Czeslaw Milosz*
MURTI-BING
It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century
that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general
unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced
directly by intricate and abstruse books on philosophy. Their bread,
their work, their private lives began to depend on this or that
decision in disputes on principles to which, until then, they had
never paid any attention. In their eyes, the philosopher had always
been a sort of dreamer whose divagations had no effect on reality.
The average human being, even if he had once been exposed to it,
wrote philosophy off as utterly impractical and useless. Therefore the
great intellectual work of the Marxists could easily pass as just one
more variation on a sterile pastime. Only a few individuals under–
stood the meaning, causes and probable results of this general indif–
ference.
A curious book appeared in Warsaw in 1932. It was a novel,
in two volumes, entitled
Insatiability.
Its auther was Stefan Ignacy
Witkiewicz, a painter, writer and philosopher, who had constructed
an ontological system
akin
to the monadology of Leibniz. His book,
like his earlier novel,
Farewell to Autumn,
could not hope for a large
number of readers. The language used by the author was difficult,
full of his own neologisms. Brutal descriptions of erotic scenes alter–
nated with whole pages of discussions on Husserl, Camap and other
contemporary ontologists. Besides, one could not always tell whether
*
Czeslaw Milosz, a distinguished Polish poet and the translator of Shakespeare
and T . S. Eliot, was Polish cultural attache in Washington between 1946 and
1950. He is now working actively in Europe for the liberation of his country, hav–
ing renounced his own privileged position in Warsaw for that purpose.
