TL note: you can find Blaga’s biography here
The problem of race. When researching the science of the phenomena of life with some interest and trying to penetrate into the secret hidden under a hundred other secrets, that of the appearance of the species and the variants of terrestrial beings, as well as into the sometimes extremely mathematical one of heredity, one does not really find satisfactory solutions to the problem of race, but one forms at least a rough idea of its insurmountable difficulties and complexity.
I devoted several years of passionate toil and enthusiastic assimilative energy to it. I count myself among those who keep up, with open curiosity, day by day, with all the discoveries that can somehow have an influence on the image we make of life and its phenomena. However, my efforts in this field did not give me the opportunity to participate in such an enlightenment as to be able to start my considerations on race in too dogmatic a manner. After my studies, I was left rather with the impression of an impasse and with a mistrust that I would like to communicate to the readers today. I would formulate this mistrust like this: scientists, who claim to have solved the race problem in all its complexity with scientific means – are either unconscious – or charlatans. And this is for the blessed reason that the race problem, under many of its aspects, is not even a scientific one. The problem of race has aspects on which the researcher can only decide on and make a judgment from the realms of metaphysics, morality, aesthetics, that is, from the realms of a world of desires and values that go far beyond the calling and possibilities of science. Among these shortcomings, let me mention only that science has not even managed to settle on at least a conventional definition of race. Anthropology offers us plenty of statistics and measurements, but every few years the results have to be reinterpreted according to ever newer criteria. How are the physical and mental attributes that are to be assigned to the "race" determined, and how are those that are due to the "environment" determined? Between what permitted boundaries can a characteristic of a race vary? At what degree of deviation from the average of a race can we be allowed to speak of a simple variant, and at what degree of deviation does the race, the mutation, begin? There are many questions of this kind which are usually settled, philosophically speaking, more by the tact, the common sense, or the good taste of the researcher, rather than according to criteria untouched by subjectivism. Precise answers cannot be expected from experiments and measurements, because experimental research and measurement postulates – in a certain way – precisely these answers a priori. Biology and anthropology still have their doors open to all surprises. —And if someone would invite us to recall some problematic results of "science", in which various metaphysical, moral, and aesthetic points of view are intermingled with and which are nevertheless presented naively and with all the pretention of “scientific" axioms—here are a few, as they come to mind without much effort. There are unyielding racist researchers who say that this and that race is, according to all anatomical and morphological signs that its majesty science has, a pure race. There are researchers who, with arguments drawn from all the drawers of human knowledge, maintain that any mixture of blood and alloy of substances between races are equivalent in their effects to the results of bastardization and degrade these races to the point of destruction. Other researchers, no less learned, find sufficient arguments, and of no inferior quality, to decide peremptorily that there is no pure race, and that the mixture of races, leading to an addition of virtues, has most often proved a fitting and advantageous process for the human species. These researchers do not realize that words like "disaster" or "advantage" imply a whole world of values, which cannot be decided upon according to scientific criteria. Specifically, scientists, attacking the problem of races with unjustified pretentiousness, managed, in the short span of a single century, to compromise it almost more irreparably than academic painters once compromised the nude. Let us treat those who have irritated us needlessly in the same way as the academic painters of a certain newer school were treated: let us ask for a ban — by a convention, say, international — of this subject, for at least another hundred years. Or more precisely: to ask science to limit itself to problems that really belong to it.
We will try in the following lines to look at the problem of race in a more relaxed spirit. Throwing overboard the ballast of mathematical and biological-statistical terms, let us regard race for the time being as an indecipherable entity of nature, and speak of it as one usually speaks of a human reality inhabiting a world of human values. In such a perspective, it is perhaps more appropriate to use the term "race" in a somewhat more everyday sense and without any pretensions to scientism. The word "race" in its current meaning is almost equivalent to that of "biological style". To the extent that we replace the term "race" with that of "biological style", we are actually put in a position to talk about race in terms closer to our intuition and feelings. Certainly, there exists the feeling of being in the presence of a man of "race", just as there is the feeling that you are in the presence of a work of "style". The one who has experienced this feeling has acquired through it a position from where he can launch into humanly intelligible considerations and appreciations. To talk about a symphony, you don't necessarily need to reduce it to the vibrations of the air that compose it on a physical level. On the contrary: to talk about a symphony in a human way, you have to completely forget that it is also made up of a sequence of air vibrations. In the case of race, we must abstract away what this entity could be in the realm of nature and limit ourselves to what it is in the realm of human feelings and values. We therefore make an analogy between the feeling that you are in front of the phenomenon of "race" and the feeling that you are in the presence of the phenomenon of "style".
I know that during my life I experienced this feeling in a sui generis way several times. A few years ago, during the picturesque and exotic sessions of the League of Nations in Geneva, where you are given the varied opportunity to meet human specimens able to vividly illustrate all the types displayed in an anthropological museum, I was impressed again and again, to the point of fascination, by the fully realised figure of the English statesman Sir Austen Chamberlain. I was simply a spectator and I was never given the opportunity to judge the qualities, neither moral nor intellectual, of this man who is reserved without being a downer, restrained without an effort, and organically imposing, but every time I was in front of him I experienced the overwhelming feeling that I was in the presence of the phenomenon of "race", and I contemplated it – without yet understanding its language – with the vibrant delight that a rare work of style communicates to you. I am talking about race and here I am guided towards very concrete cases. It is the best way for us to follow. Because the phenomenon of race, just like the phenomenon of style, can be best grasped by squaring yourself up to it and pointing with your finger at it in a concrete reality and atmosphere. —I remember another moment when I was touched by this same revelatory feeling, but in a completely different way. Years ago, when wandering through the north of Transylvania, I had to stop for a night in a Jewish village; I pulled up to an inn with its lights suffocated by smoke and darkness. A room was readied for me. When leaving the room in the morning, I entered a small square courtyard, surrounded by a porch. In the middle of the closed courtyard rose a marvellous figure of a kiosk overgrown with vines. It was a splendid May afternoon. In the kiosk, there were about six boys sitting at a table, of a biblical 12 years of age, with hair red as vine leaves in autumn, with spiral sideburns, and eyes brighter than those of a squirrel. In this fresh and sunny atmosphere, these children were talking passionately round an enormous copy of the Old Testament laid open on the table and exchanging guttural perspectives and dialectics. They were so engrossed in the fire of the debate that, that although I was standing right behind them, not a single one of them bothered to notice me. I witnessed this scene with patriarchal cubs for a long time, and then uttered to myself –as a comment on this whole picture – the word: "race"!
In our country of quite varied types, I was perhaps nowhere penetrated by the feeling that I find myself in the presence of race to the same extent as in front of our shepherds in Poiana Sibiului [Sibiu Glade]. These proud shepherds, in whose being are fulfilled the physical and spiritual qualities of a race of people, Romanian and Carpathian, qualities which in so many other parts remained - under the pressure of poverty and some well-known historical circumstances - latent, or incompletely developed, demonstrate palpably and with some approximation the level to which the average of our race could rise. I suspect, however, that these “poienari” [gladesmen] enjoyed an even more brilliant period of flourishing of their race than today, perhaps a hundred or two hundred years ago. Since then, some circumstances have intervened about which the doctors of the land could say something about, circumstances that certainly gave their ominous contribution to the beginning of the physical decline of this splendid race of people. Anyway, this finding does not change my conviction that the shepherds from Poiana Sibiului represent one of the peaks of the Romanian biological style. These people, with their tall figures, of an aristocratic air, of a controlled self-confidence, friendly and yet distant, tough yet without brutality and with a harsh serenity about them, as vegetative and astral as firs and as strong as bears, they have been recently noticed often with interest and admiration by foreigners too. There are few regions in Europe where simple people from the mountains or the country can make such an aristocratic impression. Recently, precious and well-made propaganda books have appeared with illustrations of people and places from Romania, and as I have been also publishing articles abroad for years, I know from daily experience how much our shepherds impress other, and with what persistent an echo, even and only from mere photographs. I am not at all concerned in the following text about what specific "race" flourishes in these glades from an anthropological point of view, how "pure" this race is, nor whether the Romanian from other regions does not somehow represent, from an anthropological angle, another race or a mixture of races. The shepherd in the glade interests me here as a biological, vital, and spiritual style, and from this angle, I must confess that in the presence of the “poienar” [gladesman] I am completely taken by the feeling that I find myself in front of such a style, realized fully and not merely made up of latencies, of possibilities, or from fragments about to be sketched out fully.
After you have become a little accustomed to considering race as a style, it is certain that most of the so-called "scientific" points of view from which the problem is attacked will seem to you as little essential as, for example, the feat the scientist makes when he sketches a graph after listening to a musical composition. With all its methodical advantages, the point of view of race as style is also fraught with danger, an even a great danger. The danger is all the greater the more our stylistic sensibility is rigid, but all the smaller the more our stylistic sensibility is elastic. An elastic stylistic sensibility experiences in the presence of races – as vital and spiritual styles – states that are accompanied by a certain piety, as if witnessing some urphänomen of nature. An elastic stylistic sensibility will translate itself easily and most often sympathetically into the body of physical and spiritual values of another race. But this is not the case with a rigid type of stylistic sensibility. A rigid stylistic sensibility will manifest an aversion to the whole of physical and spiritual values of another race. A rigid stylistic sensibility will tend to see in the physical and spiritual values of other races — non-values.
When race-consciousness is wretchedly paired with a rigid stylistic sensibility, the unsightly and ugly phenomenon to which we give the name of "racist messianism" is produced. This phenomenon consists in the exaltation of the physical and spiritual values of a single race. Racist messianism is characterized by the belief that a certain human race possesses all the qualities with which God intended to endow the human race, and that all other races possess these qualities only partially or in a degraded or defective way. The history of mankind has had its share of these less than gratifying messianisms: apart from the Jewish messianism of the Old Testament and the blonde messianism of German national-socialism, which is currently being talked about so much, there is also an analogous Anglo-Saxon messianism, as well as a Russian one. Each time, this messianism is differently nuanced and dressed in a different doctrine, but at the centre of each one of them is the exaggerated claim and pride of a certain race to be the "chosen race" of God. All racist messianisms, developed sometimes into theological doctrines, sometimes into biological ones, are equally forms of a collective arrogance. That a messianism is based on a fictitious contract with Jehovah or that it is built on equally fictitious considerations of natural science regarding the superiority in level and destiny of the blonde race – is not very important. Messianism! The ancient Hebrew one was based on a so-called personal covenant with divinity. The messianism of the Germans, who today want to "nordicize" themselves at any cost through physical hardening and paganization, is based not so much on a bilateral theological contract replete with clauses, but on some so-called privileges which would have been granted to the, the blondes, from nature. The difference between these two doesn’t seem that big to us. Jehovah changed his name to "Nature" and moved his preferences from the banks of the Jordan to the banks of the Spree. Racist messianism, with all its flora of fictions, existed and exists, no matter how much its form contradicts the feeling of respect for biological configurations and profiles, which should be accepted in their plurality. For his part, the Anglo-Saxon, since he set foot on his insular homeland and in his empire of the seas, believed himself – not admitting any discussion – to be God's chosen race. The sympathy that the Anglo-Saxons show almost ostentatiously for the Old Testament is only a symptom of this messianism. And the Russians, when they woke up to self-awareness and especially to the awareness that they are a huge nation, also found a way to exalt their historical role. The "mujiks" and the "idiots" of Russia suddenly became – exclusively – the only bearers of God on earth. At one point, Moscow dreamed of saving the whole of humanity, that is, probably of subjugating it. (It would be interesting to investigate to what extent Bolshevism exploited the messianic consciousness of the Russian people in its plans to revolutionize the world).
In accordance with itself, racist messianism of any kind has been and continues to be afflicted with an embarrassing blindness to all the virtues of other races. A people struck by this spiritual blindness is no longer able to overcome itself and sees only itself. All other peoples and races are seen in the distorting mirror of narcissism alone. Not even some outstanding thinkers were spared from the blindness that we have just highlighted. To Houston Stewart Chamberlain, one of the favourite theoreticians of German National Socialism, who by the way knew more than once to state the problem of race in a beautiful light as such, we reproach him first of all for his too rigid stylistic sensibility. The lack of elasticity made him incapable of understanding anything that did not bear the blond stamp of Germanism. Let us remind ourselves in what unjust and contemptuous tone he speaks in his famous book "The Foundations of the 19th Century", for example, about the ancient Egyptian culture, in which we are all used to admire without any reservation the first monumental culture that appeared in human history. And this for the reason — how irrelevant! — that the ancient Egyptians were not "Aryans." Stylistic sensitivity can be taught. Let us remember what truly obtuse views Europeans generally had of the black African races, while no one had yet taken the trouble or had the skill to penetrate into the secrets of their spiritual culture. Europeans, who want to learn something or broaden and nurture their stylistic sensibility, are invited to read or at least browse Frobenius' works on African cultures. I confess, and take responsibility under my signature for this judgement, that I have not read legends more poetically embodied and deeper in meaning than the legends of certain blacks. Just a few days ago I attended a conference about the poetry of pygmies from central Africa. Another incredible surprise. A "hymn to the rainbow" in which the pygmies, these human nothings, praise the colours of the sky and beg the rainbow not to kill them, moved me more deeply and more persistently than several anthologies of modern poetry of several European peoples put together. I had the opportunity to hear Polynesian lyric poetry, with broad rhythms and metaphors from the beginning of the world, which could’ve been signed by any great oriental poet from Li-Tai-Pe to Tagore. Fortunately, I have never suffered from racist messianism, but if I had, the few random readings that introduced me to the soul of the coloured would have definitively cured me of any arrogance.
If I were asked what attitude I would take towards the problem of race mixing, I would answer: in this matter too, I am not guided by so-called discoveries or scientific principles, but rather by my stylistic sensibility. In other words, I will declare myself against race mixing, but not from biological considerations of the purity of the hereditary plasma, but because it seems to me that mixture leads in most cases to a lack of style and in a certain sense to a lack of character. It is an elementary sense of style and a quasi-religious respect for the forms of vital substances at play, feelings that I cannot and do not intend to overcome. The feeling of being in the presence of a race which has been favoured by circumstance to realize itself in consistency with itself and to translate its potential into creative deeds, is a rare joy and generous satisfaction, and it would seem monstrous to me to give it up easily. Let's not spoil, not level, not wash away, we humans, what has sprung from the bosom of nature and fate with the irresistible and convincing power of an original plastic phenomena delimited by grace from above. No less reprehensible is the other way, the one of racist exaltation. The attitude, pretentious in form, dangerous as it is naive in essence, of racist messianism, which in its latest theoretical and practical consequences secretly or openly propagates the spiritual, physical, and economic imperialism of a single race - is not justifiable in any way. The feeling, the only one, that opens the door to an ecumenical framework, the feeling of piety in front of the phenomenon of race – dictates us to be ourselves, under our stars, and to allow others to be themselves – under their stars.
Great essay. Blaga's philosophy demands translation into English, in a more affordable volume than the only collection of his philosophy that's currently out in English. In fact, it demands translation into all major Western languages, and I hear there's been recent interest in his philosophical work in Russia as well lately. His poetry has been translated into English, as has an early play he wrote, but there should be more affordable English translations of his philosophy published.