By Robert Faggen
This spring, Claremont McKenna College hosted one of the eminent figures in the world of ideas, Leszek Kolakowski. Philosopher, historian, theologian, political scientist, literary critic, and playwright, Kolakowski has been a professor at the University of Chicago and a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is renowned worldwide for the depth and breadth of his interests, which include the impact of the Enlightenment, his critical examination of Marxism, and his exploration of the questions of religion and myth.
As a young chair of Warsaw University’s philosophy department, Kolakowski became one of revisionist communism’s harshest critics, arguing that democratic communism would be like “fried snowballs.” Expelled from Poland, Kolakowski taught in Berkeley and Chicago while writing his magisterial three-volume study, Main Currents of Marxism.
In his writings, Kolakowski argued that self-organized social groups could gradually and peacefully expand the spheres of civil society in a totalitarian state, and his thinking helped inspire the dissident movements of the 1970s that led to Solidarity and, eventually, to the collapse of communism in Europe in 1989. He is author of more than 30 books, including The Alienation of Reason, The Presence of Myth, Modernity on Endless Trial, and God Owes You Nothing, a study of philosopher Blaise Pascal.
During his two-month stay at CMC as a Podlich Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Professor Kolakowski gave two public lectures, On Natural Law and The Future of Truth. He also met individually with students and faculty and taught a seminar, Science and Faith in Modern Literature, during which students examined writings by Pascal, Dostoevsky, Melville, Frost, and Milosz, among others. These are excerpts from an interview with Professor Kolakowksi conducted by CMC literature professor Robert Faggen.
Faggen: What do you believe are the important questions of philosophy?
Kolakowski: One may say in general that many traditional questions in philosophy still persist: By what criteria do we decide what is real and what is not? What is justice? Is there a concept of justice that does not depend on human decisions? Does the world as it is produce such qualities as good and evil, or are such terms, as many have argued since the ancient Sophists, just arbitrary concoctions? Can we imagine a world in which common logical rules wouldn’t work? What do we do with theological concepts that theologians say are often untranslatable into common parlance, so that whatever we say about God can never be literal? If God is a reality that is hidden, can it be approached despite our consciousness that it is hidden? Such questions are within the horizons of ordinary readers. As questions, they are not “professional,” if the word should be used at all when speaking about philosophy.
Faggen: Is there a distinction between philosophy and academic philosophy?
Kolakowski: If there is one, it is not important. There are some aspects of philosophical thinking that require certain training or education—knowledge of tradition, classical languages, formal logic. But I think that what is truly important in philosophy can be explained without it. Philosophers have long written not for philosophers, but for the larger, educated public. So Descartes, Spinoza, and even Kant hoped to convey their thinking to the greater public and play a role in persuading people to think in new ways.
Faggen: Is there ever anything new in philosophy?
Kolakowski: I think we are all epigones, and we shouldn’t worry about it. What was really important in philosophy was probably phrased by the Greeks, but obviously we have to invent a new language adapted to changing culture and the habits of various civilizations to express the same or very similar concerns.Faggen: In your more recent work, you continue to address many questions about religion. Do you find philosophers dismissive or skeptical of a philosophy of religion?
Kolakowski: Of course, the greatest skeptics remain unknown because they never write anything. But there are many who believe that in the matter of religion there is nothing to discuss, because nothing can be said. Ayer once said that theological questions or statements are not false, but meaningless. It is a point of view common among contemporary analytical philosophers but, of course, has a much older.
Faggen: Do you believe that the question posed by Tertullian, in the second century C.E.—of whether Athens has anything to do with Jerusalem, or reason with faith—is still important?
Kolakowski: I think it is a recurrent, permanent question. Lev Shestov, the Russian philosopher who wrote in the early part of the 20th century, titled his major work Athens and Jerusalem and argued —and it was an extreme argument —that Athens and Jerusalem have nothing to do with each other, and that God is not really bound by our logic or our learning. Now, whatever the answer is, it is a permanent quandary, a permanent problem for people who try to understand religion. Our religious faith cannot be transformed into a collection of statements. God is not an empirical hypothesis, and some Christian thinkers knew that. Faith seems an entrance into a new reality; it cannot compete with empirical reality in terms that would be acceptable to rationalists.
Faggen: At what point does modern science become corrosive to faith?
Kolakowski: It has been corrosive, in part, because the Catholic Church tried unsuccessfully to suppress, at various points, scientific development and because the church compromised itself by such attempts. Apart from that, though, it might seem to some people that you cannot reasonably live in faith and accept contemporary science. Of course, many people argue that it is still quite possible, including physicists and even Darwinists. Darwinism is quite a curious question because some philosophers—pragmatists among them—are based upon the idea that human culture in all its aspects is functionally related to the biological situation of human beings. In other words, human culture is a biological organ. If one believes that, one should believe that the question of truth, in the traditional senses of the word in religion, philosophy, and even science, is irrelevant because one can only see the intellectual and cultural development of mankind as an organ of survival. But if that is so, one should not appeal to Darwinism as a theory that is true in any normal, traditional sense. Then we have nothing more than a vicious circle.Faggen: When you spoke at the Athenaeum about the idea of natural law beyond the arbitrariness of conventions and decisions, you stressed the importance of human dignity. How do you envision the conditions of human dignity, and what are its greatest obstacles?
Kolakowski: Human dignity is nothing that we can properly define, even though the concept has been used for centuries. There is a belief, deeply ingrained in our thinking, that human existence is unlike anything else in the universe. One cannot forget the oration on human dignity of Pico della Mirandola, the Renaissance expression of the peculiar position of human being in the world and how it is strictly connected to the fact that we have choice and that—unlike animals and unlike angels—we are able to choose between good and evil. The behavior of animals still seems largely a matter of instinct. Only human beings have a real choice between good and evil as well as consciousness of what evil is and what good is. Dignity is rooted in this consciousness of what evil is and what good is.
Dignity is rooted in this consciousness. Every human being should be treated (as though) he or she is the carrier of this dignity. Of course, people must be punished for crimes, but they should not be violated in their dignity. The fundamental concept is that human beings are equal. Of course, we are not exactly equal, and we differ from each other in many respects. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental meaning of equality, and it is that all people deserve to be treated as being a carrier of dignity.
Visit: http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/webcast/mmca.asp to view Leszek Kolakowski’s address, On Natural Law, at the Athenaeum.