Abstract

The article analyses one of the key concepts in the humanities and, at the same time, one of the most significant in Polish, European and world literature across all periods: the concept of freedom. The discussion centres on this notion, forming a distinctive line of thought. Chronologically, it leads from Zygmunt Krasiński’s nineteenth-century "Psalms of the Future", through Andrzej Bobkowski’s twentieth century "Sketches with a Pen" and an episode from the life of Thomas Mann, to the contemporary period at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as reflected in the works of the American linguist Noam Chomsky. Within this broad field of inquiry, this trajectory demonstrates the extent to which the concept of freedom has lost its original meaning and undergone a clear devaluation. Today, the semantics of the term imply such qualities as artificiality, confinement, falsehood, enslavement, manipulation and propaganda. Despite the passage of time, it is difficult not to acknowledge that we are subject to sophisticated
forms of manipulation and control, and that our freedom is, in fact, under threat. Paradoxically, it may be said that our freedom has become a freedom of slaves – a peculiar form of hell. This is not, however, hell understood in religious terms. As the nineteenth-century French poet and art theorist Stéphane Mallarmé wrote: ‘If hell hidden somewhere within the earth is a fable, then the hell within my own heart is real.’ Applied to the realities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this idea suggests that our times are moving decisively away from the orthodox religious vision of hell as something existing independently of human beings, located somewhere in the afterlife, and are increasingly becoming a ‘spiritual hell on earth’ – something already intuited by the quiet imagination of the author of "Psalms of the Future".