Fundamente filosofice ale artei ca joc și existență întru mister

Abstract

The study examines the philosophical foundations of art as play and
existence-in-mystery, as these are articulated in the philosophical work of Lucian
Blaga, who, in an age dominated by positivist and phenomenological thought,
possessed both the strength to offer the last major synthesis in universal
philosophy and the originality to create a metaphysical system in which poeticity
and aesthetics constitute decisive arguments. We attempt to show that, among
human experiences, art is the one in which becoming-into-being is most clearly
illustrated, insofar as, as processuality, beyond what it expresses as an outcome of
the psycho-historical reality from which it arises, it has always expressed the
demiurgic dimension of the human being. In other words, if the human
distinguishes itself from other living creatures by anything, it is precisely through
its demiurgic aspect, through its compulsive desire to possess everything.
The first part of the study reviews the concepts of existence-in-mystery,
plasticizing and revelatory knowledge, as well as their corresponding notions, the
plasticizing and revelatory metaphor, proposing—together with Plato’s theory of
recollection and with Noica’s reflections—a theory of the imagination–memory
relation.
Finally, we place the play–art analogy within the perspective of aesthetics
and within the Blagian theoretical framework thus obtained, in which art appears
as a space of tension between the ludic freedom of form and the structural
inaccessibility of being, producing a specific mode of existence that coincides
neither with conceptual knowledge nor with purely subjective expression, but
establishes, as an epiphany of being, an objectification of mystery. Art, as existence into mystery, is a paradoxical object of knowledge: although it belongs to this world, it concerns the metaphysical one, but from the threshold of this one.