Stanisław Brzozowski’s performative criticism

Stanis?aw Brzozowski was active as philosopher and literary critic for only a few years at the turn of the twentieth century, yet his writings are still inspire contemporary thinkers and critics. In every important phase of the development of Polish literary criticism, Polish intellectuals have acknowledged Brzozowski as a writer who had the courage and critical acumen to confront modernity and examine closely contemporary trends of thought from the perspective of social and individual life. This continued presence of the celebrated critic cannot but be interesting for the researcher who is led to ask, what is so intriguing in Brzozowski’s work, why do successive generations of critics and intellectuals return to Brzozowski? Drawing on many important interpretations of Brzozowski’s work (Burek, G?owiński, Nycz), I want to show that in Brzozowski’s work it is possible to find everything contemporary criticism and thought needs, because his books contain, in nuce, projects and strategies which can be (and are) used in different ways by critics representing different ideologies and worldviews. Brzozowski worked out, or rather attempted to work out, ideas which are a source of modern critical projects but in addition his work comprises a repertoire of possibilities which contemporary critical thought can turn to its advantage. Brzozowski’s work can be also treated as a performative act, calling forth the reader’s response, in this way shedding new light on it. I also show that “performative consciousness” is both close to Brzozowski’s practice of writing and deeply rooted in his philosophical conviction. Brzozowski can be considered a representative of modernist, critical literature, in which reading and writing become a mode of experience, a privileged social discourse, and a “leaven,” an act and an activity.     

Stanisław Brzozowski on the ideal of the modern man

Stanisław Brzozowski formulated the ideal of modern man in the polemic with the contemporary man, who has ceased to believe in truth and moral values and is devoid of the will to act. For Brzozowski modernity involves the discovery of truth about the human condition: about man as an autonomous subject, a creator of values, who struggles with non-human reality. This truth was formulated in Kant’s idea of autonomy and in Marx’ idea of a collective conquest of the world of nature. For Brzozowski, ideal modern man is “the conscious labourer,” who labours because he wants to proudly impose a human law on the non-human world. At the same time Brzozowski used the term “modernity” to describe life of constant change in the modern world, understood as a set of results of man’s reign over nature. For the sake of human maturity, Brzozowski expected the truly modern man to perceive modern life as an unquestionable value. Undoubtedly, there is an evident tension in Brzozowski’s ideal of modern man between the affirmation of creativity in the world of change and the necessity of disciplined production, including unchangeable moral foundations of labour. There is also a major shift in this ideal, stemming from Brzozowski’s change of attitude towards religion.     

Around the nation’s mystic core: interactions between political concepts and the literary imagination in the works of Stanisław Brzozowski

The essay examines Stanisław Brzozowski’s ideas on mutual interactions between the sphere of culture and the realm of the political. It shows how Brzozowski made use of literary texts in order to elucidate social and political processes. In doing so, he insisted on a specific form of knowledge accessible through texts of literature and literary criticism, which are not limited by the mere “logic of notions.” Following Vico and Sorel Brzozowski detected an “irrational core” at the bases of human collectivities such as above all modern nations, and it is through literature that this core can be revealed. Brzozowski’s understanding of political ideas and concepts is informed—to a decisive degree—by the literary imagination. This can be shown by a semantic and rhetorical analysis of some of his later writings.     

Another conversion. Stanisław Brzozowski’s ‘diary’ as an early instance of the post-secular turn to religion

This essay is an attempt to analyze an important decision Brzozowski took at the end of his life, i.e. his late turn towards Catholicism, which, despite his own objections, we should nonetheless call a religious conversion. The main reason why Brzozowski resisted the traditional rhetoric of conversion lies in his often repeated conviction that faith cannot invalidate life, because “what is not biographical, does not exist at all.” Brzozowski, therefore, rejects conversion understood as a radical and abrupt revolution of the soul, which annuls everything that happened before, and turns to a model of religiosity (“Catholicism, undoubtedly”) which preserves his entire biographical past. In this manner, Brzozowski seeks his own formula of faith, more adequate to the “situation” of the modern man who lives in and through History. I argue that the model of “conversion without conversion” Brzozowski chose as representative of modern man is typically, though avant la lettre, post-secular: closer to the Jewish sources of past-oriented tschuva than to the mystical timelessness of traditionally Christian metanoia. The idea that redemption consists not in a liberation of a pure spirit but in a patient working-through of the universal history of creation is an implicit credo of the whole modern age, first fully articulated by Brzozowski and only later in the writings of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin. Brzozowski emerges as a relatively early precursor of the future post-secular option whose advocates, like the author of The Diary, will not allow themselves to “lose a single moment,” either of their lives or the world’s history.     

Miłosz and Wat read Brzozowski

The paper discusses the impact of the thought of Stanisław Brzozowski (1878–1911) on several Polish emigré writers, including Józef Czapski and Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, but first of all Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) and Aleksander Wat (1900–1967). Miłosz’ approach oscillated between early fascination through an unjust rejection during the war, due to the “appropriation” of Brzozowski’s thought by the right wing publicists, to the new phase of fascination after the war, culminating in the publication of a book on Brzozowski (A Man Among Scorpions, 1962) and prolonged in several important articles till the very end of his life. Wat’s approach shifted from the communist practice of “overcoming” Brzozowski through the affirmation of his criticism and rejection of catholic obscurantism to the process of the internalization of the catholic faith.     

Sur la syllogistique déontique de Zdzisław Ziemba

Sans résuméAllatum est die 12 Octobris 1970     

Embedding the elementary ontology of stanisław Leśniewski into the monadic second-order calculus of predicates

LetEO be the elementary ontology of Le?niewski formalized as in Iwanu? [1], and letLS be the monadic second-order calculus of predicates. In this paper we give an example of a recursive function ?, defined on the formulas of the language ofEO with values in the set of formulas of the language of LS, such that ? _EO A iff ? _LS ?(A) for each formulaA.     

Słupecki's Generalized Mereology and Its Flaws

One of the streams in the early development of set theory was an attempt to use mereology, a formal theory of parthood, as a foundational tool. The first such attempt is due to a Polish logician, Stanis?aw Le?niewski (1886–1939). The attempt failed, but there is another, prima facie more promising attempt by Jerzy S?upecki (1904–1987), who employed his generalized mereology to build mereological foundations for type theory. In this paper I (1) situate Le?niewski's attempt in the development of set theory, (2) describe and evaluate Le?niewski's approach, (3) describe S?upecki's strategy without unnecessary technical details, and (4) evaluate it with a rather negative outcome. The issues discussed go beyond merely historical interests due to the current popularity of mereology and because they are related to nominalistic attempts to understand mathematics in general. The introduction describes very briefly the situation in which mereology entered the scene of foundations of mathematics — it can be safely skipped by anyone familiar with the early development of set theory. Section 2 describes and evaluates Le?niewski's attempt to use mereology as a foundational tool. In Section 3, I describe an attempt by S?upecki to improve on Le?niewski's work, which resulted in a system called generalized mereology. In Section 4, I point out the reasons why this attempt is still not successful. Section 5 contains an explanation of why Le?niewski's use of Ontology in developing arithmetic also is not nominalistically satisfactory.     

Was Brzozowski a “constructionist”? A contemporary reading of Brzozowski’s “philosophy of labour”

Brzozowski’s ‘philosophy of labour’—to which he devoted a number of writings starting in 1902—presents problems of interpretation. A conceptual approach to his conception shows it to be a sometimes uneasy mix of realist and anti-realist notions. Brzozowski appears to have thought that labour is not first of all about the things it supposedly transforms, but rather about itself. I suggest that Brzozowski can be read in the spirit of Nelson Goodman’s nominalist constructionalism (“worldmaking”). On this account, labour in Brzozowski’s idiom turns out to be the constitution of forms of symbolizing sufficient unto themselves and the needs they satisfy. However, that Brzozowski was not entirely consistent in the views I impute to him—he forever sought for some ‘external’ measure of the rightness of labour/symbolizing—can be explained at least in part by his ‘humanism’, that is, his commitment to the task he assigns humankind, that of creating the one meaningful world attesting to virtually unrestricted human power.     

A philosophy of labour: comparing A. V. Lunačarskij and S. Brzozowski

At the end of 1907 within a couple of months Lunačarskij met both Gor’kij and Brzozowski in Italy and found many important points of contact with each. To compare Lunačarskij’s thought at that time with Brzozowski’s “philosophical program” of 1907 casts some new light on the great variety of interpretations that enlivened Easter European Marxism at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the one hand, it explains Lunačarskij’s “economism” as distinct both from Brzozowski’s extreme anthropologism and Gor’kij’s “cosmism”; on the other, it shows that Lunačarskij’s “philosophy of labour” promoted a violent attitude of conquest and humankind’s domination of nature. Although he criticized Brzozowski’s sympathies with German Idealism, Lunačarskij shared with him a deep appreciation of human creative power, which is evident in his peculiar form of collectivism as well.     

Nazwy cudzysłowowe

Allatum est die 22 Martii 1963     

Uwagi o tłumaczeniu

Allatum est die 21 Novembris 1957