Dzienniki, tom I, lata 1944–1960 [Diary, vol. 1, 1944–1960]

Abstract

Władysław Tatarkiewicz, a prominent Polish philosopher born in 1886, kept a diary from 1911 until the end of his long life in 1980. His notebooks from the years 1911–1943 were lost. The extant notebooks, covering the period from 1944 to 1980, were miraculously saved from destruction by Łukasz Ratajczak, the Librarian at the University of Warsaw, and are now being published by a team of scholars from the Universities of Warsaw and Wrocław. The first volume reproduces Tatarkiewicz's diary from 1944 to 1960. The diary is preceded by a detailed biography of Tatarkiewicz from his birth in 1886 to 1939 and is followed by an index of multiple names appearing in the book. The second volume is to be expected soon.Tatarkiewicz's work is familiar to every student of philosophy in Poland for his three-volume, monumental, and extremely useful History of Philosophy. Some of them would have read his book on Happiness, written in Warsaw in a time of war. Specialists in aesthetics will appreciate three volumes of his History of Aesthetics, also published in the English language, as well as his History of Six Ideas. His numerous breakthrough papers in ethics, methodology, aesthetics, and history and theory of arts, published in the world-leading philosophical journals in several languages, won him an exceptional international standing, comparable only to the one enjoyed by Alfred Tarski or Roman Ingarden.Though enjoying immense respect internationally, Tatarkiewicz was not appreciated by his peers in Poland. Kazimierz Twardowski, the pontiff among the Polish philosophers in the pre-war period, well acquainted with Tatarkiewicz's work in history of philosophy, refused to recommend him as an author of an account of Polish philosophy for a German journal. Władysław Witwicki, translator of Plato's work, was adamantly opposed to the nomination of Tatarkiewicz to a professorial position at the University of Warsaw. But there were problems of a mundane nature: Czesław Lejewski, a member of the Lviv-Warsaw School of Logic and Philosophy, initially wanted to study history of philosophy with Tatarkiewicz. However, as he communicated to me, he was faced with a choice of buying a thick and expensive historical book by Tatarkiewicz, or a slim yet cheap volume by Stanisław Leśniewski. Eventually, as a poor student, he settled for the cheaper purchase, and became internationally known for his contributions to protothetic, ontology, mereology, that is, doctrines put forward by Leśniewski.It is natural to expect that a diary of so eminent a figure, as Tatarkiewicz undoubtedly was, would reveal secrets of his methods, delineate the path to his prominence, and details of his well-deserved and hard-won reputation. Such expectations, however, would be severely disappointed. The diary, though kept by a great figure, presents a very unglamorous picture and makes for a bleak, if not disheartening reading. The diary is a somber register of hardships, miseries, difficulties, personal animosities, and problems which he, as well as his family and his philosophical colleagues, had to cope with in a difficult period in the history of Poland. Only occasionally it is interspersed with jottings which succinctly convey the professional successes or rare private joys.The sizeable volume meticulously reproduces his daily routines in Kraków and Warsaw, where he taught after World War II, his all-too-frequent itineraries between Kraków, Katowice, and Warsaw, occasional trips to Zakopane or Polanica, his excruciating attempts to restore his destroyed house in Warsaw, his humiliating treatment both by the authorities of the newly established communist government, and by his colleagues in the academia subjected to the communist ideology. It also describes his multiple and in some cases irrecoverable loses: his Warsaw home was burnt down in the war along with all his possessions, some of his valuable manuscripts were stolen during a night journey on a bus, the hard-earned money he hoarded became worthless due to unexpected denomination, important opportunities were denied. Finally, he lost his health due to the exertion needed to keep himself and his family afloat.The dreariness of the diary is to be blamed on Tatarkiewicz himself. Evidently, the diary was never meant as a space of psychological self-examination, tentative formulation of philosophical ideas, political reflections, accounts of intimacies, or expressions of some other secret and publicly incommunicable thoughts, something done for example by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions, Bertrand Russell in My Philosophical Development, Karl Popper in Unended Quest, or Jean-Paul Sartre in his War Diary. The pages are filled by an enumeration of the parts of his daily routines: titles of the books he read and wrote, people he met, lunches and teas he had, committees he attended, the sessions of the game of bridge, his tooth- and kidney-aches, etc. The following examples are quite telling. On March 20, 1951, while on a trip to wintry Zakopane, he jotted the following sentence: “At sunset I walk around the house and think, again, about serious things. A wonderful view” (p. 439), leaving the reader in a complete darkness as to the nature of these “things” he considered “serious” at this point in his life. On September 20, 1951, also in Zakopane, he wrote: “A lunch on Kondratowa. I return about 4 pm, lie down and try to keep warm, in vain. It seemed as if I got a cold, but it goes away. Again, a boring evening and a terrible night. I think of the methodology of the history of philosophy. A freezing night” (p. 453). Anyone hoping for a glimpse of his thoughts on the methods of the history of philosophy, of which Tatarkiewicz was unquestionable master, would be severely disappointed simply because the he refuses to share them with his diary. Most likely the uninformative and enumerative diary was to serve its author as nothing more but a collection of promptings which would jolt his memory should he decide to write a fuller account of his life, as he did in Wspomnienia [Memoirs, 1979] written together with his wife Teresa.Nevertheless, the diary is not only an invaluable document of the condition of the Polish intellectual class at the time of communism. Its importance lies also in the fact that a reader, confronted by its ascetic form, cannot resist actively to imagine the sparsely described events, cursorily introduced people, barely enumerated facts, and skimpily intimated feelings.The diary also provokes a more general reflection about the fate of the Polish intelligentsia during World War II and after. Among the most painful losses was the extermination of forty-five professors and intellectuals murdered by the Nazis in Lviv (then Lwów) in July 1941. The fate of Jan Łukasiewicz's breakthrough book Aristotle's Syllogistics from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic may serve as another symbol of the losses sustained by the Polish culture at that time. In 1939, Łukasiewicz completed the manuscript of the book, making only two copies. Both ceased to exist during the first days of World War II when an air raid destroyed both his Warsaw home and the publishing house. He reconstructed the book, in the English language, many years later when he was clandestinely taken from the destroyed Warsaw to Dublin's Queen's University. It was translated back into Polish only in 1988. Such losses of the intangible tissue of the Polish culture, less known to the public, could be enumerated indefinitely. The publication of Tatarkiewicz's diary is an important reminder of the damages from which the Polish culture did not fully recover.