Philosophical Foundations of Art as Play and Existence into Mystery

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 argue that art, among all human experiences, most clearly illustrates the process of becoming — not merely as a product of its psycho-historical context, but as an expression of humanity's fundamentally creative, demiurgic nature. 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 former 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. In the latter part 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 which 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.