Solidarity Without Enemies: Józef Tischner and the Conversation of Human Labor
On 19 October 1980, a large congregation of Polish trade unionists gathered in the chapel of the Wawel Castle in Krakow to hear a sermon from Fr Jozef Tischner—one of Poland’s most prominent thinkers, a philosopher who had trained in Western Europe and also had a reputation as a charismatic pastor. The sermon, on “The spirit of solidarity,” was to become something of a canonical text for the moral and political thinking of the activist and reformists who made up the Solidarnosc movement that had been founded in the same year, and Tischner’s intellectual and moral legacy has continued to play a significant role in Poland and elsewhere. The Polish workers’ movement of the 1980s did a great deal to give fresh currency and fresh immediacy to the language of solidarity in the Western consciousness.
After its foundation in 1980, Solidarnosc continued an underground existence during many years of repression and persecution, eventually becoming a political party after the collapse of Communism in Poland. In its earliest days, it proclaimed in unmistakeable terms its debt to Catholic Social Teaching; the influence of a number of Polish clergy and theologians was of lasting significance in its initial self-understanding as what could be called a “para-political” movement, a form of organized social co-operation that did not immediately seek a role in the management of a state. Foremost among these influences, of course, was Pope John Paul II, the former Karol Wojtyla Archbishop of Krakow, who, as a teacher of philosophy and theology, had been deeply marked by the phenomenological thinking of Edith Stein and Roman Ingarden (1893–1970), the latter being the leading advocate of this philosophical school in twentieth-century Poland. But Tischner (1931–2000) was without doubt the most prominent and original supporter of the workers’ movement. Already, by the time of Solidarnosc’s foundation, he had established a national reputation and held several senior academic posts. His first research degree had been supervised by Ingarden. In the difficult decade that followed the foundation of the movement and his Wawel sermon, he was widely regarded as a “chaplain” to the Solidarnosc network as a whole. His writings and addresses from the first years of the movement were published in Paris in 1982.
These brief essays, non-academic in style and aimed at a general audience, have proved a fertile source of inspiration and provocation; Tischner himself revisited some of their themes in an essay that was posthumously published in a new edition of his Etyka Solidarnosci in 2002, to which we shall be referring a bit later. The chequered history both of the movement and the term “solidarity” itself has continued to prompt discussion in Poland, along with Tischner’s own political evolution after the end of the Communist regime. But in 1980 the sermon spoke with exceptional force into a particular cultural moment: along with the other short addresses and articles with which it was published, it outlined a quite comprehensive social philosophy, clearly grounded in elements of Catholic social thought but seldom making explicit reference to this, and drawing on a notably wide range of sources, strongly influenced by phenomenological thinkers and connected in various ways with Tischner’s own earlier academic work. Very broadly speaking: Tischner’s account of solidarity in the Wawel sermon connects the idea with three significant themes—conscience, faithfulness and work. We shall begin looking at his understanding of solidarity with these three points in mind.
First, conscience: the Wawel sermon concludes with thanksgiving for “our solidarity of consciences,” which seems to coincide in some loosely defined way with the awakening of “consciousness” he has mentioned earlier in the text as accompanying the birth of solidarity. The words in Polish are distinct—sumienie for “conscience” and swiadomosc for “consciousness.” But the consciousness in which he is interested is above all our awareness of the pressure or burden that is carried by another human being: we awaken to the recognition that we are connected with the suffering of the other, and it is in that recognition, Tischner argues, that speech itself is born. This awakening is what St. Paul means by exhorting Christians to “carry one another’s burdens” (Gal 6:2). In the next address in the collection, Tischner reinforces the point by asserting that “the ethic of solidarity intends to be an ethic of conscience.”
His definitions of conscience are mostly vague and fairly conventional to start with—grounded in generalities about the ethical sense that is natural to human beings—but they then narrow down to the specifics of recognizing suffering, with an appeal this time to the parable of the Good Samaritan. But this reference to the parable slightly shifts the emphasis of his exposition. Conscience, Tischner says, is activated when we see that someone else’s pain is not caused primarily by contingent or “natural” factors but is actually designed by one human agent for another; and the recognition of such a “gratuitous wound” stirs something deeper than mere sympathy. It is here that the difference between solidarity and support or sympathy comes most clearly into focus for Tischner: conscience is what awakens in the moment in which we perceive the deliberate, willed, non-necessary suffering of another and understand our accountability in relation to it. As he puts it in a later address, it is the presence of a deliberate intention to injure that gives someone’s suffering “a moral character”—presumably because it is then identifiable as a willed breach in relation rather than a neutral (if distressing) set of unchosen occurrences.
And this moment of being struck by the moral—not just physical—gravity of the offence to another’s humanity is what generates not only an individual response to the other’s suffering but also a solidarity with all others who combine to meet that need—because the moral character of the pain is so deeply connected with the recognition that someone has been betrayed, abandoned. What they need, therefore, is not simply the alleviation of bodily pain or distress, but the faithful attention of a community. In this level of solidarity, we are united not by our looking at each other but by our common looking towards the person in need. “‘For him’ is first and ‘we’ comes later.” This is, says Tischner, what makes the kind of solidarity he is describing a unique kind of communion, in its primordial directedness towards the suffering other; we shall find our communion in active shared response to need and pain, not in exploring or nourishing an inner sense of common interest (it is hard to be sure, but this sounds as though Tischner is in part rebutting the argument of those nineteenth-century social thinkers in the lineage of Comte who found Christian “charity” to be unduly limited by a potentially selfish focus on mutual benefit). Solidarity of conscience ultimately means the creation of a community in which what prevails is fidelity to one another and specially to those who know what it is to be victims of unfaithfulness, betrayal.
So to the second focal point, faithfulness. The further dimension of solidarity and conscience that has to do with faithfulness is spelt out in subsequent pieces in Tischner’s collection, and is presented as the polar opposite of exploitation or abuse—an exploitation that is not simply about poor or unjust conditions of work or remuneration but is most evident when people are not allowed to be what they are but are instrumentalized in a way that traps them in untruthfulness. Solidarity cannot coexist with illusion, with the pretense that work is something it is not; and when labor is exploited—as, by implication, it is in the systemic distortions and propagandist fictions of a corrupt Communist regime that has no concern for work that is meaningful for the worker—illusion reigns. One of the insights that the awakening of conscience brings is “feeling the pain of a lie”; falsity is seen as something that actively diminishes the dignity of the person, and so becomes an even more urgent issue than the injustice of a wage system, for example. If the worker is understood only as an individual with physical needs, there is a fundamental failure to see what both work and humanity really entail; and only if we grasp the absolute necessity of faithfulness to one another do we begin to address the wound inflicted by the corruptions of a social and economic system. “Solidarity of consciences is an ethical movement, the basis of which is fidelity”; but “fidelity arises and grows where clear light reigns.” There is a tight interrelation for Tischner between honest work, honest language, conscience, faithfulness, trust and communion.
And, thirdly, key to this is the understanding of work itself understood—in one of Tischner’s tantalizingly original axioms—as “a particular form of interpersonal conversation that serves to sustain and develop human life. Even briefer: Work is a conversation in the service of life.” This is explained in terms of how work, like language itself, builds up from raw material a synthetic object with a commonly recognizable purpose; material acquires meaning through the processes of labor. In other words (and does he have Hannah Arendt at all in mind here?), the distinction between work and production is artificial. Tischner would not recognize Patocka’s relegation of labor to the pre-historic realm; in sharp contrast, work, all kinds of work, is here essentially cultural, linguistic. The conventional picture of some primitive human sallying out alone to find an animal to kill and eat and gradually discovering that it is easier to accomplish with help from others is, in Tischner’s eyes, not very convincing or important. We cannot readily identify a stage of human development in which co-operative labor is absent. The labor we are familiar with as fully historical and conscious beings in social relation always presupposes agreement, common purpose, collaboration: “By working I am joining the conversation that was already in progress before I was born. I am a link between the past and the future. I am an heir of the work.” Solidarity is both the collaborative business of refining and enriching the conversation of work and a “conversation” between past and present: in both respects a view of labor conspicuously different from any idea of it as somehow “timelessly” repetitive.
Taken together, these elements make up a quite complex picture of solidarity, one that has obvious roots in earlier thought, not least in the theological and philosophical traditions out of which Tischner comes, but remains highly distinctive. Solidarity is certainly the recognition of a pre-existing relation, to the extent that there is always already something that can be injured or “paralyzed” (as Tischner puts it) by those acts of betrayal, exploitation, and oppression that create suffering. Encountering the victim of such betrayal, we recognize what has been lost. But at this point we are also challenged to recognize solidarity as a vocation or duty: there is a form of human behavior that restores dignity and integrity for others, and this is embodied above all in practices of faithfulness, trustworthiness. The marginalized, paralyzed victim is promised an unconditional accompaniment and advocacy. And those who share this response to suffering, those who—in Tischner’s terms—actively “desire to have a conscience,” to live in obedience to conscience, are bound more deeply to one another as they address themselves to the need of the betrayed. The embodiment of this binding together is a new kind of work in common, a form of labor that acknowledges the dignity and distinctiveness of each and also the dignity and distinctiveness of various kinds of labor. It is a “truthful” form of work, in contrast to the superficial and illusory patterns of working that are imposed in a society that no longer has a real “axiological” basis, a proper grasp of how values are judged (we shall return later to Tischner’s use of the word “axiological”).
“When we read the gospel, we read it as a great textbook of fidelity.” And our reading of history too becomes a complementary process of learning who we are as humans: Tischner’s vision of humanity itself is of a species capable of faithfulness, and capable of faithfulness because it is open to truth—which is why fidelity is also the primary principle of education. In the formation of the young, “betrayal is not permitted,” because it destroys hope, which is the only motive power of true human formation and maturation. This (hopeful) openness to truth involves a faithfulness to oneself as well as the other: responsibility begins with a fidelity to truth expressed in the resolve not to lie to oneself and not to collude with being lied to. What is perhaps most striking about all this is the relatively muted role of fellow-feeling in the understanding of solidarity. We respond to the unjust suffering of the neighbor with outrage and active compassion, partly because this suffering adds to our own already serious suffering; there is a very clear sense of the distance between the felt suffering of the other and my own, at the same time as a recognition that the resolution of the other’s suffering is inseparable from the resolution of my own. When Tischner writes about “dialogue,” he does indeed begin with the proposition that dialogue occurs only when we “feel” the other’s point of view; but this is “not simply a question of compassion.” It is unpacked in terms of the willingness to imagine what is “right” in the other’s standpoint—right and therefore in some sense necessary to me—and the resolution to work towards a truth that both can acknowledge as including what matters to them.
The resolution of the suffering of the other is thus more than the ending of unjust conditions, it is the reconfiguring of how we understand shared labor and the process of continually discovering the solidarity of common meaning in that common action. We come to see work as, paradoxically, not just the meeting of a need but the deferral of the meeting of a need as we work out how to meet it collaboratively, as we talk it through and clarify its purpose (work as conversation) and attend to the granular distinctiveness of what makes the other “other,” both in terms of capacity or gift and in terms of the difficulty of adjusting to the reality of another who shares the same work in such a way that something new can emerge. The worthwhileness, the meaningfulness of such work is bound up with the mutual reliance that develops. We know it is worth suspending our immediate wants, making certain sacrifices, minor or major, because we are confident of a shared good will and a clear common goal; once again, “conscience” and “consciousness” are aroused as we see more fully what is lost in the act of betrayal. And when Tischner speaks of “heroism,” as he does from time to time, it is in this context, of a sacrifice that is validated by the trustworthiness of those around us whose share in the common task makes sense of it, even if it is also a matter of risk and isolated decision. In the process of dialogue (and here Tischner builds on some of his earlier and more theoretical work), there is an irreducible element of moving into the unknown. But this is not quite the same as Patocka’s “shakenness,” in that it is connected here with the pre-existing and continuing process of trust between human agents. As in Patocka’s world, solidarity entails a “common openness to the world”; but here it is grounded not in the shared experience of the dissolution of received values and systems but in the shared commitment to build—or rebuild—the mutual credibility of human agents divided by narrow accounts of class interest, by ideological polarization, and by the endemic corruptions of a true ethic of work in a totalitarian society.
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In the background of all this is Tischner’s philosophical formation—specifically his attempt in his doctoral and habilitation theses to reconstruct aspects of the phenomenological method so as to connect it more systematically with hermeneutical questions—issues of meaning and shared interpretation. His teacher Roman Ingarden’s challenges to Husserl were crucially important, but so was Tischner’s own reading of Levinas and Rosenzweig. In brief, his concern is to move away from prioritizing questions around the relation of subject and object and the realism/idealism debates of Husserl’s disciples towards what he described as an “axiological” framework, a scheme in which values played the central role.
Rather loosely summarized, what this means is this: the question is not how to establish what is entailed by the relation of subject to object in terms of knowledge, self-awareness and the like, but how to understand the orientation of self to other in terms of attitude, engagement and desire. The I-Thou relation is radically different from that of subject and object: it represents the way in which an other of some kind both makes a claim upon the self and, in so doing, reveals the self to itself as “for” another (whether it wants to be or not). What should be our primary question is not how or whether we truly know states of affairs in the external world, human or otherwise, but how we make sense of the fact that from the very first we are invited to take up a stance towards the world: some things matter in ways that other things do not. And in their mattering they become something other than “just” things, enumerable objects. On any other basis, philosophical anthropology becomes no more than a description of determined behaviors, third-person accounts of processes.
Tischner insists, especially in his The Philosophy of Drama [excerpted here], that any purportedly “ontological” account of the I needs to be corrected and supplemented by his phenomenology of the I as engaged, questioned by what it is not. The first-person perspective obstinately remains and cannot properly be ignored, coming into focus as a point within a reciprocal relation, as being for the other: I as “addressed subject” do not stand among the list of objects contained in the world, and I as subject literally cannot speak about myself on such a basis. I cannot meaningfully say that “I” as the receiver of an address or the making of a claim am a determinate object within my own field of perception. I cannot avoid taking up a stance towards, in responding to questioning. I allot significance to this rather than that, I learn to work with differentiated and “hierarchized” meanings, according more and less significance to elements of my environment. Crucially, I can grow into this kind of practice only in continuing company. Which is why in turn it will not do to fall into the diametrically opposed error of supposing that the fact that I occupy a distinctive first-person position is the sole source of worth or meaning, that my ego’s relation to “being” is the primordial truth. Tischner’s “axiological” perspective is as critical of Heideggerian or Sartrean rhetoric as it is of materialistic reduction.
Central to this perspective is the encounter with the human other—the linguistic other. The other’s presence is what realizes the self’s freedom, because this presence directly requires me to make choices. I can respond or I can withdraw; I can help or I can hurt. This confrontation with the choice that the other presents means that encounters with an other who is recognized as a subject are unlike any other kind of encounter in the world; indeed, they are in some sense not “of the world” in that they require a passing beyond the realm of simple instinct or feeling and a drawing on some inner creativity. Tischner’s preoccupation with drama is important here: he sees “dramatic” engagement as the essence of the distinctively human. The persons of the drama are—in the old literal sense of the word “person”—masks through which we both reveal and discover what or who we are. The uncontrolled and unpredicted initiative of the other towards us or in response to us is what sets defining boundaries for us in certain ways: we could not know ourselves without this engagement.
But this is not the last word: axiology is a relatively clear summons to take up a stance of one sort or another, but it has to be supplemented by the much less clear but more foundational invitation that Tischner calls “agathology,” the recognition of and response to the Good. I encounter not only a sort of “bare” otherness but an otherness that attracts or repels. I cannot “register” what I encounter in a reaction of simple and static neutrality; I am drawn closer or pushed further away. So in affirming “value” in this way through my response, I am also acknowledging what should and should not be, in the sense that I am conscious of wanting or not wanting some state of affairs; and the oddity of not wanting, not “consenting to,” some existing state of affairs, should alert us to the fact that we are invited to define ourselves not just in terms of “values” in general (this happens to matter to me more than that) but in relation to good and evil (this is without qualification to-be-desired rather than that). The immediate facts of our environment open out onto a more challenging horizon in a way that has been called “a biblically dramatized Platonism.”
This is the point at which the metaphysical implications of Tischner’s scheme become clearest: there is an order of relations (not quite the same as an order of “things”) that is what it is independent of our conditioned state of mind or heart, an order that has what could be called a just claim on our desires. In sum, axiology alone simply tells us that we cannot avoid taking a stance; agathology tells us that this action of self-definition cannot be an arbitrary affair. Why not exactly? I think because this would leave us with an “I” that was simply the sum of its natural impulses and needs, never actually provoked or interrupted by the reality of a real other, whose demands were not defined by my preferences, skills or concepts. The face of the other, in Levinas’s language, is never one thing among others, a phenomenon towards which I can take up whatever attitude I like; its claim on me is presented (as we have noted) as something beyond the realm of “ontology”; Tischner here agrees with Levinas. The other’s claim is not something that I can either describe in a third-person narrative or absorb into the ego as an occasion for my self-realization. The “I” is always implicated in the other’s reality and vice versa, and this means that I cannot consistently see myself as legitimately having the kind of liberty that can act without constraint—without the constraint of a reality that is always defined by mutuality and responsibility before my own standpoint as subject is even determined. So the sense of what should and should not be is always on the edge of my axiological thinking, and I shall not make final sense of this inescapable world of values unless I open it out onto the agathological horizon.
All this is significant for our topic, and for the understanding of Tischner’s specific discussions of solidarity, because it helps us grasp why solidarity and conscience, solidarity and fidelity, solidarity and the labor of language are inseparable in the addresses of the 1980s. I am always constituted by the linguistic other—and Tischner would, I think, want to insist, as many others have done, that to talk about a “linguistic other” is not to confine linguistic presence and identity to articulate users of words; communicative gesture of any kind, allied to the recognizability of the face, is the point here, the point that would allow us to include the non-articulate, the non-“standard” forms of bodily communication, even, at the extreme, the communicative reality of the newborn, the unborn, the “locked-in” and so forth. This “being-constituted-by-the-other” in the axiological relation of having to take a stance towards them means that without the sustained engagement of self and other, the engagement embodied in “drama” in the broadest sense, we could make no sense of the reality of desire in our lives—desire not as the hungry craving for something to silence the begging of the ego but as the hope for a future.
In simple terms, to be involved with the other in the axiological context is to be faced with having to decide what we want in respect of the suffering of others: are we content that the suffering of another should persist? How can this be a desirable future for me any more than for the suffering other? Are we able successfully to detach that suffering from our own well-being? If so, there is in fact something about our own humanity that we are actively suppressing, something untrue to what we actually are as constituted by “dramatic” interaction. And if we do acknowledge that this is the kind of choice that faces us, if we grasp that this choice is something to do with not lying to ourselves, we shall see that “conscience” carries with it an element of hope. This situation should not be, but it does not have to be: I have the capacity for a choice that will resist and perhaps destroy what should not be. I am able to choose fidelity and to embody it. Something new can come into the situation of suffering, something not determined in the way that the cause-and-effect systems of the material world are determined.
As Tischner says in his Etyka Solidarności pieces, the capacity for solidarity thus becomes a distinguishing feature of our humanity (though not a condition for recognizing it; we also, sadly, exhibit the distinctiveness of our humanity by exercising our liberty to refuse and betray). The good is always vulnerable to destruction in any particular circumstance, but it is not absolutely destroyed because the reality of interpersonal involvement is always present and always capable of being restored by our response. This is why sacrifice for the good is intelligible; the persistence of the good is a trustworthy belief, inseparable from our belief in human dignity itself; and so we continue to try to find words and practices to share that will affirm such a belief and make it more trustworthy for more people. To a question about whether solidarity is primarily a state or an imperative, Tischner might reply that it is a state that makes the imperative intelligible and credible, and an imperative that makes the state imaginable. Solidarity—as the realization of mutual fidelity and communicative freedom—is what we most deeply want because it is what is most deeply real in us, what we always in fact inhabit. The repulsion of conscience in the face of the unjust suffering of others is inescapable because it reminds us of what is lost of our (shared) humanity in this situation of injustice. And, to connect this with another part of our discussion, it is the point at which the notions of human right and human rights come into focus: we become aware of the gravity of those responses to the humanity of others that are fundamentally “untrue,” unfitting to the reality of humanity as such.
This anchorage in an already-given connection, by way of the “axiological” and “agathological” focus of our discovery of the self’s reality, is important in Tischner’s thought because it gives him the freedom to identify precisely where the ideal collapses and is distorted. He famously insists in his Wawel sermon that he is speaking about a solidarity that does not need enemies to make it real. But, looking back in his reflections on “The Ethics of Solidarity Years Later,” he pinpoints the way in which solidarity can become weaponized if there has not been a real change in the subject. He discusses what he calls the spirit of “clienthood”—the moral or spiritual dependency that arises from looking to be rewarded, whether by the system, the hand of history (“being on the right side of history”), or simply by a social order that provides me with basic gratification and security (Bobbitt’s “market society” perhaps). Such attitudes speak of the lack of any transformation of fundamental self-understanding. And the other side of this coin is that, if motivation is reduced to reward, moral sanction takes on the form of shame or ostracism, which produces and nourishes a pattern of simple moral binaries, petty absolutisms.
As he goes on to argue, this ends up enshrining “solidarity” as merely group loyalty. It becomes the rationale for a polarizing negativity about the past: if, as Tischner puts it, all we can say about the legacy of Marxist hegemony is that it was tyrannical fantasy, we absolve ourselves from any understanding of the past that will assist our learning in the present. The past is not allowed to be our past, and so there can be no continuity of critique and learning. Power becomes an all-or-nothing contest, a realm of absolute demands accompanied by the radical delegitimation of any system that fails to meet those demands. The world of labor regresses to factionalism and pragmatic self-interest. “Heroism” has been refused, as has the “courage to think.” And the Church, which has the potential, according to Tischner, for clearly embodying every level of the ideal and the reality of solidarity, has retreated to a position of “fear of the world,” replacing the Christian personalism that provides the seedbed for shared dignity and mutual trust with a Christian “integralism” in which confessional loyalty obscures the universal call to solidaristic action and witness.
Tischner believed that dialogue was possible only when the other partner was regarded as “a necessary source of knowledge” in respect of whatever was being talked about. The stark polarization he attacks in his later reflection is incompatible with this understanding, and ultimately with the more abstract convictions around drama that shape Tischner’s basic anthropology. To see the dialogue partner (past or present) as necessary for my process of learning is not to adopt a passive and uncritical approach to that partner, but to acknowledge that without the partner’s presence and intervention there will be things I shall fail to learn. The encounter itself, in the context of all kinds of other encounters too, will lead into a fuller apprehension of the truth to which all are finally held accountable. The assumption that I can know my situation adequately without this openness to the partner, even the partner with whom I am in bitter and apparently irreconcilable disagreement, condemns me both to a partial knowledge and to the violence that results from this separation from the other.
Tischner interestingly implies, as we have seen, that this kind of dialogical perspective must apply in our reflection about the past as much as the present: the past—including, in Poland, the recent past of totalitarian repression and pervasive public corruption—has to be listened to as having something necessary to say. Letting the past speak in its own terms, and letting it speak as our past, is not a thoughtless rehearsing of a history immune to challenge, but an acceptance of the universal incapacity of any person or society to see itself truthfully outside the context of relations, welcome and unwelcome, convergent or divergent. And this is a further dimension of solidarity, the refusal simply to silence or forget the radically other, even the repellently other, including the repellently other in our own memories of our collective selves. Including them in dialogue is not collusion but the attempt to explore what the world feels like to the stranger. Unless I know this, I know less about the world than I need to (we might recall again Gillian Rose on what it is to recognize in dialogic encounter the other’s “investment” in their belief or argument).
That the world can appear differently to the way in which I experience or configure it is a truth about the world—and it is in fact—according to Edith Stein, Patocka, and Tischner alike—the truth that literally makes it possible for me to know myself. Further, connecting this to Tischner’s meditations on labor, we could say that intelligent (truthful) labor is possible only when we have found ways of negotiating the different perceptions of reality that come into play, even at the simplest physical level: we see different aspects, and we also identify different features as significant, depending on the skills and/or needs we bring to the task. In other words, solidarity and a certain kind of pluralism belong together. The solidarity we recognize in the bare facts of shared language and action impels us to work towards a more conscious, reflective solidarity, a deeper level of shared labor; and the triggering factor in reawakening the basic facts of shared speech and action seems to be the awareness of the deliberate breaches in this primordial co-operation created by the laziness, greed and hunger for power that drives us to try and silence the other and deprive them of their freedom to take a part in defining the nature and goal of any exchange.
Tischner’s vision is a powerful and rhetorically coherent model of human interconnection; but its coherence at a more theoretical level has been questioned by some generally sympathetic commentators, and we shall look briefly at two such responses. Charles Taylor, in a generally positive discussion of Tischner helpfully spells out how the basic analogy between socio-economic interaction and conversation (an analogy that, he says, brings Tischner close to Jurgen Habermas in some respects) grounds the idea that social equality and real economic freedom imply that no one party has the power or right to dictate the conditions of the relationship. But he also notes a complication in Tischner’s account. Solidarity is grounded in existing relations; but if we are using, as Tischner does, the parable of the Good Samaritan as an instance of solidaristic action, there is also something that goes beyond this, in that there is no prior relation between the Samaritan and the victim of the thieves. “The good-will of the Samaritan is able to cover up the gap in social relations . . . Not a thing in the world as it exists calls him to act.” Taylor suggests that the more basic aspect of solidarity as a function of existing relations is what Tischner is more focused on in his Etyka pieces, rather than this latter—should we say “super-natural”?—expression of solidarity.
Only up to a point, I think. The truth is that throughout these essays, Tischner shows little interest in drawing boundaries between natural and supernatural. There is indeed a sense in which the Samaritan’s act is prompted by no localized natural affinity; but that kind of affinity is not the whole story about any kind of solidaristic action, especially those acts arising from the outrage generated by the arbitrary denial of another’s humanity. That other may be a fellow-worker or trades unionist, as is often the case in Tischner’s examples (and as is very understandably the case in his specific political setting). But even here, while in one sense “the world as it exists” may be thought to prompt compassionate action out of an identification with the other that is fairly obviously connected with what I have called localized affinity, there is even here no simple cause and effect relationship: as Tischner insists, there is a choice of response or flight. Fidelity has to be chosen. The fact that it is chosen over against an option that is neither natural nor life-giving, that it is chosen as what is most fundamentally defining of human existence, does not mean that it is any less a moment of self-determination that moves beyond the surface level of affinity or group loyalty. The Samaritan’s action is neither something arising out of group loyalty nor a context-free, ex nihilo upsurge of sacrificial detached selflessness. It is an acknowledgement of what is owed to the truth of a tangibly immediate human otherness that is just one instance of a human commonalty beyond tribal boundaries, always constituted by mutual involvement, reciprocal definition and actualization; and so it is an act of obedience to what we collectively are.
But Taylor’s question is not misplaced. What is not always very clear in Tischner’s analysis is how exactly the decision for truth over illusion, fidelity rather than withdrawal, is made and sustained. In theological terms, he has apparently little to say about grace. To use his own rather awkward vocabulary, the turn from axiology to agathology is obscure. We take for granted—or we should take for granted—that our actions are shaped by judgments of value, and we discover that such judgments are concentrated in a very distinctive way around the presence of the face of the other; in some way, we come to see that this discovery entails a further judgment about what is and is not to be sought or desired, for self and other, a judgment about the Good. It is the nature of this last transition that is left surprisingly vague by Tischner. It is not that reciprocity or mutual transparency somehow work in themselves as definitions of the Good; the reciprocity between agents has as its goal the communication of a kind of life that manifests the Good.
To turn to another sympathetic critic, there is an appreciative but probing assessment of Tischner’s work, heavily influenced by the political history of Solidarnosc and of Poland generally in the post-Communist era, by Dobrosław Kot, who argues that Tischner’s account of solidarity in his Etyka is less a theory of solidarity, more a reflection on how the vocabulary of solidarity illuminates a range of significant topics, as part of a general project of allowing a certain kind of ontology to emerge by way of the discussion of ethics. Dialogical mutuality alone cannot provide a dependable ground for a critical and substantive ethic, and must turn in the direction of what the shared good in view actually is; the focus of solidaristic action is not just the relation between sufferer and observer, but looks towards a more comprehensive horizon. Tischner is so preoccupied with the damage done to social reality by the pervasiveness of unfaithfulness and untruth that the appeal for a solidarity that will overcome or cure this dominates his discussion to the detriment of a fuller analysis of how and why untruth has come to be so pervasive, and exactly what sort of inner transformation is needed to take us beyond its reach.
It is true that Tischner is inclined in the Etyka pieces to stress what he elsewhere calls the “obviousness” of the Good, and that the precise contours of an argument from ethics to ontology are not mapped out. Nevertheless, there are elements in these essays that would answer some of Kot’s challenges. As we have seen, the emphasis on fidelity and the importance of working practices and conditions that do not alienate or dehumanize the worker clearly assume that what Kot calls “dependability” is very plainly in Tischner’s view as the way in which solidarity is embodied. But Kot is right to say that solidarity is as much a tool for clarifying a variety of issues as a topic in itself in Etyka; which is why it is necessary to look a little more deeply at the hinterland of Tischner’s anthropology, and at what he means by “agathology.” And, putting it all together, it is possible to extract a slightly more systematic picture that offers a response to the suspicion that dialogic mutuality has simply overtaken any more substantive ethical structure.
The agathological perspective is one that recognizes something to-be-desired for human subjects that is not simply dictated by their contingent wants or preferences; and this something-to-be-desired is the full liberation of reciprocal generosity, the process by which persons are brought to life. Mutuality is not an exchange of peripheral acknowledgements but an exchange of life-giving energy and knowledge (remember Tischner’s account of the conditions of dialogue, including the recognition that the other has what I need to negotiate my own life in the world). But the implication of this is that my fidelity to the other, my painful awareness of their suffering, my resolve to alleviate both their pain and mine, is all predicated on the assumption that I relate to the other ultimately as a subject who needs to be liberated to give what they are able to give for the life of their own neighbors and the life of the entire human and global community.
Put more directly: I do not serve the selfishness of my neighbor, their (probably) imperfect and patchy realization of the Good. I acknowledge and share their suffering precisely as the suffering of those who have been robbed of their birthright of freedom to serve or share or love. I serve their imagined future as responsible and generous agents. There is a good for them that they may not fully acknowledge and is not necessarily what they currently happen to think it is—any more (crucially!) than it is necessarily what I think it is. I can rightly perceive what it is about their situation that frustrates or stifles their dignity—dignity in the sense of their freedom to play their proper part in the interdependent life of the human community, making life possible for their neighbors, enhancing the humanity of their neighbors. I love them as I love myself, in the sense that what I am called to love in myself is not the bundle of anxieties, cravings, obsessions and mythologies that I create for myself but the self as person, as a unique center of perceiving, receiving and bestowing, object as well as subject of exchange; myself as free to “displace” myself for the life of the world. Insofar as the “agathological” turn in Tischner’s anthropology, a movement away from a more narrowly phenomenological approach, imagines all agents to be commonly answerable to a Good that none of them in isolation can control or fully define, we do have here precisely that “reconstituted Platonism” that some have identified in his work. Solidarity opens out on to some sort of transcendental horizon.
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Tischner in his later writing—as well as several of those who have commented on and developed his thinking—shows a clear concern about the way in which solidarity language can be conscripted into a new pattern of binaries and exclusions. The affirmation of an ethical world that is able simply and comprehensively to negate a rival ethical world—even in the name of solidarity itself—is a profoundly troubling development for Tischner. It is something that reduces solidarity to that confident definition of the authentically human in terms of what one group agrees to be —“essential” that we have consistently seen to be a driver of denial and violence. Shared interest is not enough; nor is solidarity in the most robust sense to be identified with any kind of impersonal redistributive scheme. Shared interest comes to a halt when we cannot find any interest that we recognize in another; redistributive equalization comes to a halt when the natural self-evidence of redistributive calculation is turned into an absolute such that no argument is possible about how it works—rather as a forensic and abstract doctrine of human rights may paradoxically lead to violence because there can be no debate about its correctness. Tischner insists that it is—so to speak—“dialogue all the way down.“ But this commitment to dialogue, to that often counter-intuitive belief that the other knows something I need to know, must not be read as a kind of “Rortyan“ solidarity in which consensus substitutes for truth and objectivity. It is the agathological moment that obliges us to step aside from this tempting shortcut.
In dialogue, we seek what we need, not fully knowing what we need, except that there is something we shall not know without listening to the stranger. If this is so, we are acting on the assumption that the stranger also needs what I know, but does not know that is what they need. What I and the stranger have in common in the dialogical process is that we are both aware at some level that our knowledge is incomplete; so when I say that the stranger needs what I know, the irony is that I may not know what I know—i.e. that I may need the other to enable me to see what the limits are of what I think my world is. But this nudges me further towards the recognition that discovering the truth I need to know is a backwards and forwards movement of “reading and being read,” in which what comes into focus is what neither of us has previously seen or possessed. Yet what makes it compelling to our acceptance is not simply the fact of some kind of convergence but a genuine recognition of something that has a claim on both of us, something that embodies what we both desire for a truthful life, not merely a peaceful one. It will be a shared good towards which we can both work as a legitimate ground for sacrifice or struggle.
As becomes evident, Tischner’s subtle interweaving of solidarity with fidelity, truthfulness, and shared labor is designed to create a model of solidarity that cannot be reduced either to an instant and uncritical sense of affinity, a sort of tribal loyalty, or to a merely pragmatic co-existence. It is about the cost of truthfulness; it is not only the aspiration to lift the neighbour’s burden, it also requires us to create forms of collaborative labor that, as we pursue them, teach us more of what we do and can share, in a co-operative engagement with a world we did not make, a world with whose givenness we must negotiate in imagination and humility, in truthfulness. Tischner’s proclamation of the imperative for a solidarity “without enemies” is intelligible against this background: not a passive tolerance of diversity but the daunting project of discovering a form of human togetherness that does not at some level depend on identifying who is an outsider or a threat.
It does not preclude sharp and prolonged contest; Tischner fully recognizes that there will be a struggle against those who deny or stifle conscience in themselves and others, while never actually urging violent regime change. But the two crucial points he holds on to are, first, the danger of identifying this struggle with some absolute binary of good and evil, in which the victory of one side is the victory of humanity itself over its enemies; and, second, that an effective revolution changes not simply the governors but the governed. Habits of servility and fear are overcome, because the mode of effecting change is no longer a top-down process but is grounded in the necessarily co-operative activities required for deploying new technical resources. His somewhat naïve picture of technology providing not only solutions to traditional problems but a new way of working together for human agents weakens the argument in important respects.
But the notion worth salvaging here is that a solidarity without enemies is a social bond that looks beyond the seductive drama of absolute conflict, final and mutually exclusive binaries, to something more demanding. Precisely because it appeals to a shared and interactive identity that does not depend on our grasp or achievement, it warns against imagining that the other’s moral world is completely inaccessible and alien. Even more importantly, it warns against supposing that the triumph of my/our view is the vindication of it absolute rightness; the truth we seek is what it is independently of what I/we achieve. If we believe otherwise, we are in danger of reducing truth to what is endorsed by successful power.
Once again, the Platonist hinterland of the argument comes into view: if truth or justice is not the interest of the stronger—the question with which Plato’s Republic begins—then it is discovered by something other than calculations of power; we need to reflect on how we come to know what is real, and we need to turn our backs on what Tischner calls the spirit of “clienthood”—acting on the assumption that fidelity to truth is imperative because it brings immediate and obvious reward. And for Tischner it is clear that central to the learning of what is real is the revelatory importance of the moment in which I acknowledge the other’s suffering or lack as my lack also—not an identical form of privation but a privation that entails privation for me as well as for the primary sufferer. Not to imagine what the other lacks is to fail to think what the other needs; not to think what the other needs is, in effect, in Tischner’s scheme, to fail to acknowledge my own need or incompleteness. And that way lies the absolutism of conflict that in his later years he saw as increasingly displacing the solidarity he defended and believed he had glimpsed in the early days of the reform movement in Poland.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is adapted from Solidarity: The Work of Recognition (Bloomsbury, 2026). All rights reserved.
