Philosophy in... Polish
- Jonathan Egid
- 3 days ago
- 22 min read
Updated: 7 hours ago
“The most important source for these philosophers of Polish Romanticism was just the common language of Polish people [...] For them, the the main point of reference was the way in which language was used by a Polish peasant.”
Dr Tomasz Herbich is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw, specialising in the history of Polish and Russian philosophy, the philosophy of politics and the philosophy of religion, and serves as the Editor-in-chief of the Rocznik Historii Filozofii Polskiej (Yearbook of the History of Polish Philosophy). Dr Jakub Wolak is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and an editor of Kronos Philosophical Journal and the Archive of the History of Philosophy and Social Thought. He is also a translator, including a recent translation of D.H Lawrence's Etruscan Places. In this interview, our first on a European language, we discuss the emergence of Polish-language philosophy and early modern Polish-Latin bilingualism, the development of Polish philosophy through the Enlightenment and Romanticism, its remarkable focus on the ordinary usage of the Polish language, and the notion of the inteligencja.
I – Fables and Commentaries: Polish Philosophy emerging from under the Shadow of Latin
Today we have a very happy announcement in that are conducting our very first in-person interview and also our first interview with two guest philosophers. We're here at the Philosophy Department at the University of Warsaw with Jakub Wolak from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences and Tomasz Herbich from the University of Warsaw. I wanted to get straight in with the question about the origin of philosophy in Polish. What are the earliest works of philosophy that are published in the Polish language and what comes before?
JW: The question of the earliest works of philosophy published in the Polish language is quite a contentious issue. The Polish language as such starts to be a language of high literature, and secular literature only in the 16th century. Earlier on we naturally have religious literature in Polish, mostly chants and prayer books, etc, but the first lay book is printed in 1522 and this is a translation of Aesop’s Fables and Aesop’s Vita by one Biernat of Lublin (1465-1529) also known as 'Bernardus', who was a very interesting personality: a humanist physician interested in Neo-Platonist medicine and in Neo-Platonist philosophy of nature, with some links to the circles of Ficino. Nevertheless, these early translations are still just fables.
Philosophy is at this time published mostly in Latin, and these include many quite interesting works. Poland was particularly well known in his period for its contribution to natural sciences and natural philosophy, with Copernicus (1473-1543) being the most remarkable figure. The whole milieu of the Academy of Kraków produced a great cluster of natural philosophy in the 15th century particularly, and Polish legal theorists are widely recognized for their contributions to theories of just war and international law. Still, this is all composed in Latin.
The City of Lublin, Braun & Hogenberg's Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 1617
Polish language literature, or Old Polish language literature, starts to develop quickly from the first half of the 16th century onwards, and these are mostly humanist works, very often political literature. As for philosophy, it is difficult to say when philosophy proper in Polish begins, since in the 16th century there is a great deal of interest in works which lie at the intersection of philosophy and political theory. One could point to figures of the 1560s and authors such as Stanisław Orzechowski (1513-1566) as being the first, or to the Polish language political writing in the 16th century - but there are basically no strictly metaphysical works.
Perhaps the so-called founding figure in terms of Polish philosophy proper would be one Sebastian Petrycy (1554-1626), who published Polish translations of Aristotle's so-called ‘practical’ works: on economics, politics and ethics. These translations were made at the beginning of the 17th century. 'Translations' may be slightly misleading - these are not merely translations, but are heavily annotated and commented with so-called przydatki or, to render it in English, 'addenda' so that he published very long commentaries which are exclusively in Polish. And this is really a novum – earlier this kind of scholarship would be reserved for Latin alone. Now you have an effort to translate a particular term into Polish and to explain it. In doing so, Petrycy is building a Polish philosophical vocabulary for the first time.
And is this a Polish which would be easily understandable to a modern reader, or is it very antiquated language?
JW: I think that it's midway between the two, so that it's not a totally different language is the Old Polish or as the historians of language would have it ‘Middle Polish’. This is basically the earlier stage of the development of the current Polish language, all stages of which exist on a continuum. Still, you would need to have some experience of reading these sorts of works to get everything in order. It is not accessible to contemporary readers without some instruction or experience - it is just about comprehensible, but there are many false friends.
TH: For a contemporary common user of modern Polish, when you deal with such a text, you can, I think easily get the main overarching idea, but it is much more difficult to get the meaning of a single word. So I think Jakub is right: we have a continuity, but a continuity with different dimensions and differences.
So maybe if we were as modern readers to be able to understand these commentaries on commentaries we would need a commentary on a commentary on a commentary!
TH: Yes, and it is very interesting that today we have attempts to translate these into modern Polish, for example, the work of Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584) translated by Antoni Libera. It is a very interesting question as to whether we should do this or not, because on the one hand we can get main ideas of Kochanowski just by reading his text, but on the other hand, we will not have such a comprehensive, multi-dimensional attitude towards the text of Kochanowski if we read it in the language in which it was originally written.
JW: I guess that you are speaking of Antoni Libera’s translation of Odprawa posłów greckich or the ‘Dispatch of the Greek Envoys, which is the most important Old Polish tragedy, very interesting text in blank verse, quite short, but wonderful piece of Old Polish poetry. However it is not very intuitively accessible to contemporary Polish speakers, and very difficult to set on stage.
Antoni Libera, who is an excellent translator and novelist, prepared a translation of Kochanowski’s ‘Dispatch of the Greek Envoys’ to be set on stage, and it was a huge success, because if you would set it on stage, entirely in Old Polish, the public wouldn't get that much of it – although if you do know Old Polish, I think that it is way more enjoyable in the original.
So to turn from the translation of Old Polish into contemporary Polish and to go back to the original translation of the Greek into Polish, I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about maybe a couple of examples of terms and how they're translated from Aristotle into Petrycy's Polish. In English for example, we simply borrowed and take up terms like ‘ethics’, ‘politics’, ‘hylomorphism’ and things like that, rather than coining new terms. Do the early Polish translators like to coin new Polish terms, or do they prefer to borrow from Latin and Greek?
Well, if you think of really basic concepts, such as ‘ethics’, ‘politics’, etc. these are generally borrowed, because they are already widespread. If you mean technical concepts of Aristotelian ethics, Petrycy and others would think of Polish words with a similar meaning. Borrowings tend to persist in language, because they're not part of the natural texture of the language, so to say, so they're less prone to semantic mutation. I think that one of Petrycy’s aims was simply to translate Aristotle’s practical philosophy into an early modern Polish reality – he wasn't aiming for a purely academic and technical audience, but also for a broader public. That's why he would rather use coinages, because, for instance, his 'economics' was a basically book about running a household. So I guess that's what Petrycy was up to, because it was not purely academic enterprise.
The Sejm of the Crown of Poland during the Reign of Sigismund II Augustus
There is also an important linguistic division in early modern Poland. Well into the late 18th century, the Polish nobility was basically a bilingual between Polish and quite good, sometimes magnificent Latin. These languages would be used for different purposes: Latin would be language of natural philosophy and the whole discipline of philosophy at universities, as well as of the litrugy and theological issues, plus some genres of literature ; while Polish would naturally also be used widely for literature, and for political discourse. Most importantly the sessions of the Sejm, that is the parliament, were held in Polish, and this perhaps expressed the 'democratic' ingredient in the mixed constitution of the so-called noble Republic.
Thus you have two linguistic universes which coexist, which involve often the same actors, but are used for different reasons, and with kind of a passage, or transition of Aristotelian terms and traditions from neo-Latin to Polish, done by Petrycy. So in choosing to translate Aristotle into Polish Petrycy intends to address his translations to another public, to the sphere of literary and political matters.
So, at what stage do we start to get, let's say, original compositions, things which are not simply translations of earlier Greek works, but the first original works of philosophy in Polish?
JW: Oh, it’s a very difficult question.
TH: It's a very difficult question, yes. Because in fact, you see, I think the crucial moment in the history of Polish philosophy is when Poles started to really think in the Polish language and not only in Polish as translated from Latin, by using categories taken directly from Latin, but of course, repurposed in Polish. This moment is probably the turn of Enlightenment and Romanticism. But in fact it is not obvious whether we should start with Enlightenment philosophers, or whether we should start with the philosophers of early Romanticism, because they rather co-exist in the same philosophical moment. The main representatives of the Polish Enlightenment wrote their main philosophical works at the beginning of the 19th Century.
This is very important because of the fact that when we compare it with the chronology of this epoch in other European countries, it of course comes very late. And in the same moment, at the same time, the first early works of Polish romanticism were composed, not only in poetry, but also, of course, in philosophy or aesthetics.
Could you provide a little bit of background about why this may have developed…
JW: I would cut in for a second and say that it is also quite a contentious issue because this is all up to the question of what you are willing to include as philosophy. I suppose that Tomasz means a conceptual tradition of more or less systematic, speculative thought in a single language with concepts enduring over time.
In the early modern periods, say from the 16th to the late 18th century, the period of the bilingualism I mentioned, you don't really have this kind of speculation. In fact, the early modern Polish nobles were not highly interested in speculation (insofar as they were, it was theological speculation mostly), but they were definitely interested in so-called ‘practical philosophy’, to invoke an Aristotelian term, namely in politics and ethics, though they also wrote works which I would call works of philosophy, such as the political dialogues of Stanisław Orzechowski from the 1560s, which emulate Platonic dialogues.
This is not definitely not a tradition of speculative thought, so the basic issue as to the starting point of the history of philosophy in the Polish language is that: you can either start in the middle of the 16th century or at the turn of 18th and 19th centuries.
TH: It is a good question and just as Jakub said, the Enlightenment is a very important moment, a political moment of course but also a moment important for the Polish language, because in 1773 Latin handbooks were excluded by the Commission of National Education. It is an important moment because we can see that already these representatives of Polish Enlightenment made an attempt to reshape the national education by excluding Latin and replacing it with Polish.
Warsaw from the East Bank of the Vistula, Bernardo Belotto
II– Enlightenment, Partition and the Preservation of Poland through Culture
Interesting. So there is a very specific moment when this philosophical bilingualism, which we could think of as characteristic of the earlier period ends, and when the new one comes in. It makes periodization very nice and easy.
JW: I think that is a good point because language is quite determinant of the conceptual sphere and it is precisely the period which Tomasz mentioned - not just the date of 1773, but the entire period of the so-called Stanislavian times, the reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski (1764-95) - where you have a rush towards fostering the Polish language as a language of literature, and of science in Polish as opposed to Latin.
Could you explain a little bit of the political background of why that was deemed necessary - why was there this sort of assertion of the Polish languages and essential medium as opposed to Latin at this particular time?
TH: The main and the most important political circumstances of this early 19th century philosophy should be directly linked to the moment of the loss of independence in 1795. In fact there is a very interesting from our point of view text written by Jan Nepomucen Kamiński (1777-1855). Jan Nepomucen Kamiński was a very important representative of the Polish late Enlightenment, especially regarding the development of Polish theatre. But he also wrote a piece with a very interesting title. The title is a question and this question is: ‘is our language a philosophic one’?
In this text Jan Nepomucen Kamiński starts with a kind of a presupposition that there will be something like a Polish philosophy, only if the Polish language is a philosophic one. Only if we can point out in the Polish of ordinary, everyday usage, to some philosophical intuition, to some philosophical distinctions or schematics. If we don't have this, we can of course be a philosophers that come from Poland, but we cannot be Polish philosophers. For example, Hegel is not only a philosopher that comes from Germany, he is a German philosopher. He takes certain intuitions that exist already in the common German language and he tries to put them on a higher level, to elevate them to a higher conceptual level. This is a very important question, and one that was very important for very different Polish philosophers of the 19th and 20th century to deal with.
Jan Nepomucen Kamiński also presupposes that there is no important limit to, no important division between, the way we think and the way we speak, because we think in the same language in which we are speaking. He argues that we can be Polish philosophers only if this language in which we not only speak, but think, contains philosophical intuitions. It was very important for him to show that Polish language is a philosophical one and that we can construct an original philosophy on the basis of this language.
But why, from the political point of view – because that was your original question – why should this project be done? It should be done first of all because of the fact that we cannot think of ourselves as of a kind of a collective subject that has got its own country – because at this time in history Poland is divided up between Russia, Prussia and Austria. It would be quite clear for Maurycy Mochnacki (1803-1834), for example, that we have to construct our own philosophy, our own national culture to just continue exist as a part of the historical reality, as a nation that does not have a state.
According to Hegel for example, the 'historical nations' are necessarily national communities who construct their own state. Since we didn't have a state on account of the partitions, according to Hegel, we were not a part of the international relations, back at the beginning of the 19th century, because international relations are relations between states. And so we do not play any role in history. So for Polish philosophers of that time, it was very important to show that Poland still exists as a nation, that has got its own specific culture, literature, and which comes to know itself through this culture and literature.
So demonstrating that Polish is indeed a philosophical language has a political valence because it demonstrates in some way the particular genius of the Polish people as a nation, having their particular forms of thought and speech.
TH: Yes, I think that it was the main, the most important political precondition which directly influenced this process of the development of Polish national philosophy. We just tried to think of ourselves as of being still a nation despite having lost the state. And to do it, we cannot think of ourselves only in terms of political nations, because political nations or historical nations in the terminology of Hegel are these nations that do have a state, but we didn't have it anymore.
The Partitions of Poland
JW: As Tomasz pointed out, both the project of writing philosophy in the national language and the project of building cultural nation were addressed to the international community. But they were also endeavours of reconstructing a sense of national community in the wake of the great shock of the Partitions. The Partitions of Poland induced what we might call a kind of mass depression. Both in the socio-psychological sense, since the political culture was devastated, but also on the level of the lives of many individuals. There was an increase in suicides – Tadeusz Rejtan (1742-1780), a national hero who tried to stop the signing of one of the treaties of the partitions by simply throwing himself before high officials entering the chamber, later shot himself. You can read this mass depression as a local variation of the so-called ‘Romantic depression’, but in fact, what you have is an entire world - an entire political culture and political nation which was not originally built on culture but on political practice, namely on participating in various assemblies, executing laws and adhering to the monarch etc. - this whole world breaking up.
Rejtan, or the Fall of Poland. Jan Matejko (1866)
The cultural effort which Tomasz mentioned was also meant to reconstruct this world, but by means of constructing a nation which, built on the base of culture, would then be able to act politically. We are in fact speaking here today on a very special date, on the anniversary of the November Uprising which started on November 29, 1830, not far from here at the Belweder Palace in Warsaw, where Polish Romantics aimed to assassinate the Russian governor of the Kingdom of Poland, the younger brother of the Tsar. This was a historical turning point of the whole project, since it was the most massive of the 19th century uprisings, and resulted in a huge exodus of revolutionaries and intellectuals. It was a project which aimed at building a community, rebuilding the nation, which would be able to act politically as a cultural unit.
The very high political ideals that come behind the attempt to claim the philosophical identity of a particular language are perhaps not entirely dissimilar from one of the earliest attempts to translate philosophy and to demonstrate the philosophical nature of a particular language, namely that of Cicero ‘teaching philosophy to speak Latin’. The attempt to say that ‘we Romans, can philosophise too. Anything these Greeks can do, we can express in Latin just as well’. I was wondering what is Kamiński's argument that Polish indeed does count as a philosophical language?
TH: Jan Nepomucen Kamiński tried to show by examining various Polish words that the Polish language is of a philosophical kind, but you see, in fact, when we are referring to this point we should first refer to Maurycy Mochnacki. Mochnacki was first of all one of the important initiators of the November Uprising, which was just mentioned by Jakub - a philosopher, literary critic, he was also a critic of music and a representative of Polish Romanticism who directly constructed the notion of the cultural nation on the basis of a kind of a philosophy.
He did it first of all by referring to the German concept of Selbstbewusstsein. Selbstbewusstsein is of course, quite easy to translate into English, as ‘self-consciousness’. But it was very difficult to translate it into Slavic languages – we do not have any such concepts that can clearly refer to these different words in German, in German philosophy. And the Selbstbewusstsein was not translated by Maurycy Mochnacki in the way in which we translate it now, because in contemporary Polish language we translated it as samoświadomość. Mochnacki rendered it in a very specific Polish formula, “mieć uznanie samego siebie w jestestwie swoim”. In English we can translate it into something like ‘to have a recognition of our self in our own existence’.
This notion is hard to get a grip on, but it refers to something that can be expressed by means of Latin words, Latin formulas, because Mochnacki tried to refer also to Latin and to say that the Selbstbewusstsein is not only principium cogitandi [principle of thinking], but it is principium cogitandi et essendi [principle of thinking and being]. It is the moment in which we know not only our thoughts, but also ourselves as thinking, as the subject that thinks this thought. And it is very important because from this translation of Selbstbewusstsein and other related concepts into Polish, Mochnacki tries to show that we become a subject that can exist in history only when we have this knowledge of ourselves, when we become an object for ourselves in our original literature and our original culture. So we should get this knowledge of our culture as not only of this or that, I don't know, work of culture, or text of culture, but we should get the knowledge of our literature, culture, philosophy quite generally, the culture as an activity of spirit, a national spirit or national subject, which thinks also of itself in this way of principium cogitandi et essendi.
Capturing the Arsenal on the Night of November 29, 1830 - Marcin Zaleski (1831)
III – Romanticism, Common Sense and Common Use
So we see a strong emphasis on analysing the Polish language for its philosophical resources, for the significance of working in the national language not only for its intellectual benefits, but also out of a perceived political necessity of national survival. But I also understand that later on during this period, we have an important process of translation from German texts. You've already indicated some of the particular difficulties in the translation of Germanic rather than Latinate or Greek terms into Polish, and I like the idea that you suggested that it was particularly at the point a difficulty of translation, that we see what is particularly distinctive and interesting about the Polish language. I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about the translation of German philosophy into Polish: who conducted these translations, what were their challenges and achievements?
TH: We should first of all note that at the beginning of the 19th century there were only a few translations from contemporary German philosophy into Polish, and these translations are not done in a systematic way. For example the translation of a part of Herder’s work that is dedicated to the Slavic peoples. We have a translation of the first initial lecture of Schelling in Berlin, which was done shortly after he had conducted these lectures, but in fact we did not have a kind of a systematic effort to translate, for example, German idealism into Polish language in the first half of the 19th century. These attempts begun in the second part of the 19th century. The most important moment for me and the most important phenomenon in this process of translating of German modern and contemporary philosophy into Polish, and the greatest phenomenon of this kind, is when the poets of the Young Poland, at the beginning of the 20th century, translated all the main works of Nietzsche in a very short period of time.
Polish poets like Wacław Berent (1873-1940) and Leopold Staff (1878-1957), very important poets, managed to do it, and indeed Polish and Russian were two European languages into which the main works of Nietzsche were translated rather early. But at the time when, for example, Hegel or Schelling lived, we didn't have a systematic attempt to translate their main philosophical works. We have got only some few translations of a few different texts written in German which were important for the philosophy of the time. But we have got, and it is also something important, many attempts to present to Polish readers the ideas formulated in this work. They are not translations, but they are presentations.
For example, Bronisław Trentowski (1808-1869), probably the most important representative of the Polish national philosophy of the Romantic period, wrote several texts in which he tries to present the ideas of Schelling to his readers, at the beginning of the 1840s, when Schelling conducted his lectures in Berlin. Trentowski presented many of Schelling's philosophical ideas, and he did it in different texts which he wrote at that time. There are some translations, but translations are not as important as presentations of different ideas formulated by different philosophers of that time.
That's very interesting, because I suppose that's just a different way of trying to 'translate' the ideas in some sense into Polish, to make them clear to a Polish audience. I was wondering if you could just say a little bit about how this reflects the sort of changing preoccupations of philosophically inclined Polish readers through the 19th century, from this early concern with late Enlightenment ideas, and what you were saying about the importance of the Polish language to national culture and the like, into Nietzsche later on.
TH: At the beginning of 19th century Polish intellectuals clearly changed their main point of reference. This point of reference was initially taken from France. And as we have seen, later this main point of reference would be taken from Germany. We do have however one very interesting exception. This very interesting exception is Jan Śniadecki (1756-1830), the most important representative of Polish Enlightenment, who tried to defend Polish culture from the influence of Romanticism, being engaged in a kind of a battle with early Romantics. In his late works, he referred not to France or to Germany, but mainly to the British philosophy of ‘common sense’. He is a very interesting person because while debating with early Romantics, he also developed a new kind of a self-critical knowledge of his own cultural formation of the Polish Enlightenment, and he tried to somehow change this main point of reference, to change it from France to Great Britain and to the British philosophy of common sense.
Fantastic, we've surveyed so many of these interesting points of contact, from the very early stages of an international neo-Latin scholarly world to French Enlightenment ideas, German idealism, British common sense philosophers - I was just wondering if either you would want to say a little bit more about the way that the philosophical vocabulary of Polish develops at this time, either by means of contact with these other languages or by means of self-conscious reflection on the use of particular Polish terms.
TH: You see, I think that when we are speaking about this, we can first of all note that for Polish philosophers of the time, there were two main sources from which we can get our own philosophical language. The first source is the political literature of the First Polish Republic, for example, this notion by which Mochnacki translated German Selbstbewusstsein is clearly taken by him from other intellectuals such as Piotr Skarga (1536-1612) and also to other representatives of the Polish political philosophy of the First Polish Republic. But the most important and the most common source for all of these philosophers of Polish Romanticism – nevermind many differences between them – was just the common language of Polish people.
Dożynki (Harvest Festival). Zofia Stryjeńska (ca. 1950)
Both for Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), who directly referred also to the ideas of these Polish people, and not only to the way in which they use language, and for Trentowski, who was a rationalist and who tried to a construct a Polish philosophical vocabulary, for both of them the main point of reference was the way in which it was used by a Polish peasant.
Trentowski tried – he is the most important person from this point of view – to find Polish words that translate this German or Latin or Greek or French terms. He many different neologisms, which sounded strange also for contemporary Polish readers. He was attentive to how Polish people use construct these words he considered as translations, and he tried to take it into account when rendering notions or concepts taken from other languages.
JW: I think that Trentowski is a figure who fits very well into this division we mentioned earlier, the division between, so to say, strategies of assimilation and exoticization, of calquing foreign terms, and inventing new ones, because he was representative of the radical strategy of coining terms, even to the point at which you start to modify your own language. He was the inventor of many words, some of them survived and entered like normal language like świadomość or jaźń.
TH: The word świadomość was used in previous Polish, but it got a new sense that was formulated by Trentowski.
JW: And jaźń was original invention of Trentowski, meaning ‘the self’, although it has the root ja-, which means ‘me’, so it is like French le moi or like German Ichheit, and it's a very successful word, and also beautifully sounding. I think that it was also popular among representants of the Young Poland, those who translated Nietzsche. Young Poland was cultural movement, a kind a post-Romanticism, linked to a new reception of original Polish Romanticism of the 1830s and 1840s, and influenced by European symbolism and Lebensphilosophie, which produced, among others, some beautiful metaphysical poetry, and their typical themes included folk legends, demonism, nature, death and decay.
I'm really interested by this idea that they're taking very seriously the ordinary usage of non-expert speakers of the language. But I wonder whether there's a bit of a tension between taking very seriously everyday speech, which sounds like something that anticipates the Ordinary Language Philosophy of the mid-20th century on the one hand. and on the other coining new neologisms for philosophical concepts. Could you explain how they understand the philosophical significance of ordinary language?
TH: It's very important because this touches on a really crucial point. This problem is what we can get from the ordinary language users. It is not the way in which ordinary users themselves understand different words or different concepts and so on, but rather the way in which they use the language, they construct words. So what we get is a kind of a method, not a kind of an understanding.
JW: Yes, it is according to Trentowski a dynamic construction, so it's not a philosopher looking at ordinary language as a domain from which he draws philosophical insights. In Polish national philosophy, and in the national philosophy at large, the philosopher is engaged with the public, with ordinary people in order to draw linguistic resources from them and transform it intellectually, to draw new meanings from the language, in sort of feedback loop in which the people are transformed into a cultural unity, so that this is not purely intellectual, but also a political endeavour.
This is also actually a heritage of the early modern Polish culture, of the citizens of the so-called noble Republic, for whom the intellectual life and the political life were inseparable. And for that reason, they were very, very much preoccupied with political and practical philosophy. For them, ethics is inseparable from politics and thinking inseparable from politics and rhetoric. This tradition was suppressed for a while, but reappears in the form of a speculative philosophy which has ultimately political goals, goals which are also to some extent, theological, because the nation is understood as sort of an eschatological unity, a self-determined autonomous participant of the historical progress, which is understood eschatologically, and requires national participation, beyond the level of an individual.
TH: I think that during our discussion, we should also refer to the probably most important philosophical term, which was constructed in Polish language, and which is now used also outside Poland and outside Russia, these two different countries which are the motherlands of this word, namely inteligencja.
This word, which of course you know from English, was constructed by two Polish philosophers, Karol Libelt (1807-1875) and Bronisław Trentowski. It points out the part of a society which is quite specific for Poland and for Russia of 19th century, the leading part of society, on account of its education in different fields. It was also the idea, which is deeply inscribed in this word, the egalitarian idea according to which we cannot point out different political classes of society because we should love the nation as the whole. The inteligencja is neither a nobility or a middle class, it is a part of society which comes from different classes. What unites it is a kind of an ethos, an attitude towards society which is first of all connected with the love for the whole nation. So it is a part of society which is, a leading one, not a ruling one. Where does it lead? It leads this society to a moment in which all of this society will become a kind of an inteligencja.
Well, that's fantastic and it's so interesting to have an account not only of a philosophical tradition about which I think many people in the Anglophone world are not very aware, but also one which itself reflects so often and at so many different points on the significance of language to philosophy. And not I suppose of the significance of Language with a capital L to philosophy, but of a particular language, to philosophy, to its particular political significance, and also on the insistence on the significance of ordinary usage, and where it really presages that. So I will thank both of our guests for their time and their expertise today. Thank you very much, Jakub. Thank you very much, Tomasz.