Proiectul cultural al generației interbelice. De la provincialism la universal
In this chapter I will discuss the role that Mircea Eliade had, as an exponent of the generation, in the interwar Romanian culture in general and the humanist thinking in particular, under two challenges, the historical and the political. Between the two tendencies crystallized in the Romanian interwar period, philosophical universalism and autochthonism, Mircea Eliade intuits that, after the achievement of the national unity on December 1, 1918, the Romanian culture must assume a new direction. Between the first tendency, which understood that the specificity of modernity lies in the universality of truth beyond the national specificity, and the second interested in deciphering the "Romanian vein" in the cultural and philosophical capitalization of ethnicity, Eliade projects the destiny of national culture in the universal dimension, considering that Romania's destiny must be a cultural one, and our cultural modernity should by represented by the "universal man". Eliade's project, perhaps, was doomed to failure or had a partial and unfinished character, and modernity understood as cultural universalization was only the awareness of a trend that, under the "terror of history", did not materialize. But he became a personal project that Mircea Eliade assumed through the hermeneutics of the world's religions and the understanding of homo religiosus and "total man".
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