Stefan Morawski

Morawski bewailed science dominated by the cult of precision, obsessed with 'clear and straightforward results', and ready to abandon in the name of that creed all concerns with truths more obscure, less legible, yet more crucial for the fate of the humans-culture creators and culture's creatures. The elegance of proof is too poor a compensation for banality and triviality of assertions and it simply would not do to pile up abstract knowledge while the crisis of culture deepens and the threats haunting the human condition roam unabated. For Morawski, any new idea and any new way of arriving at it must first pass that supreme test of its relevance to things and conditions of prime importance to human life. Postmodernity, and first and foremost postmodernism-its theoretical and pragmatical accompaniment, in all its cultural, ethical and artistic aspects-are not to be exempted from that test.

Morawski is staunchly critical of postmodernist art and the characteristic stance of its practitioners and eulogists for the conformity and indifference they breed. Postmodernist art stands accused of abandoning the ambitions of modernist avant-garde, its dogged pursuit of aesthetic values, its conscience of responsibility for culture and its social impact, and the emancipatory spirit which informed the work of the avant-garde and spurred it to its highest artistic achievement. Morawski's critique of postmodernist culture is both artistic and political. That culture which proclaimed as its major principles the lofty indifference and disengagement from anything outside the artist's workshop and artistic gallery, cannot but produce mediocre and trivial art-while simultaneously reinforcing the spirit of consumerism to which it has placidly adapted. Postmodernism, so Morawski argues, is guilty of muffling human sensitivity to the tragic complexity of existence, of extinguishing human drive to transcendence and improvement, of elevating hedonistic instrumentality to the position of the highest, and virtually the sole, value.… (mere)