Surviving communism. Escape from underground
Journal Title: Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review - Year 2012, Vol 17, Issue 17
Abstract
This essay seeks to provide a phenomenological description of the conscience’s particular quest to free itself from servitude. Trapped in the mechanism of a world that dictates and imposes totalitarian mechanisms of control and “production” of social and personal conscience, man begins his search for the paths of freedom and liberation from this prison-like mechanism. This quest of the conscience is also possible in this society of total human alienation, and even here it is an event of everyday life, of the practice of survival, and not an event of great histories and great confrontations. The human conscience is most definitely the conscience of freedom, of transcendence towards the centre of a freedom that remains an integral part of the human being, at least as a trace or a secret propensity of the socially and politically annihilated being. Communism can therefore be interpreted as an immense challenge to the individual, the human person, as well as the community: the ultimate challenge of seeking and finding freedom. Designated for total annihilation, the human conscience rediscovers through this quest for the centre, for self-definition, its true ontological status. The escape from communism should also be defined as the conscience’s quest for freedom, and not only as a political and economic act of dismantling the command structures of the old regime. Liberation from servitude is first and foremost an inner liberation from the condition of servitude, the transition beyond, towards a new human condition, even where this condition is one of fragility and transience.
Authors and Affiliations
Mihai Gheoghiu
Keywords
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Surviving communism. Escape from underground
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