Kołakowski notes, “automatic thought is not really thought: it is the antithesis of thought. Thought, in the strict sense in which we are using the word here, means creative thought—precisely that activity which no automatic mechanism can replace.”…. His observations on “the enormity of material and spiritual desolation caused by the Stalinist system”; and his description of the communist state as “a system of total police terror” were painfully true. He condemned the state’s “wholesale destruction” of Polish culture, including “the transformation of literature and art into instruments for the basest kind of toadying to authority,” and the “humiliation and the trampling of human dignity.”
We who live in contemporary India should remain aware that totalitarianism comes in mamy forms, flying many flags: DS
Kit Wilson
The British-Czech philosopher Ernest Gellner used to tell an anecdote about visiting Poland during the last years of communist rule. When he arrived, people would ask him: “How is he?”—without ever specifying who they meant. There was no need. Gellner knew they were referring to Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009).
Kołakowski was one of the great philosophers and essayists of the twentieth century—and, despite living in exile after 1968, a hero of anti-communist resistance in his home country. After the fall of the Polish People’s Republic in 1989, Kołakowski was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest decoration. His death made the nation’s front pages. He was buried with military honors and recognized with a minute’s silence in parliament. Yet, in his three adoptive countries—Canada, the United States, and Britain, where he settled for the last four decades of his life—he remains mostly unknown.
Insofar as people have heard of Kołakowski, it is usually for his vast, three-volume history and critique of Marxism, Main Currents of Marxism, published in Polish between 1976 and 1978 and in English translation in 1978. It is considered by many to be the devastating final word on communism. Unfortunately, this has led to a tendency to treat Kołakowski as a single-issue thinker: a former-communist-turned-critic who contributed heroically to the philosophical dismantling of Marxism, but whose ideas are largely irrelevant to the problems we face today.
This is a great mistake. Setting aside the obvious fact that the temptations of political utopianism are perennial—and that Kołakowski treats such temptations as the result of entirely comprehensible, permanent flaws within us all—it overlooks the sheer range and richness of his writing.
Have a quick skim along the shelf. He produced three philosophical treatises—on Spinoza (1958), Husserl (1975), and Bergson (1985)—and published The Presence of Myth in 1972, a critique of the fantasy of purely rational thought and a defense of the indispensable role of myth in human culture. Then, there’s Religion: If There Is No God (1982), a history of arguments for and against God; Metaphysical Horror (1988), a sweeping story of mankind’s never-ending but ultimately doomed attempts to explain all of reality; and God Owes Us Nothing (1995), an extended essay on Pascal and the problem of evil. Alongside these, in various collections, are dozens of essays on liberalism, exile, genocide, snobbery, national stereotypes, boredom, gardening, and more.
Kołakowski was uncommonly witty for a philosopher. Take the title of his rejoinder to the Marxist critic E. P. Thompson, My Correct Views on Everything, or his essay “A Comment on Heidegger’s Comment on Nietzsche’s Alleged Comment on Hegel’s Comment on the Power of Negativity.” He was also modest to a fault. Some will find his frequent caveats frustrating. (He once joked that Abelard’s Sic et Non would have been an appropriate name for his own work.) But at a time when hubris and arrogance rule the day, Kołakowski shows us the merits of intellectual humility. Indeed, it is only by accepting the limits of our own mind, he argues, that we can be genuinely rational at all. Kołakowski holds that most of our problems in the modern West stem from the shallowness of our philosophical thinking—and that this shallowness comes, somewhat paradoxically, from our excessive confidence in the powers of human reason.
Perhaps the highest praise I can give Kołakowski is that, reading his work, you feel you are in the hands of someone you can trust. He is one of those exceptional thinkers who seems to possess the wisdom of several generations and who grasps by intuition what others take years to learn, or indeed never learn at all.
Kołakowski was born in Radom, Poland, on October 23, 1927. A few weeks shy of his twelfth birthday, Germany invaded Poland. When his father, an economist and political writer, was killed by the Gestapo in 1943, Kołakowski, whose mother had already died when he was three, was sent to live with his aunt in a small village in the east of the country. There he found an extensive library in the home of a local aristocrat and began educating himself with the help of teachers from the Polish underground.
After the war, like many of his generation, Kołakowski initially embraced communism, seeing it as “the conqueror of Nazism” and a bulwark against the clericalism and anti-Semitism of prewar Poland. He joined the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) in 1945—which became the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) in 1948—and was, by all accounts, a fairly hardline Stalinist in his early twenties. In 1950, while studying philosophy at the University of Warsaw, he was one of seven students who wrote a letter denouncing their lecturer, Władysław Tatarkiewicz—an act which saw Tatarkiewicz banned from teaching and which Kołakowski profoundly regretted for the rest of his life. That same year, he was invited to Moscow to meet other promising Marxist intellectuals. It was here that he first became conscious of “the enormity of material and spiritual desolation caused by the Stalinist system.” He moved sharply away from Stalinism and quickly became, as Poland’s de facto leader Władysław Gomułka bitterly put it, “the main ideologue of the so-called revisionist movement”—attempting, however naive it would later seem, to reform communism from within.
For the next two decades, Kołakowski would be a constant thorn in the PZPR’s side. In “The Death of Gods” (1956), one of his many essays seized by the censors, he describes the communist state as “a system of total police terror, a military dictatorship of lawlessness and fear” founded on “mass slave labour.” He condemns the state’s “wholesale destruction” of Polish culture, including “the transformation of literature and art into instruments for the basest kind of toadying to authority,” and remarks that “humiliation and the trampling of human dignity” are communism’s “daily bread.” It is surprising, in retrospect, that he remained a party member (and even more surprising that he was allowed to do so) until 1966 when, on the tenth anniversary of “Polish October,” he gave a speech explicitly condemning the Party’s leadership, after which he was immediately expelled.
In 1968, he was fired from Warsaw University for “forming the views of the youth in a manner contrary to the official tendency of the country,” banned from teaching and publishing entirely, and placed under constant police surveillance. Kołakowski accepted a position at McGill University, later moving to Berkeley, and then finally to Oxford. By the time he completed Main Currents in Marxism, he would conclude: “Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century.” It is “a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just round the corner.” In his essay “The Myth of Human Self Identity,” Kołakowski writes that “the dream of a perfectly unified human community is probably as old as human thought about society” but adds that “there is no reason to expect that this dream can ever become true except in the cruel form of despotism.”
Kołakowski’s works would remain banned in Poland until the late 1980s, but he continued to advise and raise funds for the underground movement in his homeland, and his writing was widely circulated in samizdat form. His 1971 article “Theses on Hope and Hopelessness,” published in the Polish-émigré magazine Kultura, became a seminal text—read by, according to the historian Tadeusz Koczanowicz, “every single intellectually active member of the opposition.” Steven Lukes notes that after Kołakowski’s death in 2009, the activist Adam Michnik wrote that for “decades he has been the symbol and moral authority of a Poland that is spiritually sovereign, that defies enslavement, of a Poland of free thought and unbending soul.”
In his pithy, fourteen-page essay “Modernity on Endless Trial,” first published in 1986, Kołakowski sets out to identify what “modernity” is and to what degree it can be said to comprise a set of coherent beliefs about the world. I am not sure anyone has given a more withering account of the modern West.
After some initial throat-clearing about the inevitable difficulties we face in trying to understand ourselves dispassionately, Kołakowski launches into a brief history of our self-conception as a distinctly “modern” people—a self-conception he identifies, by no means originally, with secularism and our consequent sense of disenchantment. Much of the timeline here is familiar: the gradual teasing apart of secular reason and revelation in medieval Christianity; Galileo’s mathematicization of the world; Descartes’s abolition of “the real variety in the physical universe,” thus “reducing God to its logically necessary creator and support;” Nietzsche’s final execution of this humbled God; and the troubling sense of malaise that followed. None of this, Kołakowski admits, is novel:
We experience an overwhelming and at the same time humiliating feeling of déjà vu in following and participating in contemporary discussions about the destructive effects of the so-called secularization of Western civilization . . . It appears as if we suddenly woke up to perceive things which the humble, and not necessarily highly educated, priests have been seeing—and warning us about—for three centuries and which they have repeatedly denounced in their Sunday sermons. They kept telling their flocks that a world that has forgotten God has forgotten the very distinction between good and evil and has made human life meaningless . . . Now, proudly stuffed with our sociological, historical, anthropological and philosophical knowledge, we discover the same simple wisdom, which we try to express in a slightly more sophisticated idiom.
But then comes the twist. Modernity, Kołakowski writes, “wants to be satisfied in its superiority and not torn asunder by doubt and despair.” And so, rather than embracing nihilism wholeheartedly, or looking for a philosophically robust way of escaping it, we simply lie to ourselves: “We try to assert our modernity but escape from its effects by various intellectual devices, in order to convince ourselves that meaning can be restored or recovered apart from the traditional religious legacy of mankind and in spite of the destruction brought about by modernity.” The “explicit orthodoxy” of our age, Kolakowski writes, “consists of patching up.”
Here and elsewhere, Kołakowski illuminates the various “intellectual devices” we use to distract ourselves. There’s Marxism, the utopian project into which we smuggle our eschatological hopes. There’s History, a kind of quasi-living entity watching over us, to which we appeal as a surrogate “divine authority.” There’s Existentialism, which assures us that we can simply generate new forms of transcendental meaning from scratch. There’s Nature, which attempts to carry on God’s legacy by projecting his care and benevolence onto the world around us.
It is striking just how prevalent each of these devices still is, forty years on, albeit in more saccharine forms. None has metaphysical depth. Each amounts to wishful thinking. And so, with no appeal to first principles, we cobble together our worldview ad hoc, tacitly agreeing to ignore the glaring contradictions. We do away with objective morality, but do so by calling its advocates evil. We do away with religious thinking, but do so by dogmatically asserting that God cannot exist. In short, modern thinking is profoundly inconsistent, and, as Kołakowski observes, it is an inconsistency born of modernity’s obsession with avoiding inconsistencies at all costs.
Of particular interest from Kołakowski’s early “political” writings is his 1958 essay “In Praise of Inconsistency” (which was published in the American magazine Dissent in 1964). Kołakowski asks to what extent is absolute consistency—that is, acting in perfect alignment with some underlying set of principles—desirable or even possible? He proceeds to answer twice in the negative: Absolute consistency is impossible, and to seek it is to run headfirst into disaster.
The argument is simple. Our lives are by nature full of conflicting, mutually irreconcilable loyalties: to our families, to our friends, to our countries, to practical causes and universal principles. Each of these loyalties, if taken to its logical extreme, would require the neglect, if not the outright elimination, of the others. We only navigate between them by being in some sense inconsistent. Indeed, strictly speaking, “it is only thanks to inconsistency,” Kołakowski writes, “that humanity has kept alive on this earth.”
This is not an accidental, temporary state of affairs. There is no prospect of any future society, Kołakowski argues, where conflicts between values somehow disappear. Wisdom teaches us, “in accordance with the entire experience of history, that a contradiction which vanishes is merely replaced by a new contradiction, so that no universal synthesis is possible.” Inconsistency of the sort Kołakowski seeks to defend is not weakness but wisdom. It is a “hidden awareness of the contradictions of this world.”
The ostensible motivation behind “In Praise of Inconsistency” was political. Kołakowski cites, as the quintessential example of absolute consistency, the ideal citizen who “will always be proud to collaborate with the secret police, since he knows that it is necessary to the very existence of the state, its perfection and its progress.” But the broader theme of the essay—the perils of aiming for total consistency in any area of human endeavor—became something of a lifelong preoccupation for Kołakowski. In the foreword to “Modernity on Endless Trial,” he characterizes his essays as “semiphilosophical sermons” that explore the “unpleasant and insoluble dilemmas that loom up every time we attempt to be perfectly consistent when we think about our culture, our politics, and our religious life.” If there is a single theme that runs through all of his work, it is this.
It would obviously be absurd to suggest that the West alone has had an interest in intellectual consistency. But Kołakowski sees in the modern West an especially inflexible—and ultimately self-defeating—obsession with the idea. The reasons for this are naturally complex, but Kołakowski identifies the crucial moment as coming in the seventeenth century when Descartes first began to dream of applying the rigorous methods of mathematics to all other human pursuits.
After Descartes it became possible, Kołakowski writes in “An Invitation from God to a Feast,” “to believe in the eventual discovery of all-encompassing, ultimate, universal constructions which would, within one conceptual framework and without invoking divine revelation, solve all philosophical, religious, moral, scientific and theological questions.” We sought it in politics, in the idea of the fully rational state, or in some set of infallible liberal principles that, if rigidly adhered to, would always yield the correct outcome. We sought it in ethics, in the form of strict Kantian duties, and in the heartless calculations of utilitarianism. We sought it in philosophy, in our blinkered attempts to follow some supposedly foolproof “ism” to the total neglect of everything else.
But just as the laws of physics break down near a black hole, so each of these apparently rational pursuits collapses into absurdity as we approach the event horizon of absolute consistency. The fully rational state becomes a totalitarian nightmare, while liberal nations invite their enemies to destroy them from within. Materialism denies the very minds defending it, positivism rests on a verification principle that cannot itself be verified, and skepticism undercuts any reasons we might have had for doubting anything in the first place.
This, Kołakowski insists in My Correct Views on Everything, is a consequence not merely of temporary human quirks, but of “the incurable ambiguity of reality itself.” Modernity’s great failing is not taking these natural limitations seriously. It therefore ends up having to accept more blatant contradictions than it otherwise would.
For Kołakowski, none of this means we should despair. Reality, he insists, is contradictory, but “contradictory only up to a certain point”—otherwise we wouldn’t be able to spot any contradictions in the first place.Instead, he argues, we must try to remain intellectually light-footed and keep all our competing values and beliefs in view at the same time, without ever hoping to reconcile them fully. We should take objective values seriously and treat them as ultimate goals, but we should do so inconsistently, as circumstances require. In practical terms, this means, among other things, rejecting political absolutes. In his masterful essay “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist: A Credo,” Kołakowski shows, for instance, howthe main tenets of all three positions can, and should, be held together in a mutually moderating tension.
But how, we want to know, are we to tell when to be consistent, and when not to be? By what set of meta-rules? Are we really just to rely on our eyes and intuitive judgment alone?
In a sense, according to Kołakowski, yes. An ongoing refrain in his work is the importance of creative, improvisatory intelligence—intelligence that recognizes what to do intuitively, without fixed instructions. What we need is not a method, but wisdom: sound judgment informed by experience.
This is easier said than done, of course, but one essential aid in knowing how to act, he argues, is the inherited wisdom of our cultural traditions, including taboos. In a striking passage at the end of Modernity on Endless Trial, he writes:
When I try . . . to point out the most dangerous characteristic of modernity, I tend to sum up my fear in one phrase: the disappearance of taboos. . . . Various traditional human bonds which make communal life possible, and without which our existence would be regulated only by greed and fear, are not likely to survive without a taboo system, and it is perhaps better to believe in the validity of even apparently silly taboos than to let them all vanish. To the extent that rationality and rationalization threaten the very presence of taboos of our civilization, they corrode its ability to survive.
All of this leads Kołakowski to reflect on the idea—or rather, many ideas—of Europe. In part, this is obviously because it is his tradition, and therefore the one whose mine of implicit wisdom can be most readily exploited.
In his essay “Looking for the Barbarians,” Kołakowski explores a fundamental paradox of European—and Western—culture: that our very identity is bound up with our willingness and desire to step outside of ourselves. He writes:
We affirm our belonging to European culture by our ability to view ourselves at a distance, critically, through the eyes of others; by the fact that we value tolerance in public life and skepticism in our intellectual work, and recognize the need to confront, in both the scientific and legal spheres, as many opinions as possible; in short, by leaving the field of uncertainty open.
On the one hand, Kołakowski observes, this represents one of Europe’s great strengths: “her refusal to accept any kind of closed, finite definition.” On the other hand, it means she can only ever “affirm her identity in uncertainty and anxiety.” Kołakowski links this state of affairs back to the tensions within the Christian heritage: between God as the incomprehensible absolute and God as personal creator; between knowledge and faith; between letter and spirit; between church and state; between law and charity; between freedom and predestination; between Christ as man and Christ as God. None of these, Kołakowski argues, can ever be fully resolved, and it is our historic and ceaseless oscillation between the poles of each one that has, to a large extent, cultivated in us our spirit of unending self-criticism.
Of course, heresies break out from time to time, and it wouldn’t be altogether wrong to see modernity’s obsession with absolute consistency as the result of certain sides of each equation coming to dominate—knowledge over faith, letter over spirit, law over charity. But this, Kołakowski thinks, can only ever be temporary—the pendulum must swing back eventually. To what? Well, to more instability. But instability of a more accepting, ultimately Christian humanist kind: acknowledgement that perfect answers and final resolutions are not for this life.Kołakowski writes:
[Our] self-questioning is itself a continuation of the very principle upon which Europe was founded; in this sense, therefore, Europe has remained true to herself in her state of uncertainty and disarray. If she survives the pressure of the barbarians, it will not be because of any ultimate solution she might one day discover, but rather thanks to a clear consciousness that such solutions do not exist anywhere; and that is a Christian consciousness.
Over the years, religion came to play an increasingly prominent role in Kołakowski’s thinking. Part of this, of course, was his growing recognition of the limits of reason. But Kołakowski had long been convinced that the biggest philosophical questions are, at heart, questions about God.
In the introduction to his remarkable essay “The Priest and the Jester: Reflections on the Theological Heritage of Contemporary Thought,” which he wrote in 1959 while still in Poland, he states:
The main questions which have puzzled theologians for centuries have lost none of their relevance. They have survived to puzzle us, and though we may phrase them differently, we have done all we can to ensure their survival. Philosophy has never freed itself from its theological heritage; its questions have always been no more than clumsy formulations of those eternal enigmas which confound us still.
What follows is a masterpieceof cultural analysis. It is the story of who we are, as Western people, told through our fumbled attempts to translate the perennial questions of theology into a more sophisticated philosophical idiom. And it is also a parable of sorts about the risks of trying to answer each question fully rationally.
The most remarkable passage comes toward the end, when Kołakowski traces a connection between our desire for revelation and the supposedly infallible starting points of the great modern philosophical “systems”—Descartes’s cogito, logical positivism’s verification principle, Husserl’s phenomenological “given.” At first glance, each of these systems appears to represent an explicit vote of confidence in the powers of human reason: Not only can we deduce foolproof axioms, but we can then construct on these secure grounds rational climbing frames that take us to the very edges of the universe.
In a brilliant turn, Kołakowski explains that these systems actually betray the exact opposite: a radical lack of faith in human reason. What we crave, he writes, is some infallible set of rules that precipitates an infallible chain reaction—the first push that sends thought “on its way by itself, smoothly and efficiently, like a marble rolling across ice.” Our desire, in other words, is to stop thinking, because we do not really trust human reason to act freely and spontaneously. In the most “rational” of our philosophical constructions, then, we ultimately seek revelation, not just in the form of the initial push but in the form of the whole subsequent marble run, constructed out of infallible rules, which safely directs our thoughts for us at every turn.
As Kołakowski notes, “automatic thought is not really thought: it is the antithesis of thought. Thought, in the strict sense in which we are using the word here, means creative thought—precisely that activity which no automatic mechanism can replace.” Here, in a way, is Kołakowski’s whole message encapsulated: Absolute consistency, absolute certainty, absolute reliability are ruses to distract us from the fact that we must, sadly, think for ourselves, reason without safety barriers, and seek without ever hoping to find final answers.
It has been widely debated whether Kołakowski eventually converted to Christianity or not. In the 1980s, he was a regular guest at John Paul II’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo. One priest, Fr. Jan Andrzej Kłoczowski, wrote an extensive analysis of Kołakowski’s work, characterizing it as “non-denominational Catholic Christianity.” And yet Kołakowski himself was always cagey. In one interview, he said, “In some general sense I cannot define, I am attached to the Christian tradition, the great power of the gospel, the New Testament.” In another, he described himself, characteristically, as an “inconsistent atheist.” One friend, after the philosopher’s death, wrote that Kołakowski sided most naturally with skeptics and mystics, but found nihilism the most irrational position of all. This, it seems to me, captures his spirit well—doubtful, and doubtful of our capacity to reach the highest truths by discursive reasoning alone, and yet convinced that this needn’t lead us to outright despair. But I will leave the last word on this to Kołakowski himself. Once, when asked directly about his religious beliefs, he simply replied: “God knows.”
Kołakowski died on July 17, 2009, at the age of eighty-one. The impression we get from his eulogies is of a humble, kind, endlessly curious man. The historian Richard Pipes recalled that when he first met Kołakowski, the philosopher was so attentive to their conversation, despite at that time being much more distinguished than Pipes, that he stood ankle-deep in a huge puddle, completely oblivious to his surroundings. George Weigel, recalling a trip he and Kołakowski took to Moscow in 1990, described an occasion when the pair came across a vast, impromptu camp of peasants in Red Square, and remembered “the extraordinary and exquisite human delicacy with which Leszek went from tent to tent offering a word of encouragement to these poor souls.”
To the end, Kołakowski remained admirably reluctant to settle for easy answers. In the preface to the posthumously published Polish version of his final essay collection, Is God Happy?, he wrote:
As in almost everything I have written in the recent years, I cannot reach ultimate conclusions in the most fundamental questions and I keep stumbling over difficulties that need to be evaded with the awkward and run-away “on the one hand . . ., but on the other . . .”
This, I worry, is why Kołakowski has never quite received the attention he deserves. He is simply too modest, too temperate, too cautious for our times.
And yet I wonder. As Kołakowski himself notes, no one can really predict with any confidence how our present moment will look to future observers. Yes, right now modernity appears to be marked by confusion and metaphysical shallowness. But there are tentative signs of change. In academic philosophy, for instance, there has been a decisive turn away from the Cartesian obsession with methodological consistency that ran, very crudely, from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century. Metaphysics, defined by A. W. Moore as “the most general attempt to make sense of things,” is having something of a renaissance. Perhaps, having burned through our various attempts at absolute consistency, we now find ourselves looking instead at some kind of philosophical via negativa: a recognition, by elimination, that there is still room for mystery and faith—and, indeed, that reality demands it of us.
https://porticoquarterly.com/essay/modernitys-patching-up/
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My Correct Views on Everything: Leszek Kolakowski’s correspondence with E. P. Thompson (1974)
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