For my part I seek the metaphilosophical in universalism in the interdisciplinariness concept typical for ecology and system and information theory. I reject monologue as a form of hegemony and propose dialogue as an interpersonal path for seekers and cocreators of truth. I accept relational and reject substantialistic ontologies and all absolutism, including virtues, in an attempt to make room for the quest for common values attainable by those who identify with them on multiple levels (the universalism of Paul of (...) Tarsis). Hence, basing on humanity’s cultural and civilizational multiplicity, I analyze the Europeanism idea through the prism of centripetal and centrifugal forces, locating “Polish” elements on this path. On one hand I approach Europeanism as the most immediate of the environments which reflect and make understandable the spiritual aspects of Polishness, on the other hand I suggest that many of its aspects should be avoided.Nonetheless I commend the disclosure and sustainance of the separateness of ethical norms developed by the ancient Greek from the legal norms instituted by Rome and the religious norms imposed on our western civilization by Christianity. This is something other civilizations lack and what bars them from more intensive participation in humanity’s advancement towards universal civilization—no longer seen as monopolistic, as in the ecological perspective this would only enhance mankind’s destruction. From the Polish perspective the most valuable Europeanism aspects are diversity, methodology in the quest for truth in philosophy, religion and science, openness to the objective products of the human spirit (which Islamic civilization opposed), and a strong accent on praxis.To close I will allow myself reference to Janusz Kuczyński’s Polishness Decalogue, an attempt to analyze the Polish “national spirit” and pinpoint those universal aspects of “Polishness” which—as clusters of empirical, social, theoretical and cultural facts—still fill Polish hearts with pride. Here, as we can see, the initially concretized universality criterion ultimately becomes an applied valuation category. Hence, universalism as a meta-philosophy appears to be a philosophy of essence, not fact, and therefore not subject to valuation. (shrink)

My reflection is dedicated to a universalist and personalistic conception of Andrzej Grzegorczyk and his main idea on deriving the sphere of spiritual values from vital ones. I try to interpret Andrzej Grzegorczyk’s ethics in a broad way, that is, as a universalistic philosophy of life. I mean by “philosophy of life” the basic aspect of the practical realization of values, that is, social life as an attitude to fate. I use Martin Heidegger’s concept of human handiness, filtered through its (...) use by Grzegorczyk, as a tool of exposing vitality values which grow into universal spiritual values. (shrink)

The text below should not be treated as a direct source of knowledge on the dynamic of philosophical ideas and attitudes of Leszek Kołakowski, but as an attempt at placing his thinking on the map of the 20th century universalistic thought, i.e. that which is the closest to the editors of Dialogue and Universalism. The starting point of the picture is the category of inorganic body from Marx’s Manuscripts and Two Sources... by Bergson, which enables a non-naturalistic description of the (...) metaphysical perspective of both these activistic anthropologies, speaking of the evolution of mankind in the vein of Hegelian Spirit causality.Another system of reference is A. Badiou’s universalistic but irreligious interpretation of St. Paul’s ideas. Both of these set out an activistic perspective which is confronted with a solely contemplative vision of mysticism, as expressed by Leszek Kołakowski, and a modern concept of belief in what surpasses but does not enslave, which Kołakowski shared with Jaspers and Paul Ricoeur.Against such a notional grid the author seeks to render the peculiar quality of Kołakowski’s pulsating and greatly dialectical metaphysical position, associated with a skeptical attitude of a rationalist in the face of the phenomenon of the world’s indifference that he experiences and within the framework of the continued existential note of the non-atheistic existentialism of Kierkegaard, Jaspers and Pascal in its combination with St. Augustine’s concept of evil, read in the context of Auschwitz and Kolyma. Taken together these ideas sort of form an instrument to express mythical questions about the sense of life and history. (shrink)

Any debate about the aim of university is a question of its place within the cultural and social whole of a given time, tradition and dominant ideology. In the first place this will feature concern about its autonomy from the state, Church, parties, capital, etc. The debate will go on to include the relationship between science and the education of citizens, science and industry and science versus capital. The dispute has included the participation of philosophy and theology or social sciences (...) in preparing university candidates, which is still an issue ignored in Poland, and in broadening their horizons.The bone of contention between the positivist philosophy of facts and the humanistic deliberations on values is the understanding of culture and responsibility, that is, a dispute about a model of a graduate and a citizen: a narrow specialist, or a rational, integral man. Is the mastery of specialist knowledge more important than the skill of universal way of thinking and responsible collective action? Therefore, we are posing a question regarding a model of university as a community of people: what form of relations between the teacher and a student should be preferred in order to teach how to live reasonably in the contemporary and future societies? What do faculties strive to achieve? Is the target to be met competitiveness, as measured by a “calculable” profit, decorated with the stars of knowledge or, rather, is it disobedience in thinking by its typical graduates? (shrink)

Any debate about the aim of university is a question of its place within the cultural and social whole of a given time, tradition and dominant ideology. In the first place this will feature concern about its autonomy from the state, Church, parties, capital, etc. The debate will go on to include the relationship between science and the education of citizens, science and industry and science versus capital. The dispute has included the participation of philosophy and theology or social sciences (...) in preparing university candidates, which is still an issue ignored in Poland, and in broadening their horizons.The bone of contention between the positivist philosophy of facts and the humanistic deliberations on values is the understanding of culture and responsibility, that is, a dispute about a model of a graduate and a citizen: a narrow specialist, or a rational, integral man. Is the mastery of specialist knowledge more important than the skill of universal way of thinking and responsible collective action? Therefore, we are posing a question regarding a model of university as a community of people: what form of relations between the teacher and a student should be preferred in order to teach how to live reasonably in the contemporary and future societies? What do faculties strive to achieve? Is the target to be met competitiveness, as measured by a “calculable” profit, decorated with the stars of knowledge or, rather, is it disobedience in thinking by its typical graduates? (shrink)

The paper presents Professor Janusz Kuczyński’s life as well as his intellectual and organizational activities, his achievements as a publisher and his efforts to establish an environment of followers of his special kind of universalism.

Doubtless that which strongly links Karol Wojtyła’s Laborem exercens encyclical with Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 is not so much philosophy of work as the personalistic anti-feudalism that is equally alive in both works. The personalistic trait, in Marxism merely an (unpursued) option mentioned in the Manuscripts, was taken further—philosophically, and not just ethically—in Laborem exercens, where the person becomes an ontological category (in light both of the transcendent existence of a tri-personal God and the transcendence of (...) the communities created by human beings, who are only able to live in communities). Also, the person acquired an ontological-social dimension by determining the boundaries of humanity’s co-creative (also in the world-creating sense) communion with God as the ideal of community-based material and social existence. And this is also the guiding perspective of my initial analysis of the personalization process underway in Polish society and the post-Vatican-II Church. Both are gradually—if not without some difficulty—learning to part with the non-personalistic models characteristic for the previous, still considerably feudalism-influenced era, which manifested themselves as much in the institutionalismof official Marxism as the socially (not religiously!) motivated doctrines of the Church. (shrink)

The text below should not be treated as a direct source of knowledge on the dynamic of philosophical ideas and attitudes of Leszek Kołakowski, but as an attempt at placing his thinking on the map of the 20th century universalistic thought, i.e. that which is the closest to the editors of Dialogue and Universalism. The starting point of the picture is the category of inorganic body from Marx’s Manuscripts and Two Sources... by Bergson, which enables a non-naturalistic description of the (...) metaphysical perspective of both these activistic anthropologies, speaking of the evolution of mankind in the vein of Hegelian Spirit causality.Another system of reference is A. Badiou’s universalistic but irreligious interpretation of St. Paul’s ideas. Both of these set out an activistic perspective which is confronted with a solely contemplative vision of mysticism, as expressed by Leszek Kołakowski, and a modern concept of belief in what surpasses but does not enslave, which Kołakowski shared with Jaspers and Paul Ricoeur.Against such a notional grid the author seeks to render the peculiar quality of Kołakowski’s pulsating and greatly dialectical metaphysical position, associated with a skeptical attitude of a rationalist in the face of the phenomenon of the world’s indifference that he experiences and within the framework of the continued existential note of the non-atheistic existentialism of Kierkegaard, Jaspers and Pascal in its combination with St. Augustine’s concept of evil, read in the context of Auschwitz and Kolyma. Taken together these ideas sort of form an instrument to express mythical questions about the sense of life and history. (shrink)

This comparative essay about two kinds of interpersonal-centric humanism is dedicated to the memory of professor Janusz Kuczyński and his conception of dialogical universalism as a metaphilosophy, and shows Immanuel Kant’s thought as a ceaseless source of inspiration for all anti-conservatives and universalists. Kant’s philosophy gave man an unforgettable sense of freedom, because it not only posed the imperative of building a pan-human community of all rational beings, but also revealed the above-natural sense of the human species’ imposition of purposefulness (...) upon itself, and the realisation of this purposefulness in the form of a republican federation of free states dedicated to co-creating eternal peace. Kantian ethics did not reach beyond the obligations people had towards one another, hence it was functionally anthropological and uninfluenced by religion, which re-situated philosophy with regard to scientific cognition and religious experience, giving rise to a metaphysics of anthropological responsibility for the condition of the spiritual freedom this ethic propounded. Kant revealed the existence of a metaphysical difference in the sphere of being—between the determinism of nature and the moral kingdom of freedom—without direct reference to the transcendental source of these two essentially different worlds. Kant was the first to set morality rooted in the autonomy and unanimous will of all rational beings—or true humanity—against legal and religious legalism. Kant laid weight on the processual character of man’s self-education to social life through the sense of commitment to self-improvement for the benefit of the solidary co-existence of all rational beings that he developed in himself as a rational being. Thus created freedom is founded on the selflesness of goodness and represents a new quality of being that only manifests itself and evolves in community, interpersonalcentrically. It is a universalistic approach capable of gradually neutralising the human inclination towards radical evil.My attempt to compare these two interpersonalcentric humanism conceptions aims to add some substance to this very delicate element in Kuczyński’s universalism as a metaphilosophy construct. (shrink)

I have chosen to approach the Marxian alienation theory from a historical angle and recount its evolution in Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Grundrisse, wherein it develops into a theory regulating the co-creation of conditions for “freedom” in the choice of processes that lead to de-alienation. I will attempt to present the alienation theory as an aspect of a broader anti-metaphysical critique of all substantialism, According to Marx, the substantialist approach to history could at most only (...) pretend to be dynamic and ignored the structural complexity of being, whereas the true idea was to notice and keep track of the structural and qualitative changes brought to being by the genetic, structural, social, economic, class and institutional conditionings of human history. (shrink)