Poszukiwanie sensu na gruzach Historii : historiozoficzna retrogresja Mieczysława Porębskiego

Abstract

Professor Mieczysław Porębski, a distinguished historian and art critic, is also the author of Z. Po‑wieść [Z. Novel] (1989), in which he presented his original philosophy of history. Characters in this book are trying to read the meanings contained in the “images” passed down by history, in order to be able to recognise the elements of their own identity in what is considered to be distant past, with the use of their imagination, interpretation and empathy. In this article, the author is trying to illustrate, how this formally complicated prose is bonded together by means of reflection on the ways of ordering one’s own biography and polyphonic history, as well as on learning one’s history and identity through narration. The aim of the article is to characterize the vision of Porębski as a hermeneutic project which, drawing from various achievements of postmodernism, does not avoid questions about the condition of human being and the sense of what happens to him/her.