Critique of the unconscious

kantian influences in the works of Lucian Blaga

George G. Constandache

pp. 445-452

in: Man and World 30 (4), 1997.

Abstract

Lucian Blaga was the creator of a speculative and metaphoric philosophical system that placed mystery at its very core. Mystery, according to Blaga, veils existence and represents both a stimulus and a brake for human knowledge. His articulation of this view is strongly indebted to Kant, whose transcendental philosophy he sought to extend by critically examining the forms of sensibility and categories of the understanding, not so much in relation to consciousness, but as they are duplicated, or "doubled," in the unconscious. The result is Blaga's "stylistic apriorism," according to which the unconscious always manages consciousness through "abyssal categories" in terms of which different regions and peoples at once reveal and remain isolated from mystery.