The professor, dumbfounded, intervened.
‘Gentlemen, please!’
‘Please retract your words.’
‘I retract them, very well, imputing to myself only my inevitable organic predilection towards …’
The listeners in the back moaned.
‘Ghița!’
Astonished:
‘Who, me?’
Philosophy courses were attended by serious, hard-working, half-educated students. The uninitiated had no hope of understanding, while the half-educated matured in their awareness and understanding of the subject through self-study. The only course students attended even if they stood no chance of following the discussion was Logic and Metaphysics. The young professor had a swarthy, furrowed face, and oddly blinking deep-set eyes, with blue irises rimmed by dark circles.
The professor would enter smiling, his shoulders slightly stooped. He sat himself comfortably on his chair, without the usual academic gravitas, and began to speak naturally and clearly, surveying the class. Each sentence seemed to be conceived then and there. He took pleasure in a newly coined expression, and would repeat it, modulate it, convey it while leaning forward across his desk, he would articulate it with perfect emphasis, strip it naked. The syntagma would lead him down a line of reasoning the results of which were impossible to anticipate. The classroom ran forward with him for a few steps and then listened as he retreated, tormented by the darkness still enveloping the new formula, saddened by his listeners’ mental darkness. He was tempted all the while to leave the thought unfinished and to revert to a more familiar means of expressing it, one more accessible to the students. And so the hour passed with the tormented professor at his desk, and a stunned audience in their seats, seduced by the agony conveyed by his irises, the dark circles under his eyes, his stooped posture, his gestures, and his probing questions: ‘Is it not so? Is it not so?’
When his class remained inert for too long, the professor revived them with sallies against philosophy textbooks and against Kant. The professor divulged what was missing from the logic textbooks was logic.
‘But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to read them. Read them, but don’t believe them.’
The girls concealed their smiles behind their handkerchiefs. After he left, they commented on the professor’s eyes and his seductive ugliness; the boys voiced their misgivings. The literature students could not understand how he had been awarded a PhD for a thesis that was on mathematics. The polytechnic college students could not understand how he could be an Orthodox mystic. The theology students could not forgive his jokes or his secular leanings.
To me, all these things seemed natural and commendable. I had long since learned not be surprised by a geometer poet, a musical philologist, or a mystical professor of anatomy. But I was troubled by his Orthodox fanaticism. I understood that his religious experience could be both authentic and outside the bounds of logic. But what about his respect for dogmas, taken to be not only nuclei of potentiated faith, but also actual truths that could be rationally proven? Was his Orthodox faith actually or implicitly the result of some need for pure spirituality? Or was it based on theological conclusions?
The life of the Logic Professor provided me with the certainty that answers to the crises originating in my adolescence would eventually become clear to me. If that life was the one he allowed to be glimpsed. And, in particular, if he did not believe in the primacy of grace. But what about his state of eternal temptation, now vanquished, now victorious, glinting in triumph within blue pupils framed by dark rings? Disquiet, which was more than mere logic clashing with metaphysics and theology, could not exist in the mind of one who had found God. What if the professor did not believe in God, as I did not believe in Him, despite the callings that trouble the soul? If he did not believe, then what hope did I have of finding peace on the path I walked, led by destiny and self-sacrifice? What other path was open to me, if the Logic Professor had not already followed it ahead of me?
And despite everything, what if he still believed? How could I tell him that I was a Christian who did not believe in God? How could I tell him that Jesus was sometime made manifest to me, in myself and from myself? Could I logically say that God did not exist, because ignorant and prideful sinner that I was, I had not yet had the opportunity to make his acquaintance? And this relationship with God – something I knew nothing about – how could I discuss it with him? Could I speak with him honestly, or try to test him with questions? But how could I test him, the university’s most astute dialectician?
With every new logic lecture I grew more and more troubled. Over the last few years, I had been plunged into confusion and desperation every time I had tried to follow the problem through to its logical conclusion. I was dissatisfied with classic solution once I realised the subjectivity inherent in the divisions of concepts, judgements, and reasoning; as soon as I understood for myself that judgements were not always the product of relationships having been established between two concepts, or between a concept and an object, or between two objects, I abandoned it. I reached the point where I could not distinguish a concept from a judgement. The helped me to understand the only distinction: the existential element; the difference between the noun ‘thunder’ and the verb ‘to thunder’. From there, I was able to move forward by myself. But I became so confused that I had to refer back to the textbook. I studied the logic of Benedetto Croce. And in the first few chapters, I found snatches of my own observations, which were rarely different to other conclusions. Croce was both clear and obscure. It was therefore necessary that I should gain a better understanding of Hegelian logic. From Hegel, whom I did not always understand, I came back to the moderns. I spent excruciating weeks with Gentile, Goblot, Enriques. One morning, confused, depressed, exhausted, I hid the books away on a shelf, without having come to any firm conclusions.
I decided to speak to the professor. He smiled encouragingly all the while. Sheepishly, I rambled on, without managing to reveal to him my disquiet. He interrupted.
‘What a happy age, nineteen – so much ahead of you, no reason to rush. How should I put it? One understands such matters only after not understanding them for a very long time. It took me seven years to find an answer, although I have yet to understand the problem of induction. And there are questions I hope I shall never fully comprehend.’
We walked side by side, next to the university building. The professor spoke to me in a kind and friendly tone. I almost asked:
‘Do you believe?’
But I knew that he could not answer me.
‘We can’t understand anything on our own. It comes to us, at a certain age, like the sexual urge or arthritis.’
‘But I want to find an answer, through logic.’
‘I suggest you first become completely and utterly confused. Afterwards, you’ll begin to see clearly, to understand organically, effortlessly, without torment.’
‘What should I do?’
‘Waste your time L do you even know how to waste time? Grab a piece of paper and doodle on it with a pencil until evening. Then visit a tavern! But whatever you do, don’t show off, and don’t talk about philosophy – you’d ruin everything. Drink, my boy!’
I looked at him, stunned. The professor’s blue eyes twinkled in their dark sockets. He was pale, very pale, with devilishly arched eyebrows.
‘You are precocious. But what’s worse, at your age, I drank all the time and I still turned
