Ontology, History and the Philosophy of National Identity at Constantin Noica

This paper proposes an outline of the history of Constantin Noica’s ideas in order to identify the origin of his thoughts and discover the place of his writings on Romanian cultural identity within his philosophical system. I will prove that in his first writings (from the 1930s) Noica follows Kantian idealism, while in his later work (1940s, and mainly beginning with 1950) he is closer to Hegel, also announcing the premises and the structure of his future ontological system, while his texts dedicated to Romanian cultural identity (1970–1978) are dependent in their ideas both on Hegelian idealism and organicism and on the Romanticist philosophy of language. At the same time, I will demonstrate that Noica’s anti-political attitude is a result of his philosophy as well as of his philosophical biography.

Full Text