„History Does not Ask Nations: what Government Did or Do you Have, but: what You Can Do?” Some Basic Ideas for the Study of Jan Szczepański’s Historiosophic Views

Abstract

Jan Szczepański (1913–2004) left his views on philosophy of history in texts created over many years and corresponding to the political situation of Poland and Europe, which was always a pivotal issue for the sociologist. This article presents the main questions of the unsystematic historiosophy, which can be reconstructed from his books, essays, articles, and of the two published volumes of his diary also. Such a wide view permits, on the one hand, to visualize transformations of this humanist’s thought and, on the other hand, its dominating traits. In this paper, such subject-matters undertaken by Szczepański, as the ontology of time, possible logic and sense of historical process, the Polish fate’s speciality and means of dealing with the “national phantoms.” The author considers, whether in his opinion one could learn anything from history, what role he assigns to the individual and “particular history” in global historical process and which were the relations between Szczepański’s ideas and his political activity also. Finally, she portrays the sociologist’s philosophy of history as a special hermeneutical project — viz., similar to that of Gadamer, his conception of tradition, historicity and “reading the past.”