Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński

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Józef Hoene-Wroński, 1776-1853

Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński (August 23, 1778 – August 8, 1853) was a Polish Messianist philosopher who worked in many fields of knowledge, not only as a philosopher but as mathematician, physicist, inventor, lawyer, economist.

1 Life
2 Legacy
3 See also
4 References
5 External link

[edit] Life

Hoene-Wroński came from a Czech family settled in western Poland, where he was born at Wolsztyn. In 1794 he served in Poland's Kościuszko Uprising as a second lieutenant of artillery, was taken prisoner, and remained until 1797 in the Russian Army. Resigning in the rank of lieutenant colonel, he studied briefly in Germany and in 1800 enlisted in the Polish Legion at Marseille. There he began his scientific and scholarly work and conceived the idea of a great philosophical system. Ten years later he moved to Paris and lived there until his death, working indefatigably to the last in the most difficult material circumstances.

He wrote exclusively in French, desirous that his ideas, of whose immortality he was convinced, should be accessible to all; he worked, he said, "through France for Poland." He published over a hundred works, and left many more in manuscript. When dying in the seventy-fifth year of his life, he exclaimed: "God Almighty, there's still so much more I wanted to say!"

In science, Hoene-Wroński set himself maximal tasks: the complete reform of philosophy and of mathematics, astronomy, technology. He not only elaborated a system of philosophy, but applications to politics, history, economics, law, psychology, music, pedagogy. It was his aspiration to reform human knowledge in an "absolute, that is, ultimate" manner.

In 1803, Wroński joined the observatory in Marseille, and began developing an enormously complex theory of the structure and origin of the universe. During this period he took up a correspondence with nearly all the major scientists and mathematicians of his day, and was well-respected at the observatory. In 1810 he published the results of his research in a massive tome, which he advocated as a new foundation for all of science and mathematics. His theories were strongly Pythagorean, holding numbers and their properties to be the fundamental underpinning of essentially everything in the universe. His claims were met with rather little acceptance, and his research and theories were generally dismissed as grandiose rubbish. His previous correspondence with major figures led to it gaining more attention than a typical crackpot theory might, even earning a review from the great mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange (which turned out to be exceedingly disfavorable). In the ensuing controversy, he was forced to leave the observatory.

He immediately turned his focus towards applying philosophy to mathematics (his critics charged that this meant dispensing with mathematical rigor in favor of generalities). In 1812 he published a paper purporting to show that every equation has an algebraic solution, directly contradicting results that had just been published by Paolo Ruffini; however, Ruffini turned out to be correct.

Thereafter he turned his attention to disparate and largely unsuccessful pursuits. He developed a fantastical design for caterpillar-like vehicles which he intended to replace railroad transportation, but did not manage to persuade anyone to give the design serious attention. In 1819 he went to England to try to gain a grant from the Board of Longitude to build a device to determine longitude at sea. After initial difficulties, he was given an opportunity to address the Board, but his grandiose address, On the Longitude, contained much philosophizing and generalities, but no specific plans for a working device, and thus failed to gain him support from the Board. He remained for several years in England, in 1821 publishing in London an introductory text on mathematics, which moderately improved his financial situation.

In 1822 he returned to France, and again took up a combination of mathematics and fantastical pursuits, largely in poverty and scorned by intellectual society. Along with his continuing Pythagorean obsession, he spent much time working on several notoriously futile endeavors, including attempts to build a perpetual motion machine, to square the circle, and to build a machine to predict the future (which he dubbed the prognometre). In 1852, shortly before his death, he did find a willing audience for his ideas: the occultist Eliphas Levi met Wroński and was greatly impressed and influenced by his work and dedication.

Wroński died in 1853 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, on the outskirts of Paris.

[edit] Legacy

Though during his lifetime nearly all his work was dismissed as nonsense, some of it has come in later years to be seen in a more favorable light. Although nearly all his grandiose claims were in fact unfounded, his mathematical work contains flashes of deep insight and many important intermediary results. Most significant was his work on series. He had strongly criticized Lagrange's use of infinite series, introducing instead a novel series expansion for a function. His criticisms of Lagrange were for the most part unfounded, but the coefficients in Wroński's new series were after his death found to be important, forming the determinants now known as the Wronskians (the name was given them by Thomas Muir in 1882).

The level of Wroński's scientific and scholarly accomplishments, and the amplitude of his objectives, placed Wroński in the first rank of European metaphysicians in the early 19th century. But the abstractness, formalism and obscurity of his thought, the difficulty of his language, his boundless self-assurance, his uncompromising judgments of others—alienated. He was perhaps the most original of the Polish metaphysicians, but others were more representative of the Polish outlook.