Poland and the Philosophy of the Deed — August Cieszkowski and the Future of Philosophy
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Polish Hegel reception is of towering significance in the history of philosophy — although it lasted only a few years and was carried by a single thinker. Count August Cieszkowski (1814–1894) developed, as early as 1838, a program that anticipated Marx’s later theses: the demand for a “philosophy of the deed” that does not merely interpret the world, but changes it.
Cieszkowski’s Prolegomena to a Historiosophy (1838, in German) was a direct attack on Hegel’s philosophy of history. Its basic thesis was: Hegel had comprehended the past, but neglected the future. Philosophy must not remain contemplatively fixed on interpreting the past, but must practically shape the future. History is not closed but open — and philosophy’s task is to realize this openness.
This critique was more subtle than the later Left Hegelian one. Cieszkowski did not reject Hegel’s method but wanted to radicalize it. Dialectic should not only reconstruct what had been, but anticipate what was to come. The third epoch of world history — after the Orient and the Occident — was the “epoch of the future,” in which philosophy would become the practical shaping of the world.
The cooperation with Carl Ludwig Michelet was significant for the history of philosophy. Michelet, who belonged to the progressive Hegelians in Berlin, recognized a kindred spirit in Cieszkowski. Together they published the journal “Der Gedanke” (1860–1864) — an organ for a “philosophy of the future” meant to develop Hegel’s system further and turn it toward practice.[1]
Cieszkowski’s later writings — Gott und Palingenesie (1842), Vater unser (1848–1869, in 4 volumes) — moved increasingly into religious speculation. His hope for a messianic future in which Poland would play a special role was part of Polish Romanticism — nationalist, religious, utopian. The philosophical sharpness of his early writings was lost.
Nonetheless, Cieszkowski’s systematic achievement remains remarkable. He formulated — seven years before Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach — the demand for practical philosophy. That this demand arose in Poland was no accident. In 1838 Poland did not exist as an independent state (it was partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria); the Polish intelligentsia was revolutionary; philosophy stood in the service of national liberation. In this constellation, Hegel’s supposed conservatism became unbearable — philosophy had to become deed.
On the Cieszkowski-Michelet cooperation, see: Andrzej Walicki: Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982, pp. 123–156. ↩︎