[Reader-list] Fwd: [humanrights-movement:1789] a reading of kolakowski

[Venugopalan K M]

'..He once wrote “Religion is man’s way of accepting life as an inevitable
defeat.”..'

'.. For him the cultural role of philosophy was “not to deliver the truth
but to build the spirit of truth, and this means never to let the
inquisitive energy of mind go to sleep, never to stop questioning what
appears to be obvious and definitive, always to defy the seemingly intact
resources of common sense, always to suspect that there might be “another
side” in what we take for granted, and never to allow us to forget that
there are questions that lie beyond the legitimate horizon of science and
are nonetheless crucially important to the survival of humanity as we know
it.” This seems like an easy sentiment to articulate, but Kolakowski
reminded us of what the stakes are in living up to it...'

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Hormazd <hormazdmehta at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 10:31 PM
Subject: [humanrights-movement:1789] a reading of kolakowski
To: humanrights-movement at googlegroups.com


Resisting the arrogance of intellect
 * Pratap Bhanu Mehta<http://www.indianexpress.com/columnist/pratapbhanumehta/>
* *Tags : Leszek Kolakowski, Stalinism, Nazism, pratap bhanu mehta*
*Posted:Tuesday , Jul 21, 2009 at 0243 hrs
* * *
 <http://promo.expressindia.com/adsnew2.8.1/www/delivery/ck.php?n=ae458322&cb=INSERT_RANDOM_NUMBER_HERE>

    Our generation, mercifully, has little sense of what it means to
philosophise as if the very existence of civilisation depended on it. But
for thinkers writing under the shadow of two totalitarian catastrophes, both
of which had intellectual support, the activity of thought had high stakes.
One needed to dig deep into reservoirs of truth to mobilise resistance to
the homicidal illusions of Stalinism. Nazism was morally abhorrent and
begged for psychological and historical explanation. But at least at an
intellectual level it posed less of a challenge. It had no pretensions to
justice or high thought. Communism was more difficult. It was an
emancipatory ideology, in some ways the culmination of the highest hopes for
humanity. Yet it seemed to turn into its very opposite: sanctioning the
worst forms of oppression in the name of emancipation. But it also posed a
deeper puzzle. How could so many of the finest minds of the age be seduced
by an illusion? How could a doctrine that was supposedly based on a stark
realism, a critique of metaphysical flights of fancy, lead so many to lose
their grip on reality?

 These concerns produced an astonishing burst of theorising. But one
towering figure, who in many ways powerfully embodied the existential angst
posed by these questions, was Leszek Kolakowski, who passed away last week.
A former communist who became a leading Polish intellectual dissident in the
sixties, Kolakowski was perhaps as influential in demolishing the
hypocritical allures of Marxism as any. He is best known for his magisterial
three volume Main Currents of Marxism. Unlike other great dissectors of
communism, Kolakowski’s path seemed at first more obscure because it was
located, not in the realm of history or smart literary and political
observation, as for example was the case with Arendt and Aron. He came to
his critique squarely from within philosophy, trying to examine
intellectually how Marxism went from a promethean humanism to monstrous
Stalinism. The book was a philosophical and rhetorical tour de force. It’s
very first sentence, “Karl Marx was a German philosopher,” was a sly cutting
down to size of the claims made on behalf of Marx. The account of Marx
himself was not unsympathetic and acknowledged his greatness. The political
importance of the book lay largely in the third volume, where his
contemporary Marxists were pilloried. Marxists often found his arguments
unfair, but in doing so often missed his central point. This was a point
that he insistently raised, most powerfully in his decimation of the
greatest Marxist intellectual of the time: Lukacs. He had describe Lukacs as
“the most striking example in the twentieth century of what may be called
the betrayal of reason by those whose profession is to use and defend it.”
But this accusation was aimed at a much larger phenomenon: intellectuals who
chose, to deny the reality of atrocity, in the face of their own romantic
delusions. Even in more easy going times such as ours, this question has not
become entirely irrelevant. But Kolakowski’s greatness lay in showing that
this flight from reality was not a contingent aberration, but could arise
from the brilliance of thought itself.

Kolakowski who for most of his life in exile, worked at All Souls, Oxford
and Chicago, published more than forty provocatively brilliant books. Like
his Polish compatriot, the great poet Czeslaw Milosz he became increasingly
uncomfortable with a certain self representation of modernity. He was a
defender of a human instinct to transcendence. He thought that the
unwillingness to acknowledge the possibility that we might not be the ground
of our own being, led to a kind of self deification. This self deification
could itself be a source of bondage. It has to be said, that in the end his
sense of religion bore very much the hallmarks of Catholicism, with its
great sense that pride was the ultimate sin. It was a defence of
transcendence with a heavy heart. He once wrote “Religion is man’s way of
accepting life as an inevitable defeat.”

While he remained a powerful defender of liberal societies, he was not a
conventional liberal. Marxism’s fatal flaw was an overreach of reason. But
there was a danger that liberal democracies would refuse the use of reason.
He despaired of a certain kind of intellectual levelling that was carried
out in the name of modern politics, one that refused to make fine
distinctions. Such levelling itself was dangerous for it also, in its own
way threatened to obliterate the distinction between right and wrong. A
tolerance that said, ‘anything goes’ would undermine its own foundations.

Kolakowski had an ability to produce paragraphs of startling luminosity.
Witness his riposte to the arrogance of intellect. “A modern philosopher who
has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow
mind that his work is probably not worth reading.” As an undergraduate I
accidentally ended up in lectures he was giving at All Souls. I mistakenly
assumed the lectures would be on Marxism. But the lectures were on medieval
philosophy. The clarity and verve with which he explained obscure sounding
figures like, Duns Scotus and Pascal, had even a small group of nineteen
year olds hooked and I stayed on for the term. Some of the material is in
his extraordinary tour de force God Owes Us Nothing. The first half
discusses the medieval argument for the persecution. It displayed
Kolakowski’s skills in reconstructing arguments that are now politically
unimaginable; the attraction of his work was that for the most part, he
would not let you score easy intellectual victories over positions you
disliked. The second half is a moving account of what he called “Pascal’s
sad religion,” that seemed to encapsulate vividly humanity’s never ending
doubt on the questions that were truly fundamental.

He achieved almost all the high academic honours imaginable. For him the
cultural role of philosophy was “not to deliver the truth but to build the
spirit of truth, and this means never to let the inquisitive energy of mind
go to sleep, never to stop questioning what appears to be obvious and
definitive, always to defy the seemingly intact resources of common sense,
always to suspect that there might be “another side” in what we take for
granted, and never to allow us to forget that there are questions that lie
beyond the legitimate horizon of science and are nonetheless crucially
important to the survival of humanity as we know it.” This seems like an
easy sentiment to articulate, but Kolakowski reminded us of what the stakes
are in living up to it.

*The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research*

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