In the dialogue of the Cotidianul daily, Andrei Pleşu adds in his turn something essential in this sense: "the specificity of this type of universe is that it doesn't have its meaning in itself. It is entirely organized by comparison to a meaning which, while it is not external from a spatial perspective, is separate and has a radiant and ordering function. It is a world which is not self-sufficing, not centered upon itself; it is not centripetal and egolatre. It is a world which accepts to live in a very coherent and serene dependency with a higher principle which constitutes its premise, while the modern worlds are living in the euphoria of their sufficiency." Let's try to follow this lead of "dependency" which would define "traditional man?s? world which Bernea constantly refers to, a world which is different and opposed to "modern worlds", which are centripetal and self-sufficient.

Psychology makes a typological distinction, elaborated by Rotter (1966) between that which used to name external and internal locus of control, respectively: ("He that is born to be hanged shall never be drowned" may prove "externality", while "what goes around comes around" may show "internality"). More precisely, we are dealing with a projection of the "source of control", of the active principle, so to say, in a correlative, but external instance of the individual (God, an institution, the father etc.) or in an internal instance, typical to the individual himself (personality, reason, will etc.). From this point of view, not only individuals, but entire populations may differ in tendency, while being more or less "externalist" or "internalist", as a whole. Moreover, we can use this alternative in order to sketch the passage through modern ideology[7]from a perspective which is useful to the present discussion.

From the perspective of Man (and not of the individual!) there are two basic possibilities: that the origin of control lies either outside Man (it is of an external, previous and higher nature, heteronomy, or it is placed within Man itself, having him as origin, autonomy). In other words, the "reason" is projected either in the World, or within Man. In the first case, we can talk about a given order of the World (or cosmocentrism, which in Romanian is defined by the beautiful word "rânduială," or "ranging"). In the second case we speak about an order that was instated by Man - anthropocentrism. This is precisely the intuitive difference which Bernea identified between "ranging" and "order": "ranging" is given to man who will thus be able to do "what is in order", while "order" is Man's creation, who thus becomes the measure of his freedom to order his own life.

[7]We use the term ideology in the sense in which Mary Douglas (1986/2002) speaks about "the cognitive dimension of institutions" or in which André Petitat (1998) speaks about ideology as "transcendence of the conventional";  in other words, as the last reason to support a given society or social life, in general.