without dialectic, metaphysics is vanity.”

But entry into this movement of the mind automatically means creation, and creation means a work. The written work is not a cultural vanity, but the figure to which, through the intermediary of the system, metaphysics must necessarily lead. What is vanity is to believe that you can fix the world by the verticality of a neutral thinking. Not even the philosophers can be understood in this way, in their presumptive “in itself”. “For, as you, too, know well, after you have understood exactly what each one wants, you have to be able to Kantianize Plato and to Platonize Heidegger, if not actually to Dragomirize the lot. Otherwise how can you make the history of philosophy?” (10^th April 1951).

In short, Noica reproaches Dragomir that he, as Dragomir, is nowhere, is just a whip, “the whip in itself that strikes everything”. The problem of his own creation appears in the context of this discussion as a direct problem of salvation. Unlike Herod, who was foreseen in the plan of Creation, unlike “all the Herods of today” (the great ones of the Communist world, foreseen in the project of History), you, Sănduc Dragomir, have not been foreseen anywhere, and so you have to affirm yourself through the thought that does not just “mirror” and “reflect”, but thinks by swallowing and integrating everything. In order to begin to be, you have to create. As ordinary people that we are, we are condemned to creation (and – to return to the theme – to the work, the system, to metaphysics understood as it should be, that is to say dialectic…). And Noica closes his last letter, on 10^th April 1951, with this terrible summons: “And so I say to you once more, in a different form I say to you the same thing that I have been throwing in your face in vain for almost ten years since I first met you: what are you doing, man? Understand once and for all that you were not foreseen in the plan of Creation and that those above will call you to account. And if they find your answer unsatisfactory at the terrible judgement, the Angel Gabriel will take you by one hand and the Archangel Michael by one foot, and they will throw you into the hell where all the analytics and all the exact-understanders of this world lie, with Aristotle at their head! In the name of your good angel, Dinu.”

Dragomir’s letters to Noica have not been preserved. They were confiscated, together with those of Cioran to Noica, on the morning of 12^th December 1958, when the Securitate made a final search of the house in Cîmpulung the day after Noica’s arrest. And so we do not know how Dragomir answered the angel or Noica. He probably had no answer to give, then. To get the answer, Noica would have to wait for Dragomir’s emergence from underground.

THE MEETING ON STRADA ARCULUI

I first met Dragomir at his home in 1976. Some time before, Noica had given him my book on the tragic, A Phenomenology of Limit and Transcendence, which had just been published by Univers. I suspect he wanted to show him what was going on in the “philosophical world” of Romania, and probably to show off the achievements of one of his “children”. “Dinu, Dinu,” Dragomir later told us he said to Noica, “mind you don’t land that one in jail like you landed the others!” (He was referring to those who had made up the “Noica batch” at the end of the 1950s.) In any case, he took the book, probably attracted by the daring with which the word “phenomenology” (full of nostalgic connotations for him) appeared on the cover, in a cultural context that was officially defined as “Marxist”. One day Noica told me that we were going “to visit Sănduc Dragomir”:

Gabi, dear chap, he’s a pupil of Heidegger; he’s just retired, and he wants to get started seriously on philosophy again; he’s been reading a lot over the years, but in a desultory sort of way, just for his own pleasure, without any particular thought in mind. For a while, after I came out of prison, he didn’t want to see me, either because he was afraid or because he was angry with me because of the death of Mihai Rădulescu. I asked him through a mutual friend to lend me the Diels-Kranz edition of the pre-Socratics – he was the only person who had it; he brought it back with him from Germany – and he sent me word not to look for him. In the meantime he has softened; I sometimes take him books, and, I don’t hide it, from time to time I give him to read the odd chapter of what I’m writing myself, because he’s such a ruthless judge that he’s very useful to me. In fact he’s read your book too, and he has some things to say to you.

We arrived around 6 pm on a winter evening. He lived at number 3 Strada Arcului, in an old 1940s block with seven storeys. It was the very first building on the left-hand side of the street, so that one row of flats opened onto Strada Armand Călinescu. From the one-room apartment on the sixth floor where he lived – which had once been part of his mother’s flat, (sold in the meantime) – you could see the little streets that link the former Strada Italiană to Piaţa Rosetti and the back of the Intercontinental Hotel: Săgeţii, Caragiale, Popa Rusu, Speranţei, Constantin Nacu, Batiştei, Dianei… The block suffered seriously in the earthquake of 1977, and as it has never been consolidated, both its facades still bear the scars of that event across the dirty plaster. Being a block of pensioners, its condition gradually deteriorated. The two-person lift, with the eternal dirty cardboard in place of a broken window, struggled to drag itself from one floor to the next, and broke down about once a month. The ancient heating boiler failed sometimes in the depths of winter, leaving the inhabitants to scatter wherever they could. The bins were sometimes left in the stairwell, right beside the lift door, so that you had to hold your breath or keep a handkerchief over your nose while you waited for the lift to come down. I noticed all this gradually, in the course of the hundreds of visits I made over the years to 3 Strada Arcului, as if the concrete carcass was decaying, getting uglier, ageing, along with the discreet and fatal decline of its illustrious occupant.

There was none of this, however, back in 1976. Dragomir, who had just turned 60, received Noica and myself in his minuscule flat with the relaxed manner characteristic of people whose centre of gravity is never outside themselves. None of the “great people” that I have met, from Noica and Cioran to Dragomir, gave twopence for their external comfort. All the great deeds by which the culture of a country or an age had been moved from its place had come to birth on an ordinary table (if not on a board supported on someone’s lap), in notebooks of poor-quality paper, scribbled with failing ball-points and badly sharpened pencils. I saw some of them living almost in squalor (Noica at Păltiniş, or Ţuţea in his one-room flat behind the Cişmigiu park) and none of them ever rose beyond a minimum level of decency in their dwelling place (Cioran in his mansard in the rue de l’Odéon, or Heidegger in his chalet at Todtnauberg, the interior of which I inspected room by room in the summer of 2003, taking advantage of open curtains and, of course, the absence of the owner). Regardless of whether or not they had been in prison, they all had a certain ease in coping with scanty and poor material resources, an ease that sprang not from any impulse to “slum it”, nor from negligence or dirty habits, but simply from their power to separate themselves from the world of comfort in the name of values and imperatives that demanded everything of them and that, were in any case, from the start, very far in the order of existence from what is meant by “ordinary life”. What is strange is that all these people were, in their own way, elegant, which surely resulted to a large extent from their spiritual standing and their belonging to that human category that is best defined, regardless of origins, wealth and historical period, by the word “aristocrat”.

Alexandru Dragomir was an aristocrat who welcomed us into a sixteen-square-metre room – his bedroom, office and living room in one. Next to the wall opposite the door, there was a large bed. At its head, there was a bedside table, and continuing along the wall to the left of the door, a narrow sofa on which two people could sit. In the middle of the room, next to the foot of the bed, there was a huge sagging armchair, covered with a blanket. Under the window, there was a tiny work table, with another armchair facing it. On the wall to the right of the door, there was a bookcase, with no more than a couple of hundred books, almost all of philosophy: Hegel (the Glockner edition), Plato in “Belles Lettres”, Aristotle, Jaeger’s monograph, a massive Latin edition of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa, Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des XIXen Jahrhunderts, a French edition of Kierkegaard’s Journal in four volumes, the Pre-Socratics in the Diels-Kranz edition, Descartes, Leibniz, the Journal of the brothers Goncourt, a few dictionaries, etc.

The man himself was thin and short of stature, with a small head and skin like parchment. He had fine hands, which he would run one after the other through his ever-rebellious hair, which formed an eddy right over his forehead. What was impressive was his look, with its metallic inflexion and its appearance of extreme hardness, especially when Dragomir was taking us through a demonstration, concentrating and looking somehow into himself, contaminated by the very severity of the thought he was unfolding. Never before had I seen in someone’s eyes, mirrored with such precision, the sequence of small steps that seemed to make up his thinking. Dragomir’s look, turned inward, took over that hallucinated walk along the unseen corridors of the mind, and then let it be seen on the outside. Because it was transmitted through his eyes, because it became visible, there was something unsettling and savage about his thinking. Dragomir was terribly like a “thinking animal”, like a thinking snake or feline. This sensation completely disappeared and his look immediately became mild as soon as he emerged from the world of his reasoning, as often as not “deconstructing” it with a joke or saying that what he had constructed was within the power of anyone that was willing to concentrate – as he had just done – along the (single) direction of their thought.

A Lesson in Thought

Of course in the hour that followed, he demolished my book completely, taking it apart from the foundations, that is to say starting from the very definition of peratology (“the theory of limit considered in its relation to consciousness”) on which, full of the philosophical pride of youth, I had raised my entire theory about the tragic. I still recall that the discussion began with the fact that neither “limit” nor “consciousness” had been adequately defined in my book, with the result that, as Dragomir pointed out, I used them indistinctly, as the context dictated. “Consciousness”, for example, was sometimes used in its Pascalian-Kierkegaardian sense of individual-suffering, and sometimes in a Kantian sense, as a property of the human species (“consciousness in general”), or a Hegelian one (the historical consciousness of an age). My tragic hero was consequently sometimes Werther (or Hamlet), sometimes the indefinite representative of humankind (mortal in their very essence), and sometimes Nicolae Bălcescu or Götz von Berlichingen. Correspondingly, “limit” was sometimes the interior limit of the hero, sometimes corporeality as finitude (“nature”), and sometimes a boundary of history. Dragomir then went on to pull apart a sentence of which I remember I had been very proud, at least in the context, when I wrote it: “The maximum degree of difficulty in overcoming limit becomes, at the limit, a limit that in principle cannot be overcome.” “What do you understand here by ‘difficulty’?” Dragomir asked me. “Stumbling block, obstacle, condition? In the preceding sentence, you speak of ‘the possibility of overcoming’, and then, after all that, we find ourselves in the region of ‘it’s hard, Mum, it’s very hard, in fact sometimes it’s actually impossible’. In fact, limit itself doesn’t have the ‘quality of being overcome-able’, in the sense of being easier or more difficult to overcome, and – at the limit – impossible to overcome. ‘Hard’ or ‘difficult’ come only from the person and differ from one person to the next.” I protested, saying that in my book “limit” is “transcendental”, and thus is only considered in the field of consciousness, and that, in my “peratology” with tragic valences, there is no limit “in itself”. Then he attacked me at another point, telling me that I did not distinguish between “the self-consciousness of limit” and the “self-consciousness of limitation”, and that, in general, I practised a “technique of amalgam” – “The most dangerous thing in philosophy! For example you mix Greek tragedy with modern tragedy, transferring in an impermissible way the categories of modern philosophy into the ancient Greek universe.” His conclusion was that overall it was all right, but as far as “thinking” was concerned I still had a thing or two to learn.

We parted – Noica stayed longer – and I left convinced that the “old men” had set up a plot which, undoubtedly, formed part of Noica’s “paideic programme”. Dragomir had been the “cold shower” that had to be administered to me preventively so that my debut with the book on the tragic would not go to my head. I muttered to myself all the way home, turning Dragomir’s objections around in my head and considering them from all directions. Then at night, before I went to sleep, I kept asking myself what it could mean that I still had a thing or two to learn where “thinking” was concerned.

About ten years passed. From time to time, Noica would come and complain to us that Dragomir had pulled to pieces another chapter of the Treatise of Ontology that he was working on. I saw him seldom, generally by accident, and had only a vague notion of how he spent his time. I knew, also from Noica, something about a “paper” concerning time that Dragomir had been labouring on, apparently since the ’50s, but I knew nothing about what results he had produced, or even if he was ever going to finish the task. I had managed to find out that he “didn’t write”, and that his refusal – which could only be perplexing to us as pupils of Noica, raised in the cult of effectiveness, of publication and of the “work” – had its basis in a sort of egoism of understanding, in the idea that all that matters, if you have landed in this world, is to try to be clear in your own mind about it, “not to leave it like an ox”. Sometimes when I came to his home in the morning with a book he had asked me to bring him, I would find him with a Greek edition of Plato or Aristotle open on the table and beside it a notebook of cheap paper on which from a distance I could make out closely written lines written in ballpoint. “So, you’re writing!” I teased him happily. “No, I’m not writing. I’m confronting those who have looked at the problem before me.” “And why don’t you publish?” I began again. “Because it does not in-ter-est me, can’t you see, Mr Liiceanu?” “But if this lot hadn’t published either – Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz – I mean, your people – who would you have been confronting today? It’s clear that you are a great egoist!” I concluded triumphantly.

This game was repeated dozens of times. Sometimes I would just find a little notebook on the table with a ballpoint beside it. “What are you doing?” “I’m noting down a thought or two. Like Wittgenstein. I mean like me. It so happens sometimes that I think.” As he raised such a screen of bashfulness around the matter, I never asked him to show me or read me anything. And still less did he ever offer to do so. Somehow or other, one fine day his youthful essay “On the Mirror” fell into our hands, the essay that, it was said, had been annotated by Mircea Vulcănescu, and then “judged”, in Noica’s presence, in a meeting at the chalet in the forest of Andronache. Exasperated by so much “Dragomirian mystery”, and happy that at last we had a chance to judge the man who judged everyone else, Andrei and I dived greedily into the seven or eight pages. At last we had a “sample” of Dragomir. We quickly concluded that it was nothing special. Then we took it round to Petru Creţia, who was our “mirror specialist” (for the past ten years he had been throwing pieces of paper with notes either “on clouds” or “on mirrors” into two large cardboard boxes): “For someone who hasn’t gone into the subject thoroughly, it’s quite good,” he declared categorically, and that was the end of the discussion. We had been put at ease. Now we knew who Dragomir was. It was clear that we had nothing to fear. We had got worked up for nothing. The man hardly wrote, or anyway “didn’t know how to write”. From Noica we had learnt that a philosophical idea had to overturn the usual way of seeing things, to surprise. Whatever the cost. The rest was how you said it. And so we did somersaults and competed with one another in stylistic pedantries. We wrote beautifully. And ultimately that was what counted. We turned our backs on someone who, with an uncompleted doctorate under Heidegger, was unable to tell us anything except that we had to understand the world in which we lived and to learn to think.

THE LUCACI CUL-DE-SAC LECTURES

And so, as I said, ten years passed. At the end of 1984, Pleşu and I returned home after a long Humboldtian sojourn in Germany. Our Alpine spiritual idyll had in the meantime been exposed: The Păltiniş Diary had been published the previous year, and this divulging gesture had itself completed the “rite of parting” from Noica. We were, so to speak, free from the master, and neither of us had much idea in which direction to go next. All that was in my mind was that I had to rewrite the book on limit, but in a different way, “freely”, without being able to say exactly how. And then, early in 1985, in a superb ludic episode, Alexandru Dragomir asked Noica to “lend” him his disciples, who had in the meantime become “characters in a novel” (Sorin Vieru, Pleşu and myself), with a view to “using” us as an audience for a series of private lectures. Noica was delighted at the idea, thinking that in this way he was making Dragomir emerge from his burrow, making him manifest himself. In a solemn meeting at my home in the Lucaci cul-de-sac, Noica “handed us over” to Dragomir. To start with, three weekly meetings were planned, and at the first of them, Dragomir shocked us with the announcement that he was going to present “a Platonic interpretation of Caragiale’s A Lost Letter”. (“I hesitated between a Leibnizian, an Aristotelian and a Platonic interpretation, but in the end I have settled for the third,” he began in an absolutely serious tone.) He spoke for an hour, occasionally glancing at a sheet of paper in his hand or reading a quotation from it. We sat in armchairs, and all of us, I think, took notes. We had certainly never experienced anything like this. Dragomir spoke, with that look in which was reflected the pilgrimage of a subtle logos towards a place known only to him; he affected preciosity (“for the misshapen is something nasty, isn’t it? – a ‘pooh’”); he moved from a general overview (“Caragiale’s whole play sets up a relation between eikôn and eidos, between periphery and centre, what is comic being simply the fatally skewed form of the eikôn – the local, the provincial – in its unhappy relation to the eidos – the centre, the capital”) to juicy hermeneutics of detail (“The reflex response of the subaltern Pristanda – ‘absolutely’ – represents the echo, which is simply the empty response that the boss needs in order to hear an amplified version of himself”). Quotations from Plato’s Timaeus and from Augustine’s commentaries on the De Anima of Aristotle, the “master-servant” sequence from the Phenomenology of Mind, details on the configuration of the province in the Roman empire, the Hungarian word világ (origin of the Romanian expression dare în vileag, meaning loss of privacy, gossip), sentences of Ennius… all were mobilized in the interpretation of Caragiale’s play, together with a huge quantity of intelligence, verve and depth. In contrast to Noica’s demonstrative hermeneutic treatment of Eminescu’s “Luceafărul” or the folktale “Youth without Age”, made to illustrate (and confirm) his own ontological model, Dragomir did not seek to demonstrate anything (any preconceived idea or theory or doctrine of his own), but, in a Heideggerian manner, allowed the thing to speak through itself, to manifest itself, to appear in the full light of day, to emerge from the hiding place in which it had hitherto lain. And as for us, how could we not have seen before what Dragomir had “shown” to us? He ended the first lecture (of three devoted to the interpretation of the play) by saying that ultimately he had not communicated anything original, and that anyone who was willing to think things attentively would find there exactly what he had just told us.

It was the first time outside Heidegger’s writings that we had seen phenomenology “at work”, and without any of the epigone’s laboured imitation, but simply in the way that, having once learnt to play a musical instrument, one can choose ones own melodies to play on it.

At the end of the three lectures, my enthusiasm was so great that after a while I felt the need to give the whole thing the coherence and fluency of a written text. Typed in standard format on the Swedish typewriter I had brought back from Germany, the text came to 30 pages. I was in love with it. I had no idea, of course, that in this way I had brought into the world the pages that, eighteen years later, would open the first volume of the “work” of Dragomir. Several times I tried to give it to him to read. Each time he refused. As for publication, not a chance.

The Opening of the Archive

Our “working” meetings with Dragomir continued at very irregular intervals until the year 2000. They almost always began with a lecture by him, followed by discussion. It sometimes happened that one of us opened the meeting, and on other occasions the discussion was “free”, without any starting point or particular theme. At a certain point I stopped taking notes, as Dragomir agreed to have a cassette recorder on a little table beside him while he was speaking. After 1995, Horia Patapievici joined the team, and, from time to time, when he was back in Romania (he was doing a doctorate in Scotland), Cătălin Partenie would also turn up at my home in the Lucaci cul-de-sac. Patpapievici unnerved me with the eagerness with which he always wrote down everything in a notebook on his knee.

For those of us who for fifteen years had been confronted with Dragomir’s orality, it remained until his death in 2002 a mystery whether he actually wrote or not. With the exception of that translation of Heidegger’s lecture What is Metaphysics?, published in a journal of the Romanian exile and signed together with Walter Biemel, he never published anything in his own name. Whenever one of us asked him if he wrote, the standard answer would always come: “That isn’t important. I just try to understand.” That “understanding” might sometimes involve notes, annotations, a written page or even a few pages in succession, but was, for him, a quite unessential matter. After his death – he had no heirs, and left “everything” to Nina Călinescu, with whom he had shared his life since 1973. I was able to take his whole “archive” home. What did I discover in it?

Notebooks, over 90 of them, each with an air of the years it dated from: some of them were hardback, with the cover bound in fabric, from the Freiburg period; others, the majority, were “socialist” notebooks, some in large “student” format, some normal sized, some thin, with 100 pages, some thick, with 300, in vinyl covers of different colours. Curiously, all had been numbered from the start, by drawing a little square in the top corner of the right-hand page and writing an odd number in it. (Most of the notebooks began with the number 1 or 3.) That the numbering was done from the beginning, and not as the writing advanced, was clear from the fact that not only were the pages of the notebooks not all filled, but as often as not the writing stopped well before the last numbered page. The intention of writing at least as far as the numbered pages went was belied each time by the abandoning of the notebook long before. Thus, as a result of this “dread of the full”, many of the notebooks were almost empty, as if they had been hastily rejected as soon as they were begun, in favour of a new notebook that could then expect to be thrown aside in its turn, with most of its pages numbered. On the other hand, there were various pocket notebooks, of different sizes, shapes and colours, that were packed full of writing. They gave the feeling that the person who filled them had been driven by an unseen hand away from the “big notebooks” to take refuge, bag and baggage, in a minuscule space, in which everything was tightly squeezed and piled one thing on top of another. Here you could find extracts from the Greek, Latin and German philosophers (with exact references to the sources) – sometimes commented, sometimes not – reflections of one or two lines or developments of a thought over three or four pages, notes on current events, families of words, schemas, bibliographies, quotations. Some of the notebooks had titles that acknowledged this inexhaustible bric-a-brac: Seeds, Odds and Ends, Scribblings… Judging by the modest dimensions of the pages, Dragomir seemed to have preferred to do battle with the problems that would not leave him in peace not on an open field, but by setting up ambushes, attracting them into scrubland, valleys and narrow defiles.

Some dozens of the notebooks had a well-defined content and a title written clearly on the cover. Among them were those with notes from Heidegger’s seminar, the notebook summarizing Hegel’s Logic (also from the 1940s), the book of notes from Nestle’s course on Homer, and an avalanche of notebooks resulting from Dragomir’s reading of the great European philosophers up to the 1950s and again starting from the ’70s: fourteen notebooks on Plato, eight on Aristotle, four each on Descartes and Leibniz, two on Wittgenstein, and then various notes from reading of Kant, Hegel, Tarski, Russell, Freud, Jung, Lacan and Eliade, some of them with a notebook to themselves, others gathered together in the same notebook. Under the title I and the Others, a notebook started in 1986 assembled together quotations from Plato, Aristotle, the medieval logicians, Thomas Aquinas, Galileo, Kepler, Kant, Fichte and Freud – most of them with commentary. Then there were summaries and quotations taken from secondary literature, from Gilson to Koyré or Janik and Toulmin, and other notebooks dedicated to geometry, arithmetic or mathematical logic. It was a huge laboratory, branching out in an endless variety of directions, which extended to the great European dynasties, traditional Romanian forenames that were falling out of use, and the typographical terminology for the principal letter forms.

Separately, in a white plastic bag, there were four large notebooks, all dedicated to the problem of time.

Chronos: The Time Notebooks

The theme of time was evidently a preoccupation of Dragomir’s throughout his life as a “thinker”. The first notebook had 160 pages (numbered by twos) with writing only on the right-hand pages. On the cover, as on the covers of the others, was written the title Chronos, in Greek letters, and below it a series of five years: 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952. This notebook, with its pages turning brown along the edges, and, like almost all the notebooks Dragomir used, of poor-quality paper, was filled with writing in pencil (at one point a blue pencil with a filed point had been used, making the writing clumsy), sometimes in German, sometimes in Romanian, with the date of writing mentioned in each case. The pages written on 2^nd March 1948, for example, are dedicated to the clock: “The clock has no past and no future, not even a present. That is because the clock is not time; it just shows time. In fact it shows only the present. It is easy to imagine – even if it has not actually been made – a clock with a fixed hand and moving numbers…” On 30^th August 1948, Dragomir notes: Was bedeutet “wie”? Was bedeutet “so”? Jedes Vergangene ist immer wie (d.h. so) und nie Existenz. Jedes Jetzt ist immer Existenz und nie so. Was bedeutet aber “so”? (“What does ‘how’ mean? What does ‘thus’ mean? Any ‘how’ is always ‘how’ (that is, ‘thus’) and never existence. Any now is always existence and never ‘thus’. But what does ‘thus’ mean?”) The way of thinking – attacking the taken-for-granted, that which circulates unimpeded and unquestioned in language – and the terminology are Heideggerian; the courage to go to what is most difficult (time, existence, happening, space, etc) is both presumptuous and juvenile.

The notebook, as I have said, extends over five years: from 1948 (when Dragomir was 32) to 1952. This is exactly the period in which Communism was establishing control in Romania. The principal element of its programme had already been achieved: terror had taken firm root in people’s hearts. It is likely that Dragomir, who had already gone into cultural clandestinity, felt that in writing about time he was opening a great philosophical building site in the underground of history. Set against the background of real history, of what was happening “on the surface”, the notebook gives the impression of a desperate gamble, almost an experiment performed on himself: how long would the reflexes acquired in Freiburg keep functioning? There is also, in this notebook, something challenging in Dragomir’s relation to his own past. Inasmuch as the notebook on time marked Dragomir’s renunciation both of the doctoral thesis on Hegel and of that on Plato (mentioned in his letter to Heidegger in 1947), it abolished his status of “student”, and at the same time announced his intention and will to pursue original thinking. Moreover, Dragomir was entering ground in which Heidegger had spent almost a decade, thus letting it be understood that Sein und Zeit had not “solved” the problem of time… And so, how long would the reflexes acquired in Freiburg continue to function?

The answer is given in the second notebook. It is labelled on the cover Chronos II, and underneath, 27^th Nov. ’78 – 27^th Dec. ’78; 27 II ’79 –… For 24 years, Dragomir had stopped working on the problem of time. This was the period in which he had successively worked as an editor at the Energetică, Tehnică and Politică publishing houses, then as a quality controller at the Bicaz power station and an economist at Exportlemn. Now he was retired, and miraculously he found within himself the resources to penetrate once more into a compartment of his life that had seemed abandoned forever. For two years – from 1976 to 1978 – he “warmed up”, rereading the classic texts on time by Aristotle, Augustine, Hegel and Husserl. On 27^th November 1978, he picked up again the chain of thought in the 1948-1952 notebook, as if nothing had happened in the meantime apart from the passage of those 24 years. The code of traditional metaphysics (Essentia, Substanz, Sein, Anwesen) was retained, and the struggle with “thus” (Sosein) continued.

The third notebook, entitled Chronos: Laboratorium, covers the period 1980-1990, and represents the culminating moment in Dragomir’s development of the theme. 395 pages are numbered (as usual, by twos), and as there is writing only on the right-hand pages, the notebook contains 200 written pages, making it the most substantial document in the archive. The “hard” technical language here starts to soften, and the reflection becomes simple, friendly, and reminiscent of the unsophisticated Dragomir we knew at the time of his lectures at Lucaci, who had come to think using mainly the words of ordinary language. The theme, in its turn, becomes supple and penetrates unsuspected corners of existence. The expression “time passes”, for example, breaks out of the perimeter of Dasein, and goes as far as the “age of trees”, which “measure time” by the wrinkles on their trunks, by their rings, by the “marking” of annual cyclicity, thus bearing the calendar engraved on their “flesh”. Again it is interesting to note how the hypostases of time here take on personality, having “states” and species (at one point he speaks of the “perished past”, for example – which is much more than the past that has simply “passed” – the past that is dead, reduced to nothing, without trace, pure non-being that goes far beyond the preserved past), and how, modulating in this way, they enter into strange resonances and correspondences with each other. The future, for example, is not simple and indeterminate, but has a structure: there is an immediate future, corresponding to what is kept from the past, and which is “passage”, and there is a distant future, corresponding to what is remembered from the past, and which is the unknown. On page 127 there is a striking note with an apocalyptic tone about the past. Might we not somehow grasp better the being of the past, Dragomir wonders, if we tried to find out what would happen if we suppressed it? In the first place the “presences of the past” would no longer exist, that is to say the dead, graves and cemeteries; then there would be no monuments, commemorations or anniversaries. There would be no tradition, customs and habits. History itself would no longer exist. But nor would there be any science or even empirical knowledge, since both presuppose the already-known. All that would be left would be the present of “is”, as an eternal beginning, and the future reduced to a pure unknown. It is now that Dragomir begins to feel the enormous metaphysical charge of banality and the fact that the centre of gravity of philosophy lies in reflection on the banal, that is on the thousands of trivial details that make up our lives.

The discourse on time in the third notebook loses the distant tone with which it began, sheds its “indifference”, and acquires “existential” tones and in places lyrical inflexions. (“The sadness of the consumption of life, and with it the feeling that you are part of something that escapes you, perhaps without appeal.”) At one point on page 127, Dragomir feels taken in and devoured by the very subject to which he has dedicated his life. He writes then, under the date of 28^th April 1984, insinuating himself into the text with the entire fragility of his person, the following underlined words: “Because I am afraid that I shall start to forget some thoughts, I shall keep writing, from today onwards, new thoughts in whatever order they come, and – above all – what I have long known but have never put down on paper.”

The fourth notebook, entitled Chronos: Notes, has 221 numbered pages (so 110 pages of writing) and is undated. It was most likely compiled in parallel with the third book (rather than continuing it after 1989). The specification Notes in the title points to the completely relaxed tone of the discourse which manages to “suck up” thoughts on time from all directions; some are from the minds of classic authors (it is full of Greek quotations) but most are the thoughts of Dragomir himself, all collected with a view to possibly working on them at a later date. The form of the notes likewise varies, from schemas to discursive texts, with occasional flashes of thought, dazzling annotations. For example: “The lightning-flash present of orgasm is at the same time the procreation of the future.” Or: “The past: the only petrified time.” Or: “The illnesses of the past: forgetting, distortion, error.” Elsewhere the notes concern themes of thinking. It is clear, Dragomir writes, that there is a temporal difference between when I see a movement and when I hear a melody. But in that case, if the three-dimensional seems characteristically anchored in sight, and music in hearing, how is it possible for them to be combined in ballet? Elsewhere he asks: how is it that in the case of the future I can either go towards it (projection) or stop and let it come towards me (waiting)? And what is more important in the future? My desire, the fact that I “tend towards” something, or what the future brings? And again: every “now” is repeated and yet is another. But what is the relation between repetition and passing?

Crass Metaphysical Banalities: The Vinyl Notebooks

After I had gone through the “time notebooks”, which would undoubtedly make up a volume of several hundred pages, I opened the other large notebooks, which I had christened the “vinyl notebooks”, from the fact that they were all covered with green, black or brown plastic sleeves. They were six in number: three of them bore the marks of that horror pleni that periodically took hold of Dragomir and had made him abandon them after 17, 21 or 25 pages (out of the 300 in each notebook) and take refuge in pocketbooks and notepads. The other three, however, were more substantial, and gave the best view of what had become of Dragomir’s thought, latterly, up to the year 1997. The “green notebook”, begun after 1986, contained mini-essays of between four and eighteen pages, with surprising titles: The Morning Awakening, The Immortality of the Soul (with the specification “in plain everyday terms”), The Land of the Foul and Ugly, Wear and Tear, Mistake. The “black notebook” and the “brown notebook” – which was entitled Me 1 – were the most substantial, and contained a sort of “journal of ideas”, recorded by years and days in the case of the “black notebook”. The notes in this book covered twelve years (from 1980 to 1992), and the other, undated, was probably started after 1994.

Both notebooks seemed touched by a sort of restlessness of thought, by a “noetic greed”, by the need mentally to devour each detail of life, to take it from the place where it lay (well-behaved, taken for granted and ignored), to turn it round and look at it from all sides, in order to put it aside (for a time) and then take it back, as if the first examination were not sufficient and a host of details from this essential detail of life had been missed at the first glance of thought. How had this man, who for eighteen years had laboured over the great problem of time, come to meditate, after the age of 65, only on things which in relation to Time seemed mere bagatelles? There could only be one answer: the problem of time itself had put them in his way; they themselves were time, the small change into which that great banknote had to be converted in order to obtain thousands of aspects of life. For time was life. And the aspects of life poured as from an enormous dish into the lap of the thinker who now spent his time endlessly looking through them, as if they were the most precious treasure: about things said and those unsaid, about clumsiness in communication, about the weight of words, about old age, about the hours of time and the hours of the day and night, about loneliness, about the six movements of the person in space and their symbolism, about the utterance, about the sexual act, about the aggressivity of ideas, about the actor, about “know thyself”, about the meaning of the world, about lack, about sport, about the fragility of life, about what it means to know, about exteriorization, about society without God, about totalitarian regimes, about front and back, about transition, about science, about the myth of words, about life as a consumable good, about history, about my body and me, about forgetting, about the astronomical calendar and the religious calendar, about signs, about the theory of “both-and”, about the body, about laziness, about the secret services, about handling the unforeseen, about talent…

“He is the very devil,” Noica once said about Dragomir. If it was the devil who took control of the tree of knowledge after the fall, then Dragomir was the very devil. What is certain is that in Adam’s place he would have managed to eat from all the forbidden fruits. And for all that, in his frenetic desire to understand everything, there was something rather of an eternal student, approaching Creation as a class theme and preparing assiduously for the day in which he would be examined by God. Indeed he knew this and said it, on 8^th January 1993, in a formidable note in the notebook entitled Seeds: “Basically I am doing a doctoral thesis with God.” The most important thing that happened in Dragomir’s life is precisely this: at a certain point he changed the supervisor of his thesis. He simply felt that any thematic content that could be imagined in university terms was too narrow in relation to everything that was to be thought. On 1^st September 1979, he noted: “The evening is falling beautifully on my conviction that I do not know how to write (I write dryly, schematically) and on a soul full of joy that there are so many problems that one has to think about and that are lying here, within our reach, like the trees, like the flowers.”

Whose Is the Burden of Thinking?

But what does “to think to yourself” mean? Is there any person who does not think? Is thinking not an attribute of the human being? Are we not all thinking from moment to moment, from the moment we wake up till we lie down and fall asleep again? Of course we are. Only that this sort of thinking is thinking around what we are doing and according to our preoccupations. We do not make thinking as such a preoccupation in itself. When we think, which is all the time, we think pragmatically. We do not stop our activity to think about how the activity is possible. We never take a break from what we are doing to think – without doing anything else – about all sorts of things that we habitually do. We do not stop hammering to think about the being of the hammer and what a tool is in itself. We do not wake up in the morning to think about what it means to fall asleep and to return to a state of wakefulness. We wonder in passing at a dream, but we are not so amazed at the fact of dreaming as to start really thinking about our power to dream and the strange reality that a dream is. We consider ourselves, some of us, intellectuals, but we never come to the point of asking ourselves what in fact an intellectual is, and when he first appears in the world in the posture of an intellectual. In short, in order to think you must think of something other than what you are actually doing; you must think with wonder at the things that you usually do without first interpreting the essence of what you are doing.

This pause, which interrupts our habitual activity and into which the question and commentary of thought insinuate themselves, is not, for the vast majority of people, a normal thing. And even if it so happens that people find something that “makes them think”, they do not do it systematically enough (which most often means following a particular method) to become “thinkers”. And then, in order really to become a thinker it is not enough to have this vocation of the pause. (In that case any shepherd standing leaning on his staff in the heat of a summer’s day while his sheep graze, lazily chewing the end of a straw with his gaze lost in the distance, would be a thinker. For he is undoubtedly thinking “of something”.) To become a “thinker”, you also have to become aware of all that has been done (that is “thought”) by those before you who have transformed their existence into an extended pause for thought and have faced the problems that you are facing. And that presupposes an immense struggle with the thoughts of others, with noone able to guarantee that after all this struggle you will still, others’ thoughts and all, be able to think for yourself. Any true thinker must be able to cope with this situation: to avoid being a dilettante, ignoring what others have thought before you, and to avoid the risk of no longer reaching yourself, being swallowed up by the outpouring of the thinking of others. The noise of the others’ thinking must stop at some point, so that in the silence that falls you can hear the voice of your own thinking.

Latin has a remarkable pair of words – otium–negotium – whose significance can help us to understand what I have just said. Otium is that “pause” of which I have spoken, the repose that intervenes when the “agitation of preoccupation” (negotium) ceases. Thinking is impossible in a world of “negotiation”, because negotiation is par excellence the world of activity in which thinking is entirely absorbed – and so cancelled as pure thinking – by what you are doing, by the object in itself of the activity. Because it requires one first to stop, thinking is, in its very essence, “otiose”, lazy, sublimely indolent.

Well, Dragomir took up this “burden of thinking”, in a time in which in Romania noone was thinking anymore, and in which thinking, in the sense described above, had decayed almost everywhere in the world. We might make play with the fact that Dragomir retired (from Exportlemn!) and “started to think” in the very year that Heidegger died, 1976. In any case Dragomir was conscious that the post of “thinker” was vacant. On 6^th November 1983, he noted in his “black notebook”: “In our intellectual circles, the essayist stirs ideas, the logician reasons, and the professor or researcher presents papers. But who actually thinks?”

To judge by the meetings a few of us had with him, and by the archive that remained “secret” until a year ago, Dragomir was a thinker, one of the very few, if not the only one, that the Romanians have ever had, if we are prepared to take the following into account: 1) a formidable meeting, at the source, with those who had thought about a problem before him; 2) a technique of thinking acquired at first hand in Freiburg and refined by uninterrupted (probably daily) exercise over more than twenty years. This unveiling of the object of thinking by a double operation – connecting it to the history of thinking about it, and then scrutinizing it with phenomenological sight – was the lesson which Dragomir had learnt well from Heidegger.

HEIDEGGER’S LESSON: A TECHNIQUE OF THINKING VERGING ON HUMILITY

If we are to look in detail at this lesson, then we must first stop for a moment to look at the technique of scrutiny and “phenomenological sight”. The truth is that this gaze of special quality was preceded by the capacity for wonder that Aristotle had already spoken of in the first book of his Metaphysics.

But be careful! In order to be truly philosophical, Aristotelian wonder appeared rather in the presence of objects that escaped the sphere of our preoccupations. In other words, the more un-experienced and un-experienceable an object was, the further it lay from our everyday life, the more worthy it became of philosophical wonder. The movements of the planets were for Aristotle more worthy of wonder than the being of the sandal we put on every morning. The “principles and first causes” of the universe: there lay the supreme object of our ignorance and our wonder, and, as such, the one true object of philosophical preoccupation. While Heideggerian phenomenology also starts from the philosophical virtue of wondering, the direction of wonder is now completely changed. And the source of this change of direction must be sought in a reappraisal of the youthful dialogues of Plato, where Socrates wonders and raises questions about the things that make up our everyday life, but which noone around him wonders at. It is precisely this technique of wondering in front of the taken-for-granted – in front of that which, through excess of use, no longer constitutes a problem for people, and as such no longer merits thought – that is given new life by Heidegger. Heidegger does not ask about “first causes” and “ultimate principles”, but about the things that occur most frequently in our daily lives and expression. He does not wonder, for example, about the verb “to be” in the hierophantic manner of traditional ontology (leading inescapably to “Being”), but only inasmuch as the verb “to be” lies at the very heart of our everyday speech, as we use it in almost every sentence we utter. Heidegger does not question the “archei of the world”, but wonders what “to think” means, what is understood by “thing”, what technique is, that is to say exactly that which is represented for us all by the familiar par excellence, which determines every moment of our lives. The more familiar something is – meaning the more it is taken for granted, the more it is “passed over” – the more denkwürdig, “worthy of thought”, it is.

The result is a considerable democratization of the object of thinking in philosophy: that which is humble, unnoticed, completely lacking in the mark of prestige – at the limit even the speck of dust, rubbish, dirt (the level of “pooh”, as Dragomir would say) – can mobilize thinking just as well (and to more use, as far as understanding the world you live in is concerned) as the traditional sublime objects of thought: the supreme cause, mind, immortality etc. When Dragomir speaks of the joy he finds in “the problems that you have to think about and that are lying here, within our reach, like the trees, like the flowers”, he is expressing precisely this “tropicalization of thinking”, the fact that in its orchard there is a place for all the flowers (and weeds) of the world, and that all of them, subjected to our endless wonder, can provoke the exuberance of thinking. These huge deposits of problems can only be uncovered by paying attention to the evident things that we no longer perceive precisely because they are too evident. The questioning of the familiar, of the too familiar, is the lesson that Dragomir learnt from Heidegger. “To place these taken-for-granteds in the light of raumazein, of the fact of wondering”, he notes somewhere. In this way everything can be to be thought, everything ultimately falls within the burden of thinking. Woman is different from man. That is evident. But in what does this difference consist? A Lost Letter: an evident text from which we quote all the time when we speak Romanian. Evident, since it has become the spiritual environment for each of us. But if we were put on the spot, could we say what exactly the being of A Lost Letter is? We all live in a spatial and temporal environment; we move here and there and are “contemporary”. That is evident, taken for granted; everybody knows it. But what does it mean to be contemporary and to move here and there?

We can already observe that an intimate relationship emerges between this wonder (in the face of things that are overpowered by their own familiarity) and sight. For the sight proposed by phenomenology lives off that which has been passed over, forgotten, diminished, ignored. Phenomenological vision is ultimately one that acquires its acuteness from a previous blindness. All the things around us have fallen, through excess of use, into a sort of ontological faint. The phenomenologist gifted with the freshness of the primal gaze is a resuscitator capable of giving a philosophical kiss of life to things that, as victims of our blindness, have become lethargic.

In this context, philosophy certainly `becomes originary: it is an askesis, an exercise in the space of the primal gaze. But what is the origin of this “freshened” gaze? Does it result from an exceptional gift that, by divine or genetic grace, is enjoyed only by philosophers and by phenomenologists in particular? Here I might bring into the discussion the fundamental hypocrisy that is characteristic of phenomenology (one that Dragomir liked to indulge in) and on which it proceeds to build its false modesty. Like Descartes’s reason (le bon sens), the phenomenological gaze is an equally distributed good that in principle anyone can make use of. We can all, if we like, come to gaze at and see the “is” of each thing. What distinguishes the phenomenologist from the ordinary person is thus a question of will: and of effort, of course. You have to want to see a thing beyond the layers of prejudices under which general opinion has buried it, beyond the distortions to which we subject it every day by our triviality, by our empty curiosity and our ambiguities. The phenomenological gaze is in the first place a liberated gaze, and one that in its turn liberates the thing from the (inevitable) hiding place in which it is kept from one moment to the next by the slippage of language and by routine. The effort is, as we can see, archaeological in nature: the phenomenological gaze excavates, brings to light, washes, cleans. That is all. Ultimately it all comes down to an attentive concentration on the thing that we want to recuperate by looking / thinking appropriately.

From this point of view, phenomenology, being originary, does not set out to be original. And Dragomir provided the display par excellence of this willed lack of originality. For there is nothing original about attention and concentration, is there? It is all, as we have seen, a matter of the need to understand, a technique of concentration and exercise. Dragomir never thought when he spoke to us that he was bringing something of his own to add to the matter under discussion. “You throw yourself into philosophy bare, as into water,” he notes in one of his notebooks. “If you throw yourself in fully dressed, your clothes and your boots will drag you down, even if you know how to swim.” The “clothes” and “boots” are here the ornaments of your own mind, the pride of your foreknowledge and your ideas, and the undressing is the prior ritual that the philosopher performs in order to announce that in the act of interpretation it is the being of the thing interpreted that must appear, and not the ingenuity of the interpreter. The interpreter interprets only by deciphering, finding the cipher of the thing (its “is”), which people no longer see either because they are no longer looking for it, or because they no longer have a fresh view of it. In short, if you want to get to the being of a thing, you have to let yourself be guided by it.

But then, if everything is reduced to heightened attention, to the focusing of the gaze and to deciphering, it is ridiculous to want to be an author. It is pretentious to put your signature to a “mere” gaze. We have seen that Dragomir used to close each lecture by saying that his ideas were the ideas that would have come into anyone’s mind if they had had the desire or the inclination to consider, as seriously as he had done, the matter in question.

Where in all this is there room for hypocrisy? In the fact that Dragomir knew very well what “labours of understanding” were concealed behind the “mere gaze”. Phenomenological scrutiny – that examination that grasped what noone could see anymore (or had never seen before) in a thing, that “saw” in any thing the hidden part of its own manifestation – was in fact the supreme difficulty of thinking, and as such something far from being available to everybody. And so the character who, in the name of the initial democracy of the “evenly distributed” gaze, had seemingly been definitively expelled from the stage – the author – now reappeared, when this thinking born from the liberation of the hidden was confronted with the supreme test of formulation. Heidegger himself had at one time to leave the road opened up by Being and Time, because his power of expression had failed him, the language had been unable to follow the thinking. And for Dragomir, writing had undoubtedly been the great burden of his life as a thinker. In a letter of November 1981 to Noica, at the end of the (unfinished) text entitled Socrates, Dragomir writes: “Dear Dinu, I am bored. My fullest admiration for those who can write; they are heroes. But how can you write when you could be thinking? Only women can give birth: we conceive.” That this proclaimed sterility of thought (which is apparently excused the test of objectivization, of “birth” through writing) is a whim, a momentary indulgence, designed to conceal if not a handicap then at least a disinclination, is made clear by another confession that Dragomir lets slip in one of his notebooks: “Where do I have difficulty? I have difficulty in catching my own thought. In order to know what you think you have to make an effort. In order to know what you think you have to formulate your thoughts. But how hard it is!”

One thing is certain, however: in these conditions of total austerity, to “do philosophy” ceased to be an “act of culture”. When Dragomir invoked the classic names of philosophy or made reference with spectacular ease to Greek, Latin or German sources, he was not doing it in order to show the solidity of his philosophical training, and still less to astound us or to make a display of culture. He simply knew that for a professional thinker, at the end of its own solitude, the act of thinking met the thinking of the “great philosophers”. In January 1996, Dragomir shared the following thought with Cătălin Partenie: “Why do you need to read the great philosophers? Because when you look at Aristotle, for example, after thinking on your own about a problem, you see that out of, let’s say, ten things that he says about the problem you have said three, and two of them badly.” Precisely because these philosophers were “great”, precisely because, through them, you can get an idea of how and at what level a philosophical problem can be asked, they become inevitable companions on the road of your own thought. It is natural that when you think of something, since you are not the first to think of it, you should think together with those who have thought about it before you. Thus every author he quoted was for him a form of mit-denken, of “thinking in the footsteps of others”, together with them. And here, too, the lesson was eminently Heideggerian. The only non-Heideggerian aspect was that Dragomir had no “code”. Unlike Heidegger, he did not construct concepts, did not create an idiom for himself. Rather, inasmuch as in his lectures and writing he preferred colloquialism and direct formulation, he was closer to the image of Socrates who, according to Alcibiades in the Symposium, philosophized in the language of blacksmiths, shoemakers and tanners. The fragmentary character of his thinking (even the discourse on time, pursued and “constructed” over the years, takes the form of a journal of ideas) itself speaks of Dragomir’s intention to totally de-solemnize philosophy.

We may add to all this the authenticity of his effort, guaranteed by the very fact that this effort, as such, was not caught up in any institutional cultural circuit. Alexandru Dragomir – let us recall – never set out to publish. More than that, he never set out to write with the thought in his mind that someone would discover his manuscripts later and that they would thus ultimately see the “light of the press”. We might even say that, in so far as writing is a preoccupation attained by way of cultural mimicry and the adoption of a definite intellectual profession, Dragomir never wrote. The thousands of notes scattered through his various notebooks and on loose pieces of paper represent the more or less systematic, more or less concentrated record of stages of thinking, in relation to which writing appears in a somewhat accidental, and in any case secondary position. If he had been able to remember everything he had thought, he would probably never have noted anything down. I am convinced that he sometimes dreamt of a paradisiacal thinking, one that came before the fall into writing, and that could advance without the crutch of letters.

A FAILED SHIPWRECK

All this translates a sovereign indifference towards the fact that the public exists. Dragomir received nothing and expected nothing from anyone; he certainly did not expect recognition, which, without communication with the other and publication was hardly a possibility. If he had not met us, the small group that he thought might provide him with an opening for some of his ideas and an excuse for thinking aloud, the solitude of his thinking would have been perfect. And indeed his life and his “acts of thinking” would have acquired – as perhaps he had wished – that uncertain state of existence that lost treasures have at the bottom of the sea, existing somehow without in fact existing for anyone. What is now happening to him – these pages, the book that they accompany, the volumes that will follow it – basically represents the story of a failed shipwreck. For once in Romanian history, with Dragomir we find ourselves in the ontology of “it was to be”.

Dragomir’s thirst to find out everything for himself, his need, which became overwhelming in time, to be clear about himself and the world in which he had been “thrown”, brings him strangely close to a thinker who lived 2,500 years before him, and who is indeed the only one about whom he wrote recurrently: Socrates. The whole Socratic problematics of “to know” (to think you know, to know that you do not know, to know that it is possible to know or that it is possible to try to know, etc.), on which ultimately depends the way we choose our lives, seemed to Dragomir to be the supreme enigma of philosophy, and the thing to which it was worth dedicating one’s life.

Like the story of Noica in his Păltiniş retreat, the story of Dragomir withdrawn into the trenches of thinking raises the problem of the roads that are open to an intellectual when he does not want to follow the only road that is officially accepted: that which ends in an obedient dialogue with the authorities. In other words – and in dramatic terms – Dragomir’s story is an answer to the following question: how can you fulfil your destiny if it is incompatible with the historical world in which you live? On page 14 of the 1997 notebook whose cover bears the title Odds and Ends, the following story appears under the heading “Dictation from waking-sleep after lunch, 23^rd April”: Three people are talking in the next world. One says: “I didn’t do much in my life, but I did do a few good deeds.” The second says: I didn’t do good deeds, but I the things I knew how to do I did well.” The third says: “I did good deeds, and things that I knew how to do.” God hears them and says: “What are you looking for here? This isn’t the place for the things you did to be judged. This is the place for those who lived the life that I gave them and that was to be lived and cherished just as a gift. I didn’t ask you to put right the world that I made either by good deeds or by making things.” And Dragomir ends the story of his after-lunch dream with these words: “I asked what happens to those who could not live their life because of circumstances that brought it low and sacrificed it – but I got no answer.”

Now, when the 90 odd notebooks have emerged from the underground of history and are waiting to be deciphered, published and judged (but by whom?), it is time to ask the question: is Dragomir’s destiny a mutilated one? Or is it possible that Dragomir did not know how to interpret his own life? It may be that on that afternoon of 23^rd April 1997, Dragomir woke up too soon, and never heard the answer that was addressed to him. Perhaps, according to some higher calculations, it was precisely inasmuch as it seemed to have robbed him of his life’s destiny that the mutilated history in which he lived gave him the chance to fulfil it.

(English translation by James Christian Brown)

NOTES