Stanislaw Witkiewicz

Religion and Philosophy


Now I maintain that religion is, generally speaking, a construction of feelings arising from metaphysical anxiety, a construction contained in symbols that, in any given cult, are precisely those and not any others, although in the abstract these symbols are, to a certain extent, arbitrary, whereas philosophy, on the other hand, having reached its full perfection, is a construction of concepts--of necessary concepts, arising from the same feelings of metaphysical anxiety not experienced directly, but transformed conceptually with the aid of concepts provided by common sense.  It is immediately evident that any given religion is simply what it is and there can be no question of any progress, except in a social sense, whereas in the case of philosophy we can speak with the assurance of progress throughout the entire course of its history, the progress consisting of rendering its concepts more and more precise.  The origins of various primitive cults in relation to questions of social organization are beyond the scope of my argument.  What I am concerned with is the psychology of the religious feelings of any cult whatsoever once it has already evolved.  Here I stress only that I have always maintained, in opposition to the views of Malinowski, expressed in his first treatise in Polish on the origin of religious feelings, that at the basis of everything that happens in this sphere there must be acknowledged the primordial fact of the opposition of the individual to the rest of existence; as a result of this feeling of opposition, the unity of the individual seen from his viewpoint and the unity of the totality of the world outside him have inevitably been directly intensified for that individual.  Here lies the source of metaphysical anxiety, the further reworking of which are the symbols of any given cult, symbols either personal or impersonal, which represent certain powers.  The impersonal unity of the world is the only basis on which there can be incarnated the figures of particular deities, which thereby become more comprehensible for the human creature and attenuate the frightful and incomprehensible mystery of the world outside him, in which the sole support for the terrified individual has been the existence of creatures of the same species who are similar to him.






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