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Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz |
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| Presentation |
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| Life |
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| Main works |
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| Selected Bibliography |
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| Keywords |
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| Two divergent opinions of Ingardan and Kotarbinski |
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| A little gallery of his paintings |
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| Witkiewicz's letters to Kazimierz Twardowski |
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The personality of Stanislaw
Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939), also known as Witkacy, goes beyond
the confines of philosophy to embrace a whole series of creative
activities that make him a unique figure in Polish and European
culture between the two World Wars. Dramatist, poet, novelist,
painter, photographer, art theorist (from 1919 onwards he was
one of the most representative members of the poetic and artistic
avant-garde in Poland, together with Witold Gombrowicz and Bruno
Schulz, and a supporter of Formalism), and last but not least
an acute and eccentric philosopher: this multitude of interests
sums up a restless spirit who is difficult to classify in the
usual categories. Of all his activities, he certainly considered
philosophy as occupying a central place. But the philosophical
thought which incessantly accompanied all Witkiewicz’s activities
was mostly unknown to his contemporaries except as mediated by
his art.
Witkiewicz was a radical critic of bourgeois society and the kind of social existence generated by capitalism, which he feared would lead to the complete dehumanisation of social life and a growing totalitarianism, with the consequent annihilation of the individual personality. Paradoxical and ironic debunker of bourgeois morality; harsh critic of the overwhelming mass society he saw as irreversibly invading both West and East not only in the hypocritical guise of a democratic system but also behind the banners of the proletariat; tragically aware of the progressive abandonment of authentic values linked to the individual, creative personality of man in favour of the spread in social life of values based on happiness, utility and material satisfaction, his philosophy of history led to a catastrophic diagnosis of contemporary reality: the welfare towards which society tends and to which even the "working classes" aspire leads them to forget the mystery of existence (a concept he placed at the centre of his "monadology"), to extinguish the metaphysical sentiment that springs from it and hence to the demise of religion and art, which have their foundation in it. It also marks the end of philosophy, its suicide: this is the negative result of his diagnosis of the growing mechanisation of life, the crisis of the individual in contemporary society, increasingly threatened by the advance of uniformity and democratic homologation, the greatest embodiment of which was for him Socialism. And rather than live in a society moulded by Socialism, as an authentic nihilist Witkiewicz preferred suicide. Against this unnatural end for philosophy, against its deterioration, Witkiewicz protested in the name of the individual and launched his slogan against the new myths of democracy and egalitarianism: "Monads of the world unite!".
In the philosophy expounded in his essays, Witkiewicz sought
theoretical and ontological bases for the concept of the individual
he expressed in his plays and novels. He harshly criticised the
scientific model of culture that he saw in the works of Wittgenstein,
Russell 
and
Carnap (using the term "Carnapisation" as a synonym
for stupidity) and which practically dominated the Polish philosophical
scene in the 30s. Making no concession to Bergsonian mysticism
and intuitionism, he particularly criticised the works of Kotarbinski 
and Chwistek . His main work, Pojecia
i twierdzenia implikowane przez pojecie istnienia (Concepts
and Theses Implied by the Concept of Existence, Warsaw
, 1935) focuses on the monadic
character of the existence of the individual, which embraces a
multiplicity of existences. For Witkiewicz each "I"
is an identity that contains multiple identities: he defined his
philosophical position as "biological monadism". With
his ontology his intention was to construct a system that would
unite all the individual visions and partial truths of other philosophical
viewpoints, especially psychologism and physicalism, thanks to
the inescapable, unshakeable assumption of the totality of existence:
"I start from the hitherto undifferentiated concept of Being
in general". From this concept of Being he derives that of
plurality - what he called the "original metaphysical implication"
- and this plurality is made up of individual beings. In this
way, he viewed the individual personality as a priority concept
that cannot be reduced to its pale, bloodless counterparts - Husserl’s
"pure conscience", Cornelius’ "data mediated
by the personality", or Mach’s "complex of elements".
The fundamental thesis of his ontology is thus that the World
is made up of a multiplicity of Particular Existences. The particular
existence, i.e. every conscious individual or every "I",
is the ultimate being in his system and cannot be reduced to anything
else. It is a dual being, in which two independent parts co-exist
and interpenetrate: body and conscience.
Witkiewicz considered the inseparable unity in plurality represented by the monad, which is itself and at the same time embraces the multiplicity of the world, as an original fact that cannot be further clarified, just as any logical construction has to have a starting point that is assumed to be indefinite - that Mystery of Being that "can be defined as the impossibility of defining all the concepts of any conceptual system and the inevitability of getting bogged down in primitive concepts". In substance, the Mystery of Being expresses the insurmountable abyss that separates the "I" from the world, the finite nature of every monad and the infinite nature of the universe.
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The characteristic note of Witkiewicz’s life was also
great originality and non-conformism. Born in Warsaw, he was the
son of an eminent critic, writer and artist (also called Stanislaw).
From his early childhood he showed signs of genius, reading scientific
and philosophical works in various languages and writing short
comedies in imitation of Shakespeare at the age of seven. He spent
his youth in Zakopane, where he received a private education from
his father and, among others, M. Limanowski and W. Folkierski;
his father was, in fact, convinced that the school system annihilated
a child’s personality. At the age of 17 he wrote his first
philosophical dissertation, in which the theories he was later
to expound can be traced. In 1903 he sat school-leaving examinations
as an external student in Lvov and in 1904 he enrolled at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow ,
later making frequent trips to Italy, Germany and France to perfect
his technique. His life was at times adventurous: in 1914 he accompanied
the famous anthropologist Malinowski on an expedition to Australia,
acting as a painter, photographer and private secretary. During
the First World War he served as an officer in the Russian Army
(having been born in Warsaw, at that time under Russian domination,
he was a Russian subject), and after the October Revolution he
was transferred to St. Petersburg where he commenced
his philosophical studies (which he never concluded) and was appointed
the "political commissioner" of his division, even though
he was not a Communist. The period he spent in Russia was of fundamental
importance for the development of his thought, as it was at this
time that his philosophical ideas took shape, influenced by the
impression he had received of the war. He started writing his
main work on aesthetics (New Forms in Painting, 1919) in which
he elaborated the concept of "pure form" in art (now
in Witkiewicz, Nowe formy w malarstwie i inne pisma estetyczne,
cit.). On his return to Poland, he settled in Zakopane and made
friends with Chwistek, with whom he was the main theorist of the
avant-garde art movement called "Formism" (1918-1922).
He also promoted theatrical initiatives (including the avant-garde
Formist theatre of Zakopane from 1925-27), at the same time painting,
studying philosophy and working incessantly on his philosophical
system, which he tried to popularise and divulge through a series
of articles published in magazines and newspapers. His main philosophical
work was not published until 1935, after which he toured Poland
giving lectures in literature, art and philosophy. In the meanwhile
his critical attitude towards contemporary civilisation became
increasingly radical: he saw the Western Nazis and the Eastern
Bolsheviks as a lethal threat to culture and civilisation in Europe.
When Soviet troops invaded Poland following the Molotov-Ribbentrop
pact, he killed himself in an aristocratic, individualistic protest
against the mass regime he dreaded so much.
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