The Part of the Whole: Analysis of the Relationship between the European Cultural Model, the „Sentiment of Being”, and the Structures of Language
In this paper I attempt to sketch out a critique of Constantin Noica’s notion of cultural model. In his writings on this topic, the Romanian philosopher articulates an atemporal typology of culture which is based on five types of relationship between rule and exception, or between the One and the Ma...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
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Axis Foundation
2005-06-01
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| Series: | Hermeneia: Journal of Hermeneutics, Art Theory and Art Criticism |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://hermeneia.ro/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/balba-nr.-spec._0.pdf |
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| Summary: | In this paper I attempt to sketch out a critique of Constantin Noica’s notion of cultural model. In his writings on this topic, the Romanian philosopher articulates an atemporal typology of culture which is based on five types of relationship between rule and exception, or between the One and the Many. In this semantic context I set out to show that the five relations between the One
and the Many are in fact ways of conceiving the relationship between man and being, and, furthermore, that in times past, culture (or the relationship between man and being) was structured by religion. Noica approaches this issue from a
modern perspective, according to which religion is one of the many domains of culture, the coherence and structure of which was derived from an abstract scheme. This kind of approach cannot yield the expected result. Thus, according to Noica, the ancient monotheistic culture, for instance, was structured by the
fundamental fact that the „exception confirms the rule.” Against this interpretation, I attempt to show that Noica’s scheme of cultural explanation has little if any value unless it is applied to a culture which is endowed with the sentiment that it has an exceptional destiny. More specifically, monotheistic religion in the ancient world is the exception to a broader rule. The practitioners
of monotheistic religion highlight their difference and exceptional condition, which is precisely that which makes it possible for the exception to confirm the rule. This proves that the types of relations that establish between the One and the Many are meaningless in the absence of their material conditioning. On the
other hand, Noica tries to articulate a new cultural morphology from the standpoint of grammatical morphology. His attempt yields a typology of European culture based on the idea that each of the familiar historical periods (the Medieval Age, The Renaissance, the Baroque, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and late modernity) introduces the „reign” of a certain morphological
category. My strategy is to compare Noica’s discontinuities with those of Foucault in order to argue that the former undertakes an archaeological investigation of European culture. At the same time, however, Noica aims to extend the range of this method. However, I came to believe that Noica’s understanding of culture, which is based on the categorial structure of language in its relationship to being, is essentially logocentric and Eurocentric. Noica wishes to prove the possibility of cultural morphology in general, but his starting points are, first, the morphology of Indo-European languages and, second, an Aristotelian conception of grammar. On this basis one can infer that „universality,” according to Noica, would have to be defined in terms of the answer to the Cratylic question whether barbarians have access to the thinking
of being. The same, highly questionable type of philosophical reflection is revealed by Noica’s The Romanian Sentiment of Being. Noica wants to show that „our” universal is of the general kind, but forgets to ask if the generic universal is indeed „ours”. |
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| ISSN: | 1453-9047 |