Tadeusz Kotarbinski

From Reism to Pansomatism

"I reached the chair of philosophy via logic. Teaching logic became the field of my activity as a university professor of philosophy, a member of other humanistic faculties. Emphasis is here placed on the words 'teaching' and 'humanistic'. For my lectures and classes were conceived as an organon in the classical sense of the term, for philosophers as well as for those who, having completed their course of study, would espouse the cause of disseminating humanistic knowledge and thinking, particularly future secondary school teachers.

Somewhat later my activity embraced also law students. My linguistic equipment proved to, be very helpful in this respect. For it seems especially important when the problems of an organon of this kind are conceived historically and is quite crucial when pondering the original Organon of Aristotle (or to be more cautious, of the peripatetic school) and its continuators. Conceived in this manner logic was by no means confined to formal logic, but came to comprise the problems of epistemology, semantics and methodology. It is precisely the latter problems - not those of formal logic - that were of particular interest to my mind. Nevertheless, I felt bound to contribute to the study of formal logic. The feeling was encouraged both by my colleagues at Warsaw University and by my awareness of the precise phase that logic had reached in its historical development. It was precisely the moment when mathematical logic was triumphantly entering the scene. The names of Frege, Bertrand Russell, Peano, Burali-Forti, Couturat and many others were on everybody's minds. Mathematical logic was closely allied with the rapidly developing set theory.

The international periodical devoted to the latter, Fundamenta Mathematicae was, and still is, published in Warsaw. The distinguished philosophic-mathematical logicians: Jan Lukasiewicz and his disciple and my colleague, Stanislaw Lesniewski among many others, were active here. I only mention the names of those persons to whom my studies in mathematically oriented formal logic are particularly indebted. In this respect I owe a lot to my close alliance with Professor Lesniewski. I simply took over his original system of formal logic to suit my own purposes. (1) Relieved thus from the necessity to contribute to formal logic itself, I could concentrate on the problems I faced as a teacher of logic to be used by humanists. These centered around the problem of overcoming the hypostases of linguistic origin, what Francis Bacon referred to as idola fori. Both our everyday language and the language of the sciences as well are teeming with nouns or noun-like forms. Hence the tendency to perceive an object behind them even when the noun is an abstract one, like for example, 'roundness', 'equality', etc. Once the existence of the alleged objects of such names is admitted, once we agree to the existence of such qualities or relations, human thought is made to wade through a mire of apparent ontological problems.

They in turn impose a literal interpretation of the expressions like 'a quality inheres' in an object in the same way as a nail is embedded in a wall: whereas, in point of fact, their meaning is only metaphorical. Leibniz himself was of the opinion (which he expressed in Nouveaux essais 2, XXII, § 1) that problems bristling with difficulties can be dispelled as soon as we stick only to the names of concretes in our discourse. Unaware both of these words and equally ignorant of Franz Brentano's similar ideal I formulated in 1929 the principles of the so called reism. In its most mature formula it declares war against the hypostases of linguistic origin on the following lines: inasmuch as it is possible try to formulate statements in a way that would eliminate all names other than the names of objects, that is, physical bodies or parts thereof. Persons ought to be regarded as objects, i. e. sentient objects. Sentences may contain words that are not names, e. g. verbs or conjunctions, etc. The point is, however, to eliminate names other than the names of objects. Let me hasten with an example of a reistic interpretation of sentences. 'Prudence inheres in wisdom' simply means: 'Every man who is possessed of wisdom is prudent.' 'Bonds of brotherhood related Orestes to Electra' simply means: 'Orestes was Electra's-brother.'

A reist by no means demands that the use of sentences with abstract expressions like the names of qualities or relations be completely abandoned. Quite the contrary, the necessity of applying them is fully recognized just because their presence may often reduce the length of the statement. The only thing he insists upon is to try to be able to do without names which are not the names of things. I may add, by the way, that at present I prefer to use the term 'concretism' instead of the term 'reism' as my readers were prone to identify 'reism' with 'realism' while the meanings of the two are totally different. Thus, reism, that is concretism (or somatism - as I identify all objects with bodies and in Greek 'soma' means 'body') proves to be a certain innovation of my organon. It is however, highly debatable as a conception since a number of difficulties inhering in an attempt to interpret reistically theorems of set theory have not yet been overcome."