Six Maladies of the Contemporary Spirit

Six Maladies of the Contemporary Spirit undertakes an analysis of history, culture and the individual in terms of what Noica describes as the fundamental "precariousness" of Being. From the level of inanimate matter to that of the human spirit, Being does not reside inertly in the logical categories of universal/general/particular/individual and determinations we employ to define it, but is continually transforming the nexus of relations between them. Being, as it were, atrophy or hypertrophy, resulting in an inflammation or deficiency of one or another of its terms as it manifests itself in the spirit, i.e. in individual humans, peoples, cultures, or historical epochs (the "Zeitgeist"). Using the Aristotelian terms for general, individual and determination (katholou, tode ti and horos) Noica, half seriously as he himself admits, coins six pseudo-medical terms for these maladies of the spirit: catholitis, todetitis and horetitis for pathological excess, and acatholia, atodetia and ahoretia for pathological deficiency of one or more of the terms of Being as they manifest themselves through the spirit. One example is Moliere's Don Juan, which dramatises the condition of acatholia: the pathologically obsessive pursuit of the particular, exacerbated by a morbid rejection of the universal. Don Juan falls into the "bad infinity" of endless particulars, desiring to conquer and possess each and every woman in her unique individual being, while rejecting any universal notion of woman. Tolstoy, on the other hand, in the novel War and Peace, suffers from the opposite disorder - atodetia - in which individuals are crushed into insignificance by universals such as historical laws or abstract concepts like the "type of the Russian peasant"