Trãirism’ and Existentialism

 

Trãirism developed from the thought of Nae Ionescu, whose philosophical term trãire (‘living-ism’) became an inspiration for the younger intellectuals56 between the two World Wars. Tutea was influenced by this, along with Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran. The fact that Ionescu is not universally held in high regard today should not be allowed either to obscure his historical significance, nor debar him from consideration as a thinker in his own right. Ionescu developed trãirism in a religious and non-materialist direction. His horror of system, especially of Marxism,57 is shared by Tutea, who refers to Ionescu’s description of the system as a ‘coffin’, in contrast to ‘living thought’.58 He quotes Ionescu’s view that salvation precludes any sense of ‘frozen form’.59This fundamental emphasis in Ionescu profoundly influenced Þuþea’s own stance against rigidly conceived and constructed systematic thought.

Eliade and especially Cioran transmuted trãirism, as it was originally conceived, into a form of secular existentialism which, Tutea claimed, was itself a system incapable of leading beyond the ‘antechamber of life’.60 Secular existentialism ‘cannot accommodate holiness or heroism’.61 Hence Camus’s ‘radical pessimism’ and view of absurdity as the ultimate context of all experience, at the end of The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’62  Furthermore, for Camus, Sisyphus is almost a Romantic hero or anti-hero. Tutea’s criticism of Camus grows out of his very different experience of life – in its crudest physical and mental brutality. For Tutea, Sisyphus in Hades, pushing his great boulder up the mountain only to have it roll down again as he reaches the top, represents stupefying mindlessness, dehumanising emptiness, and barren stereotyping of humanity as a concept rather than joyful creative celebration of human personality in the infinite diversity and extent of its actual living ‘nuances’. Tutea regards what Camus calls obliquely Sisyphus’s ‘happiness’ as a form of moral suicide inseparable from the absurdity63 of his toil. Camus’s existentialism was simply concerned with existence, not life. Although Tutea appreciated the attempt of trãirism to engage with the totality of the human person, he was unable to accept the existentialist world view of Ionescu’s disciples.

‘Absurd indifference toward, and existential disgust for, the world are characteristics of the period in which we live.’64 Chaos (meaninglessness) and aesthetic anarchy, in Tutea’s view, provide no worthwhile response to, or escape from, the deadening commonplaces and clichés of existence. He rejects pursuit of the absurd, the gratuitous, and the grotesque as means of escape from existential impasse. He has no patience with Camus’s declaration (at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus) that suicide is ‘la question fondamentale de la philosophie’.65 Reduced to the level of ‘existential technique’, secular existentialism indicates a condition of drained communicativeness derived from a kind of colour-blindness in the use of nuance:

‘Lack of communication leads to solipsism, for which Schopenhauer prescribes internment in the madhouse.’66 Within a perspective bounded absolutely by human birth and death, existential pessimism and despair are not surprising, for existence is characterised merely by the futility of change, and by circular, repetitive experience (including failed attempts at escape). Because secular existentialists like Camus live ‘without hope and illusion’, their happiness is ‘inseparable from the absurd’ in which ‘Sisyphus forever shoulders anew his futile burden’.67 Their concept of movement being limited to this world, they can know nothing of nuance in the liberating, transformative, sacramental sense which Tutea offers.

As a Christian form of existentialism, trãire means, for Tutea, ‘mystical experience which releases the human being from the antechamber of life and knowledge’ and which, ‘through faith, makes the impossible possible in the believer’s heart’.68 It comprehends the whole of a person’s being, and leads to spiritual growth: ‘This is the sense of Nae Ionescu’s trãirism. Trãirism should be conceived in theological rather than philosophical terms.’69 Yet Tutea’s philosophy of nuances, as I will show later in this chapter, goes beyond the theological, into terms essentially sacramental in nature – perhaps (to suggest a different nuance of categorisation) a kind of affirmative liturgical ‘philosophy’.

From: Petre Tutea
Beetwen Sacrifice and Suicide
by Alexandru Popesku