The aim of the text is to discuss Karol Irzykowski’s concepts of “pałuba” and construction, which he proposed in Pałuba (1903), where he characterises a “constructional element” appealing to the theses of empirical criticism of Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach. However, the question of the construction, understood first from the epistemological and psychological point of view, was present in the theses of Kant, Fichte and Schelling, and it became popularised thanks to neo-Kantianism and empirical criticism. The theses related to the construction were intensively discussed during the creation of Pałuba and Irzykowski’s subsequent works, in which the issue of construction also appears, considered as a cognitive schema, as the formal element confronted with the content, as the constructional aspect of the verbal and visual (film) communication. His later works concern the cultural construction which is also a formal construction, and they come into being at the same time that Cassirer’s books on the symbolic forms of culture were published. However, the question of construction is best presented in Pałuba, described with the phrase “constructional element”, which was opposed to a “pałuba” (“pałubic element”). Confronting the terms “pałuba”, i.e. natural, direct, presented to the human being, and “construction”, i.e. the world created by human beings, specific for us, Irzykowski defines human existence, he shows the regularities of human acts, cognition and feeling. At the same time, he captures the “natural” aspect of culture with the use of the term “pałuba”. It is that coexistence of the naturalness and the specifically human products within the world of culture — in the world which annexes the “natural”, bestows the senses and meanings on “pałuba” — that makes an “enculturation” possible, i.e. an introduction of the “wild” man into culture, teaching and adaptating to life in the cultural world, full of human senses and meanings. The text discusses the category of the “constructional element” and presents Irzykowski’s thoughts on the background of the hitherto existing concepts of construction, as well as in the context of his own anthropological, epistemological and cultural theses.
The aim of my article is to indicate the inspirations provided by the Bergsonian ideas that we find in texts written by the Polish intellectualist Karol Irzykowski — these inspirations are declared explicitly, but more frequently they are suggested implicite. The inspirations are clearly noticeable in his book on the cinema (Dziesiąta Muza, 1924) as well as in his early articles and the experimental novel Pałuba (1903). On the other hand, the late book by Bergson, concerning religion and morality (Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 1932), reveals a work approaching the clerc’s ideas which is declared explicite and incessantly by Irzykowski. It has to be stressed that Irzykowski is familiar with Bergson’s works, first and foremost, thanks to Polish translations and editions — as referenced in his commentaries (Henri Bergson, Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du comique, 1900, Polish edition 1902; Henri Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice, 1907, edited in Polish in 1911). However, the Bergsonian work which seems most influential for the philosophical theses of Irzykowski, i.e. Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (1896), was only published in Polish in 1926. It is possible that the presence of theses from this book in the works of Irzykowski is the result of his familiarity with philosophical currents and discussions of that time. Irzykowski’s works address, among others, the essential question of “reality” considered at the time by Bergson (as well as by William James). The Bergsonian vitalist philosophy of life (but also the culturalist position of Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel) was a critical point of reference for Irzykowski’s own comprehension of the terms “life”, “matter”, and “spirit” in the larger context of “reality” (defined as a sum of particular beings). Irzykowski considered language and history — surely after Bergson — in the context of memory and individual biography. He postulated the subjectivisation and individualisation of historical knowledge. Just like Bergson, Irzykowski confronted mechanism and dynamism; he considered in the context of this opposition questions of comicality and laughter as well as the anthropological effects of a specific, cinematographic perception. However, Irzykowski — in contrast to Bergson in his book L’Évolution créatrice — coupled the mechanism strictly with the dynamism, grasping film as a mechanic registration of human perception, as well the art of dynamic movement. According to Irzykowski, film would be a confirmation not of the analytic, but synthetic character of human perception and cognitive faculties. Just like Bergson, Irzykowski tried to go beyond the metaphysical and psychophysical dualism towards the standpoint of monism, but with pluralistic aspects (pluralism of different “realities”). The late Bergsonian theses on religion and morality (Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 1932) demonstrate, once again, some similarities between his ideas and Irzykowski’s concepts. There might seem to be many differences between them: Irzykowski consistently declared his own intellectual point of view and Bergson stressed that instinct and intuition played the most significant roles. However, in the end, Bergson discovered that he had fulfilled his life’s mission and his late declarations seem close to the clerc’s standpoint of Irzykowski.
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