August Cieszkowski

August von Cieszkowski (Nowa Sucha, 1814 – Wierzenica, 1894) was a Polish philosopher working in the Hegelian tradition, as well as an economist and a social and political activist. His ideas shaped the young Karl Marx and later theories of action, which makes him an important figure of nineteenth-century European thought.

He studied at the Jagiellonian University and then in Berlin, where he came to Hegelianism through the lectures of Karl Ludwig Michelet, who became a lifelong friend. He earned his doctorate at Heidelberg in 1838. After travelling through France, England and Italy, he returned to Poland in 1840 and settled permanently in Wierzenica, near Poznań, in 1843. He helped found the Polish League in 1848 and sat in the Prussian National Assembly from 1848 to 1855. Although his effort to establish a university in Poznań failed, he promoted the Poznań Society of Friends of Arts and Sciences, which he led for many years.

His most influential work is the Prolegomena to a Historiosophy (1838), which offers an original reading of Hegel's philosophy of history. Drawing on Hegel and on the medieval millenarianism of Joachim of Fiore, he divides history into three ages: an early artistic and realist stage, a second philosophical and idealist stage marked by the split between spirit and world, and a third stage centred on action, in which these oppositions are resolved through creative practice. In later works, such as God and Palingenesis (1842) and Our Father (1848), he restated this scheme in explicitly religious terms.

His influence reached the young Marx through Moses Hess, and it also touched Polish writers such as Zygmunt Krasiński and Cyprian Norwid. He is also among the earliest writers to use the term praxis in the sense of action aimed at changing society.