Ethics

It is possible to discover views on ethics in Szymanowski’s literary works ranging from matters that might generally be considered purely personal to those that have a wider artistic and social application. The personal dimension is dealt with primarily in writings that remained unpublished in his lifetime, notably the remnants of other papers associated with the incompletely preserved novel Efebos, completed in 1919. One of its central preoccupations is summarised in the course of ‘Uczta’ [The Feast], a chapter that is modelled on the Symposium of Plato. In the course of Szymanowski’s account of the conversations, which eventually focus on the nature of love, one of the participating characters, Charles de Villiers, declares:

In the world of man, all factors having to do with love ought to be acknowledged in total either as abnormal from the point of view of love in nature, or else as normal from the point of view of man in himself [ein Ding an sich]. For the essence of love is the resulting sum of individual and subjective properties and does not depend on any law or dogmatic formula laid down a priori. ¹