Work · Life & Existential Philosophy
Trilogy of Knowledge
Distinguishes “paradisiac” knowledge, which reduces mystery, from “Luciferian” knowledge, which deepens it, and argues that the “Great Anonymous” subjects all human knowledge to a “transcendent censorship” that keeps it from ever grasping the absolute.
Introduction
The “Trilogy of Knowledge” (1943) brings together three books of the early 1930s – “The Dogmatic Aeon” (1931), “Luciferian Knowledge” (1933) and “Transcendent Censorship” (1934). Blaga distinguishes “paradisiac” knowledge, which seeks to reduce mystery to the known and works with concepts in the manner of classical rationalism, from “Luciferian” knowledge, which opens a problem within the mystery and thereby makes it deeper. Dogma, in the sense of the early church councils, appears as a form of thought that affirms an antinomy without resolving it. Human beings cannot know the ultimate ground positively, since a “Great Anonymous” subjects all knowledge to a “transcendent censorship”. The trilogy forms the first part of Blaga’s system, followed by the trilogies of culture and of values.
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