Metafizyka Karola Rarnowskiego – rozumienie poszukujące wiary I nadziei

The article concerns the philosophy of Karol Tarnowski. I depict his perspective as metaphysical in its goals but phenomenological and hermeneutical in its starting point and method. Tarnowski begins with an experience called “eschatological awareness”, particularly vivid in recent times, marked by a feeling of uncertainty about the sense of life. It includes a sense of the fundamental inadequacy of the factual world that is grounded in a much less obvious metaphysical longing. Tarnowski's analyses of metaphysical longing are deeply rooted in both Plato and Levinas. However, his thought is closer to the views of the former, since he does not accept the latter's claim that the longing is structurally unsatisfiable. He believes that longing without any hope of satisfaction is absurd, desperate, and irrational. The only way to avoid despair is to maintain hope and faith in God as the source of being and the real and attainable aim of our metaphysical longing. There is, however, no rational necessity of choosing this particular hermeneutics of our existential situation, so the metaphysics of (satisfiable) longing remains conditioned by faith and hope.