The Necessity — and the Pitfalls — of Altruism

In 1987 I was working on an essay about altruism in Polish and Russian culture, philosophy, and science. I wrote then about Józef Tischner’s philosophy of encounter on the basis of his writings and a conversation we once had in Cracow. Upon receiving news of Tischner’s recent death I rummaged around in my private archives and found the tape on which that talk had been recorded. It seems to me that this conversation, now published for the first time and — sadly — unauthorized by Tischner, is a faithful reflection both of his basic philosophical ideas in the period preceding his total commitment to shaping our new reality’s philosophical and moral tissue, as well as of his artistic dilemmas preceding the writing of his fundamental philosophical works Filozofia dramatu [The philosophy of drama] and Spór o istnienie człowieka [The dispute over human existence].