I heard the word “pismism”, like all Pole, at school.
I was convinced that it meant an era of intellectual boredom: a programmatic mundane, programmatic enemy of all greatness (embodyed especially by romance), curious only in substance and numerals – "science" in the worst sense – and yet monothematic literature about the lives of mediocre people. Is this image left to another students after school years? Likely, although it is hard to be sure, as it is hard to say how many of them even care about akin subjects.
It's been so many years that it's time to give justice to this age of sharp thoughts, expressive types of people, meaningful discussions, and deep programs that would be vain to look around today. due to the fact that that was the positivistic era in Poland.
Positiveism did not constitute, as I thought as a student, a “dark night of the soul” in the improvement cycle of Polish culture. Oh, he was far from that, though he himself declaratively placed sobriety, proseness, and attachment to empirical facts. By the way, can't you capture the spirit empirically? After all, it was during the positivistic period in Germany Max Weber (1864-1920) attempts to theoretically explain what the spirit is – and in Poland Julian Ochorich (1850-1917) He's even looking for ghosts...
Because in fact – a small contrary to what we were taught in schools – positivism was not alien to the spiritual sphere. Very rapidly it was noticed by the large depositary and the continuation of Polish heritage and European romanticism, Marian Zdechowski (1861-1938). Already in the youth sketch on “The Lantern” Henryk Sienkiewicz of 1882 he pointed out the presence of a pantheistic motif in this novel. Narrator relates the experience of Skawiński: “The full planet now began for the old man and ended on his island. He had already become so close to the thought that he would not leave the tower until he died, and he simply forgot that there was something else too it. He became a mystic. The gentle blue eyes of his began to be like the eyes of a child, beheld eternally and as if stuck in any daisy. In constant isolation and in the face of an highly simple environment and a large one, the old 1 began to lose his sense of self-difference, ceased to be as a person, and became increasingly angry with what surrounded him. He did not reason about it, he felt only ignorantly, but at last he thought that heaven, water, its rock, its tower, and the golden shoals of sand, and the puffed sails, and the seagulls, the tides, and the tides, were any large unity and 1 large mysterious soul; and he himself plunges into this mystery and feels the soul that lives and soothes himself. He sank, swayed, remembered—and in this limitation of his own separate being, including half-feeling, half-sleeped found peace so large that he almost resembled half-death.”
In turn, the full description of Skawiński's eremic life in the lighthouse expresses the temper of fatigue of civilization and the desire to retreat from the planet – it is worth emphasizing, due to the fact that proving that in the era of positivism the optimistic belief in the possibilities of science, technology and material culture did not dominate as much as it is frequently presented. The attitude of the title character can even be read as a quest to accomplish a Buddhist nirvana, which according to Zdzechowski could draw Sienkiewicz from Schopenhauer's philosophy, which was then gaining popularity. The Lantern was not the only case of this kind. In the works of Polish positivist literature there is simply a thread of mystical experience, to which the rationalist worldview – Christian, as in Sienkiewicz's fresh “Let us follow him” (1892), or more general [1], must break, as in Bolesław's short communicative "Sen" (1890).
It would besides be a mistake to identify the intellectual atmosphere of times of positivism with – left-wing in its essence – progressiveism, the secular religion of progress. For decades the Marxist historiography in Poland has classified Warsaw's alleged positivism as standing small little to the law than the Krakow historical school and the state community. I think she was right about that one. The 2 leading names of our positivistic culture, Sienkiewicz and Prusai, already mentioned here, were both average conservatives, which was expressed especially in their publications on socio-political topics. But even the positives far from conservatism came together with the right-wing imagination of the planet – and distanced themselves from the left-wing 1 – in many crucial issues.
One of the intellectual fathers of Warsaw positivism, Aleksander Świętochowski (1849-1938), caused a storm and brought thunder upon himself after the publication of the text "Political Indications" (1882), in which he became close to triloyalism, questioning the sense of attempts to reconstruct Poland's independence. In later years Świętochowski went gradually towards the nationalist right, until he ended his long life as a publicist akin to the circles of the Oenerov cultural diary “Straight from the Bridge” (1935-1939).
Even positivists demonstrating a stereotypical dislike of metaphysics for this period did not necessarily place themselves in liberal or leftist positions. Let the case of 1 of the most extraordinary characters of the era attest to this, Andrzej Niemojewski (1864-1921), which he founded and edited for the remainder of his life the magazine “The Independent Thought”. This author and writer of late positivism in his texts expressed the belief that the improvement of technological cognition must and should lead to the expulsion of religion from public consciousness (although he made his debut in the highly conservative diary "Country", published by Polish preservers in St. Petersburg). Beginning with the 1905 events, he condemned the socialist revolution (both in the internationalist edition of SDKPIL and PPS-Levice as well as the independency of the PPS-Fraction) as banditism and barbarism, while remaining a fierce opponent of National Democracy and its leader Roman Dmowski [2]. Along with many addeks and conservatives, however, he was among 69 personalities, who signed and sent to the hands of the large Prince Nicholas Mikołajewicz, the commander-in-chief of the Russian army, a ceremonial telegram maintained in a speech of loyalism.
From 1907, in his views, Niemojewski combined positivism and Scientism with anti-Semitism. In addition to many articles, he dedicated the book “to the Jews and Judaism.Jewish Soul in the Light of the Talmud” (1914) and brochures "The composition and march of the army of the 5th partition" (1911) and "The Ethics of the Talmud" (1917). Shortly before Niemojewski's death, in 1920, the judaic Institute was founded at the office of the editorial board of “Independent Thought” and the editor-in-chief himself attended the first gathering of his authorities. I no longer remember in whose book I came across the definition of Niemojewski's views as "conservative-revolutionary", but it strikes me with its aptness. due to the fact that if Niemojewski lived longer, he could become – alongside authors like Jan Emil Skiwski (1894-1956) or Jan Stachniuk (1905-1963) – 1 of the intellectual fathers of the Polish counterpart of this ideological direction, which after planet War II became celebrated in western Europe under the name of fresh Right [3].
Of course, positivism did not gotta go hand in hand with antireligious attitudes. Let the last of the large representatives of the Krakow historical school be utilized as an example, Michał Bobrzyński (1849-1935). As a historian, he was a declared positiveist. In the introduction to the second edition (1880) of his loudest book, “Poland's past in outline“ He himself confirmed the influence of a reluctant Christian and spiritual English historian in the field of methodology and doctrine of discipline Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862), materialist and supporter of geographical determinism. And not only as a historian – besides as a political thinker: Bobrzyński's conservatism is secular, it is simply a construction built on sociological grounds, without referring to religion. However, personally, Bobrzyński remained a devout Catholic who was amazed that he always carried the Bible with him to the church in the Greek edition (and only in Greek he read it without recognizing Bible translations into national languages).
I devoted my attention mainly to Poland, but it was not an exception in the context of the era. The intellectual reconstruction and restoration of French conservatism in the second half of the 19th century [4] was made by a positivist historian Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) and the borderline philosopher of romance and positivism Ernest Renan (1823-1892). About another – German – influential affirmative I wrote earlier in the sketch "Conservatism in Legal-State Thoughts by Georg Jellink".
Leszek Kołakowski In an excellent monograph on this subject [5], the positivistic doctrine besides includes its finite currents – German Empirecriticism and French conventionalism – which, by developing to the final consequences the reflection on discipline as the main origin of knowledge, led to the deconstruction of the materialistic imagination of the world. 1 of the most crucial spiritual mathematicians and philosophers Édouard Le Roy (1870-1954) he was besides 1 of the leading theorists of Catholic modernism. Empiriocriticism Richard Avenarius (1843-1896) and Ernst Mach (1838-1916)) despite constant assurances of its own technological background, it has much to do with the conventional imagination of the world, but in its pagan version, pre-Christian. However, the second court requires a more extended justification, so possibly I will compose them separately 1 day.
Positiveism as an intellectual tradition can be a useful origin of inspiration for right-wing thought and conservatism besides today. On the 1 hand, it provides antidotes for crying, excessive subjectivism and relativism of today's liberal and left-wing philosophy. On the another hand, it protects against the frequently encountered in Christian political environments overly sembling the concept of natural law, which leads to a sentimental, idealized image of the planet – and then to crying complaints that reality does not reflect it.
Adam Danek
[1] Thus, what is called natural mysticism in the doctrine of religion.
[2] In this context, it is worth quoting the wonderful evidence that Brzozowski gave Niemojewski erstwhile he wrote: “Niemojewski as a writer’s organization belongs to exceptions. It has an ever-present spirit of rebellion and open nostrils engulfs the atmosphere of storm, battle. He, who among modern-day sung and displeased writers makes a unusual impression, as if 1 of those who sleep with their head over a saddle of support, and do not part with armor, 1 who on campings can sink in any old battles and battles of history, 1 who loves a fight for being a fight, and thus for danger, momentum, a whistling ball close the ear. He is 1 almost at last among the lyricists a typical of the warring intellect, giving nothing but his own whisper, rebellious against the authority of thought.” (Stanisław Brzozowski, Modern Polish novel, Stanisławów 1906, p. 203.)
[3] The search for the roots of the fresh Right is justified before the war, as illustrated by Louis Rouger (1889-1982). This French philosopher fought against Tomism in the interwar period and defended Ernest Renan's philosophical tradition. In 1979, at an old age, Rougier joined the GREECE association, the main centre of the French fresh Right.
[4] extended discussion of this function of Taine and Renan in: Arkadius Barut, Egotism, ethics, politics. Conservative thought by Maurice Barres, Kraków 2009, passim.
[5] Leszek Kołakowski, Positive Philosophy. From Hume to Vienna Circle, Warsaw 1966.
Think Poland, No. 51-52 (18-25.12.2022)
