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Barry Smith

WHY POLISH PHILOSOPHY DOES NOT EXIST

1. The Scandal of “Continental Philosophy”

There are many hundreds of courses taught under the title “Continental

Philosophy” (C.P.) each year in North-American universities. Such

courses deal not with philosophy on the continent of Europe as a whole,

however, but rather with a highly selective portion of Franco-German

philosophy, centred above all around the person of Martin Heidegger.

Around him is gathered a rotating crew of currently fashionable,

primarily French thinkers, each successive generation of which claims

itself the “end” of philosophy (or of “man,” or of “reason,” of “the

subject,” of “identity” etc.) as we know it. A sort of competition then

exists to produce ever wilder and more dadaistic claims along these lines,

a competition that bears comparison, in more than one respect, with the

competition among Hollywood film directors to outdo each other in

producing ever more shocking or brutal or inhuman films.

The later Husserl, Heidegger’s teacher, is sometimes taken account of

in courses of this “Continental Philosophy”; not, however, Husserl’s own

teacher Brentano and not, for example, such important twentieth-century

German philosophers as Ernst Cassirer or Nicolai Hartmann. French

philosophers working in the tradition of Poincaré or Duhem or Bergson

or Gilson are similarly ignored, as, of course, are Austrian or

Scandinavian or Czech philosophers.

What, then, is the moment of unity of this “Continental Philosophy”?

What is it that Heidegger and Derrida and Luce Irigaray have in common,

which distinguishes them from phenomenologists such as Reinach or

Scheler or the famous Daubert? The answer, it seems, is: antipathy to

science , or more generally, antipathy to learning and to scholarly

activity, to all the normal bourgeois purposes of the Western university

(and we note in passing that, as far as phenomenology is concerned, it

was Heidegger who was responsible for terminating that previously

In: J.J. Jadacki and J. PaĞniczek (eds.), The Lvov-Warsaw School – The New Generation

( PoznaĔ Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities , vol. 89),

pp. 19-39. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2006.

Barry Smith

healthy scientific line which had brought forth such masterpieces as

Brentano’s Psychology form an Empirical Standpoint and Husserl’s

Logical Investigations ). This rejection of the values associated with

normal scholarly activity is combined, further, at least in the case of

those French thinkers accredited as “Continental Philosophers” – with a

substitution of politics for science (where politics, too, is to be

understood in a broad sense a sense broad enough to include also the

adolescent fringe). Philosophy thereby becomes transformed into a

strange type of ideologically motivated social criticism.

This transformation is sometimes defended, especially by American

apologists for “Continental Philosophy” such as Richard Rorty, by appeal

to an argument along the following lines:

All scientific activity is in any case an exercise of social power

(here the work of Kuhn is often called in aid).

ii.

The putative distinctions between “knowledge” and “power” or

between “descriptive” and “performative utterances” are therefore

spurious such distinctions must be “deconstructed” (in the

manner of Foucault et al. ).

Hence:

iii.

Philosophers should cast aside the pretension that they are seeking

knowledge and should instead engage exclusively in the struggle

to shift the relations of power in society (and here we note that it

is above all radical feminist groupings who have gained most from

the widespread acceptance, in North America, of different versions

of this argument).

(The problems with the argument are, of course, legion. To mention just

one obvious stumbling block: if this is indeed an “argument” in defense

of what might best be described as a grab for power on the part of certain

groups, then this can only be because there is, after all, a distinction

between descriptive and performative utterances, for if its premises did

not themselves have validity as descriptive truths, then the argument

would lose all force as justification.)

That the discipline of philosophy has been subject in certain

circles to a transformation of the sort described is at the same time

masked by the use of new styles of writing which are designed to fool

outsiders and to protect the circles of initiates from potentially damaging

criticism. The most prominent mark of such styles of writing is the heavy

use of pseudo-scientific jargonizing inspired by sociology and

psychoanalysis. In addition, and especially in “post-modern” circles, they

Why Polish Philosophy Does Not Exist

are marked by the utilization of various tricks of irony and self-

“quotation,” by means of which the authors of the new philosophy seek

to distance themselves from the responsibility of making assertions

which might be judged as true or false. Finally, however, the new writing

style is often marked by the use of what can only be called pornographic

devices. Consider the following characteristically pretentious passage,

chosen at random from Derrida’s Spurs , in which the French Doctor

Criminale undertakes to “deconstruct” the petit-bourgeois assumption

according to which the two concepts of truth and castration would be

somehow distinct:

The feminine distance abstracts truth from itself in a suspension of the

relation with castration. This relation is suspended much as one might

tauten or stretch a canvas, or a relation, which nevertheless remains –

suspended – in indecision. In the HSRFȒ. It is with castration that this

relation is suspended, not with the truth of castration – in which the

woman does [not 1 ] believe anyway – and not with the truth inasmuch as it

might be castration. Nor is it the relation with truth-castration that is

suspended, for that is precisely a man’s affair. That is the masculine

concern, the concern of the male who has never come of age, who is

never sufficiently sceptical or dissimulating. In such an affair the male, in

his credulousness and naivety (which is always sexual, always pretending

even at times to masterful expertise), castrates himself and from the

secretion of his act fashions the snare of truth-castration. (Perhaps at this

point one ought to interrogate – and “unboss” – the metaphorical

fullblown sail of truth’s declamation, of the castration and

phallocentrism, for example in Lacan’s discourse.) (Derrida 1978,

pp. 59 f )

Or consider this pudding of similar nonsense from Luce Irigaray:

Gynecology, dioptrics, are no longer by right a part of metaphysics that

supposedly unsexed anthropos-logos whose actual sex is admitted only by

its omission and exclusion from consciousness, and by what is said in its

margins. And what if the “I” only thought the thought of woman? The

thought (as it were) of femaleness? And could send back this thought in

its reflection only because the mother has been incorporated? The mother

that all-powerful mother denied and neglected in the self-sufficiency of

the (self) thinking subject, her “body” henceforward specularized through

and through. (Irigaray 1985, p. 183)

Or again:

1 The ‘not’ is left out by the translator, to no apparent consequence.

Barry Smith

Inside Plato’s or Socrates’ cave, an artificial wall curtain

reenactment, reprise, representation, of a hymen that has elsewhere been

stealthily taken away, is never, ever crossed, opened, penetrated, pierced,

or torn. (Irigaray 1985, p. 249)

As Ms. Irigaray explains:

Any hint, even, of theory, pulls me away from myself by pulling open

and sewing up unnaturally the lips of that slit where I recognize myself,

by touching myself there (almost) directly. (Irigaray 1985, p. 200)

(It is, incidentally, one not inconsiderable victory of radical feminism in

the Anglosaxophone countries that the C.P.-obsession with sex, as

revealed in passages such as the above, has been introduced into the

pages of even the most technical scientific journals via the banishment of

the unmarked personal pronoun and its replacement with a pervasive and

senseless switching back and forth of gendered “she’s” and “he’s.”)

2. Philosophy in Poland

What, now, of the fate of philosophy in Poland? We note in passing how

sad is the spectacle presented by the host of young students of philosophy

in Poland currently devoting its energies to deconstructionist and to other

non-serious and ultimately corrosive philosophical fashions. More

important for our purposes, however, is the degree to which Poland’s

own philosophers have fared so badly as concerns their admission into

the pantheon of “Continental Philosophers.” Why should this be so?

Why, to put the question from the other side, should there be so close an

association in Poland – at least since 1894 – between philosophy and

logic, or between philosophy and science? 2 One can distinguish a series

of answers to this question, which I shall group together under the

following headings:

(a)

the role of socialism;

(b)

the disciplinary association between philosophy and mathematics;

(c)

the influence of Austrian philosophy in general and of Brentanian

philosophy in particular;

(d)

the serendipitous role of Twardowski;

(e)

the role of Catholicism.

2 What other country – to mention just one symptom of the association I have in mind –

would publish an encyclopedia entitled Philosophy and Science (Cackowski, Kmita and

Szaniawski, eds. 1987)?

Why Polish Philosophy Does Not Exist

3. Socialism and Scientific Philosophy

Much of what needs to be said about the Polish case can be derived, with

suitable modifications, from considering the case of Austria. Consider, in

this light, the following passage from the autobiography of A. J. Ayer,

who in 1932 spent a protracted honeymoon of just over three months in

Vienna before returning to Oxford to write Language, Truth and Logic :

The members of the Vienna Circle, with the notable exception of Otto

Neurath, were not greatly interested in politics, but theirs was also a

political movement. The war of ideas which they were waging against the

Catholic church had its part in the perennial Viennese conflict between

the socialistic and the clerical reaction. (Ayer 1977, p. 129)

A more explicit version of the same thesis put forward by Johannes

Dvorak (also quoting Neurath):

In light of the fact that the bourgeoisie – especially in Central Europe –

had discharged itself of all enlightenment traditions and paid homage

rather to the cults of irrationalism, while the proletariat struggled for a

rational formation of society, the hope certainly prevailed that “It is

precisely the proletariat which will become the carrier of a science

without metaphysics.” (Dvorak 1985, p. 142)

Not only Neurath and Dvorak but also other scholars working on the

background of the Vienna Circle have defended a view according to

which the flowering of scientific philosophy in Central Europe between

the wars is to be regarded precisely as part of a wider struggle between

left and right, between science and reaction.

I do not believe that we need spend too much time on this purported

explanation as far as Poland – a land not of proletarians but of peasants

and nobility – is concerned; but the reader is asked to hold her horses

before rushing forward with objections to a political account of the rise

of scientific philosophy in Poland along the lines suggested.

4. Safety in Numbers

At the dawn of Polish independence in 1917, as part of a widespread

campaign in favour of the conception of science as a laudable form of

public service in the cause of the new Poland, the mathematician

Zygmunt Janiszewski committed Polish mathematicians to a program

designed to take advantage of the talents of the Polish mathematical

community via systematic collaboration and concentration on specific

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