MIRCEA ELIADE AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEING
MIRCEA ELIADE AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEING

Summary/Abstract: The work of Mircea Eliade brings the concepts of being versus nonbeing into sharp focus. To this, one might retort that spirit rather than being, and indeed, the primacy of the spiritual is the actual focus of Eliade’s “early” output. And that, if anything, the sacred rather than being, again, is the focus of Eliade’s “later” output. For is the sacred not, to sum it up, the focus of Eliade’s work in its entirety? Hence, my research hypothesis is that Eliade makes progress across his life from an “early” focus on spirit to a “later” focus on being. Therefore, to him, being is as intimately linked to the sacred as nonbeing is linked to the profane, its counterpart. Applying Rita Sherma’s “hermeneutics of intersubjectivity” to a close reading of Eliade’s scholarly work shows how and why his discovery, or rather, his recovery of the sacred as a topic of ultimate concern becomes a discovery or a recovery of “true” being, identified with an “archaic ontology” – modelled on Plato. Indeed, Eliade’s critics would concede that much, that is, that Eliade’s is a scholarly construct, while he insists instead that historically it is Plato who had modelled his philosophy on “archaic ontology”. Effectively, Eliade’s evolution from a focus on spirit to a focus on being mirrors Mark Smith’s distinction regarding how we think about divinity, about humanity and their relation, between a Biblical metaphysics of power and of spirit, and a Christian medieval (and indeed, Greek Classical) metaphysics of being.

• Details
• Contents