Pascual Ángel Gargiulo and Humberto Luis Mesones-Arroyo (eds.)Psychiatry and Neuroscience Update – Vol. II10.1007/978-3-319-53126-7_1

1. Phenomenology of the Encounter According to Józef Tischner

Miriam Dolly Arancibia de Calmels¹

(1)

Universidad Nacional de San Juan, Avda. Ignacio de la Roza y Meglioli, C.P. 5400 San Juan, Argentina

Miriam Dolly Arancibia de Calmels

Email: mdacalmels@gmail.com

Abstract

The general crisis of individualism is reflected in the conflicts generated by human beings themselves in different parts of the planet: fundamentalism, xenophobia, gender violence, wars, genocide, and exploitation of human beings. Politically, individualism is presented under the form of extreme Manichean positions: left or right, capitalism or socialism, liberalism or communism. However, human society is much more complex; these simplifications are no longer possible. Neither the left nor the right will provide paradise, even less if their exponents think themselves to be possessors of absolute truth. On the other hand, respect for the diversity of the other view is not exhausted in the development of critical thinking. The purpose of this review is to schematically describe the viewpoint of Tischner, based on the notion of encounter to refer to the original experience with another human being where the other takes the highest level of persuasion. The encounter with another is the agathologic horizon of the interpersonal experience, and opens up the possibility of meeting with oneself in a new way. By impotence or ignorance many tragedies are possible, and in fact they have taken place in the darkest periods of mankind, when evil apparently killed good, resulting in the most sadistic forms of selfishness. Finally, the present review tends to demonstrate that on the agathologic horizon, the manifestations of the other and oneself are developed in a true sense of the good and the bad, the different logos that fit the drama or tragedy in interpersonal relationships.

Keywords

EncounterAgathologicPhenomenologyComplexity

Introduction

The philosophy of encounter is one of the most original accomplishments of Józef Tischner, and constitutes a challenge for contemporary philosophy. The general crisis of individualism is reflected in the conflicts generated by human beings themselves in different parts of the world: fundamentalism, xenophobia, gender violence, wars, genocide, and exploitation of human beings. Politically, individualism is presented under the form of extreme Manichean positions: left or right, capitalism or socialism, liberalism or communism. However, human society is much more complex; these simplifications are no longer possible. It follows that the encounter with another as the agathologic horizon of the interpersonal experience opens new ways for understanding people.

The philosophy of Tischner has been defined as connected with phenomenology and close to the thought of Emmanuel Lévinas, although Tischner himself preferred the term “philosopher without labels.” He was a thinker who could hardly be confined to any philosophical school.

We can divide the work of the Polish philosopher into two periods. The first involves The World of Human Hope and Thinking in Values, in which Tischner developed a philosophy of man connected with axiological problematics. In the middle of the 1970s, the theme of the other emerges in The Ethic of Values and Hope (1976), and in the article Phenomenology of the Encounter (1978).

In the 1970s, Tischner became increasingly influential in Poland’s intellectual life. While sticking to the phenomenological tradition, he also followed the leads he found in the philosophy of drama and the metaphysics of the good, blazing his own path. At the end of the 1970s, he also took issue with Marxism in the book The Polish Shape of Dialogue.

In the second period of his work, which started in the late 70s and the early 80s, he published The Philosophy of Drama and The Controversy over the Existence of Man, which place the other at the heart of their philosophical reflections. Tischner arrives at metaphysics of the good embedded within the Platonic tradition [1].

The problematic of encounter was taken up by Husserl, who influenced many Polish thinkers through Roman Ingarden. One of the main themes of transcendental phenomenology is intersubjectivity. According to Husserl, intersubjective experience plays a fundamental role in our constitution of objectively existing subjects, other experiencing subjects, and the objective spatial–temporal world [2].

Tischner adds that to have a primary experience of another human being is to have an encounter, and he proposes recasting Husserl’s old catchphrase “back to things themselves” into “back to other human beings.” Intersubjective experience is empathic experience; it occurs in the course of our conscious attribution of intentional acts to other subjects, in the course of which we put ourselves into the other’s shoes [3].

An encounter is to be “face to face” with someone. It enables us to gain an intuition of another human being’s face, which reveals a truth about the other. The face is not the same as a veil or a mask. A veil covers the face, a mask aims to create an illusion of a face, and thus they do not reveal who that human being is. In contrast, a face can tell us that.

Therefore, Tischner analyzes what a face is. He applies a phenomenological method proposed like a plan: first, a discussion about the essence of the encounter; next, a description of the face by comparing it to a veil and a mask; and finally the challenge of seeing or reading the face.

The first question is, what is an encounter with another beyond particularities? It means, beyond circumstantial facts, not only Marxists of Tischner’s time, not only refugees of the twentieth century, not only Marxists of the 2010s in Latin America, but beyond all of these; so, the question is about the essence of encounter.

We will meditate deeply in the following part of this chapter. We will analyze reciprocity, aretetic function, wonder, and admiration according to Tischner’s proposal. It is important to underline that those reflections emerged in constrained situations when Soviet power dominated Poland. In consequence, to deeply understand the relevance of these thoughts it is necessary to remind ourselves of this context.

The Context of Tischner’s Meditations

Just as Gandhi had fought against the British monopoly, so the social movement “Solidarity” and the Catholic Church in the mid-1980s challenged the government’s monopoly over information, history, and cultural life [4].“Solidarity was born, and its power lay in the fact that for the first time in the post-war years all social groups gathered under one banner: workers, intellectuals, artists, farmers, and the youth. We walked shoulder to shoulder, and we knew where we were heading”. Lech Walesa, Gdansk, 2006 [5].

In fact, Solidarity was a movement which emerged from the industrial working class with the support of the Catholic Church; therefore, it is not strange that the theoretical basis came from the priests, and what is more, from the sermons of some priests, such as Józef Tischner. In his sermon at the Wawel Castle in Kraków on October 1980 during a Mass for Solidarity, leaders initiated a series of texts published in the weekly Tygodnkik Powscechny (The Universal Weekly). Later, those texts were published as a collection entitled Etyka Solidarności (The Ethics of Solidarity, 1981). Ever since then, he has been generally regarded as the chaplain of Solidarity. In a homily preached at Zaspa in Gdańsk in 1987, Pope John Paul II cited Fr. Tischner’s texts as the ones which best rendered the truth about “Solidarity” [6].

In Perspectives of the New Ethos of Work [7], Tischner puts in context the ethical aspects of the social revolution, which is not a fratricidal war; on the contrary, it means a leap of history to something new. Therefore, revolution has some ethical sense; it is the step on the road of progress. The Polish events of the year 1980 were described using the word “revolution,” although not one person was killed, nor did any basic change in the structure of government take place during these events—the Communist Party continued in power.

Adam Michnik ([9], p. 66) wrote: “August 1980 designates the date of the drafting of a new social contract: what had been only vivid black and white; what had not been more than shared became something organized. And it was our luck. Luck is not easy to achieve. What is at stake is not only the commitment between the sovereign society and power deprived of its sovereignty, it is what society should negotiate with that power”.

The workers’ protest in August referred not only to the economic conditions characterizing the state, but primarily to the ever more unbearable relationships between people ([7], p. 29). Economic and strictly political issues were only a part of more fundamental matters. The solidarity ethos is a synthesis of rebellion and hope, a protest against some evil and a project for a better organization of social life.

After World War II, Marxist-Socialism became the official ideology of the government ruling Poland. The nation entered the period of “socialist building,” which was to cover gradually all spheres of social life, from economy to culture. However, the sense of the socialist ideology was never and nowhere defined unambiguously, it was outlined only by the government’s actual policy.

They spoke about “the socialization of the means of production” but it was never known what range of things was denoted by the concept of “the means of production,” nor was the expression “the dictatorship of the proletariat” clear.

Another example noted by Tischner about the ambiguity was the approach of socialism’s ideology to religion: at first, religion was treated as an anachronism from the past, but later this claim was attenuated.

Another important notion ([7], p. 30) is truth, which is a kind of bond that links person with person, people with people. Trust means that a man can rely on another man not only in ordinary situations, but also during the extreme situations of life. The one who trusts another man does not have to subject him to incessant supervision, since one knows in advance what the other will do. The crisis of truth occurs when the elementary bond between people begins to crack. The place of faith and faithfulness is taken by distrust and suspicion. Social life is permeated by gloom and uneasiness, and fears are awakened.

The crisis of trust can take various forms: a simple distrust evoked by the fact of not keeping an obligation, a suspicion caused by making a sham promise, or a formal betrayal which makes one’s friend prey to their enemies.

The solidarity ethos found sympathetic grounds in Christian ethics, and especially in the whole of John Paul II’s teachings focused around three values: human dignity, every person’s right to the truth, and the obligation of faithfulness towards the fundamental values of Polish culture.

With regard to the notion of solidarity, Tischner considers that this virtue is born all by itself, spontaneously, from the heart; it is born of goodwill and awakens goodwill in people, it is born of the pages and the spirit of the Gospels, and does not need an enemy or an opponent to consolidate and develop. It is directed toward everyone and not against anyone. The dignity of man is founded on his conscience; the deepest solidarity is the solidarity of consciences.

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