August Cieszkowski

Works

• 1838Prolegomena to Historiosophy

  Divides history into three ages – of feeling, of thought and of action – and asks philosophy to become a practical knowledge that shapes the future.

Position

Cieszkowski accepted Hegel’s dialectic but objected that Hegel had closed history in the present: if history is a rational whole, its future must also be knowable. He divided world history into three ages – antiquity as the age of feeling and art, the Christian-Germanic world as the age of thought culminating in philosophy, and a coming age of action in which knowledge becomes conscious deed. Philosophy therefore had to become practical, a “philosophy of the deed”, and pass over into social life. Moses Hess took up the formula in 1841, and through him it entered the debates of the Young Hegelians in which Marx arrived at the demand that philosophy should change the world; Marx met Cieszkowski in Paris in 1843–44, but whether he read him and was directly influenced is disputed (Nicholas Lobkowicz, 1967; David McLellan, 1969). In “Our Father” Cieszkowski turned the scheme into a Christian messianism: the third age is the age of the Holy Spirit, in which the Kingdom of God is to be realised on earth through the work of nations. Andrzej Walicki placed him in the context of Polish Romantic philosophy. Critics note that his practical turn remained speculative and that “Our Father” stands closer to the medieval prophecy of Joachim of Fiore than to social theory.

Life & context

August Cieszkowski was born on 12 September 1814 in Sucha near Węgrów in the Kingdom of Poland, then under Russian rule, into a landowning noble family. After studies in Kraków he went to Berlin in 1832, where he studied philosophy with the Hegelian Karl Ludwig Michelet, with whom he remained friends; he took his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1838. In the same year he published, in German, the “Prolegomena to Historiosophy”. There followed in Paris “Du crédit et de la circulation” (1839), a treatise on credit and banking, and in Berlin “Gott und Palingenesie” (1842), a polemic against Michelet’s denial of personal immortality. In 1843 he settled on the Wierzenica estate near Poznań in the Prussian partition. He was a deputy in the Prussian National Assembly of 1848 and later in the Prussian House of Representatives, where he led the Polish group; he co-founded the Poznań Society of Friends of Learning in 1857 and an agricultural school in Żabikowo in 1870. From the 1840s he worked on “Our Father” (“Ojcze nasz”), a religious philosophy of history whose first volume appeared anonymously in 1848; the remaining parts were published only after his death. He died in Poznań on 12 March 1894.

Further main works

• On Credit and Circulation (Du crédit et de la circulation, 1839)
• God and Palingenesis (Gott und Palingenesie, 1842)
• On the Peerage and the Modern Aristocracy (De la pairie et de l’aristocratie moderne, 1844)
• Our Father (Ojcze nasz, vol. 1 1848; complete edition 1899–1906)