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Hello, everybody.
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This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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A
Welcome today to this new episode of the New Books Network and the Catholic Studies Channel. My name is Nathan Phillips. I am the host of this podcast. And today I have the great privilege and honor of welcoming Artur Sebastian Rossman of the University of Notre Dame to this to a conversation about a new book, an old book, but a new book that he has recently translated through Notre Dame Press in 2024 called the Philosophy of Drama. The Philosophy of Drama. And the author of this book is a Polish philosopher and priest, Joseph Tichner Arturosman is the editor of the Church Life Journal at Notre Dame, which is a very beautiful and serious online periodical that is that I recommend to all of our listeners. And so I'm really thrilled and honored to be able to have Artur on this podcast and in conversation about the new book. So welcome and thank you.
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C
Thanks. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.
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A
So, yeah, maybe we could just start about, you know, sort of the context around the translation project. You mentioned over lunch the other day that you spent about eight years working on this, but I assume so. But I'm sort of curious about when you came to know about Joseph Tishenor, who Joseph Tichenor is. Obviously you have language skills in Polish yourself, which is unique, so maybe you could just tell us a bit about the genesis of the project.
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C
Right. So I came upon the project through various encounters, so that's appropriate. And in a lot of ways, I wasn't really intending to be his translator. It was the furthest thing from my mind since he is one of the maybe 2, 3 most important Polish philosophers, along with Ingarden and Wojtewa, maybe Bohanski on top of that. So that was never really an aspiration of mine. I happened to take classes with his nephew Ukasz, who is an expert on Czeslaw Niwash, the Polish poet. And. And it just came up in conversation. Hey, I've seen some of the translation work that you've done. The Tushner Institute is looking for a translator. They got a grant from the Ministry of Culture. Would you be interested in doing this? And I thought, well, duh, obviously it's a great responsibility. But at the same time it sounded like great fun. And given Tishnor's kind of place in Polish intellectual culture, it was just kind of a no brainer to. To volunteer to do this. And this being his most important and most systematic work, it just made a lot of sense. So I dove into it, then got sidetracked by various dramas of life. So the book strangely parallels my own life and the process of translating in its very structure. I think that's one of the wonderful things about it. In a lot of ways, it's a lot like reading Lonergan or reading Girard or Levinas himself, one of his main inspirations for this book, because they offer you philosophies that are applicable almost immediately in just about any situation. So it's impossible to escape this sort of book once you've been brought into the circle, into the conversation that it inaugurates and the conversation that it actually thematizes in itself because you continually come back to it and you say, oh, yeah, that really does, you know, reflect my everyday drama that I'm dealing with right now. And you can do that on an almost daily basis. So the explanatory power of it, I think, is really quite immense, and hence the attraction of it.
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A
Yeah, I was surprised by that as well. It's very captivating. It does kind of spark your sense of conscience, I would say, throughout. He's a moral thinker. Right. Like the, the main claim of the book really is that, you know, that life unfolds on a, on a stage and that, you know, the most important things in life are dramatic in their nature. So, yeah, and I want to talk more about each of those things. But before we go into the actual exposition of the text. Tell us a bit about your own training and your own background. So tell us a bit about where you come from.
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C
Well, I had the great privilege of studying at the University of Washington while they still had a Comparative Literature department. And well, thanks to that I was exposed to a lot of polymaths who gave me the background to be able to approach a book like this. And, well, also gave me a forum to really talk about Czesville Milosz's poetry, which is what I wrote my PhD on. And one of the things with Milos was that I remember reading a line out of one of his books. Actually it was a poem. It was like a two line poem encounter. And it was just the random anthology that my parents had bought at a garage sale. And at the end there was some weird dude with a vaguely Polish looking name in it. And I thought, well, that's interesting, I'm going to read that. And once you got pulled into that particular dialogue and set of problems that he was talking about, it opened a whole world of the intellect and ways of actually being able to think about life in ethically responsible ways. So anywhere starting from Samuel Beckett to Aquinas to the Polish author Gumbrovic, and I mean just Baudelaire, and everything was contained within that one poem, that encounter. And Tischer, along with Kolakowski are two Polish thinkers. I guess Kolakowski could have added, maybe it's five people who have been crucial to Polish philosophy. Maybe there's more than I realize, but he's right up there. So anyway, I just got pulled into that and. And also the unfortunate distinction of getting through 27th grade and getting my PhD. It was all because of one poem. So I think even the way that I came eventually to Tishnir was structured in a way that was consistent with his philosophy of actually coming into dialogue with somebody. It's one thing to see write a name in a table of contents and you think to yourself, well, well, it looks interesting. And you get a general sense of well might be Polish. So it could be of interest to my own kind of sense of Polishness, having been brought up in Poland and having come to the United States as a refugee in 1986. And then you encounter the kinds of struggles, difficulties, evils that he had encountered. With Milos, it was, you know, he was a kid when his house was being shelled. During World War I he was in interwar Paris studying with Jacques Maritain, I think at the Institut Catholique. Then During World War II, he was in Warsaw in the middle of like the worst occupation in all of Europe. And afterwards in post war Paris, seeing Beckett on the stage during, you know, the first performances of Waiting for Godot. Then in the 60s in Berkeley. I mean it doesn't then in the 80s having dialogues with the Polish Solidarity movement and being able to actually visit Poland for the first time in decades. And at that same time Tishner was functioning there as well as the semi official chaplain of Solidarity. So yeah, my background is it almost seems like there is some sort of sense of destination in it all, or it all kind of falls together into discrete kinds of events that lead up to one another thanks to the various encounters. And Tishnar's nephew Ukash, who actually has a wonderful book called Miwash on the problem of evil published with Northwestern. He is one of the best experts on Milosz's thought. And Milosh is somebody that Tischen dialogued with himself. They knew each other and liked each other other personally. So it all kind of comes together through the actual encounters and taking up the sets of problems about the problem of evil, whether God exists and all this. How do you deal with totalitarianism? What responsibilities do you have to the other person in front of you? They all come out of these various encounters. I mean, I could have lived a fairly safe childhood had my parents not bought that anthology of high school English literature. However, thanks to that Encounter that helped to, well, helped to structure the stage for me, to use Tushner's terminology, I.e. the world around me, the sorts of people that I encounter. It created a kind of space of meaning. It also dictated the sort of space of meaning that I would later inhabit in my intellectual work and coming to work here at the University of Notre Dame. All of that is defined through that very first, you might say, chance encounter and the awakening of a feeling of responsibility, of seeing something kind of profound and having resonance with the kinds of questions that I was asking myself and kind of pulling me into it. Maybe the opposite of the kind of dialogue of temptation. It's kind of like the good, right? You see goodness and you want that for yourself in your life. So you look for the kind of literature that will, or philosophy or prose that will actually help you think about those things, but not only think about them, but also like change you as a person.
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A
And so you had mentioned one poem in particular. What's the name of that poem?
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C
It's called Encounter. I might be able to actually pull it up. It might be somewhere online. Yep, here we are. So it's a very simple, you know, two, three. Okay, maybe four lines. So it begins. We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn. A red wing rose in the darkness, and suddenly a hare ran across the road. One of us pointed to it with his hand. That was long ago. Today, neither of them is alive. Not the hare nor the man who made the gesture. Oh, my love, where are they? Where are they going? The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles. I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder. And that kind of. Just kind of opened up a whole bag for me.
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A
And the poet is. The name of the poet is Czeswav.
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C
Miwosz or I don't know what the correct American mispronunciation of it is.
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A
And so your first. Your dissertation was on.
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C
And his Catholic imagination.
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A
So that leads to my question about Tishner. So in what way do you think that this is a Catholic book? Just like right out of the bat, like, what does that mean to you exactly? Apart from the fact that he's a Catholic priest and he's kind of living in that cultural milieu?
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C
I think there's like, a dimension of ethical responsibility that's particular to Polish Christianity, given the historical difficulties. That really kind of like, speaks to that. Yeah. Could you rephrase that question again?
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A
Well, no, I mean, just like, you know, like what. The frame. You know, I assume that there's some kind of frame, you know, that you bring both to your reading of the poet and then also to Tishnor, right around the question of his Catholicism. And, you know, like I. And also, just like, the book is a. It's a beautifully. It's a beautifully published book. It's got a beautiful image on the COVID It's like a very handsome, handy book to carry around. It's published by Notre Dame Press. You know, they, they.
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C
They.
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A
They obviously have an interest in publishing Catholic books. Tchener is a Catholic philosopher. So I just didn't know if there was some kind of frame that you had ahead of time, prior to your kind of getting into it, that motivated you or that you found motivating. Maybe not.
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C
Yeah, well, the element. Well, I know. I think this is a really good question. I mean, I think the element of forgiveness and the encounter with evil is something that's powerfully Catholic within it and, well, an ethical responsibility once again, because the life of faith is not something that's lived in the abstract.
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A
Well, some of your other work has been on martyrdom, as you mentioned, and you worked on. You helped. Socrates and Other Saints is another Book that you were involved with. Yeah, right there. And you edit the Church Life Journal. Right. So you're kind of swimming in this Catholic culture, and then all of a sudden Tishner appears. Right. The Philosophy of Drama. And, you know, I do think it's a. I think it's a major event to publish this book. Right. It's not a book that most people would have access to. It is extremely well written. It is very rich. Your translation, I think of it, is meticulous and, I don't know, like it. For me, you know, if I'm going to make a parallel to another book, it would be on par. You mentioned Levinas. I think Martin Buber's I and Thou comes to mind. Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption certainly comes to mind. And even, even Heidegger, even, Even being in Time, you know, it is a. It's a. You know, it's a. It's a systematic work. It's pretty comprehensive and it requires a lot of the reader and it takes you places, like you said, that are unexpected and that you really can't shake. Right. Like, the third chapter is. Is really a long meditation on the problem of evil and, and of the moral conscience and. Yeah. So, yeah, you know, so I congratulate you on all that, basically.
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C
No, I. I think, yeah, I think you. You did zero in on something important. And it enters like an important Catholic conversation about the transcendentals. So that third part is fascinating in that. Well, it talks about how the true, the good and the beautiful. And then the critique of maybe like the one of the four transcendentals is worked out in those. Those three are worked out in that chapter. How those things can be. Can go wrong. And typically they do go wrong. So Tishnar starts out with the pre. With the presupposition that, well, okay, so if we're talking about salvation, right, we need to be saved from something. Right. Or if we were talking about the exercise of our freedom, what does that look like? If we are creatures that are in need of salvation, or as he puts it, there are, you know, you're offered two paths with the encounter have with the other person is either salvation or damnation. So that's like a fairly stark formulation that you do not typically see formulated in most books. Catholicism has tended in the latter part since maybe the mid century to kind of gravitate away from that particular drama. The exception being maybe somebody like Van Balthazar. Right. So it's the seriousness of it, the fact that your life actually does matter and not only Your life matters, but what you do with life together with other people. So that is a key component of it, I think.
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A
Yeah. And Cyril Regan, the great systematic theologian at Notre Dame, writes the preface to the book, which was a lagoon, I guess, to get him in on the project. But he's a great thinker of tradition. I don't know if you could sum up what his thesis was or just in your conversations with him, what was his takeaway from Tishner?
- [19:12]
C
Well, one of the things that kind of came through was the idea of how to situate him properly, because it would be easy to get somebody who's an expert on Tishna from Poland to talk about this book. And one of the interesting things about translation is being able to make it accessible to a whole new audience within a new context. And why does it matter? Right. Well, it's because your life is pitched within a drama. Right. And the tasks that are given to us are or determine the sort of life not only I will inhabit, but also the person that I'm encountering will inhabit. So there's, like, an utter seriousness to it that's so very important and that might have gotten lost had I gotten somebody from Poland to talk about the technicalities of it. And I thought, well, we're not trying to reintroduce it to a Polish audience. The book has gone through maybe, like, four or five editions in Poland. And. And so the Polish audience is fairly. It's like one of the standard books of Polish philosophy or even, like, somewhere hinging, like, close to, you know, being literature as well. Right. It's both a deeply philosophical and at times inaccessible work, yet at the same time, it will always, like, bring you back to everyday life. And the sorts of things that we owe to each other and how we carry one another's burdens is very crucial to it. So I thought, hey, you know, let's figure out how to talk to an American audience. And, well, Cyril thought, oh, well, this looks a lot like John Paul ii. Right. And you'd think that there would be a great deal of overlap, but, well, the fact is that there isn't all that much until much later in their lives, closer to, like, the end of Tushner's life, really, that they really get to kind of know each other. So there was no Tishner might have taken a class, the famous class or infamous class on social teaching with Voithua, but that's about it. So I thought, well, I think you actually do zero in on something, that there's, like, a similar set of questions that both of those Catholic thinkers are trying to answer as they deal with problems within their own parishes as pastors. I think that also makes it a very Catholic book, is that it is written somewhere in the background is the heart of a pastor kind of beating there and looking after his flock and trying to explain them, to help to explain to them how to navigate through all the difficulties of their lives. So I thought that. And Patocka was the person that we kind of zeroed in on as somebody who, as a dissident underwent and as an agnostic, for all I know, a kind of martyrdom at the hands of the security forces in the Czech Republic. So that was, yeah, trying to find the right nodes to kind of latch onto was the basic problem that we tried to zero in on. And it wasn't easy. But I think he did a really good job of actually doing that for the audience, of giving them that. And also the overlaps with von Balthasar, which again, it's kind of like a false cognate because he doesn't appear within this book. And it's only like in later works that Tishner mentions some of Willem Balthazar's work in passing. And he really didn't have time to actually to actually work out that relationship in more depth. But once again, I think it circles back to a set of problems. And I think the key problem, I think, is the problem with evil that Catholic theologians and philosophers after World War II, after a holocaust, after the Russian prison camps and other atrocities and in Poland, I mean, that means that anywhere. The estimates are like anywhere from 1 in 5 to 1 in 6 people were murdered during World War II, both Catholics and Jews. The Jewish community was utterly decimated. I think something close to like 90% of that population was killed off during the war. So you're dealing with. Well, I mean, it is a sense of responsibility, of trying to answer, like how and why that sort of dehumanization happens and how do you live in the aftermath of that.
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A
I think the problem of evil as something just viscerally there. Tishner, I mean, one of the. We can talk about this in a little bit, but essentially like one of the. One of the big contributions he makes is, you know, he's trying to take theology, he's trying to. He's trying to move it from kind of a dry scholastic thing into the living reality of life together and of this dialogical situation. And as part of that, like, he wants to kind of insist that as he says, evil is, Is. Is a given. Right. It's something that appears, that shows itself, that we. That confronts us even in the face of another person, Even unto the face of another person. But I think some of that also dovetails with developments in philosophy in the 70s and the 80s, in the European context especially, and the phenomenological tradition of returning to the things themselves and of the priority of experience as a basis for thinking. So it makes sense in the aftermath of the horrors of the 20th century, that philosophers would be reflecting on things that actually happened.
- [25:44]
C
You can't escape history or even the question of Heidegger's guilt. Biography becomes important, I think, in ways they kind of indirectly play themselves out in a kind of revolutionary book that comes, I think, sometime in the 70s or 80s. But it was Pierre Ado's Philosophy as a way of Life. I mean, in a lot of strange ways. Tischen comes to a similar position of trying to. That life is a process of education, that the doing of philosophy is not the memorization of dry facts or. Or formulations or Denzlinger formulas, but it is the shaping of a human being and also of communities. So that kind of seriousness is also something that's very crucial to it. And Edo does that by demonstrating that actually that was the original Greek ideal, was. Well, you know, you have math, you have the sciences, and you have everything else, but they're subordinate to spiritual formation, to their spiritual exercises, their means to an end. Right. Rather than being an end in itself. Whereas philosophy may be before World War II, but even after World War I, is a really profound shock. So Nicholas de Warren has a really nice book on German philosophy since world or after World War I. And you get to see how that profound shock of just having your whole world decimated fuels philosophizing. Sometimes it makes people just abandon philosophizing. But Husserl, who gets mentioned in this book and Tishner's book, is one of the protagonists of that. And Tishner's input into it is. Well, it looks like Husserl is just doing this really kind of abstracted out kind of consciousness. And the problem then becomes like, well, how do you rejoin it to the world? But he says, but if you look behind that and you try to look at the motive, motivation behind the philosophy, you have the crisis of European sciences after everything went up in rubble. And how do you rebuild that? How do you rebuild a sense of responsibility? Another really great book is Gupser's the Far Reachers, where he talks about phenomenology even in Husserl. Like starting with Husserl as a philosophy of. Of Spiritual, intellectual, and moral renewal. And so he traces that from Cooslo up through. Even through Derrida. So that's an important component there. And I think part of the reason why there was a Renaissance while reading, I don't know, like Kierkegaard and Marx and Nietzsche in the 20th century, is because they did break out a lot of the stale kind of intellectual dead ends of 19th and 18th, post Kantian philosophy of them saying, like, hey, you know, like, you know, shake yourself out of your stupors where your life really does matter and, you know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. And we're not just writing books for the hell of it or to get professorships. We're actually trying to deal with profoundly disturbing realities that we have to live through. I mean, the alternatives are not great. So you have to face the kinds of evils of the age, but also the evil within yourself and come up with some sort of answer. It's sort of like Adam in the garden and where are you? Right. And Adam's like, well, you know, I've been here all this time. But he's trying to hide. That's one of the metaphors that Tishner picks up on and uses nicely within those books. So, yeah, so there is that profound shock to philosophy, to post enlightened philosophy, of trying to, you know, it's not that you wouldn't like to be in your ivory tower and do philosophy and come up with really kind of interesting and revolutionary thoughts. It's just that somebody just took a cannon and took apart your ivory tower. And then, well, what do you do in a world like that? Right. There's an apocalyptic element to it that's inescapable. And then you have to put your world back together from the fragments I.
- [30:34]
A
Just asked for to read this book. I guess the other question is just who Tishener's audience is or was, or who. Who was he writing for and why did. I mean, you've articulated, I think, the broad stroke of, you know, his relevance in the, you know, in the time that he was writing. But, like, you know, he's not. Like, he's not. He's not studying scripture. Right. He's not telling stories per se. Like, he's. He's doing philosophy, but he's doing philosophy for a public. And. And as I was reading it, I think, by the way, that theme of renewal definitely stood out for me. And it has that kind of effect, I think, on reading it. But I was sort of thinking like, well, who are the people that are actually interested in this and why, as a pedagogue, right? Why as a chaplain, as a priest? Why does he think that this model of philosophizing is helpful for people? And I don't know. And I guess I can connect that question to your work as a translator, right? Because, like, you're probably more aware than most of just how Tichnor kind of ties it all together, like, how careful he is in the way that he connects the dots.
- [31:43]
C
And I think you did a very good job of actually drawing that out. And I just wanted to thank you for that. That was really masterly how the questions that you kind of initially posed helped me to kind of tie all those things together and see the bigger picture. Because reading a book is an encounter, even translating. So you can translate a whole book, right? And I've done like, six or seven of them, and you don't have to necessarily understand to get it right. So. Well, then it's a problem of dealing with the disgust of having finished a project that you came into very enthusiastically. Then you realize that you've kind of have gone into. Gone astray in a lot of ways, and maybe it's a lot more than you could handle, but you got to do it anyway because you're under contract. So.
- [32:37]
A
Yeah, no, I mean, who are his people? I guess he was the unofficial chaplain of the Solidarity movement. What is the Solidarity movement?
- [32:44]
C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's funny, and I think this is changing, unfortunately, in Poland, but in Central Europe, there's the. The notion of intelligentsia, which is public intellectuals, people who actually speak. They. They have to reconnect the. The kinds of problems that they're. That they're formulating in a way that speaks to a wider public. So when you ask, like, who it was that was the audience, was everybody sort of, here comes everybody. Well, but it is. I mean, it is phenomenologists, right? He's trying to kind of engage Levinas and his philosop and maybe incarnate it more within the concrete world around him. But at the same time, he also taught, like, in a drama school in Krakow. So he had an audience that he would bounce these ideas off of, and they would come from perspectives that were totally, maybe foreign to the sorts of things that would have been asked by other professional philosophers, phenomenologists. He also worked as a chaplain for both college students and children and then also academics. So, like, when I say everybody, that's pretty much everybody. The funny thing about it is that when I grabbed my copy of the first copy of the book that I Bought in Polish. It was after he died. And I thought, okay, maybe I should finally read this thing. And I was at this bookstore that I'd been to, like, several times in Warsaw, and I remembered that that was maybe the only place in all of Warsaw that still had that. That edition. Well, I guess maybe that was like the only copy of it available in Warsaw. And I put it off for a long time and I go reach for the book, and there's just some. Some random person just. She looked like a school teacher. And she reached for it and she goes. She looked at me and she said, oh, maybe you might than I do. But she was reaching for it because this is the sort of person who is not only involved in this sort of writing, but also dealing with the dilemmas of the Solidarity work movement and how do we act against a state that's hell bent on destroying us. Somebody working within their church that had been insulated probably a little bit more than a lot of countries in the west against the trends of Vatican ii. And then the contrast between that kind of Neo Thomas philosophy and the questions that were being asked by his parishioners, I think it comes back. I think you're right in actually zeroing in on that. It comes back to him being a pastor. And I remember him talking about this in various interviews and a couple of essays that he wrote. And he did philosophy for his parishioners.
- [35:56]
A
As a pastor under the communist regime.
- [36:00]
C
Right, right, right.
- [36:02]
A
All right. So maybe we can just start now walking through some of the topics, and I think that will show us just sort of like the sophistication maybe, of some of the moves that he's making. And so, you know, I want to get clarity on some concepts. I want to share some passages here from the book and maybe talk about the implications of it for philosophy and for. And for life. So just to start, we have this passage to be a dramatic being, he writes, means living through a given time surrounded by other people, while having the earth under one's feet as the stage. So what's the stage thing that he's talking about here? Why is that? Why the stage as opposed to just the earth or the world or a disembodied transcendental ego, or what's going on with the stage thing?
- [37:01]
C
Yeah, the stage thing, I think, reiterates the dramatic nature of. Of the philosophy. So it's not only. I mean, and it is. It's difficult because I think one of the problems with trying to understand the book is that there are so many wonderful individual analyses of phenomena like the. You know, like the sorts of masks that we put on to dissimulate the truth or the veils we put on in order to kind of hide certain things that are dear to us that we don't want to expose. So it's hard to actually get a wider view of the thing because there are so many wonderful extended sections which seem almost immediately applicable to life of like, I can see situations, whether at home or in the workplace or even at church, you know, where it's like, oh, yeah, this makes sense. And then you zero in on that, and then it's easy to lose sight of the wider picture. The wider picture being that, unlike with Heidegger and Husserl, we're not only concentrating upon the stage, meaning the kind of non human, non dialogical environment around us that makes life possible. So it seems as if he's kind of rejecting that because he wants to say, well, Husserl and Heidegger concentrate on this to the exclusion of dialogue. So they're missing an important kind of human dimension. Then he launches into a whole extended chapter on Levinas, right? And you think, okay, well, this is all about the dialogical element. And Levinas tends toward Platonizing and kind of moving away from any concretized examples. The face becomes this kind of like mystical, disembodied thing that you encounter. And you go, oh, so is that the alternative? But no, it just keeps going, right? And then you get the reintroduction of the stage back into it. It's just that the world that we inhabit with other people both shapes us. Because it's not that the environment is not entirely passive or the stage is not entirely passive. Because we have to be, as he puts it, kind of attentive to how the world functions and what it demands of us and what's possible within it. So it does dictate back to us. And there is like some element of. I don't know if it's dialogue. Maybe it's like a monologue from the world. And if you don't listen to the world's monologue, in some ways you're missing out on something. So it's the continual reintegration of those things and seeing how the interplay of the kinds of. Of quality of relationships that we have with other people create a certain world. But then that certain world actually reinforces the patterns of behavior that we then think are possible and exhibit upon the stage. So I think in a lot of ways, I mean, in some ways it's kind of like a restating of original sin in a totally different and foreign idiom. And like, well, how are we saved from that? How do we emerge from it? And for him, it is thoroughly through dialogue through the.
- [40:28]
A
Be saved from the stage.
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C
No, not safe from the stage, but be safe from a world that no longer feels or is no longer sensed as a promised world, but one that's been denied to you and you have no place. And then you turn to revenge just out of spite of. Towards it or towards other people. So it's like, well, how do you begin to situate yourself within it? And what are the possibilities for emancipation from it? Is it total freedom? And then you do whatever you like, as in, I don't know, like somebody in an existentialist level. Right. Or what's Melville's character? Who would prefer not to. Right, yeah, Bartleby.
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A
Right.
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C
Yeah. I would just like, prefer not to deal with this. Right. You know, it's like, that's not. That's not an option that's given to you.
- [41:20]
A
Yeah. The stage is a site of, I think, for practitioner, both freedom and fate.
- [41:24]
C
Yeah.
- [41:25]
A
And, you know, like, you have a role to play. Your role is frequently defined by the people who are around you. And, you know, you can do certain things on the stage, you can decide not to play the role, but at that point you're going to be doing a disservice, maybe to the others.
- [41:41]
C
Right.
- [41:41]
A
And so, yeah, I mean, you're working through. You're trying to. It's the work of freedom in relationship. Right. With the other people that you share the stage with.
- [41:52]
C
Right. It's the interaction of freedom and necessity. Yeah, you're right.
- [41:55]
A
Freedom and necessity. Yeah. And so that's where we get our value. Right. That's where he calls. He talks about the solid solidity of the self.
- [42:04]
C
Right.
- [42:04]
A
We. There's a certain gravity, Right. That the stage has because I find my identity in the role that I play. But at the same time, he'll talk about the stage as. He'll compare it to natural phenomena. So it's also the source of. It's the site of evil, like you said. I mean, it's the site of good and evil, of salvation and damnation, of sin and grace, and it's also the site of misfortune. Right. So he says, man runs the course of a peaceful life upon the stage of the world. When at a given moment, the stage revolts against him, against his presence, the joyful certainty of possessing the world instantaneously disappears from the soul, from his soul, the soul of man. So it's very neutral. It's value neutral. Right. It's almost like a fact, but it's a fact that that is essential to the encounter and to kind of working out your salvation, I guess.
- [43:07]
C
Yeah. I mean, and it's also a recapitulation of the distinction between natural and moral evil that became so important to kind of contemporary or modern philosophy. And he wants to say that. Well, I mean, in a lot of ways, and the ultimate tragedy, we all die. Right. Is inescapable. But part of the evils that we encounter within the world is people telling us that crimes that are being perpetrated against ourselves or other people are just kind of part of the natural state of things. That's just how the world functions. It's not my fault that this happened. It was just pure natural necessity that forced the situation to happen. And that is, you know, one form of the lie and of trying to shirk the kind of ethical responsibility that we have to each other of saying, well, it's not my fault. I think, oh, gosh, which one was it? Was it Anne and Gloucester from Henry? Oh, I forget which Henry. It is the Shakespeare play where he says, like, you know, I murdered your husband, but it's not my fault. It was because of your beauty. Right. And I was forced into this. And I do not expect. I do not accept responsibility for it. Right. So, yeah, so that's an important distinction that we miss if we do not make this kind of distinction between the stage and interpersonal realities. And we can pawn off interpersonal realities as being the fault of the stage. It's like. Well, it's like an earthquake. It just happened. Like, there's nothing I can do. At the same time, there's kind of an interesting thing because I was reading this, you know, maybe for the 10th time now, and I was. I was. I was looking to this. It's like. Is there like some sort of creeping anthropomorphic element to it? But no. I mean, he talks about how the, you know, inner human relations can lead to a kind of devastation of the world. So it's not only that the consequences of the philosophy are for our interpersonal relations, but there's also consequences for the world around us, which makes life possible. So in a lot of ways, he kind of poos on Heidegger at the beginning of the book where he says, well, it's all about the stage and there's nothing going on. But then the stage comes back later on where he talks about his work on technology, and he's saying, like, yeah. I mean, look at how profoundly, you know, modern technology and science have decimated the natural world around us, and that. That affects the quality of the interpersonal relations and, you know, the very possibility of life. So that's there. There's also like an element of, like. Well, there's potential of having some sort of dialogical relation with nature. And he doesn't really. He kind of like, hints at that and then he drops it several times within the book.
- [46:21]
A
Book.
- [46:22]
C
But that's even there within Buber as well. And that's also something that he doesn't really thematize all that much in I Am Thou. Because he's talking about specifically about the interpersonal relation and its importance.
- [46:35]
A
Yeah, it's certainly a human drama that unfolds. I think you're right. There are implications to that trauma, for sure. I think the interesting thing here, just in terms of the evolution of the development of the book, is the way that he progresses. He's not that he's introducing the stage in order to keep moving forward from that kind of foundation that he sets. And in that sense, I think he is phenomenological, so that he's providing, he's giving some kind of grounding for further development of thought. And in this sense, the drama on the stage is the drama of damnation or salvation, of life and death, of good and evil. But it's also the destiny of philosophy, he says, is tied into this because philosophy has to affirm itself in some way and maintain its direction. And so he's reframing the conversation vis a vis. You mentioned Husserl, Heidegger and others with the stage in view, but in order to then move forward and to develop what this philosophy of dialogue or this philosophy of drama is. And so philosophy is implicated in the way that the story, that movement of thought sort of unfolds. So, like, on the stage, right, this issue of, like, the call and the response, there's the statement that he makes that, you know, I have to give an answer. Like, I am responsible somehow for replying to a question, right. Or if it's my time to say my lines, like, I have to know my lines and. But I think there's a vulnerability there. You know, if we're talking about Levinas, like, I think that the other comes sort of unidirectionally at the self, and I'm sort of. I stand kind of under the weight of the call of that of responsibility for the other, for Tishner. Like, I, I. I am a vital member of the conversation, and I Have to reply so that the other can speak back to me. And like, there's this reciprocity that I think that starts to unfold on stage. Right. Yeah. So I wonder if you could.
- [48:45]
C
Yeah, there's kind of like a monologue in Levinas. So that, That's, That's. That's a. Yeah, you zero.
- [48:49]
A
Paralyzing. Yeah, yeah. There's that passivity in Loving Us.
- [48:52]
C
I mean, uncharitably, I forget who it was. Kind of characterized it as like a terrorism of the other, where you just. You be. Well, I. And I mean, he does that and like, in otherwise than being of what I was able to. Of what very little I was able to absorb of it, I really like totality and affinity a lot more.
- [49:11]
A
But.
- [49:11]
C
But there he really kind of doubles down on. On the kind of the, the, the. The. The implacable kind of call of the other. And it's as if it's always. It's always somewhat other than yourself. And there isn't a sense that. Well, maybe you. And in your face or whatever. Gosh, if I could only pin down what the face is, but maybe that would be the wrong thing to do with the face, basically. That it's not just passive, right. That it actually has its call to action, to respond. I think there's like a monologue within Levinas of the other, the stranger, the widow and the orphan, right? And they're like somewhere on the outside coming in, breaking into your reality and say. And like totally taking it apart. While there's elements of that in Tishner, he's also saying, like, hey, you are like the stranger, the other and the widow as well. And so the position then becomes dialogical of how do those strangers, others and widows talk to each other, right. There's an added level of maybe complexity and that might be missing there in Levinas within Tishner's work.
- [50:32]
A
He's faithful to Levinas too, though. I mean, he affirms the priority of duisance, like the enjoyment that we share. But the question of the dialogue or of the drama becomes when I have a role to play or I have something to say in response. And in that sense, he pulls in these concepts from Levinas of destitution and proximity, I think. And what he means kind of by destitution, I think is something like, if I don't say anything, the story ends like I. Or like. Or better yet, like, I have. I have a responsibility to respond so that it may be a gift, right? Like, I need to make. I need to bring the. I have to realize the good in this situation. And to the extent that I don't reply, it's simply destitute.
- [51:17]
C
Right.
- [51:18]
A
The good is just sort of hanging out there and so the actors have to effectuate that good on the stage.
- [51:29]
C
Right. And I mean, it opens up a whole world of possibilities, potentially restructures your life. I mean, that's what that whole section about the call of the good through the other is that, well, the good is beyond being and all those other transcendentals. But at the same time it has a structuring the function related to it. And I, I suppose there you might have questions about that, but. But yeah, no, I mean it, yeah, it's classically Platonic in that way and that it calls you back to question your complacency and the kind of relationship you have to both yourself and to other people and the world. And asking yourself the question, well, is this really like a really human world? I mean, for some reason, like Martin Luther King kind of comes to mind, which is like a totally strange connection that I never really, really thought about it in this sort of way. But like, you know, the I have a dream speech of like, well, like, hey, America, is this really the best that we can do? I have a better, you know, dream for the future. And that also is, I mean, that's something that grows out of Buber as well and him having read that and several other philosophers of dialogue as well. So there's kind of like an interesting dimension and maybe something that helps to translate a little bit of the kind of ethical responsibility and the calm response and kind of like puts that on a plane that's more understandable to an English speaking audience where if you just transpose it to that, then you kind of see the kinds of aims of philosophy that he's looking for and the sort of potential for changing the world that it has.
- [53:32]
A
Yeah, it's interesting that you bring up Martin Luther King because I think what he's trying to figure out is how is my love activated? Where do I get that motivation to change things and make it for the better, better? And so he talks about desire. He says, desire does not know its home, it never returns. It is condemned to abandon all past and all presents. And in this sense he is pulling on Levi and Austin this idea of the infinite. Infinite as infinite goodness given to desire. But there's a positivity to that, right? So if you're talking about the Kantian ideal of the kingdom of ends, of this pure practical postulate that I like, I placed before myself in order to motivate my action somehow. Like, but I always run upon the limit of that thing. And there's always, you know, there's always more on the other side of what I am able to do. Like, for practitioner, like, it's a positivity, right? There's a, there's a, there's, there's transcendence and then there's positivity. And it's unclear where that positivity comes from, apart from the desire for it. Right. He contrasts the desire for the good from, like, wanting to eat or, like, satiate myself or for finite goods. Like, there's there's this, like. And again, like, I think the Platonic move is, is right. Like, there's this transcendence that, that opens up in the response that I give to the question that's posed to me on the stage. And so, yeah, I have a dream, right, that's, that's pure, that's just like, undiluted.
- [55:04]
C
No, I mean, I desire because I, I, I did. I did. We, we made a trip to, to Louisiana, through Delta. So we actually stopped in Memphis, and the motel was just kind of profoundly moving. And I think it stuck somewhere in the back of my mind of somebody who's like, witnessing to the possibility of another world. And, well, there's also the risk, the risk of philosophy, the risk of your very own life, of that you might be killed for it. Right? Because the world is out of kilter. It doesn't appear in Tischen's book, but I reformulated it and I like it better than what he wrote. I forget what he actually wrote, but we kind of experience evil even though the transcendentals might be ontologically prior to everything else and structure things. Evil is something that we experience ontically in a prior way. So then you try and figure out, how am I going to be liberated from these evils that I see around me and how to escape from the good. So that structures the whole book is the initial encounter with evil, the kinds of evil and things that we typically would think of as being positive, like beauty, the truth, or even goodness itself being perverted. He starts with that because that is what drives philosophizing, at the very least for him. And a lot of not just Polish, but Central European, even Russian thinkers of, well, what do I do in the face of this world that seems impossible? I mean, I was, I grew up, I was what, like 8 years old when we, when we left Poland. And I remember seeing not only tanks in the streets, but, you Know, certain parts of my part of northern part of Warsaw, there were actually like buildings with damage from World War II still that had. They hadn't had money to rebuild and those sorts of things around me. And, well, why bother to go on? I mean, I think that comes back to the pastoral question of like, these things were very bleak. And then how do you deal with it when your parishioner asks you about that? And while the possibility that their career might have been ruined. I know there's kind of like a vogue of comparing on various sides of the political spectrum, so not singling one out of comparing what they're undergoing to totalitarian terror. Right. And it just trivializes some of that. I mean, I see the analogy and I think Tishnor would welcome that, but the radicality of the kinds of evils and the immediate consequences of it and the just almost really kind of disgusting disregard for life and the cynicism involved in that is something that he had to explain to his parishioners and also his philosophical audience and say, well, that is not the only answer to life. Or that is not what you see in front of you ontologically, is not like some sort of structure of the world that it necessarily has to be. So another future is possible, and it begins with solidarity with each other, with accepting the encounter. He uses the metaphor in the book, but one of the other two books that have been translated into English, the spirit of solidarity, of carrying one another's burdens. And there's like subchapter in this one as well. That was like his main theme for the solidarity movement as it was kind of welling up from the ground after years of various protests, repressions, economic desolation, and then periods of prosperity in between, and then martial law. And how do you deal with that? That. How do you respond to it? And so that. That was part of his audience. And the book begins just roughly a couple of. So he began writing it, I think, in like either 76 or 77. There are elements that one of my friends, Pavel, who's a philosopher, who works kind of in. In various areas, but the history of solidarity is one of his specialties. And he says, yeah, like I. I was reading a paper from 77. He's clearly working out the very issues almost in places verbatim, that he. That end up being in the book. So as something like solidarity is starting to well up, where workers and intellectuals realize that, hey, or. And students, that was the other kind of main group of, well, one particular group has been persecuted by the state and and the others just kind of like, sat back. And then the other group got persecuted. And they kind of like the workers sat back and didn't really care about the students or the intellectuals. And right toward the end of the 70s, people get together and say, hey, what if we, like, took the intellectuals and we started dialoguing with the workers and providing them with legal support and monetary support? And that. That's that long historical process of the stage having been set the way that it had been. Then there's all these, you know, dramas and tragedies for particular social groups until they actually figure out that they can work together. And then you have Tishnor at the Vauville kind of laying down, like, asking the question, like, what is solidarity? Right? And. And trying to lay that out for this labor movement that has formed, which then came to kind of inform the rest of the movement of actually looking after each other, of actually helping each other out, of not resorting to violence. Because then you're only replicating the violence that you see in the streets. And part of the tragedy of that is that by the mid-1980s, a lot of that had been repressed in various ways by divide and conquer methods. But there was that earlier promise of, well, it is possible. And it is possible to, like, radically change society. Where for, you know, 30, 40 years, all you have is like, well, we just, like, we belong to the state and we have to deal with the parameters that were handed to, well, another world is possible, and we're actually capable of achieving this. And you go from. From, you know, everybody being part of the party to. To then something like, I don't know. I don't know, somewhere in excess of 50% of the country within a year and a half of the founding, official founding of the solidary solidarity movement. People declaring and being able to step out of one particular lie and. And saying, hey, we're part of the solidarity thing and we can't be pushed off the historical stage. And another way of doing things is actually possible. So there is, I think, part of the application of the book is kind of in the historical. Whatever you might want to call it, the historical process that he was actually. That was clearly not just in the back of his mind, but in the forefront. Because he was writing like, 20 articles or essays plus in a year, sometimes that much in a period of a couple of months. So he was really active and he was really witnessing to the fact that something else is possible by responding to the good that's calling us from totally from the outside of the World that we have have hitherto known since World War II. So there is that interplay between his social Persona and his intellectual Persona as a. And there really is. It's really hard to, like, find a division between it. He is always Kishner, and he is someone who's really kind of for other people. Whether even if you agreed with him or not on some of the positions that he took up, up, you knew that he was actually attempting to think things through for some sort of common good. So it was hard not to like him. And that was either part of his personal constitution or something that developed over time, or both.
- [64:14]
A
That solidarity is built on trust. He talks about that trust as being a common background for what he calls the space of meaning, which is emergent through encounter. He says, I ask someone for directions who seems to be as sincere as I am and who will not give me a false answer, will not give a false answer to someone who is asking sincerely. So, like, yeah, you know, you can work well with others to the extent that you trust them. The problem is, right, the problem of evil is that it's inherited evil. It goes back in time, right? There's a horizon of it, right? Like he pulls from Heidegger to say that whatever the truth is that's emergent in the situation on the stage, it's emergent out of a horizon of untruth, of concealment. And this is an interesting. You mentioned apocalypse and revelation as part of this journey of desire for the good. And it's interesting because he contrasts the philosophy of value with the philosophy of the good. And both are really important because the value is sort of situational. It's where I find myself on the stage. But ultimately what I want is this good that's motivating the way that I respond, so that I can respond in a way that is life giving, I guess, for the other. And I do think that that reciprocity is interesting, like, vis a vis loving us. But we should talk just about how, like, you've mentioned evil a few times. And there's obviously the historical reality of evil. There's the. There's the fact that evil, for Titchener, is a given in the sense that it appears. It's like it's an actual thing that's even. Like you could even identify it with a person on the stage. Like, that person is evil. But, you know, like, I think this is really the crux of that philosophical. The question of philosophy is always the question of where it starts and where it comes from and where it's going this love of wisdom, right? And I think here, like, the crux of the issue is we've inherited this evil. We're on this stage, we have a responsibility to say something and to do something that brings goodness into the situation. But like, it's complicated, right, because evil is embedded in the lie, right? Like, and, and the liar is the one who takes that semantic field, right, those values and inverts them and shows how you know, like what you know, and, and you know, it can be convincing enough to you, given this, the situation on the stage, that you think that he's telling you the truth, but in fact he's deceiving you. And the effect of that lie is what he calls broken reciprocity. Right? That. And so, yeah, so I, you know, I, I appreciate the, the political horizon here because I think this is where he, he does talk about the genesis of political reason and of, you know, social norms and things like that. But like, philosophically, you know, like, if I'm the one who's in this place of responsibility, how do I discern the good in a, in this horizon of potential lies? You know, like to, to quote Rod Dreher, like, how do I live in a way that's not, you know, live not according to the lie? And maybe it's just an awareness thing for him. Like, it is that drama, right, that like, we do have to have the discernment of, of the, you know, that we could be interacting with a liar, right, in any given moment. But I think that the lie, the liar, according to Tishner, the liar, like Satan in the garden, for instance, right, is the one who promises you something that results in the loss of the promise, you know, the desire, the, the denied existence. As you said earlier that like, I, I, I think I'm pursuing a good. But it turns out that I've made a mistake and now I no longer have what I thought I had. And, and this, this is the question of justification that Tish brings up, which is, you know, like, where do, and how can I, how is my place justified? Like what? Like, you know, you know, where do I find my place in all this? How do I keep my place? And how do I avoid losing it? And once I've lost it, right, because that's the horizon. Once I've lost it, how do I reclaim it? How do I discern the truth in the midst of all of this nonsense? And just to say one more thing for him, I think beauty steps in at that point. But the challenge with beauty is that it doesn't require anything outside of itself for that justification. It's deceptive in the sense that it's enchanting and it's beguiling and it doesn't need the other. Right. The beautiful is, you know, it's sufficient unto itself. And in that sense, like I think, you know, it's both gift and it's poison at the same time. Like there's a. There's a danger zone to beauty, but it can raise our minds up, right? It can bring us forward somehow in this desire.
- [69:23]
C
Well, it's a risk. Like everything else, it's a risk. How does he put it? He says that beauty with the kind of incandescent light that comes from it both kind of charms and invites us, but at the same time it could also burn us. This makes it a perfect book for teenagers to read. They're discovering those realities. But I think there is a risk. Risk. There's also risk of failure and tragedy in all this. So you were talking about that all important element that he puts at the beginning of the book where he talks about, well, like this philosophy is also a drama of sorts, right? And it's not necessary, it's not pre given as in a kind of maybe universalist logic that good will triumph, it is possible, that maybe will not. And so he offers his philosophy as an attempt to dramatize drama. And he says, well, part of the drama of the philosophy is that it might fail. And I'm going along the process and trying to figure out like what the encounter of other people with other people who've thought about these problems will lead me. So I don't entirely know what's going to happen next. And that might, might explain a little bit of how much like the profusion of the book it really is kind of overall. Well, at times when you start reading and you just like everything is the kitchen sink and like the plumbing behind the kitchen sink and like the water plant is also in there somewhere, right? And you just go, well, yeah, but you do have to risk that answer and it could end in failure. He talks about tragedy also, like when there are competing values. I mean, from any number of experiences in my own life, I can think of that, of having to choose between my immediate family and my parents, right? And you go like, wow, these are two very important values that I cherish. But one of them within my hierarchy of, of values is higher. So the other one, unfortunately, when this clashes, will suffer and there is ultimately a tragedy that could result from that sort of thing. So it's not naive I don't think he is realist in that respect, where he talks about the possibility of failure and he admits that maybe his philosophy is not adequate to the problem, which is an invitation to the reader or to future philosophers to take up the questions again and see if they can come up with a more adequate answer and a clearer picture of the drama that we encounter upon the stage as we encounter other people within our world.
- [72:37]
A
It does get back to the solidarity thing, right? Because it is about promise. It's about commitment and solidarity and covenant. I don't know how you escape the crisis of justification necessarily, if the lie is active and it's mobile and it's effective somehow and real, even in a phenomenological sense. I think for him the crisis is a crisis of. Of existence. You know, like it's not dissimilar from the Heraclit. The anaximander fragment of Heidegger, right, Where, you know, the. The first problem is that I exist, you know, like, I think he, He. I mean, he does. Like, he does make a claim back to Descartes, right, that there is this sense of the Cartesian self that. Like this, the, The. The. The value of the self, right, In. In oneself. Like the goodness of existence. Like, he, He's Thomistic, I think, in that sense. And it's unclear if it's a matter of value for him, because I think he seems fairly traditional with regard to the hierarchy of values of my place on the stage. And if it's a question of the good, that's an infinite desire that seems to outstretch the stage in some ways. But, but at the end of the book, he talks about the Sacred Heart, the Eternal Heart. And it's interesting because, like you said, the third chapter has got a lot of information on a lot of stuff on evil and the problem of evil. He's got a brief fourth chapter that's kind of talking about axiology and different research considerations about value and the space of meaning. He kind of dovetails back into the problem of evil again. And then in the last two pages, he introduces this notion of the Sacred Heart or the Eternal Heart. And what's interesting to me about this is that the individual is primary somehow. And what he's calling the self to this philosophical self, or the self that wants to listen to the call, is what he calls absolute fidelity. And this notion that step after step, in flight and falls, fidelity is born, an absolute fidelity without regard for circumstance. And here, like, you know, you hear. You know, you can hear echoes of Deuteronomy you know, on, like I set before you, life and death, the blessing and the curse right here. He's the. The challenge is, I guess for him to maintain, is to maintain fidelity in the face of all the circumstances. And he says, continually choosing life according to the good, man rises towards something that is above time. He is convinced that it is as if. As if the eternal heart pulls him toward itself. Man has put his fragile fate, like you said, the vulnerability of potential failure under the roof of the good which blesses him. And that's kind of how the book ends. Yeah. So you know what's missing there? Like what?
- [75:54]
C
I think there's like an undercurrent that's not sufficiently thematized within the book that's Christological because, well, the potential for failure within the aim towards the good or given that, the possibility of a world of lies. And he actually does a really nice job of situating Descartes within the situation of his time and talking about how it totally takes on a different valence. If you look at Descartes as somebody who is looking at the wars of religion and various groups, religious groups murdering each other and professing a. A messiah who was a victim murdered by the state. And that's part of historicizing and placing. You have the stage and the drama of Descartes trying to deal with what's going on around him and well, trying to figure out some sort of certainty that he can be drawn to. But I think with Tishnor there is that possibility of failure. And I think. I don't know whether it's not in this book, but in the controversy over the existence of man, the book that it grew out of, which he later completed after this was published, he talks about Maximilian Kolben and the possibility of failure. That is you're dead, but you do step out and meet the demands of the other. You actually volunteer your life for someone else's life. Sometimes they might be required of us. And it's both a tragedy in that you end up being killed, but at the same time it also witnesses, to use a word that you had really keyed in on really well earlier in our conversation, witnessing, as in martyrdom. So I think there's that Christological element through martyrdom is something that's always hanging somewhere on the margins. And it comes through in places like at the end of Levinas, where he talks about chapter one, which is devoted to discussing Levinas and the dialogical dimension. He says, well, yeah, but there's like a Christological dimension. And in that way we're not entirely abandoned in our experience of evil, which might ultimately, the lie might win, it might be triumphant, but then I might lose my place.
- [78:53]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's interesting. I did do a search. Yeah, go ahead.
- [78:56]
C
No, I mean, it might actually. It is coming from, like, a different order of sorts, maybe, to use Marion's borrowing from Pascal of saying, like, things are possible differently, even if that means that I am. I mean, it goes that deep. I mean, that martyrdom, that I might die, my ultimate failure, might actually end up being a defeat of the evil that. The very evil that destroys me life and limb, in a way that's irreplaceable. I mean, Kolba is not with us. Somebody like Popie Awuszko, who's a friend of his who was murdered by the. I mean, I remember going to like to see his, you know, his body or his coffin when he was killed, I think in 1984 or something like that. I mean, it's like one of my first memories. And this is part of Polish Christianity is the. The. The experience of suffering and evil and the potential of martyrdom. And also, like, the generative possibility that grows out of it is something that's important to it. Father. Father Manfred, who just retired from the Auschwitz center for. For dialogue and prayer, who did, like, a wonderful job of creating a space for Christians and Jews could come together and talk about what happened during World War II, talked about this wonderful distinction between German madonnas. And they're beautiful. If you look at baroque churches from Germany, there's all these pinks and pastels, and then there's these Madonnas with happy children. And then you have the black Madonnas in Poland. And he talks about how this kind of sorrow and the markings from some sort of encounter with an evil are present there within Polish Christianity in a way that it isn't in German Christianity. Yeah, I think that's kind of an important part of this. If you're talking about the possibility of failure, you have. Have Poland being taken apart during the 18th, 19th centuries until it just stops existing for 100 plus years. So you have total societal failure, not just personal failure, although there was a lot of immense personal failure, total societal collapse. And what do you do then? Do you just stop being a nation, I suppose, or after World War war ii? Like, what do you do? I mean, is evil triumphant in the end? Right. So these are very concrete questions, but also there are concrete christological answers to it that maybe he didn't get a chance to totally work out. But, like, with The Sacred Heart imagery that he uses towards the end. And then there's elements of Christology that come through in various parts of the book. I think he does us caps an answer, a partial answer, that in the extreme, it might end it in total failure. Sorry, I don't mean to.
- [82:23]
A
Well, I did a quick search because of our conversation.
- [82:26]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [82:26]
A
And in two of the four instances of referencing Christ in the book, he contrasts Christ with Prometheus, which is interesting. If I'm not mistaken, Prometheus is the guy who rolls the boulder up the hill, right?
- [82:40]
C
No, no, no. He's the guy who stoles the fire from the gods.
- [82:42]
A
Sisyphus, this. Okay, so Prometheus is the guy that steals the fire. All right, well, maybe that's less relevant of a.
- [82:51]
C
Like, there was a whole, like, genre of, like, even early Christians like Tertullian, I think, picking up on. On Prometheus as being a kind of analog of Christ, which is totally different because, like, you know, the modern Prometheus is like, hey, you know, Promethean man is the.
- [83:12]
A
What does that represent?
- [83:13]
C
Right. It's a rebellion against the divine. Whereas in some of these, both early Christian and also just straight up Greek and Roman pagan sources, he's seen as somebody who's making a sacrifice of his own life in order to bring a particular good fire to humanity. So, yeah, I mean, that. That. I don't know that he was aware of that, but yeah.
- [83:38]
A
Well, I know Nietzsche contrasted Adam in the garden with Prometheus. You know, the fall by virtue of weakness, of just like, give me the apple and I'll eat it versus the man who goes up and actually takes it for himself. But in the fourth instance of the reference to Christ, he's looking at the last words of Christ. And I think this is to your point about. About failure and the hope of salvation, of some kind of hope. So when Christ says, forgive them, for they know not what they do, for a petitioner that reveals. He uses the word reveal. That reveals heroism. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? This is tragedy. And into your hands I commend. My spirit is hope, he says, for salvation. And I know that you drew a parallel with the Rosenzweig section on the face where the Star of David actually almost looks as like a profile of a face. And Tischen completes that last passage by saying this precisely is the face. So I don't know what he means by that exactly. But to move from the heroic through the tragic to the hope. Hope of. But the hope is in the just handing oneself over. Right. The, you know, like.
- [84:59]
C
Right. And it's. It's a risk. Right. I mean, it might turn out to all have been. I mean, in some ways, I think the drama of salvation also becomes a risk. And I think that's why he doesn't feel comfortable talking about it directly. It's always like in the background, which is part of the reason why I chose the painting for the COVID because you have like the. The kind of whole series of various figures from Polish history and literature in the foreground. I forget what the name. Let me just double check. The name of the painting itself was reality. So. Yeah, right, right. So you have like the human drama in the foreground, but in the background you have like the. The Virgin and Child right there in the background behind the kind of like fencing kind of set up. So in some ways kind of separated, but also informing what's going on in the foreground and kind of looking on in judgment. So, yeah, there's very much that interplay, but there's also the risk of. Well, yeah, I mean, it is faith that it's not certainty. Right. And I guess there's maybe something like an eschatological kind of confirmation of it in the end. So there's even that risk of responding to the call. And while you also added the very important dimension of discernment and how difficult that can be because a lot of. Of things that look like the good in the end might not, and then, well, there's always the chance that your process of discernment will fail somewhere along the line to recognize those things. So I think that also reinforces the need for some sort of interpersonal tie between people, so you're able to be helped in your discernment of those realities. Right. This is why, you know, it makes sense to. To have a confessor, because you. You come into the confessional with a sense of your own, maybe sinfulness or whatever you might think the, The. The major sins are, then it turns out that it's something else. For me, typically it's. It's a. It's a great relief to. Well, I. There's always an element of resistance, of entering into that drama, of being exposed in that sort of way. But at the same time, when once you get through it, there's. Well, on top of just the absolution, there's also a sense of. I did not really see this particular relationship as being diseased in this sort of way. And it's only thanks to having come into dialogue with. With a confessor. That I was able to suss that out. So in that way, I mean, it's more. I mean, at the risk of sounding like Woody Allen in what was it? I think it was like, oh, gosh, Warren Love or one of his earlier films where he says, like, you know, but subjectivity is objective as they're going through. Like, it's the final line and. And a kind of intensification of what is objective and what is subjective. And then it ends with that. And it's like, well, yeah, but subjectivity is objective. Or inter. Subjectivity is objective in that sort of way. And he talks about that. I mean, hearkening to things like coming up with it by himself. I think. I don't think he read Kuhn or. Nor Latour of. Well, the only way that we actually come up with any sort of scientific objectivity is through forming these communities who are devoted to research, who sacrifice their time, their lives and large amounts of funds in order to come up with a more adequate version of the world that everybody agrees on. It actually reflects reality.
- [89:17]
A
Yeah, he did mention that for Husserl, the life world is not really about the other, which I actually don't agree with. I think the life world for Husserl is very much, much an inner, subjective world. So we abandon ourselves to the promise of some type of covenant or bond or place. And I think that it's interesting that in the context of moving, he says, from the old law into the covenant, of overcoming the master slave dialectic of revaluing, like the. You know, the. He talks about the inquisitor, he talks about the priest, but we find ourselves in a place, and he mentions the home, our workplace, the temple and the cemetery. And I think, you know, as a priest, I would probably add for him, like, the church, you know, like. And I think you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, like.
- [90:14]
C
Well, he does mention the sanctuary, which is.
- [90:16]
A
Yeah, sanctuary.
- [90:18]
C
Right. Yeah. So that is kind of like the technical.
- [90:21]
A
That's like the quintessential stage, it seems to me, would be the altar.
- [90:26]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [90:28]
A
So, yeah, it's. You know. But so it's interesting because there's just. There's very much. There's. There's many things that are unspecified. He says to be convinced of anything means to give a meaningful name to what remains unspecified on the margins of our expression. And I think the book is compelling for that reason, because it doesn't answer all the questions. It takes evil very, very seriously. Maybe this is something unique to. As he said, it is unique to the Polish experience. And I think it's important to remember that he is himself a priest. And so he's kind of doing a double take, I would say. Right. Both as philosopher and as priest.
- [91:12]
C
Yeah.
- [91:14]
A
I don't know. So, any. Any last thoughts? Just on any final pitch for the book, I just.
- [91:20]
C
I just feel that I might. Might have overwhelmed our audience with. With the amount of stuff that we've covered. Well, they.
- [91:26]
A
They can listen as long as they want into. Into the. Into the conversation.
- [91:30]
C
But there's so much more to the book that we. Yeah, there is. Just don't have the time, nor do I have. I mean, part of. Yeah, the. The translation was the rich risk of trying to transpose this into English. And then it's only as I'm translating and then going back and looking at it that I'm coming to better understand it. Through various kinds of dialogues with yourself and the other folks that I've talked to on podcasts before. Even the discovery of the fact that he sort of makes a joke in the introduction where he says, like, hey, you know, people, what is drama? Because this is going to be like, you know, that's my basic question. Like, people begin with etymologies, and they start working back to, like, archaic words and how they function over time. And he says, well, that's not really all that productive because, like, drama is, like, what we do. This is our life with other people. Right. So that's just too limited. So he makes fun of etymologies, which is kind of like a nicely veiled joke against Heidegger. But then in the next chapter, I noticed after having our conversation the other day over lunch was, hey, you know, he begins the next chapter, chapter one, on Levinas, with that whole, like, etymology, which is maybe potentially, like, a little bit fanciful about experience in Poland as Dakshvetchenya, as being witnessing, too. And I go, that's like a Heideggerian etymology. It might be a little bit of a stretch. So he's having fun with this as well. And I think in a lot of ways it's a fun book, despite being very challenging. And I think for, you know, if you've had, you know, if you've read some books, even for high school English, you'll recognize some of the examples, especially Shakespeare. I mean, that's one thing that we didn't really talk about is that how he does concretize a lot of these things by hearkening back to chiefly, like, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, like, his major conversation partner as well, besides all the great kind of philosophers of the 20th century, and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and really like pops up and Baudelaire as well. So there's lots of things and lots of examples that he throws out at you that you can kind of reconnect, even if you get lost in some of the terminology, to make it a lot more concrete. So in that way, it's also like a philosophy of drama by talking about dramatic works of literature as well. So, I mean, one of my great regrets is not finishing this in time for Herbert Blau, one of my former teachers, who is a kind of revolutionary director of modernist theater here in the States, to see the end of this project. But, yeah, the literary aspect of it is really kind of of wonderful in anchoring it in something that might have a wider audience to invite that wider audience, the kind of the general reader who might be aware of that, to dig into the phenomenology, which can look foreboding at times, and I think the use of thinking within metaphors. So the unacknowledged conversation partner in this book, I think, is recurring recur. And instead of talking about recur, he just uses various biblical metaphors in order to set up fundamental examples and then structure the argument itself as well. So there is that element which is both literary and in some ways kind of liturgical, of staging his argument by using those examples. And he makes the claim, without really substantiating it, that the biblical religions are the most dramatic ones and that he just sort of leaves it hanging. But then he brings it back, kind of suggesting it throughout the book, by using examples like Abraham leaving his home as being different than Odysseus coming back, back and seeing, you know, how things have changed, but how they kind of remain the same. Or as Abraham is called into a holy kind of new land, and he doesn't know what to expect. I mean, his only kind of guides along the way are the people that he encounters, both human and divine. So, yeah, so there is that literary element that, I mean, in some ways kind of recommends the book to practitioners of theater or literary criticism to look at it. It might be like a false cognate in that somebody who wants to teach a class on drama. It's like, let's find a philosophy of drama. And there's this book. Right.
- [96:56]
A
Some people are going to be very surprised. Yeah, yeah. But I would recommend it wholeheartedly, really, to anyone interested in the history of 20th century philosophy, to Polish history, Eastern European history, history of European European history in the 20th century. The book is the Philosophy of Drama. The author is Joseph Tichenor. And we've been so fortunate to have Artur Rossman, associate research professor at Notre Dame and editor in chief of Church Life Journal, here today to talk about it. So thanks, Arturo.
- [97:29]
C
Thank you so much. Appreciate the dialogue.