"And thirdly: we are in a world in which you need to act in such a way that, while preserving your own dignity, you nevertheless do not need to arrive at your own invalidation. Don't invalidate the gift which carries you beyond yourself, into a vaster responsibility, for the sake of matters which turn out to be secondary in the end.
There was one man in our generation who stood above us all, by his reading, his fantasy, the grace of his intellect, his moral consciousness. He was called Mircea Vulcanescu. He died in prison in 1950. He had been sentenced to five years, and if he had not chosen to do what he did he would have survived the sentence and would have entered into the vaster responsibility which he had towards everyone else. Judge for yourselves whether or not I am right in what I argue.
"I found out a year ago why he died. At that time it was not permitted to speak in the cell. But in fact those imprisoned together used to set up little 'cultural universities': they learned languages, did history, philosophy, talked about their novels...One day the guard heard them talking and came into the cell: 'Who was talking?' They had all been talking. If they had all kept silent, if no one had accepted the blame, they would have received a collective punishment: staying on their feet for a few hours, or something like that. But seeing that no one spoke up, Vulcanescu took it all upon himself, and denounced himself alone. What followed? He was taken from the cell and put in the 'isolator.' It was winter; in the isolator water had been spilt on the floor and had turned to ice. In the first day of isolation you got nothing to eat and you were kept undressed. So he was undressed and taken to the isolator. There were another four or five prisoners inside. They were all clapping their hands and jumping, trying to keep going till evening. At a certain moment a young man of about twenty collapsed. Vulcanescu was fifty, and thought it was more important for the young man to live. So he lay down on his back on the floor and told the others to put the youth on top of him. It was a sublime gesture. The young man survived. Vulcanescu got pneumonia and died. Let me ask you: Was he right to do what he did? Would it not have been more deeply ethical to have thought of what he owed the others, of all the good he had to do for the whole community once he got out of prison? To have thought of all those with whom his extraordinary mind might have been shared? What I am preaching is not cowardice, or general moral ugliness, but ethics put in the service of something, not ethics for its own sake. For his first gesture, when he took the blame for everyone by saying that he had been talking, represents bare ethics, in the practice of which he made himself guilty, forgetting a larger responsibility. Vulcanescu carried with him a vaster mind, towards which he had deeper obligations. It is possible to preserve both your dignity and the consciousness of that larger responsibility.
"Public life is full of the traps which pure ethics lays for you.
Here we find the danger of falling into the intoxication of the 'fine gesture,' of ethical gesticulation, just as in every beautiful woman there is a seduction which provokes a false need for love in you. (...)
Constantin Noica
VULCANESCU, Mircea (1904-1952): Philosopher, sociologist, economist, a leading figure in the Criterion group, author of a work on The Romanian Dimension of Existence. As recounted by Noica in the Diary (8th May 1981), he died in prison.
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