Conferences
101. Dialogue with Mihai Șora
The first conference of the National Theatre in 2018 shall take place on 21st January, from 11.00 a.m., in the Studio Hall and shall be held by philosopher and essayist Mihai Șora. The conference shall be entitled: 101. Dialogue with Mihai Șora.
About the Conference
Over time, Mr. Șora has held further two conferences at NTB, but this time, at the incredible age of 101 years, he opted for a special meeting with the audience of the National Theatre of Bucharest. The conference shall commence with the projection, in premiere, of a film, a portrait-documentary with a duration of 45 minutes, followed by a dialogue with the audience. The being Mihai Șora is a profoundly (and authentically) dialogical one, very seldom encountered in our culture. Or, a film (where Mihai Șora is the main character, of course) has precisely this purpose: to introduce the audience into the so complex, unusual and atypical territory of this silent, piercing, humble philosopher, whom one gets to know only after years, days, entire hours of patient and careful vicinity… And one can – to a certain extent – „share“ him with others, with those people who do not have the time, occasion or privilege of always being around him.
About Mihai Șora
Born on 7th November 1916, in Ianova, Timiș County, Mihai Șora is a philosopher and essayist. Since 2012, he is an honorary member of the Romanian Academy.
After high school studies in Timișoara, he would pursue philosophy studies at the University of Bucharest (1934-1938). There, he had Nae Ionescu and Mircea Vulcănescu as professors, among others, and Mircea Eliade as a teaching assistant at the seminar, for three years. Scholar of the French government, he arrived in January 1939 in Paris, where, under the guidance of Jean Laporte, he wrote a PhD thesis on La notion de la grâce chez Pascal / The notion of grace in Blaise Pascal’s works.
The menace of the Wehrmacht’s vertiginous advancement made him leave Paris in June 1940 and, after long wonderings, he settled down in Grenoble (1940 – 1945), because there Jacques Chevalier, „an inveterate Pascal follower” was practising, according to his own words. In this period, he conceives his first book, Du dialogue intérieur, an essay of metaphysical anthropology, published later, in 1947, at Gallimard Publishing. During wartime, he participated in the antifascist French resistance and afterwards he became a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, from 1945 to 1948.
Not grasping the true tragic dimension of the de facto occupation of Romania by the Soviet Union, he returned to the country in the fall of 1948, with the intention to return to France, but it was too late. The border had already been closed and at the same time, Romania’s opening towards the West for almost 20 years.
However, due to his youth and his obvious and outspoken apolitical attitude, he was not hindered from doing intellectual work. He worked as an expert advisor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1948 – 1951), then as a head of department at the Foreign Languages Publishing House (from 1951 to 1954) and editor in chief at the State Publishing House for Literature and Art (1954 – 1969), where he had the outstanding editorial merit to be the founder of the new series Library for Everyone.
Mihai Șora is a founding member of the Group for Social Dialogue, of the Civic Alliance and the Romanian Phenomenology Society.
He translated from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Reveries of a Solitary Walker), Jean-Paul Sartre (No Exit), Benjamin Fondane.
He was awarded the Writers’s Guild Prize for The Salt of the Earth (1978) and for The Leaf of Grass (1998).
After December 1989, he was a Minister of Education in the first temporary democratic government, led by Petre Roman, and the sole minister who resigned from the government, as a sign of protest in the aftermath of the miners’ riots from 13-15 June 1990, refusing afterwards to hold any office in the state apparatus.
In 2016, he was bestowed the „Star of Romania” National Order to the rank of Knight.
Works:
Du dialogue intérieur, 1947, Paris, Editions Gallimard; Romanian translation About the Inner Dialogue. Fragment from a Metaphysical Anthropology, Humanitas, 1995; 2006; The Salt of the Earth, Cartea Românească Publishing, 1978; Humanitas, 2006; To Be, to Make, to Have, Cartea Românească Publishing 1985; Humanitas, 2006; me&you&him&her or generalised dialogue, Cartea Românească Publishing 1990; Humanitas, 2007; The Leaf of Grass, 1998; Croquis and Evocations, 2000; Do We Still Have a Future? Romania at the Beginning of the Millennium, interviews, Polirom, 2001; Common Places, Universalia, 2004; The Moment and the Time, Paralela 45 Publishing, 2005
Translated by Simona Nichiteanu
