Insatiability [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONIt was only towards the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy. Their bread, their work, their private lives began to depend on this or that decision in disputes on principles to which, until then, they had never paid any attention. In their eyes, the philosopher had always been a sort of dreamer whose divagations had no effect on reality. The average human being, even if he had once been exposed to it, wrote philosophy off as utterly impractical and useless. Therefore the great intellectual work of the Marxists could easily pass as just one more variation on a sterile pastime. Only a few individuals understood the causes and probable consequence of this general indifference.A curious book appeared in Warsaw in 1932. It was a novel, in two volumes, entitled Insatiability. Its author was Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, a painter, writer and philosopher, who had constructed a philosophical system akin to the monadology of Leibniz. As in his earlier novel. Farewell to Autumn, his language was difficult, full of neologisms. Brutal descriptions of erotic scenes alternated with whole pages of discussions in Husserl, Carnap and other contemporary philosophers. Besides, one could not always tell whether the author was serious or joking; and the subject matter seemed to be pure fantasy.The action of the book took place in Europe, more precisely in Poland, at some time in the near future or even in the present, that is, in the thirties, forties or fifties. The social group it portrayed was that of musicians, painters, philosophers, aristocrats and higher-ranking military officers. The whole book was nothing but a study of decay: mad, dissonant music; erotic perversion; widespread use of narcotics; dispossessed thinking; false conversions to Catholicism; and complex psychopathic personalities. This decadence reigned at a time when western civilization was said to be threatened by an army from the East, a Sino-Mongolian army that dominated all the territory stretching from the Pacific to the Baltic.Witkiewicz's heroes are unhappy in that they have no faith and no sense of meaning in their work. This atmosphere of decay and senselessness extends throughout the entire country. And at that