THE APPROACH OF SPACE AND AN INTER-WAR ANTHROPOLOGICAL MODEL
THE APPROACH OF SPACE AND AN INTER-WAR ANTHROPOLOGICAL MODEL

Summary/Abstract: First of all, the anthropological approach of space is counter-posed to the objectivistic one. Then, by discussing a philosophical theory about space as a cultural construct and factor of style shaping the way of life and trajectory of a people, the paper intends to emphasise a philosophical solution in a time of world crisis. Indeed, the inter-war Lucian Blaga wrote his work in a time of phase crisis: the monopoly phase crisis of capitalism, already showed by the First World War and continuing until the constitution of state monopoly capitalism. Blaga’s theory about space as the main factor of cultural style has sketched a solution where the culture rather separates humankind into cultural fragments framed by cultural styles and predestined by their cultural spaces: this solution may be viewed as a reflex of the real antagonisms within the world. In Blaga, the deep cause of the subjective feelings and faculty of creativity of the contemporary people lies within the immemorial collective unconscious that shapes the cultural style. The collective unconscious is the place where the expectations and patterns of behaviour of the immemorial ancestors were shaped just by the structure of space. These expectations and patterns constitute the unconscious spatial horizon, that which is trickling in every conscious creation and behaviour. The spatial horizon of the unconscious is a spacematrix, as that of the Romanians, described by Blaga’s model of the “Ewe-space”. And the cultural style is the memory of mental structures containing the ancient and continuous logic of natural determinism over man, transposed within his unconscious psychical world. The paper is concerned with the interweaving between the ideological subtext and the ingeniousness of creation in the framework of philosophical theory. It analyses the meanings of the focus on what is continuous and motionless and gives a sentiment of security, the cultural style, and the place of such a theory of culture in the ways of life of a people.

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