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Volume 18 Issue 1

Journals in the Moral Space

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Publication date: 2021

Licence: CC BY-NC-ND  licence icon

Editorial team

Issue Editor dr hab. Łukasz Tischner, prof. UJ

Issue content

Robert Piłat

Konteksty Kultury, Volume 18 Issue 1, 2021, pp. 32 - 46

https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.21.003.13533

In the present article, I discuss the issue of whether writers’ diaries reveal strong evaluations of their authors. Following Charles Taylor, I understand strong evaluation as the best axiological explanation which a given person is able to formulate and present as the reason for his or her preferences. This axiological awareness is a non-trivial internal choice made from among many possible explanations – it is a self-interpretation aimed at showing the source of the goodness instantiated by the person’s values. In the article, I look for evidence of such awareness in several well-known writers’ diaries. My conclusions are skeptical. Although the journals provide some clues in the search for strong evaluations, they are too chaotic and inconclusive. David Parker believes it more promising to look for fundamental axiological awareness in autobiographies instead. I find his approach correct; distanced reflection seems to be the only chance to reveal strong evaluations. This is despite the aporias involved in self-knowledge.

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Tadeusz Sławek

Konteksty Kultury, Volume 18 Issue 1, 2021, pp. 47 - 58

https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.21.004.13534

With the use of journals by Samuel Pepys written during the 17th-century plague epidemic in London, we discuss the issue of weak and strong evaluation discourses which create the subjectivity of an individual in its relation to a group. Our fundamental goal is therefore to discover the conditions indispensable for the emergence of a “person” whose life retains the ability to refer to “strong” moral concepts, which is necessarily connected with a phase of critical approach to hegemonic discourses. In our analysis of the text by Pypus, we postulate the emergence of a “we” phase which allows for critical reflection and temporarily frees a “person” from petrifying discourses imposed by the social “they.” This makes it possible for the “person” to come into existence and critically approach the “understanding of everyday estimations”; this takes place by referring to the strong value of opposition against “cruelty,” but this reference is fleeting and does not endure in further questioning.

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Paweł Rodak

Konteksty Kultury, Volume 18 Issue 1, 2021, pp. 59 - 80

https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.21.005.13535

The present article constitutes an extended three-part commentary to the chapter Life Narrative and Languages of the Good from the book The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good by David Parker. The first part of the paper is a critical discussion of the views espoused both by Parker and by Charles Taylor, whom Parker cites in his work. On the one hand, the author agrees that acquiring a sense of identity is practically impossible without a horizon of values which gives origin to our identity. On the other hand, he rejects the premises underlying this conclusion, primarily the assumption of a necessary iunctim between ethical consciousness and ethical acts and the literary-textual matrix of comprehending humans and the world. In the second part of the article, the author puts forward his own interpretation of the book Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, independent from the one proposed by Parker, discussing it as an example of practicing identity in the form of a literary-typographical-visual performance. The third part of the paper seeks to open a broader discussion of narrativist concepts by indicating six issues connected with their application: the privileged position of cognitive processes in experiencing the world and one’s self; the perception of the world and humans through the lens of the textual model; the methodological principle of studying narrative textual products and not practices bringing them to life; the conceptualization of a textual subject as a lonely subject, isolated from the network of social relations; the universalization of the subject of narrative operations, lack of diversification of narrative practices by gender/sex and social class/group; the semiotic conceptualization of mundanity as an element of narrative identity.

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Anna Pekaniec

Konteksty Kultury, Volume 18 Issue 1, 2021, pp. 81 - 93

https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.21.006.13536

The present paper focuses on several significant issues connected with writing/reading journals. The author discusses journals, treated as an everyday practice based on obligatory narrativization of experience (as defined by Hannah Arendt), within the ethical horizon demarcated by the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor and the ideas of David Parker. Parker’s argument of immanent ethical nature of journaling is confronted with autobiographical theories developed by Philippe Lejeune, Małgorzata Czermińska, and Magdalena Marszałek. The discussion is supplemented by the indispensable component of gender. The narrative nature of journals becomes a starting point for changing the perspective used in the analysis of journals – from hermeneutic to constructivist, which also finds its reflection in how the subject is shaped in journal entries.

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Anna Głąb

Konteksty Kultury, Volume 18 Issue 1, 2021, pp. 94 - 106

https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.21.007.13537

The author agrees with the positions held by Charles Taylor and David Parker, who associate autobiographical accounts with “thick” languages of the good. She believes that writing an account of one’s own life requires adequate language which the third-person perspective typical for hard science cannot supply. On the example of Jadwiga Stańczakowa’s Diary of a Twosome, she demonstrates that keeping a diary is a type of spiritual exercise understood as a way of living a good life.

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Anna Spiechowicz

Konteksty Kultury, Volume 18 Issue 1, 2021, pp. 107 - 129

https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.21.008.13538

The article discusses personal documents through the lens of ethics. The argument focuses on Dziennik [Journal] by Jan Józef Szczepański, which is analyzed primarily with the use of Charles Taylor’s deliberations on ethics and subjectivity and David Parker’s study of ethical interpretations of autobiographical literature. The discussion presented in the article is based on several key concepts, including “constitutive good,” “strong evaluations,” “moral space,” “qualitative differentiations,” “conceptual framework.” The author seeks to answer the question of whether – and if so, how – a journal, in particular Szczepański’s Dziennik, may constitute an act of building identity and establishing subjectivity and how it articulates constitutive good and reveals the roots of morality. The article is also an attempt to demonstrate the necessity to adopt an ethical perspective in literary research (with particular emphasis on autobiographical literature) in the “secular age.”

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Łukasz Garbal

Konteksty Kultury, Volume 18 Issue 1, 2021, pp. 130 - 148

https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.21.009.13539

The present article discusses issues connected with the process of editing autobiographical works. On the basis of selected examples (especially the editing of journals by Jan Józef Lipski and Jan Józef Szczepański), the author emphasizes how significant a role is played by editor’s notes and comments. It is pointed out that there are no clear criteria or commonly accepted practices in this field. The article constitutes a call for a methodological discussion. The invitation is not directed exclusively at editors. The debate is intended to span various specializations and help develop a code of commonly accepted practical editing solutions.

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Radosław Kuliniak, Mariusz Pandura

Konteksty Kultury, Volume 18 Issue 1, 2021, pp. 149 - 159

https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.21.010.13540

The Ingarden family archive includes the diary of Roman Witold Ingarden, over 400 pages long. This personal document is not completely unknown in Polish specialist literature dealing with the life and work of the phenomenologist. As an author of an autobiographical work, Ingarden was certainly not an exception in his times. At the turn of the 19th and the 20th century, many people wrote diaries and other life narratives. It is worth noting that personal journals (some later published and some still available only in handwritten form) were written by Kazimierz Twardowski, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, and other Polish philosophers. It was also enormously popular to write letters and poetry bearing autobiographical traces. It should be noted that the text analysed in the article was not originally created as an autobiographical document of a philosopher, but as an account of the life of an aspiring artist. Ingarden was a poet for a large part of his life and continued to write poetry even after the Second World War.

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