Paul Balahur
Pages 115-123
DOI: 10.5840/cultura20063225
ABSTRACT
Research in the world of Eminescu’s manuscripts has brought again to discussion the bond between culture and creation and, within this, the relation that we are especially interested in, that between Philosophy and Poetry. It is a known fact that the poet studied philosophical works intensely, not solely out of the obligation to prepare for a university career (as Maiorescu had suggested him), but mostly because he had the passion for philosophical problems, as it can be concluded from the analysis of his entire poetic work, as well as the exploration of the “hidden world” in his notes books. He knew, most of all, the German Philosophy, as he transposed into Romanian pages from Kant’; but he discovered thinking affinities with the “pessimist philosopher” Arthur Schopenhauer, whom he assumed as a sort of spiritual mentor, relating thus with young Nietzsche, who had declared in his first book, “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music”, his veneration towards the same master (whom he would, with the same passion, renegade later). Eminescu, however, did not part from Schopenhauer, but took him also as a guide to discovering the old oriental Philosophy, especially the Indian one, that had also inspired the author of “The World as Will and Representation”. Therefore, Eminescu accumulated a rich philosophical culture; but did he also produce Philosophy? If by the term Philosophy we understand “thought” (“cugetiri”, notion equivalent in Romanian with the Cartesian “cogito”), Eminescu was undoubtedly a philosopher, although he did not write any scholastical works on philosophical subjects; nor did he lay down his thoughts under the form of Pascalian meditations, although the style from “Tes Pensees” (usually translated by “Thoughts”, in Romanian -“Cugetiri”’) was closer to him, by use of the revelatory metaphor, than the more geometrico of the rationalist philosophers” dissertations; finally, he did not transform the fragment into a new form of Philosophy, as Gilles Deleuze wrote about ! M.Eminescu: Lecturi kantiene, (Kantian Readings), romanian translation from “The Critique of Pure Reason”, edition by C. Noica and Al Surdu, Ed. Univers, Bucuresti, 1975.