Leszek Kolakowski: Jester at the Court of Marxism
Pachter, Henry
THE NAME of Leszek Kolakowski is famous outside the borders of his native Poland and far beyond the circle of professional philosophers, not because his doctrines are exciting like Sartre's...
...Kolakowski can therefore define logical empiricism as "the product of a specific culture, one in which technological efficiency is regarded as the highest value . . . . It is a technocratic ideology in the mystifying guise of an anti-ideological, scientific view of the world, purged of value judgments...
...they call for tolerance and moderation, responsibility and restraint...
...Just as Das Kapital is a critique of economic ideas, the Marxian philosophy is a critique of philosophical ideas...
...Since the positions taken in different essays differ occasionally, datingthem would have allowed the reader to follow the author's evolution...
...The emptiness of philosophy therefore reflects the crisis of our sciencebased society, its inability to derive values (knowledge in the proper Socratean sense, Reason) from its scientific premises...
...With Wittgenstein's famous "Tractatus," philosophy seems to end in the whimper: "What we cannot speak of we must be silent about...
...Unfortunately, no dates are given for the other essays...
...But in Kolakowski's case, the philosophy is so intimately interwoven with the fight against orthodoxy that one could describe it as a primer on how to be a heretic...
...Even in its most liberal version, Marxism still must recognize some measure of necessity in the development from the bourgeois to the socialist society...
...choices, what then is the basis for his commitment, and by what right does he speak of the need for a "Left socialism...
...The problem here, moreover, is not to justify revolution but to defend simple humanrights—and the right to include "the negation of the negation" in a textbook of Dialectics...
...His first reaction is to ask indignantly: Is this still Marxism...
...In fact he can praise inconsistency ("In Praise of Inconsistency," see DISSENT, Spring 1964), and he calls himself a Jester, as in the superbly funny essay "The Priest and the Jester...
...We are aware that Kolakowski uses the word Reason here in a specific sense, not very unlike the sense that appears in Hegel and Plato, but he admits that positivism is right: this Reason has just as little cognitive value as Poetry...
...He has no confidence in the effectiveness of science as a cure for conflicts that have their origins elsewhere, and he has only scorn for those neopositivists who, like Wittgenstein, try to invalidate all human concerns as mere figments of the imagination...
...but these developments also have brought to philosophy the insight that no science can tell us what is good and desirable...
...He neither goes along with Fate nor can he debate with it...
...Just as one may say that Kolakowski is no Marxist, one may still grant him that he is thinking in the Marxian spirit...
...Since this cannot be stated in so many words under the conditions prevailing after "liberation from the capitalist yoke," Kolakowski asks the strategic question: What did Marx mean by truth...
...Kolakowski comes out, of course, for freedom, moral choice, and Utopia: "The existence of Utopia as Utopia is necessary for its eventually ceasing to be a Utopia...
...but he finds that this is not possible without destroying the system to which he is committed...
...THE NAME of Leszek Kolakowski is famous outside the borders of his native Poland and far beyond the circle of professional philosophers, not because his doctrines are exciting like Sartre's or his discoveries pioneering like Galileo's, but because his much more modest achievements aroused the displeasure of the authorities...
...He is closer to the late Karl Korsch, whose very similar approach enjoys a vigorous revival in Europe...
...His originality is not in devising a new interpretation but in his devices to elude any attempt to catch him in subscribing to a definitive opinion about "what Marx really meant...
...In some cases the social and political implications of a philosophical thought—its susceptibility of being used by ideology-makersare mentioned briefly...
...Stating that this is incompatible with Marx's view, he then proceeds to show that Marx's view is even less compatible with the Engels-Lenin 276 hypothesis...
...What position can the Marxian critic take vis-a-vis such sterility...
...He had to show where he differs from them...
...Yet patriotism, progress, and other "demiurges" have been invoked to declare certain developments "moral" or to derive a moral halo for actions that contributed to the desired result...
...Some of these little stratagems are merely verbal hedges, permitting the author to shoot from behind a cover...
...the problem of freedom and the problemof death is fictitious, it is the most beautiful of the many fictions which philosophy feeds humanminds...
...Three essay collections have appeared in Poland: Essays on Catholic Philoso Kolakowski's fight with "The Office" is reflected in his impish tactics, a few examples of which will lead us right into the center of his thinking...
...BOOKS In the days of Comte positivism had started out with the claim that scientific management can make humanity happy, the implication being that science (Reason) is capable of finding out what ought to make humans happy and how to achieve this happiness...
...The remarks on necessity and morality are directed first of all, of course, against the Stalinists...
...Had Marx written a philosophical book, it might have resembled the critiques of the young Lukacs, of Korsch, or of Kolakowski...
...He maintains that the Council of Trent (154563) solved this question approximately as Stalin did in the famous "Summary" to which we have alluded...
...he compares them to the theologians who disputed the respective merits of Nature and Grace—he even finds that these ancient instruments of redemption are related to each other as Necessity and Freedom are today, and that the dispute between Pelagius and St...
...BOOICS Lenin argued to refute them, and trusts the reader to see that Lenin did not know what he was talking about...
...one cannot so determine himself for the future...
...4 Kolakowski's book on Spinoza, The Individual and Infinity (Warsaw: 1958), has not been translated...
...By contrast, Kolakowski expounds the pragmatist view of William James, or rather a caricature of it which has a strong resem blance to the partiinost's view that true is what is useful at any given moment...
...In passing, Auguste Comte receives a superb vindication, but the main thrust of the book takes us through the British utilitarians and the American pragmatists to the German empirio-criticists and eventually to the Vienna (later Chicago) school of logical empiricism—developments that are explained almost entirely by the inner necessity of solving the problems previous solutions had left unsolved...
...it is] the granite throne from which they pass judgment without risk of error...
...For Kolakowski, nothing becomes moral or desirable because it is necessary...
...He began his career with studies on Christian philosophy, and later he put his knowledge to good use: in the late fifties he wrote of Thomism in such a way that it was easy to read "Stalinism," and when he attacked "the Church" for denying the autonomy of the individual, readers could not help thinking of "the Party...
...Questions of meaning, of value, of origin become irrelevant, and logic is reduced to a mere game with grammatical rules...
...Still more savage is the attack in an essay that begins with two quotes by the same Soviet author, before and after the Party Congress but as different from each other as two photos in a patent medicine advertisement...
...Thus he complains about "remnants of petty-bourgeois ideologies," which survive even "in countries liberated from the capitalist yoke...
...So much for the living inquisitors whom Revelation enables "to evaluate any opinion they might encounter...
...Had Camus been interested in formal philosophy he would have liked this book...
...Kolakowski had noted earlier that positivism not only destroys most assumptions of common sense, such as "facts" and "laws...
...On the contrary, he has enormous fun with people who are trying to find out...
...This is brought out in the hard-hitting essay on "The Concept of the Left," where he shows that the left is Utopian and intellectual whereas so-called "realism" permits counterrevolutionaries to take over socialism...
...But what about the hallowed source of that Revelation...
...The desire for revolution cannot be born only when the revolution is ripe because among the conditions for this ripeness are the revolutionary demands made of an unripe reality...
...I must therefore take exception to the titles which the publishers have given Kolakowski's books...
...rather it is "humanized nature" appropriated by human activity, and therefore forever changing as new social conditions permit mankind to ask new questions and to set itself new tasks...
...It expounds some modern problems in the sparse, highly disciplined language of the philosophical technician...
...He must not become the head of a school exercising its wits in the barren gymnastics of doubt...
...These, of course, require the suppression of passion in political debate...
...Moral and immoral acts are committed by individuals, not by historical forces...
...Kolakowski pours ridicule upon the view that problems which cannot be formulated in scientific propositions do not exist, and that we can get rid of history, anxiety, dissension and hate if we but follow the precepts of scientific analysis...
...Despite the sensational title of the American translation, the reader who expects the flowering language of Beckett, Marcuse, Laing, or Bettelheim will be disappointed...
...A direct link, however, between the developments in philosophy and those in society is attempted only in the last chapter, which is entitled: "Logical Empiricism —A Scientific Defense of a Threatened Civilization...
...From this brief summary it may be clear in what sense the title Alienation of Reason is justified and why we have to call Kolakowski a jester...
...I have not been able to see a collection of essays which I understand the Pall Mall Press of London is preparing under the title Marxism and Beyond...
...It is perhaps for this reason, among others, that Kolakowski had to write a history of the modern school of agnostics, positivism...
...Though the Germantitle, On the Mortality of Reason, suggests an antirationalism that Kolakowski specifically repudiates, it at least reflects the mischievous spirit of Kolakowski's antiphilosophizing...
...His negativism can become self-defeating nihilism...
...We already have indicated in what very specific, very Marxian (as opposed to Marxist) sense Kolakowski speaks of "humanized" nature: in the profoundly revolutionary, Utopian sense Marx has in mind when he says "vermenschlichen...
...Therefore Kolakowski constantly eludes the Hegelian demiurge...
...This double nature, however—his desire to live in peace with a humanized Marxism and his conflict with the perfected system of Marxism--exacts a cruel price from Kolakowski...
...And above all, even the most stringent proof that an action was necessary does not make it a moral action...
...Continuing, Kolakowski points out that this must be true even more of Marx's view of historical and moral objects: historical research answers questions which the historical actors did not ask...
...These seem poor reasons to read a philosopher —as though one were to study cogito ergo sum because Descartes caught pneumonia in Queen Christina's chambers...
...They repudiate, however, the one tenet that even the most critical Marxist would like to retain—the tenet on which indeed the entire edifice of "scientific socialism" must rest: the validity of Historical Materialism...
...He answers by first stating the wellknown view of Engels and Lenin that our mind, with the aid of our sensory organs, can reflect, or at least approach more and more closely, a reasonably adequate picture of the "outside" world, which these masters conceived as independent of the mind...
...Meanwhile, the sciences have refined ever more the instruments of control and manipulation...
...Unlike any Western relativist or positivist who might have come to similar conclusions, he cannot see philosophy as a mere game of wits...
...our interpretations are not forced upon us, but only suggested to us, by the facts...
...necessity itself is a matter of interpretation...
...One might enjoy Spinoza's philosophy without the knowledge of his excommunication...
...1 The important essay on "Marx's Conception ofthe Truth," a lecture given at the University of Tuebingen in 1958, is the only one included in both the English and the German collections...
...In brief, when combined with a fanatical belief in education and a humanitarian aversion to bloody conflicts, these attributes describe the attitude Kolakowski recognizes as social-democratic and which he finds in representatives of the neo-positivist school such as Carnap, Ayer, Reichenbach (a one-time "ultraleftist"), and (surprisingly) Bertrand Russell...
...His relation to Marx is well indicated in this passage: "The probability that unknown texts of Plato will yet come to light is small, but undoubtedly Plato's thought, as presented in existing texts, will never cease to be interpreted in different ways, and no version will ever be final...
...Deprived of his university chair and expelled from the Polish Communist party, he now lives in his homeland as an exile...
...One can determine himself as that which one BOOKS is by referring to the determining data of the past...
...to be modern one has to deprecate Reason...
...KOLAKOWSKI'S HISTORY OF POSITIVISM betrays some of his vexations, but it does not give any answers...
...Suppression is not the worst that can happen to the Jester...
...rather, the form and content of his philosophy are the strategy and tactics of nonconformist thought, particularly in countries where "The Office" provides "The Truth" for everyone...
...But "Marxist humanism"—a system BOOKS word that Erich Fromm, 2 or Herbert Marcuse, will never omit if it helps to stop further thinking— a word that must have been used by the Polish Marx-priests ad nauseam—is anxiously avoided by Kolakowski, who circumscribes it even in a passage where he has to call for the humanizing of Marxism...
...There is no moaning, wailing or breast-beating but a sober, almost heroically calm, face-the-music attitude...
...But for readers who don't dig it, he adds: "Stalin summarized this book in a popular article that was required reading in all Soviet schools...
...To the young Marx the objects of the world were social products, and matter separated from human praxis seemed as nonsensical to him as thought separated from action...
...Augustine was none other than the one between Kautsky and Lenin...
...But let us not forget that it was Marx who said, "I am not a Marxist...
...He demands that his philosophy spell out his commitment...
...He does not offer, as others have done, a neo-Marxian system amended by Freud or Heidegger or Tillich or Russell.4 He does not succumb to the philosophies of the post-Marxian age, but also does not ignore them...
...He maintains the stance Marx assumed in front of the philosophies of his age—not just critical but using them for the two related purposes: as evidence of the ideological impasse which reveals the inner conflicts in this society, and as weapons in his arsenal of argumentation with this society...
...Criticism of the system's immobility, in other words, must not be converted into the immobility of criticism...
...There is an ambiguity here in Marxism which Kolakowski does not clarify but muddles up...
...he can become socially irrelevant, his jesting can be empty or escapist...
...his dialectical skills must be constantly on the alert—else he might be trapped to become either part of the system or an accomplice of its enemies...
...Since I do not read Polish, I am much indebted to two articles by Mr...
...Kolakowski thinks that man's centurylong search for meaning, for truth and certainty, in short that which we may call "Reason," an autonomous field of intellectual endeavor independent of technological functions and empirical data, is not simply a cancerous outgrowth of our intellectual abilities and devoid of any vital need...
...more profoundly, he is averse to any system and even to Marxism insofar as it lends itself to the claim that it has come into possession of The Truth...
...For Marx, he explains, the truth is not something forever outside the human mind...
...Kolakowski has always been fascinated by the manifestations of orthodoxy and the gyrations of theology...
...And he ends with the Manichaean outcry that the physical world may be a kind of malicious joke played on us by a demon...
...For Kolakowski's story of philosophy is also that of a "penitent judge,") The argument is immanent, following a development that was forced on philosophical thinking after David Hume had awaked epistemology from its dogmatic slumber...
...Only that is inevitable which is past...
...Similarly with value judgments: no number of true statements adds up to an insight into what is good...
...Nor does the word "alienation" occur either in the Polish title or in the original text of the book that appeared in 1966 as History of Positivism from Hume to Wittgenstein...
...hence those stratagems, those hints of unseriousness and of jesting...
...It must be stated here that the word Humanism does not occur in the original title or text of any of the essays collected under this title...
...Kolakowski himself does not believe with Socrates that virtue is knowledge and sin ignorance...
...3 Markovich (in Fromm, op...
...names the reason for the apparent sterility of Marxism in Eastern Europe: "In order to break one authority[Stalin] another, greater authority [Marx] is invoked...
...To be everybody's fool is indeed the proper business of the Philosophe in any age, even after the revolution—and precisely if the revolution is to continue...
...I know an event was "necessary" only after it happened...
...He did not, like Galileo, just accidentally and unsuspectingly clash with the authorities...
...so he states clearly what the empirio-criticist's concern was, then abruptly states what phy (Warsaw: 1955), Philosophy and Everyday Life (Warsaw: 1957), Culture and Fetishes (Warsaw: 1967...
...An immoral act does not become moral by the fact that it was committed in the name of a historical force, or even of History or the Hegelian World Spirit...
...Learned Marxists have always deplored Marx's failure to write his "philosophy" and have been disappointed by his failure to disengage himself from Engels's Anti-Duehring...
...he can only denounce it or laugh at it...
...Can one criticize Lenin in a country liberated from capitalist dogma...
...he can have fun with past antics and derive more laughter from his own agile evasions...
...From Labedz's summary I gather that Kolakowski is not interested in Spinoza's "System" but in the tension it reflects: "If [Spinoza's] solution of...
...In rejecting this proposition Kolakowski, so it seems to me at least, steps outside the pale of even the most latitudinarian Marxism, no matter on how many other points he may still have Marx on his side...
...But Kolakowski is not simply against the caricature of Marxism which is The Office's version of The Truth...
...Kolakowski cannot say that, in writing his only philosophical work, Materialism and EmpirioCriticism, Lenin made a fool of himself...
...the inevitability of that which does not exist is doubtful...
...Such radicalism has its dangers besides those that are obvious...
...TheGerman translation is closer to the original, the English more readable...
...Apparently to sell a Marxist book one has to use such words as "humanism" and "alienation...
...He can find irony in the persistence of priesthood throughout the ages and in all societies...
...The Jester must be nimble...
...here he continues that it eventually develops a self-destructive tendency to ask questions that deny the very ground on which it stands...
...Leo Labedz in Survey and in Encounter (both published in London), from which I have gleaned quotations from previously untranslated essays...
...But then he pauses and says: Come to think of it, this is Marxism as it has come to be when it stopped being criticism and was converted into a state philosophy, the ideology of a party, a faith...
...Kolakowski is more radical than Mikhailo Markovich,3 the Yugoslav heretic who still is trying to restore a system of "Marxist humanism...
...But if it is to make sense, then we are forced to the conclusion that the world in which science rules and that where Reason prevails spring from two different sources that may even be hostile to each other...
...One laughs, and the irony becomes ribald when Kolakowski, turning the tables on his critics, finds these ideologies surviving "under the guise of Marxist orthodoxy...
...determinism...
...It is now clear that Kolakowski's stance is Brechtian and that his philosophy is rather an antiphilosophy...
...THE BEST ESSAYS in both collections are those that discuss the problem of responsibility vs...
...but apparently it is still too early for Kolakowski to acknowledge familiarity with the work of that perennial heretic...
...If he does not believe in either Necessity or Arbitrariness as a foundation for his moral 2 A tendency toward sentimentalism and systembuilding mars most contributions to Erich Fromm's otherwise useful and interesting anthology Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium (Garden City: 1965...
...Applying this insight to Marx, one understands why Kolakowski can never be a Marxist in any systematic way but must refuse to subscribe to any particular system...
...he angrily asks the positivitists where they acquired their values...
Vol. 16 • May 1969 • No. 3
