The Human Drama at the Heart of Józef Tischner’s Philosophy of Drama
Responsibility for one’s neighbor becomes responsibility for everything—even the world where one’s neighbor exists. It coincides with the responsibility of a servant of God who believes that the fate of the world depends upon his prayer and sacrifice. One is either responsible for everything or for nothing. Only the one who is ready to die for the salvation of the other whom he encounters refrains from murder. There is no third possibility between Cain’s and Abel’s stances. This is the path of desire, which grows as good deeds drill down to the goodness in man.
—Józef Tischner’s The Philosophy of Drama
Józef Tischner’s The Philosophy of Drama, begun in the late 1970s, and mostly written in the 1980s, is one of the most significant philosophical works in Polish. It is also probably one of the most important in contemporary (yes, still contemporary!) European philosophy. However, the book owes its particular significance not so much to the novelty of thought, but above all to the strength of its intellectual resonance in the universe of problems that were the focus of the philosophy of the last century. The work of this Polish thinker somehow absorbed and creatively processed them in order to derive a specific synthesis from them. Their importance is revealed in the close connection of intellectual concepts with the actual practice of social life. In this sense, this “treatise on the dramatic nature of human existence” belongs as much to the area of ethics and philosophical anthropology as to political philosophy. More than that: at the deepest, although hidden, layer it is also a modern theological proposal.
Hence, to be more precise, Tischner’s philosophical reflection takes up issues found in the works of thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Buber. Starting from the basic epistemological findings of Husserl’s late phenomenology and its continuation in Heidegger’s early philosophy, the Polish philosopher moves to ontological positions similar to existentialism, but closer to Heidegger or Gabriel Marcel than to Sartre. He does so in order to establish ethics on this foundation as the basis for and ontology of relations, which bears clear traces of the philosophy of dialogue and directly refers to Levinas. Somewhere deep in the background of these polemics and references there is undoubtedly another man—Karol Wojtyła—the author of the book Person and Act, written in the 1960s; the later Pope John Paul II would translate the theses of that treatise into his activity as the leader of the Church.
Following Tischner’s narrative, we may have the overwhelming impression that the author is very intent on maintaining contact with the reader, and one who is by no means an academic philosopher. That intention results in the choice of a specific writing style, combining the inquisitiveness of living thought with an enriching lecture. The book is both a record of the philosopher’s profound reflections and a first-rate literary essay, both a universal political theory and a practical manual of the ethical life of an individual in a modern society. It is as if the author of the book wished to remain a teacher rather than a scholar and writer.
From the very first words, one notices the author’s peculiarly contrarian spirit; he was not only an academic philosopher of international standing, but also a priest, a popular preacher and retreat leader, a shepherd of the academic community of his university in Krakow and, finally, an informal spiritual chaplain of the Solidarity movement, which contributed significantly to political changes in Poland and around the world in the 1980s. Tischner’s public lectures and media appearances attracted crowds of listeners hungry for an intellectual feast. His manner was characterized by ease and simplicity, and the professor-priest would often relieve the tension of improvised thought with a witty comment, joke, or anecdote. He readily emphasized his highlander origins and frequently returned to his home area in the Tatra Mountains region of Poland.
In this, he was in fact similar to his older friend Karol—a poet, playwright, and actor in his youth—who never lost his naturalness in contact with people, even as pope. They were both writers, but they addressed listeners, not readers, and both openly drew from great works of European literature. One might say that they acted like actors and spiritual leaders whose charisma came from the resonance drawn from those who were supposed to be moved by their teachings.
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The author of The Philosophy of Drama begins his considerations by pointing out the richness of the meaning of the word “drama.” For him, it means above all a certain existential situation; one that is permanent in the life of a human being, because being in drama is the essence of being human. Tischner is not interested in being as such, but only in being that is realized in human form. It is about being humanly. And to be humanly means to exist through acts directed at other people, to exist through actions and, because of their value, to exist in the heart of the horizon of values. It must be stated up front: for the Polish philosopher (and his Polishness is of consequence here, but I shall speak to that later), a human is a being who not so much is as should be; it is an identity which is a task. Such a human is always “someone”; it is a person who realizes himself under the influence of his duty being revealed; it is a being that becomes itself in relation to something that exceeds individual existence, and always manifests itself through events—as an encounter with a fellow someone.
The essayistic style of the book seems a conscious choice here. In many places, the author does not hesitate to use persuasion rather than argumentation, as if his goal was not so much to convince the listeners of his interpretations, but to reach to their own potential for understanding their own existential situation. Albeit, contrary to what it may appear as, this is not a set of loose musings but a systematically ordered treatise. Yet, the system proposed by the lecturer does not serve to lock the listeners in a cage of prevailing paradigms, but establishes points of support for independent, and consequently always constructive, reflection.
I suspect that the postulate, dominant in contemporary humanities, of thinking that intentionally suspends a decision would be considered ethically questionable by the Polish philosopher. In his thinking, there is a distinct feel of personal involvement of the thinker, a real creative process, and at the same time a sense of responsibility for the possible consequences of the words uttered. The teacher does not hide the fact that he is addressing us, a community of listeners close to his heart, a community which he strengthens in its weakening sense of its own identity. This allows an intimate relationship to form between the writer and the reader, which is, in fact, characteristic of literary rather than strictly scientific works. The reflections contained in the book reach us on an intuitive level, requiring no special preparation within academic philosophy. As a result, readers of this book, from Russia to America, may get the impression that they are communing with something well-known to them, with something of their own. And they have to confront this on their own, on the basis of current challenges.
The didactic attitude of the author, the sources that he uses, should not be seen as a symptom of a mechanical reductionism of humanity to a Eurocentric perspective. It should rather be acknowledged as a declaration of humility towards one’s own cognitive limitations. It is intellectual honesty which makes him engage in ethics, the artistic expression of which was Greek tragedy, chivalric romance, Shakespearean drama, and finally the modern European novel—all illustrating the mutual confrontation of individuals entangled in a network of axiological conditions. The Polish philosopher is convinced that what has been done in those works has also been done through these works—in their readers; and this remains in these books at such a fundamental level that the Western mind and Western moral sensitivity cannot cancel them with “critical gestures,” because if it does then it falls under the threat of not so much collapsing into the eternally undecidable, but into a state of impotence to determine, and therefore to decide, and therefore to act—into a state, if still alive, then no longer humanly alive.
In this tradition, the “human” is defined as the subject of ethical acts. (And that, I may add, distinguishes it from “human” as defined through various contemporary gnoses: deep ecology, new materialism, transhumanism, etc.) As an ethical being, the human:
- participates in the drama of choosing/deciding,
- is party to interpersonal relationships,
- is guided by values and, in addition,
- understands all this, and
- captures it in acts of expression through the power of acting.
The latter factors are organized into a dialogical dramaturgy and narrative whose mysterious author is a composer rather than a sender. He inevitably remains hidden from those who are drawn by him into the continuous happening of the emergent drama—both addressed to its conscious recipients and offered to its inevitable participants. The narrative of the drama (of what is happening) consists of individual narratives, remaining in dialogical interdependence. Those individual, always autonomous, acts of expression confronting each other within unforeseen events, find a common ground/horizon of agreement/conflict—and from there, from that place revealed to them as common, the call to be human reaches them through reciprocity. The content of human drama is precisely the calling for reciprocity. That content is released and clarified gradually, it becomes embodied to everyone from the perspective of both viewer-witness and actor-author, in the course of dialogic performance, in which everyone participates personally and momentarily, in the time of the game given to them—in kairos, part of a drama that cannot be encompassed by understanding, and instead emanates mystery.
Humanity thus understood cannot be merely defined or explained; its dynamic form can only be testified to, in the role of both participant and observer. A human understood in such a way cannot be described; one can only note their drama on an ongoing basis, and continuously interpret that developing scenario. There will be countless scenarios, but they can all be reduced to one pattern: existential circumstances lead to a meeting of subjects, the meeting encourages individuals to start a conversation, and in its course the stakes of the confrontation, that is, the subject of the drama itself, are revealed.
In other words: a human is subjectivized, in both the epistemological and ethical sense, only in a dynamic (performative) manner, because it comes as a result of an encounter with another subject, and thanks to this she can confront the object of her necessary reference—not a thing, but the content of her own vocation. For the human subject refers, cognitively and morally, not so much to objectified entities, but to her own duty; to who she is to be, since she exists.
Thus, the aforementioned “traditionalism” of Tischner reveals its very modern face. The philosopher does not intend to deny the essentialist definition of humanity contained in the Hellenic-Judaic tradition, but he clearly fears that it creates a temptation to separate our understanding of ourselves from the reality, which is the temporal dimension of the experience of life. By drawing a scenario of dramatic existence, he restores to the human a sense of responsibility its daily here-and-now, restores to it the dignity of an authentic actor-author of the dramaturgy of life: not only one’s own life but also our life, because it is always a dynamically interpersonal one. Such a scenario also dictates a modern research program for philosophy itself. For if a human does not exist otherwise than dramatically, then it is necessary to study that very “dramatic” condition of human existence. Such research must necessarily take the form (method?) of understanding. Thus, in Tischner’s view, philosophical research will be an interpretation, an analysis of meaning—a hermeneutics of the dramatic condition of the human.
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Of course, the term drama remains a metaphor, but the metaphor is not merely an instrument of communication here. It is, in a way, necessary for thinking itself, because the object that we are examining is in fact metaphorical, full of meaning. Thus, metaphor does not so much mediate the human condition in the cognitive medium of language, as it becomes the subject of source-analysis itself. Metaphor imposes itself on the mind and, supported by the authority of the tradition of its use, generates semantic consequences.
Thinking in the element of metaphor remains thus methodical thinking, but it leads not from discovery to discovery (as in the empirical sciences) and not from premise to conclusion (as in logic), but from understanding to understanding (as in real life). And understanding demands recognition of its factuality, and thus confirmation, in experience, and demands consequences in the form of actions. Described by great writers, and thus recognizable to us in the form of a metaphor, the activity of human individuals is treated here as a symptom of the subject’s understanding of her own dramatic situation, which is the basis of each of these acts—the recognition of her role in the recognized drama. And this is not about “knowledge” but about a specific decision-making “impulse.” In this context, one may wish to mention another name of a contemporary philosopher who in some sense shares a similar way thinking with Tischner: his friend Charles Taylor.
To recapitulate: In Józef Tischner’s opinion, the answer to the question of the ontological identity of the human should be sought in ethics (a practical and not merely formal one), revealed through the axiological interpretation of the acts of meeting between humans. Such a revelation occurs by describing specific actions of individual people at moments when they are somehow faced with such acts of decision-making, because they recognize their entanglement in the interpersonal drama. Thus, literary narrative seems to serve here not so much as a medium—tolerated out of necessity and treated with suspicion, as a malicious intruder—but as an instrument of insight and projection necessary because of the limits of human thought. In the historically developing self-knowledge of the human, something occurs which might be called a constant translation: of real events into a literary narrative, and of the latter into an ethical narrative. Between these two translations lies a metaphor; it needs to be there, for it conditions understanding. And so, experience is fixed in the form of a metaphor, and metaphor becomes the subject of philosophical interpretation. Still, this is not enough. It is still necessary to translate the phenomena of human action into ethics, so that ethics can once again be read as a text, but this time as a record of symptoms indicating the source of the acting specific to the human.
This is how the reflection on the metaphor of “drama” proceeds. And where is it heading? To the same place where every serious philosophical reflection leads. The philosopher leads us along the path of hermeneutics focused on understanding the experience of human reciprocity, towards ontology, and perhaps even further. However, we will not be led by the hand, nor will we be led by a guide confident in his knowledge; our partner and advisor is a humble but experienced cartographer. And if someone leads us, by drawing a useful map, into a territory so eagerly closed to inquisitive minds today, we will find ourselves there rather as a weary wanderer—invited unexpectedly and joyfully surprised by the hospitable reception.
A map is essentially an image, a text to be read; it is the effect of conceptualization and formalization of empirical research; it is a theorem or a work of art. Can such an artifact be useful to us in the daily effort of making decisions? Is it really possible, through ethics founded on the analysis of literary works, to find the answer to the ontological question: what does it mean for the human to be?
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It might seem that if being a human is realized through an ethical attitude, then the ontology of humanity is realized only within an individual existence, although entangled in interpersonal relations. Would it not then be better not to bother yourself with metaphysical questions? Should we not rather, in a more prudent manner, replace the spiritual iconography of human existence with a diagnosis of the human psyche, and reduce the ethical valuation of the latter to the economy of individual needs? Reconciling oneself with such a reduction would bring the Polish philosopher’s thought closer to the horizontal ontology and social ethics of Sartre, to the Marxist humanism of the Frankfurt School, to various post-humanist turns which characterize the contemporary confusion of philosophers in the labyrinth of paths which are cautiously deemed possible, but never riskily chosen. The author of The Philosophy of Drama undoubtedly realizes the times in which he has to think. And he chooses the opposite direction.
Tischner only seemingly ignores the question of being-as-such, because, in fact, he only suspends it in order to answer it indirectly. It is obvious that the ethicality of being constitutes for him precisely the essence of human existence. And that is because the ethical attitude of the individual is inevitably anchored by the philosopher in the sphere of values, which are constituted not within the framework of self-knowledge, but on the horizon of real existence, i.e. in the place where it borders on transcendence; even if the latter were to be only a tendency towards some transcendence, practically preventing the mind from crossing its own border. That tendency, the sensing of which always comes with a moment of pre-decisive tension, suggests that the human may have indeed been thrown into existence, but as an ethical being (not reducible to biology) it was thrown there from the outside. Whence then, if not from beyond existence? Also from beyond immanence (in the understanding of Gilles Deleuze), for immanence could not precede the individual.
In other words: Becoming aware of the necessity of permanently maintaining an ethical attitude, the human finds himself as a being transcending his own existence, and at the same time treating that very existence as a space for the realization of his own humanity. A moral act, resulting from attraction by value, activates the essential humanity in the existing individual. This is what fundamentally distinguishes Tischner’s axiological transcendental ethics from the pragmatic ethics of materialists. This is also what distinguishes his political project of solidarity of persons from projects of liberalizing and unifying human coexistence.
Like Heidegger before, and then the post-war existentialists, Tischner accepts as a research assumption the primacy of existence over essence, except he goes a step further (following Levinas), recognizing the primacy of the ethical over the existential. It is the ethicality of existence that constitutes the exceptionally human way of being, and only such being interests him, because such being is the only one available to us humans, and perhaps even one given to us as a task to understand. Tischner’s personalistic existentialism is therefore situated close to, yet at the same time in opposition to the materialistic existentialism of Marxists, Freudians, and other determinists. This affects the choice of metaphor that dominates his thinking.
For the literary form through which every determinism is expressed is a finite story told by an omniscient narrator. It can be understood and accepted or not (conservative conformism or permanent revolution), it can be read and interpreted many times (sustained agnosticism, constant deconstruction), but one cannot take part in the events it describes. Its opposite would be the dramatic form. The author of the drama composes the events, but he does so for them to be played out. For a drama, unlike a novel, is interpreted by performing it, by acting in circumstances that the playwright suggests to those willing to take on the roles of dramatic characters.
The author of the drama does not recount anything, as the author of a story does, but presents a series of situations. Therefore, it matters whether the philosopher directs his translational-descriptive effort at the described or the presented world. That is why the characters in Tischner’s essay on humanity are not characters of a finite narrative, whose creator would decide fully about their actions, situating himself outside the created world, but they are characters of a drama, and an ideal drama at that, in which a character co-creates the dramaturgy with another character in statu nascendi, and together they gradually become aware of the meaning of the dramatic events in order to read clues from them as to further development of the action. This drama is written on the stage, which is itself a place of rehearsals. It is a rhapsodic drama, a performance of real action.
I am alluding here to a very specific stage play, perfectly familiar to every educated Pole; but I will return to that at the end. Now I would just like to indicate that the drama meant by the Polish philosopher is not a metaphor chosen by him at random or arbitrarily; it refers to a tradition of playwriting which was developed from poetry and acting rather than emerging from epic, as was the case in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. This trend of thinking about drama flows from Greek sources, gains strength in medieval mystery plays, and then makes the leap beyond the Shakespearean chronicle, the classicist debate, and even the bourgeois story taken from life—to the romantic stage poem and further to the avant-garde encounter of the word of the exposed person with the body of the real performer. It is that particular literary form of drama, interpreted metaphorically, which leads to specific philosophical findings.
In Tischner’s philosophy of human drama, the character and the author can be the same person, because the human is neither carried by events nor creates them, but receives them as material for development. Everyone, in their individuality, must undertake the mission of realizing universal humanity. An Everyman composes a drama together with another Everyman from what is jointly given to them as the created world, as the earth to be made subject to the community of people, and in the name of the commandments given to them. The community in such a drama is not an organized society but an organizing congregation of fellow beings, and the individual does not realize the social function assigned to them, but rather activates the personal potential of freedom found in the course of life events. It is a drama more for actors than for readers. Here the actor does not present the character as an object to be imitated, but the character becomes present as a result of the actor’s actions, their free acts. In a thus understood theater, drama does not serve the viewer as a plane to consider moral problems, but gives them a scenario for practicing ethics. “The biblical stories,” says Erich Auerbach, “seek to subject us.” We are not in an Athenian theater, we are in the middle of biblical history.
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It is difficult to say whether Tischner’s treatise is ethics or philosophical anthropology, or perhaps a hidden ontology, or even theology. We sense in the author’s reflections a certain aversion to ontology as such, especially in its Neo-Thomistic version; sometimes it seems to be downright anti-ontological. Yet, at the same time, the philosopher does not intend to replace Thomistic realism with a phantom phenomenology, establishing the primacy of epistemology over ontology. Is it possible to reconcile those two aspirations?
Yes, it can be done. Philosophical questions need to be transferred to the ground of the experience of art, so that instead of answers we obtain commandments. Ultimately, the philosopher sanctions her claims to publicize her spiritual effort in a similar way to an artist or a priest: she will achieve the right effect if she manages to return among people to speak to those who are thirsty for the comforting truth. To speak not so as to make others follow them, but so that those others can speak from themselves and to each other in the words of the drama in which they find themselves. The philosopher’s task is not much different from that of a preacher or a poet; from each of them the listeners expect . . . no, not a lesson at all, but a metaphor; something that they will be able to use independently. Is it possible? By all means, we have done it for centuries!
Metaphor is, in fact, something very substantial, because it appears in human perception preceding the recognition of meaning; it is the vanguard of the moment of intellectual revelation. We await this moment of hermeneutic revelation, and metaphor heralds it, because we expect to make it our assistant in action. Meaning, having fulfilled its task, loses itself in its pragmatic function of an impulse for decision-making, it becomes transparent, while metaphor remains with us as something that we hope to use again and again. In practice, metaphor usually becomes something which we have contact with every day, but we do not pay attention to it. We indifferently, carelessly pass by an object, an image, a situation—that matter of visual arts, literature, theater—until someone takes it out of its utilitarian context and transfers it to the space of semantic activity of the mind. Then life becomes “life”—an epic, a biography, a confession, a drama. We can (and even must) look at such life from a distance, and only then, paradoxically, can it be used in the life that engages us. In other words: in order to answer the question of what happened to us, we must translate the event into a phenomenon fit for hermeneutic processing.
Therefore, if a thinker does not want to get locked in the paper walls of the academy, such a thinker should not invent terms but create metaphors. Or rather: discover them in human experience due to a special sensitivity to them.
That is why for Tischner, the existential phenomenon takes the form of a sign; but a sign treated not as a representation of what is, but as a symptom of what is happening. A series of sign-events forms a composition in human hermeneutic experience, containing a message of ethical content, and thus it generates duty. In the form of duty, a value appears; however, it can only be known as a value post-actum, in retrospective reflection on the motivation for the act. In conscience, perhaps?
Such recognition of value (anagnorisis) in one’s own act makes the individual aware that freedom belongs to his essential identity. The individual then experiences a kind of purification (katharsis), because he frees himself from necessity, not just becomes aware of it. He experiences a sense of dignity that flows from responsibility, which is a symptom of being the real doer of the act, a human subject. As in tragedy—the protagonist becomes himself through a crime or through an act of love. The “I” endowed with the dignity of conscious agency is a Person, the protagonist in the drama, whose development depends on him. A protagonist is a person to whom his calling to be human has been revealed.
In Tischner’s view, a person does not put on a mask when confronted with another (as Sartre would have it); on the contrary, the person becomes aware that she has a face (as Levinas claims) and that her face is rather a face for another than for herself, and thus that her own identity is not limited to self-definition, but has consequences in the form of an act directed at another. It is the act that defines the person, not the person who legitimizes the act. For an act is nothing other than a choice from among recognized values. And the latter cannot be fiction if they are to be the initiator of action (not: reaction). By becoming aware of the “dramatic” nature of her life, a human not only recognizes her freedom but also experiences the reality of values as beings transcendent to materially determined existence.
For freedom (following Hannah Arendt’s thought lurking in these arguments) can be grasped by the mind only in human acts. Belief in any being transcendent to individual existence and limited to material duration is achieved, according to Tischner, through acceptance of the transcendence of the other as an autonomous neighbor. A person experiences a person and that experience opens the way for everyone to the Absolute Person. If we extend such a relationship towards the neighbor to all individuals, we will achieve a bond of solidarity, a spiritual human family.
The possibility of standing face to face with God is therefore available to everyone who enters into a lasting relationship of solidarity with other people. Shall we call this “the Church”? In his book, Tischner does not want to proclaim an apology for the Church, he wants to remain a philosopher, but leaves no doubt as to the fact that it is the Church, as the People of God, that is the human face directed toward God. It is worth recalling that such an “anthropological” definition of the Catholic Church can be found in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1968 and the reforms of which would be supported by the Polish priest, and finally in the new version of the official Catechism, announced by John Paul II in 1992.
From philosophical reflection on existence, through theological conclusions, we are thus heading back to life, to practical ethics. A philosopher must not only be wise, but also useful. And to whom, if not his closest ones? To whom, if not those who want to hear encouraging words in their own language and obtain metaphorical tools to operate their own imagination? That is why Tischner wanted to give his religious and political lesson primarily to his compatriots, when they dared to oppose the communist regime. In this way, the philosopher did the same thing that Polish poets once did for the nation: he raised political activity, the fight for the freedom of the community, to the level of metaphysical drama.
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Let us take a look at the workings of this dramaturgy—perhaps a dramaturgy of the spirit? The Everyman, being a dramatic character incessantly, exists in time as someone towards someone, a person defined by actions. Tischner therefore involuntarily redefines Aristotle’s old thesis on the structure of tragedy. The Greek philosopher believed that it is the action (mythos) that creates characters; the Polish thinker believes that action is not the events planned by the gods that happen to the protagonist, but the responsible actions of that protagonist; so the character somehow creates himself through what he does, and does not only emerge from the events (dramatein) that fate has sent. The protagonist of the drama is not herself, but becomes himself. While acting? On the stage, where he meets his partners? That is exactly how the actor does it in the ideal project of the rhapsodic drama, in a spontaneously created performance. The theatrical action occurs in statu nascendi, yet it does not merge into a chain of random situations, but into a dramatic composition, because the order of events is given by the progressive, dialogue by dialogue, understanding of the content of what the actors participate in, successively and consistently gaining the status of a character. From the viewer’s perspective, what happens on stage does not illustrate the drama, but reveals it gradually in the dramaturgy of the performance. It is on this metaphor, a drama occurring on stage, and not recorded in the text, that the philosopher meditates.
Fated to exist in the drama, a human becomes more and more consciously a character of that drama. Gradually becoming the protagonist of the drama is the result of recognizing the content emerging from the sequence of events, meetings and actions; it is the result of recognizing the stakes of the dramatic game. In this way, the protagonist identifies with himself-as-an-author, because the latter is not the author of events, but the author of the sense of what the individual-character experiences. Everyone is the author of the drama of which he is the protagonist, not because he has full control over the events, but because he is the author of the understanding of the duties resulting from the interpretation of events. I, the author, assign tasks to myself, the character, because I have recognized the sense of the drama in which I am participating. Can one be freer than by realizing conditions as possibilities, not as limitations?
The author-character of the drama is therefore essentially a hero, a protagonist of the history they embody. Everyone can be such a hero; in fact, everyone should be. Being a hero includes the freedom that is innate to the human, which is the ability to take action thanks to transcendent values, and not under the influence of immanent necessities. Such freedom does not ignore the reality found but takes it into account, and makes it the material of interpretation. In short: The human is a hermeneutic being, reads her life, understands it, and in the name of this understanding, decides about this life—the human recognizes the dramatic potential of her existence and on this basis composes the drama in which she acts.
Human freedom, Tischner makes it clear, does not consist in the ability to freely change individual conditions of existence. It instead is activated in deciding about the actions that everyone undertakes as a result of recognizing the values that appear to them in light of current events. Human freedom does not therefore refer to the ability to interfere in matter but to the ability to assess facts by the measure of values. Hence, the ontological foundation of being-in-humanity in axiology; hence, the foundation of epistemology in hermeneutics.
The drama of humanity is a composition of sign-postulates. That drama can therefore be played out as the real life of individuals in a community of mutually fulfilled duties. Is this a project of a possible society? A project of a new polis? Or perhaps a renewed Church? Either way, we are dealing here with an actual project, not a ready-made program; drama is a proposal, not an ideology. The dramatic order of actions takes place in a world open to interpretation, and thus in a “world” understood only momentarily, but that temporary understanding is filled with content that obliges everyone supra-locally. The human drama, therefore, clearly unfolds within some larger order, but that order always remains outside, present in human experience only in the form of signs, present as meaning, not as fact. It becomes clear why Tischner, a contemporary philosopher, does not want to lock himself in the scholastic cage of Aquinas, but also does not allow himself to be drawn into the cogs of the Hegelian system. In his proposal, God does not impose himself on the human with his icon, does not interfere in human creativity, does not even judge, but gives the human signs as material for independent composition. God supports the human in the effort of actualization, the creator of the dramatic work entitled My Life.
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So it is theology, after all, that Józef Tischner designs into his book, and practical theology at that, because it is presented as ethics. His philosophy of drama uses metaphors taken from the theatrical arts, but constantly refers to meetings of individuals who create a community, so one can safely call it a political theology, founded on the artist’s imagination. It has a universal dimension, but it also has very Polish roots and a Polish context; it grows almost directly from Polish historical experience and Polish culture, and within its framework, from Polish romantic poetry and Polish theater of the twentieth century. I would like to present this matter briefly here at the end.
We should start with poets who wrote in Polish, about Poland and for Poles, while living in exile in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s. The main theme of their works was freedom, but seen from the side of its opposite, captivity, because Poland was occupied by neighboring powers at that time and did not exist as a political community. In freedom, poets saw the fulfilment of the human way of being, but in practice they only had “freedom” as a project. Freedom, therefore, meant duty, a calling to act responsibly. A free human, and, therefore, a human of fulfilled identity, was a human active among people, a hero of everyday life. Thus, in the poetic dramas of Polish Romantics, the philosophy of the person and the act came to the fore.
Like Father Tischner later, and Father Karol Wojtyła before him, poets such as Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński, and Cyprian Norwid believed that moral duty was born from recognizing and then accepting values as signs of transcendence. Or even, to say it openly, from accepting the discerned will of God. Thus, they wanted to make their work a hermeneutics endowed with the power of ethical practice founded on religious faith. They unanimously called it “active poetry” and considered the theater to be the most perfect place for its impact. Regrettably, there were no Polish cultural institutions at that time, and Polish playwrights would only find their theatrical fulfilment on the stages of the next century.
Drama was therefore chosen as it was considered to have a practical dimension—it acts as an internal mechanism of the community, it is a starter of the polis. They reasoned through analogies, tried to understand metaphors, and had the courage to propose the results of that hermeneutics as an ethical practice in the life of the community. They believed that the dramaturgy of the human heart, active ethics, is triggered in an encounter with another and is transferred to real interpersonal relations, which are disseminated creating politics, or the principles of interpersonal coexistence. Politics is not a social stasis but a dunamis of dialogical encounters; its model is thus not structure but dramaturgy. And so, it is not the Spirit of History (an anonymous and autonomous author) who writes interpersonal drama, but ethos (an internal collective author) who performs its own existence on the way to fulfilment. The political history of the community is made of improvised meetings of individuals within the framework of a permanent axiological support surrounding them. However, this mechanism was not to be activated by a dramatic text, but by a theatrical performance.
There is not sufficient space here to speak of how and through which theater artists this came about. For the purposes of this essay, I shall mention only two names which are at the end of this path, names which are probably universally recognizable: Karol Wojtyła (a theater artist who was to become a priest; a philosopher and theologian who became a pope and finally a saint) and Jerzy Grotowski (a theater artist who gradually became a philosopher, and towards the end of his life became a spiritual leader). Both, taking their cue from the Romantic philosophy of Polish poetic drama described above, saw in dramaturgy a metaphor which allowed them to recognize the drama of the situation of human co-existence, and in theater, they found the opportunity to create a model for it. Although their biographies were surprisingly similar in their course—from theater, through philosophy, to public activity—they differed from each other in many respects, and yet they were united by an astonishing community of imagination; both used almost the same terms from the theater dictionary which are used by Józef Tischner, a priest and philosopher, author of The Philosophy of Drama. If all three were placed next to each other, Tischner would probably be between them.
So, I shall allow myself to propose the following set: Wojtyła – Tischner – Grotowski. What unites the three of them is the human in action. Wojtyła uses the term “acting man,” Tischner perceives the dynamics of interpersonal encounters as “dramatic action,” while Grotowski sets the performer the task of extremely authentic action, which he calls a “total act.” Each of them is concerned with practicing reciprocity. In the theater I am discussing here is that of concerned performers acting on stage (actors), but after all, those on stage are people just like those in the audience. Do the words of poets, which actors utter and under the influence of which they act, not belong to our common spiritual heritage? The actor, the author, and the viewer thus share the scene of events and the horizon of symbols surrounding it.
Wojtyła the actor and Grotowski the director drew from the same theatrical tradition, initiated once by the Polish Romantics, and Tischner the philosopher read the metaphor that Polish theater suggested to him. For all of them, the most important thing in the theater was the actor. The actor was to become not only a metaphor for an acting human, but literally a model of the way of being for a human towards the other. Such an actor does not pretend, does not imitate, but personally realizes a certain aspect of humanity, so that the viewer accompanying them could experience a human in action, himself in his own essence. Because an actor is simply an acting human, a model of an everyday hero, a model member of the community of actants, realizing the dramatic ethos.
The metaphorical imaginations of Wojtyła, Tischner, and Grotowski work in different fields, but these areas could be compared as levels of human activity: theology – philosophical anthropology – art. If those activities were transferred to the ground of everyday human group activity, they would find three models of reciprocity corresponding to them: congregation – society – community. All three draw from the same tradition: the Romantic philosophy of action, understood as the action of individuals in the space of reciprocity, subordinated to a common ethos. It is, no more and no less, politics founded on ethics, and thus the main message of the Polish Romantics. To the Polish inspirations shared by them, one could also add a specific code of heroic virtues, derived from the Polish political idea of the republic of nobility.
The basic political doctrine of that state assumed that the main directive of an individual’s conduct in the community is not some common interest, but maintaining the vitality of the shared moral ethos.
When writing The Philosophy of Drama at the turn of the 1970s into the 1980s, Józef Tischner must have kept in mind the model of drama proposed by Polish Romantic poets, because he knew it from school and the tradition in which he was raised; Grotowski’s theater operated in his environment, at that time influencing the entire Polish intelligentsia; and Karol Wojtyła—actor, philosopher, theologian, and pope—carried out in social and political practice the task of a human of action which he had set for himself. All three believed that the meaning of human life is action, and it is what testifies to the true fulfilment of the Word, which reaches the human in the form of a question, a calling, reaching from afar, when we stand before the face of another. Then the answer, as Grotowski repeated, “cannot be formulated, it can only be done.”
EDITORIAL NOTE: The Philosophy of Drama is now available in English translation from the University of Notre Dame Press. Some of the remarks for this essay were developed for the 2024 Fall Conference panel on Tischner’s thought, available below: