Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz
Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz:
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
