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.