Tomasza z Akwinu rozumienie rzeczywistości a postmodernistyczna konieczność tworzenia nowych światów

Abstract

The paper strives to demonstrate, on the one side, St Thomas Aquinas’s specific understanding of reality and, on the other, the essence of postmodernist thinking, which gives up reality and refuses to take it into account as a result of man’s free and uninhibited creative activities; an approach that destines him to engage in play or pastime and to create completely new worlds. In the first part, the author presents St Thomas’s concept of reality and points out that at its heart lies the perception of the fundamental role of existence. Apart from essence, the most principal and strongest aspect of each entity is its existence. The object of philosophy cannot therefore be anything else but ‘exactly this’ existing world. A world that is intelligible and exists independently of a perceiving subject. A world that through existence ‘carries’ in itself a certain truth about itself, which man discovers but does not create. A world that as both rational and accidental expects justification of its existence and intelligibility. A world whose existence demands the existence of the Absolute. In the second part, the author refers to the philosophy of Frederick Nietzsche since his thinking well depicts the postmodernist spirit of the second half of the twentieth century. The godfather of postmodernism, Nietzsche maintains in his own typical manner that reality is in fact empty, alogical and variable; in short, it is chaos. It is only man who pours meaning into this. Man does not actually discover reality but merely interprets it. In the process of interpretation, man somehow creates the world and creates himself. In the third part, the author presents to what extent contemporary times are steeped in such thinking. He explains Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of ‘simulacra’ and ‘simulation’. Against this backdrop he demonstrates a picture of man turning away from existing reality and heading towards worlds that have nothing more in common with reality, an attitude so typical of postmodernism. In the world of simulacra – signs that represent nothing and stand for nothing but themselves – there is no mediation, demonstration or representation. And if that is the case, if there is no dominant original sense, then we are doomed to be involved in play, pastime, multiplication, proliferation of meanings, endless reproduction of signs, depictions and metaphors. All that is left is unrestricted creativity, writing, private narration, generating differences and creating totally new worlds.