Looking Westward. The Submissiveness of Polish Philosophy

Looking Westward

The Submissiveness of Polish Philosophy

There is Polish sausage, there are Polish pierogi[1], there is even a Polish notation in logic, but is there a Polish philosophy? This question has been repeatedly asked by Polish intellectuals over the centuries[2], so far with no universally agreed answer forthcoming. And there seems to be no hope for one, since very much the same question has regained its urgency in recent times, in the period of wholesale transformation, social and cultural, of the region of Eastern and Central Europe, and is debated with heat far too vigorous for any conciliation. One thing is pretty clear, though: there are Polish philosophers, and they are people with an acute identity problems.

Thanks to the all-embracing political, social and cultural change, Polish philosophers have all too gladly shed the constraints of heavily distorted doctrine of Marxism. The doctrine, in its propagated version, aspired to an all-inclusive universality and final truth. However, even though it has been rejected almost totally, its demise has made it apparent that, despite its gross oversimplifications and distortions, Marxism had served a very important need which ingrained itself deeply in the Polish mind: a need for a universal, fundamentalist conception of the natural and social world, together with a well-defined conception of the philosopher and his or her role in society.

Marxism satisfied this need for its supporters. For those who, despite the totalitarian system, had had the courage to reject Stalinist Marxism, very much the same universalistic and fundamentalist need was usually satisfied by one of many doctrines opposed to the Stalinist version of Marxist orthodoxy: Thomism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, or Hegelianism. With Marxism gone, however, Polish philosophers of all persuasions have lost something very important: for some, it was the loss of the final truth they earnestly believed in; for others, it was the loss of the enemy, destruction of which was the aim of their all intellectual efforts.

Thus, having won the battle of 1989, or lost it, as the case may be, an average Polish philosopher found himself in a situation in which he has to find a reason to remain a philosopher, a reason which would be as compelling as before. I believe a similar worry is more or less universal across the region of former Soviet-dominated states and nations.

The current situation, then, can best be described as a frantic search for another comprehensive philosophical outlook, an equally universal and finally true Weltanschauung as Marxism. Worn-out Kuhnian metaphors turn out again to be very useful: a dominant paradigm has been rejected in a revolutionary process - though the revolution had primarily non-philosophical sources and reasons - which starts a subsequent period of theoretical disorder and a search for a new paradigm. Next question to be asked is where the new paradigm is to be found? What is the direction we are all supposed to be moving?

Usually, predicting the future is thought to be very difficult. But the question of the future of Polish philosophy is very easy indeed to predict. The answer concerning the source of a new paradigm which will be adopted here is the following: Polish philosophers will find their new philosophical idols to worship in the prosperous Western countries, primarily in America, but also in Germany, England, France, and too, to a lesser extent, in less affluent Italy, or maybe Sweden, or Norway. But why is that? What is the ground for such a preposterous certainty in predicting the future, particularly the future of human thinking? Did not, after all, late Sir Karl Popper provide us with a compelling proof (repeated subsequently by various writers, including Alasdair MacIntyre, though himself no Popperian at all) that the future cannot be predicted just because the future content of our thought and knowledge cannot be known beforehand? What makes me so sure in my prediction?

This is also an easy one: In the memorable year of 1989, newly regained freedom meant that everyone will, ever after, be free to stop looking eastwards for permission do anything of substance, particularly in philosophy. Philosophers in the West usually do not have the faintest idea of how stifling it has been, even for a humble, wholly insignificant person, to be in such a situation. Under the so-called Communism, publishing was a way to prevent one's perishing, just as it is in the Academia in the West. There were some differences, however: a carelessly published paper could sometimes be read by someone higher up on the Communist ladder, and it sometimes meant a sure way to extinction for its unfortunate writer. The resulting situation was that the stuff that usually got published boiled down to a meaningless repetition of approved phrases and statements. Very many people in philosophy have in fact published nearly nothing, altogether stifled by fear. Originality was available - to a limited extent, but still - only to those few currently favored, or feared, by the hierarchy.

  Thus it should not surprise anybody that in 1989 everyone eagerly turned their eyes westward. As far as politics is concerned, for example, nearly everyone has become a zealous liberal. Popper's and Fukuyama's Panglossian arguments that the liberal democratic world is the best of all possible worlds, have been found very convincing here. A somewhat similar process took place in philosophy as well. For Polish philosophers the truth seems now to be residing in the Western affluent countries. It is quite apparent that the more affluent a country is, the more truth-containing it is thought to be.

Another, newly rediscovered argument for the general philosophical U-turn runs that Polish philosophers, always feeling more affinity with European culture than with the "Asian barbarism" of the Soviet Union, have turned to the West to find the answers to their philosophical worries, just as the whole nation turned to liberalism to cure its economic ailments.

There are, however, some significant differences between available ways of aping Western ideas in politics and philosophy. As far as politics and economy is concerned, the lesson of the Western experience is pretty univocal: liberalism seems to be unquestionably victorious, or, rather, any presently known alternative to it seems to produce economically less desirable results (which does not preclude, one hopes, the possibility of an equally effective system, which would at the same time be socially less destructive, or, to put it differently, even more beneficial). In philosophy, however, it is more difficult to be equally positive as to which doctrine would be the best of all choices, and there seem to be no place for univocality in philosophy in general on this question, or any other.

This general difficulty is aggravated by another one, typical of the Polish mind. Substantial numbers of Polish philosophers have formed some ties with various centers of philosophy in the Western countries. As a rule they came to think that - after all former philosophizing was rejected as being tainted (one way or another) with totalitarian politics - the new philosophy is to be built according to the principles they have seen in operation in the West. But since Polish philosophers were going to very different places, to quite different centers of philosophy, nearly everyone thinks that the new universal order in philosophy should be established according to what he or she saw during his or her itinerary. Each recipe for salvation is, unfortunately, wholly different and incompatible with each other. Thus, with particularity being systematically confused with universality, not only agreement, but even communication is difficult to achieve.

Basically there are no original Polish philosophical projects to remedy the present, formerly unheard of, situation of incommensurability. The times of the Lvov-Warsaw School of Philosophy are now long gone. There is no Łukasiewicz, Tarski, or Leśniewski anymore. There is no Kotarbiński, Tatarkiewicz, Ossowska or even Ingarden[3] to establish an autonomous center for original Polish thought which would be able to contribute something of importance to philosophy, or at least to solve Polish philosophical problems. This inability should at least partly be explained by the terrible loss Polish philosophy suffered during the WW2, when a number of great Polish philosophers, some of them of Jewish extraction, were killed by the Nazis[4], and also by the subsequent communist control of original thinking referred to above.

Instead, quite a number of Western projects to enliven and to reconstitute Polish philosophy have achieved notoriety. Thus some think that the breakdown of Marxism, an offspring of the Enlightenment, is an evident sign of the breakdown of all modernist programs, and that they are all to be superseded by postmodernism. Another group, less numerous (consisting mainly of Catholic philosophers) is advocating a strictly antimodernist approach to the problem of reconstituting of philosophy in Poland. Others still are attracted by the paradigm of analytical philosophy as developed by Oxford philosophers and their descendants, despite of the fact that many analytical philosophersin the West (to mention Peter Hacker only)  feel that their movement is dramatically losing steam. Other doctrines and philosophies are being imported as well. Since each of these movements has its staunch adherents suffering from acute universalistic ambitions, there is little communication with members of other tribes, and little hope for any co-operation and mutual understanding.

The attitude of Polish thinkers towards postmodernism - the popularity of which justifies one in calling it a new Polish orthodoxy, something which would surprise a true Marxist and a true postmodernist alike - is a case in point. Contrary to the notorious postmodernist thesis that there are no centers of culture anymore, many Polish intellectuals, who repeat endlessly this very thesis, behave and argue in practice as if there were a center of the philosophical discourse, as if, indeed, postmodernism itself provided us with the final language capable of expressing all we wish to express. Supposedly this new true postmodernist philosophical religion has its Mecca, though there are differences as to where it is located: in NYC, Paris, London or maybe Coventry.

This, I hope, will suffice to show that when talking about philosophy in the region of Central and Eastern Europe, we are dealing with a serious intellectual situation, affecting the content and the level of education as a whole. Coming back to the present specific Polish philosophical condition: Polish writers are mostly concentrating their attention on authors from the English-language countries, which by far dominate in the exegetical output. Polish journals and books are plagued by more or less second- and third-hand accounts of randomly selected writings of Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, Martin Jay, etc., etc.; MacIntyre is beginning to be heard of. But also French (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Klossowski, Battaille, Deleuze etc.) and German (e.g. Wolfgang Welsch, Odo Marquard) writers are being widely read. For the newly converted Polish believers in the analytical tradition their Mecca is located in Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard or Berkeley. Others find it in Heidelberg, rarely in Rome, much more frequently in... the Vatican.

The interests of Polish philosophers are tremendously wide, yet their writings do not, as a rule, intend to be original. And it seems, that they, as yet, cannot be. They publish exegeses and reports from writers from other countries, as if their only function was to describe what one, feeling lost and groping in the darkness, had found, and meekly to say whether there is any point in moving in this or that direction or not. This is on the whole quite useful and necessary job, but it can hardly be counted as an original contribution to the philosophical conversation of mankind. The bulk of the writings is evidently bent on satisfying the need to know what one is supposed to be interested in, what one is supposed to be reading, talking and thinking about. Only rarely are the writings more ambitious than that.

Thus one is perhaps justified in understanding the word „condition” in the above title as describing some kind of a disease, an illness of mind which is incapable of originality, because it is scared of any independent thought, though the fear is now of a different character: it is the fear of being old-fashioned, outmoded, not au courant.

Let us sum up. Having all of the above in mind, it should come as no surprise that the situation in Polish philosophy closely resembles the situation in Polish show-business, where imitation (verging on plagiarism) of Western „cultural” output is equally rampant. Polish intellectuals compete with each other fiercely, but the object of competition is neither originality nor truth, but the fact that the one who manages to publish (in Polish) the first account of the philosophy of a Western writer, is afterwards considered a specialist on „the subject” (sic!), is generally admired, coveted, etc. The will to truth, if ever present here, is, as before, superseded by the will to theoretical safety. And it is satisfied not so much by adoption of one indubitable and irrevocable system of thought (a function formerly performed neatly by Marxism dogmatized into a nonsense), but rather by adoption of a truly postmodernist distance in expounding what they think to be the latest fashion in the West. And what is thought to be the latest philosophical fashion is, as a rule, mistaken for the final word. It is, then, obvious that the effectiveness of this cultural imperialism would be quite impossible to account for, had it not been for the abundantly evident eagerness of its victims. Their eagerness, in turn, can arguably be seen as a result of their being very unhappy with the present state they are in.

Thus, once such a „final word” has been seized, the rest of the Western fashions or home-made superstitions can safely be dismissed as irrelevant. It is a very useful mechanism (and its application seems to be more universal), since dismissal of creeds that are not being believed by me, conveniently relieves me from getting acquainted with them. Such a dismissal can also be easily transformed into dismissal of efforts of one's own colleagues who happen not to profess the same creed as one does. (In case of colleagues who happen to believe in the same philosophical creed, they can always be dismissed as inadequately learned, or as those who "did not really grasp the essence of Rorty", "the essence of postmodernism" , "the essence of communitarianism", etc.)

Quite often these exegetical writings display lack of analytical skills, which frequently leads to evident confusions, misreadings, misprisions, willful misinterpretations, outright lies, and - since analysis and careful criticism are rather rare - impressionistic writings dominate the scene. The result is that people write not so much what they think about something, but rather about what they vaguely guess someone wrote about what someone else thought. A pyramid of interpretatory metameta...levels results from such an attitude, with no detectable theoretical or didactic gain. Often the works and writers that are being discussed are randomly selected, which is due to a very prosaic reason: availability of their writings, or rather lack of it.

Bertrand Russell, in his philosophical beliefs, was all too often led by extratheoretical motives, especially by his loneliness and need of love, as well as by his gratitude to those who consoled him in this more or less permanent condition of his. All this is pretty evident from his recent biography by Ray Monk. But Russell, being a lord and a man of independent means, could afford to pursue those higher, spiritual and psychological aims as the main objective of his life. His great gift in auto-analysis, together with his literary skill, enabled him to get world-wide audiences interested in his intricate and even intimate thoughts and experiences. An average Polish philosopher, however, being no lord and having no wealth, is motivated by more mundane desires and, usually speaking English poorly, has less skills to make them sound interesting to anyone in the world, or, for that matter, to himself.

I believe that one can find similar psychological and social conditions, in more or less amplified forms, in other countries of the region as well. I also believe that the current intellectual dilemmas of the people in the region make this whole part of Europe into an unique field-research area for a new philosophical discipline, descriptive socio-psychology of philosophical thinking, which desperately needs to be established.

It is only fitting to end this diatribe by unambiguous statement that all these afflictions - mental and external as well - are something from which the author of the above suffers in equal measure with his compatriots.

[1] Incidentally, for some reason Poles call them Russian pierogi.

[2] Cp. a volume entitled Jakiej filozofii Polacy potrzebują? ([What Is the Philosophy That Poles Need?], PWN Warszawa 1970.

[3] To those interested in knowing who were the bearers of these strange names, I recommend a "Polish Number" of The Journal of Philosophy vol. LVII, No. 7, March 31, 1960, which includes an enlightening paper "Philosophy in Poland" by Max Rieser, and also, far more substantially, Jan Woleński’s book, The Philosophical Lvow-Warsaw School, Kluwer 1987.

[4] This loss was commemorated during the Xth International Congress of Philosophy in Amsterdam. In its Proceedings (Amsterdam 1949) an incomplete list of the Polish philosophers killed in that period can be found.