The Priest And The Jester
Kolakowski, Leszek
The editors of DISSENT are pleased to print the first English translation of this remarkable philosophical and social essay by the distinguished young Polish writer, Leszek Kolakowski, whose...
...However, the very concept of transcendency could only have resulted from that natural, precritical cognitive attitude, no results of which were to be considered...
...in fact, however, the alleged beginning is already the end, and the structure has been given a roof at the moment when it seemed to us that we had just laid the cornerstone...
...In a world where allegedly everything has already happened, the jester's contribution is an always active imagination which thrives on the resistance it must overcome...
...we can stop its motion...
...Likewise, original sin and the fall of man can be considered a necessary phase previous to man's future happiness to which he can look forward because of his Savior's act of redemption: "0 felix culpa quae talem ac tan turn meruit habere redemptorem"— thus speaks the well-known medieval song...
...but the slogan itself, even if true, is just as sterile as the statement that God is a mystery to mortals...
...Whatever happens, man ought to rejoice, because the rewards which await him in heaven are generous...
...All the above-mentioned examples are nothing but attempts to justify theology not by rebuilding its whole structure systematically, but by illustrating some of its subjects...
...In all fields of culture, in philosophy as much as in art and custom, there always has been present an antagonism whereby everything that is new derives from an unceasing need to question the existing absolutes...
...The problem of redemption and incarnation also lends itself to a sui generic secular interpretation: it is the matter of the individual's role in history, that is, of that mechanism which allows the historical absolute to become incarnate in exceptional individuals, or, in more general terms, the question as to whether those individuals really draw their energy from transcendent sources, or rather are in themselves a spontaneous "principle of creativity" in history...
...Still others accept the principle of unconditional responsibility to the absolute, but coupled with uncertainty as to the legislator's intentions...
...and finally, in matters relating to the substantial character of the first reality...
...LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI was born in 1927 in Radom...
...The content of the different metaphysical doctrines would have its basis in the processes of energy transformation on which the human brain depends...
...just as Spinoza's causa sui, being the starting point of the thought process, is inevitably its point of attainment, the only world whose reality can be defended...
...Although within each of them there exists a current of orthodoxy and a group of people who know only how to repeat invariably the original formulae, each one of them has also produced offspring capable of life...
...Eschatology And thus, the first question which contemporary philosophy has inherited from the theological tradition is the problem of the possibility of eschatology itself...
...There is only one kind of order hostile to an anti-absolutist philosophy: an order which has formulated fully the plurality of existing worlds...
...All concepts pertaining to natural cycles of civilizations, such as Arnold Toynbee's, are analogous repetitions of that world vision we know from De Civitate Dei...
...We do not laugh at it, for who does not defer to this belief...
...This attitude clearly summarizes the idea of historical predestination, against which all rebellion is doomed in advance to failure...
...All historical examples make us doubt it...
...our knowledge of God is as great as the love we give Him...
...The inner antinomy of this search for revelation was, in the case of Husserl, an illustration of all such analogous searches...
...As things now stand, thought which is subject to the process of increasing entropy, that is, conservative thought, has been opposed in the course of intellectual history by a mode of thinking which exemplifies reverse processes, processes of increasing tension...
...The very essence of philosophical research could be derived from the same propensity human thought shares with all the other systems of energy...
...or else that nothing is wasted in human affairs, and the suffering of the individual is recorded in the bank of history, thereby adding to the account from which future generations will draw dividends...
...We pose it differently: can the human values we accept attain complete realization...
...In Christian history, this was one of the central preoccupations (Pelagianism, the Reforma tion, Jansenism), along with the question of theodicy (Manicheans, the Cathari), and the idea of redemption (Monophysites, Arians, Socinians...
...Both the priest and the jester violate the mind: the former by strangling it with catechism, the latter by harassing it with mockery...
...some of the varieties have become questions to be studied and solved empirically, losing thereby their philosophical character...
...It would seem that once the absolute of the beginning was given, so would be its end...
...for or against the monistic concept of knowledge, and thus, for or against striving for intellectual power over reality by way of possessing a code of supreme and elementary laws explaining everything...
...If, at one time, it was a question about the mystery of the divine personality, it was formulated in sufficiently general terms for the theoretical priority to remain in the hands of theologians...
...It may be that what is involved is not really a riddle but, frequently, a situation into which we read a riddle because the most self-evident facts appear unacceptable to us...
...We know that the attempts to apply everyday concepts to the absolute existence have led to antinomies, hence the mystics became masters of a thinking which proceeds by thesis and antithesis...
...A rain of gods is falling from the sky on the funeral rites of the one God who has outlived himself...
...this is the Catholic solution...
...Kolakowski became editor in chief of the bimonthly Studia Filozoficzne (which succeeded My9l Filozoficzna) but gave up this post in 1959 though he remained on the editorial board...
...Once the revelation has been found and thought has reached its much desired fulfillment, philosophy begins to construct what it thinks is a "system...
...At a royal palace there are more priests than jesters, just as in a king's realm there are more policemen than artists...
...of final equalization and justice...
...nonetheless, there is no irresistible grace, and the individual is responsible for accepting or rejecting the offer to cooperate tendered by the absolute to everyone...
...The absolute usually becomes a moral support because of being a metaphysical support...
...At any rate, every optimistic historiosophy must inevitably, by its very nature, be a victim to suicidal tendencies...
...philosophers accepted in toto Descartes' question, thereby half-accepting his answer, while the persistent work of modifying the cogito formula has lasted until the present century...
...The difference is this: only the former are curable...
...These are the daily troubles of scientific thinking, similar to those that occurred in the past when revelation was the skeleton which organized all our knowledge into one compact "system...
...Pragmatism rejects as irrelevant all queries about the nature of reality, and substitutes for them practical questions...
...the goal of criticism was self-annihilation, the goal of motion was the absence of motion, a point of immobility...
...in this case, however, the author has no intention of removing himself from the disreputable register...
...It is not difficult to see that secular eschatology, that is, the belief in an eventual elimination of the disparity between human essence and human existence (the belief in the deification of man), naturally presupposes that "essence" is a value...
...If the absolute is a historical process, secular historiosophy simply takes over the tasks of theology which, in its old version, had become all too obviously anachronistic...
...If certain facts cannot be integrated with a previously accepted coherent set of principles which explain our past experiences, how much within our rights are we to ignore these facts or to advance interpretations whose purpose is to align them, sometimes falsely, with the system...
...Nature and Grace First of all, the matter of nature and grace...
...it ridicules common sense and reads sense into the absurd —in other words, it undertakes the daily toil of the jester's profession along with the inevitable risk of appearing ludicrous...
...or whether, on the contrary, we see in them only their empirical and immediately given content, and therefore tend to ignore those possibilities which may be realized only after certain preparations are made, but which require transcendent interpretation via assigning sense to each fact by relating it to something outside it...
...However, many important questions in the theory of knowledge also originate in the very same sources, although they are not connected with historiosophy...
...Someone might say that our reasoning tends to submit to the temptation of the very same monistic thinking it criticizes, that it betrays a tendency to submit a multitude of facts to one ordering principle...
...Conflict as Principle However, had such a principle governed human thought exclusively, it never would have caused the previously mentioned chronic conflict in philosophy which, to our mind, effectively directs its course: a conflict between the search for the absolute and the urge to escape from it, between the fear of oneself and the fear of destroying oneself...
...It is irrelevant whether we call this result the end of history or its beginning: for every eschatology the end of the history of the earth is the end of human suffering and the beginning of the life of the blessed about which we know nothing except that it will be a state of permanent contentment...
...For there is nothing surprising in the fact that certain central difficulties of any and all world concepts have a stubbornly persisting character as to their basic problems, while the actual degree of culture and the richness of vocabulary at our disposal determines the way in which we express them...
...The controversy over the unprovable assumptions of empirical knowledge on the one hand and, on the other, the existence of preferential criteria in regard to conflicting sets of experience, has inherited much from the old tradition...
...Anyone able to nurture such beliefs can certainly derive advantages from them, and there would be no reason to discourage him so long as he does not resort to them in the face of an evil or a misfortune which can still be opposed...
...Perhaps the desire for the absolute, the striving to equalize tensions, must embrace a disproportionately larger number of units in the system than the increase of tensions, if the whole is not to blow up...
...Independently of the arguments expressed in more or less "technical" tongues, the question itself has become common currency...
...yet it is only an apparent motion, for automatism is precisely the antithesis of thinking...
...We have the right to assume that the way in which things happen varies, and that the effort to reduce variety to uniformity is most frequently futile and artificial...
...The death instinct thus would be hostile to the libido, and at the same time explain the striving of the mind to discover in the world such principles as would reduce personal forms of existence to impersonal ones...
...It is thus not only a certain intellectual attitude to the world, but, indeed, a form of the world's existence, namely, a factual continuation of a reality which no longer is...
...And anyway, by what right are we to call religious feeling something that may just as well manifest itself outside all that which both in our daily life and in science we commonly term religion...
...Thought, as every motion, attains satisfaction and fulfills itself only when it ceases to be motion, that is, when it ceases to be...
...that is why its seekers find it almost as soon as they become aware of the need...
...for others, "cybernetics" raises the hope of solving all social conflicts...
...The third possibility, one formulated in the "Gestalt" theory, is the principle of simplification, according to which all "Gestalt" systems or entities have an inborn tendency to acquire forms as simple, regular and symmetrical as possible...
...the latter require additional presuppositions, namely, the assumption that current history can be characterized by its striving towards a lasting result, one which can be defined and which will end all conflict...
...Impossibile est igitur quod natura intendat motum propter seipsum...
...This is the problem of mystery which, in contemporary philosophy, belongs as much as the former ones to the heritage of theology...
...The great ambition of phenomenology was to present reality in the absolute and final sense, and since reality thus conceived could not be anything but immanent reality, the idealism of Husserl's late work seems to be the result of the previously mentioned inborn logic of a doctrine whose main task originally was to overcome subjectivism...
...They all give rise to doubts and difficulties...
...Whatever evil happens, it is a sacrifice on the altar of the whole, and sacrifice is not borne in vain...
...Philosophy and Absolutes And to what peculiarities of human nature—to use this much abused term—ought one to ascribe that indestructible tropism towards absolutes, that hope for the revelation of one, ultimate principle which would explain the whole world and shoulder the burden of man's existence, behavior and thought...
...The philosophy of the jester is a philosophy which in every epoch denounces as doubtful what appears as unshakable...
...Theodicy belongs to the department of popular philosophy, the philosophy of everyday life...
...in this lies their chance to live not only as congregations of perennially acquiescing believers, but also as thinking organisms capable of further evolution...
...Historiosophical reflections on progress which fulfills itself through its "negative aspects," and on alienation by which man is enriched as he overcomes it, are variations on the same theme...
...If, in a series of experiences, the world crumbles before our eyes like a heterogeneous mass thrown together accidentally, we have the right to assume that the world's structure is precisely what it seems—chaotic, free of uniformity and order, full of accidents, more akin to a garbage heap than a library where every item has its clearly defined place and where everything has been inventorised...
...And so we do not know of any absolutely elastic ultimate method which history could not threaten with ankylosis...
...It was Fichte's admirable observation that thought cannot function without overcoming obstacles, just as a car cannot start on ice, or an airplane in a vacuum...
...There can be no agreement between a priest and a jester, unless, as it sometimes happens, one becomes transmuted into the other...
...because, in a metaphysical structure of the world, individua appear as its manifestations, or its accidents, and only as such become understandable...
...He is also author of On Karl Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth (1959), delivered as a lecture at Tubingen University, West Germany...
...The very existence of a principle which is the source of all obligation and simultaneously a tribunal deciding in each case whether the law was observed, was not a subject of controversy at that time...
...beyond that, it would be superfluous for us to comment on its implications...
...it is not necessarily conservative where it justifies evil resulting from someone's free choice...
...Philosophy itself favors it...
...person alism in its metaphysical version, that is, the monadology of the human world, did not attack theology, but borrowed its troubles...
...The preponderance of the believers in mythology over the critics seems inevitable and natural: it is the preponderance of a single world over many possible worlds...
...that sand is usually removed to enable people to stand on solid ground...
...The question about the existence of an immanent order in the universe is not futile, a fact we accept silently any time we agree to reply to it, even in the negative...
...Propped up by revelation, we can do more than move the earth...
...the most common hope of historiosophy is to bring into harmony the essence of man with his existence, that is, to create a situation in which the inalienable aspirations of human nature are fulfilled in reality...
...on the other hand, there is the affirmation of the individual existence as an irreducible fact, and thereby the rejection of all reasons justifying individual existence, the refusal to accept any absolute reality, the refusal to recognize immobility as the genuine nature of something that is mobile, the refusal to consider the prospect of finality...
...There is a difference between the problem previously formulated and the one posed by theodicy: eschatology assigns sense to all facts by relating them to a perspective of ultimate completion: theodicy justifies partial evil by invoking the order of a wisely construed whole, while the question of whether the ultimate completion is a justification of partial evil remains unanswered...
...it may also be that we want to acquire the certainty that in our lives we have chosen the better side and thus all we do is just...
...this was to show that many basic problems which are today considered by various philosophical doctrines—sometimes diametrically opposed to each other—as well as by "everyman's" philosophy, which always revolves around the same questions as "technical" philosophy, are a continuation of theological controversies, or rather a new version of the same prepositions which, in the original and less elegantly phrased version, we have known from the history of theology...
...He is presently living in Warsaw...
...In 1954 he became professor of history of modern philosophy at the latter, and concurrently taught at the Institute for Training of Scientific Workers, a secondary school maintained by the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Communist Party...
...Priest and Jester The antagonism between a philosophy consolidating the absolute and a philosophy questioning the accepted absolutes, appears to be incurable, as incurable as the existence of conservatism and radicalism in all areas of human life...
...Alienated from its source, the world, an emanation of God, being finite, is the negation of its source...
...Depending on time or place, the jester's thought can oscillate between the various extremes of thinking, for what is holy today was paradoxical yesterday, and absolutes revered at the Equator may be a sacrilege at the Pole...
...these examples were drawn from the speculative theology of scholasticism...
...The original key formula of secular revelation is the Cartesian cogito: an attempt to question all that is obvious, and all the traditional finalities, in such a way as not to allow the act of criticism and destruction to be completed before a new finality—the self-knowledge of man's own thinking process—has been attained...
...Every belief or disbelief in a God-less history, or a God-less universe organizing its elements in a teleological unity while assigning them values independent of human notions—is a belief or disbelief in theodicy...
...In regard to the antagonisms between the natural aspirations of human essence and man's entanglement in his external fate, philosophical anthropology today may still search for solutions either in terms of transcendency, as do the Christian existentialists (Jaspers, Marcel), or in terms of history, as do the Marxists, or, finally, it may recognize the conflict as insoluble...
...Intendit igitur quietem per motum...
...In the attitude of the jester, on the other hand, there materializes that which is only a possibility and which, in him, becomes real before it becomes factual...
...In its modernized version, mystery is identical with the limits of rationalism...
...I think we ought to define religion before we speak of homo religiosus...
...that, once we managed to stand on solid ground, moving forward would cease to be interesting...
...Above all, there has grown up around historical determinism a multitude of complex questions which compel attention as the most vital in contemporary philosophical thinking...
...The priest is the guardian of the absolute who upholds the cult of the final and the obvious contained in the tradition...
...this haughtiness is as unreasonable as derisive laughter at medieval man would be because he transported himself from one place to another by means of the horse and not the jet plane...
...The jesting role of philosophy was mentioned by Georges Sorel in connection with the Encyclopedists—but in pejorative terms...
...therefore, the nature of all things realizes itself in fulfillment...
...The problem of the possibility of eschatology is one of the central issues of a discipline which may be called philosophical anthropology, and which today deals with the majority of vital philosophical questions...
...Moreover, this knowledge is not so much a series of prescriptions one can learn by heart before applying them in practice, as the actual application of them...
...This seems natural: reality will always have in man's vision such nature as is inherent in the ultimate data from which he tries to reconstruct it...
...the critique of the immobility of all accepted principles became the immobility of universal criticism...
...The second guardian of the properties taken over from mystical theology is dialectics...
...So also people for whom the physical objects of daily reality constitute the only collection of absolute data, must recognize that those data necessarily exhaust all possible data, while people who assign this character to sensory phenomena will construct the world exclusively on the basis of sensory phenomena...
...while the ideal of the philosopher is the order of an active imagination...
...The Heritage of Mystic Theology The problems of mystic theology are particularly alive in the following four departments of modern philosophy: the practical interpretation of knowledge...
...The principle of economy, as the principle of the natural tendency of all systems to equalize tensions and differences, might also help to interpret man's thinking in an attempt to reduce individua to an undifferentiated absolute, an attempt to explain monistic realities...
...those who today reject the existence of such a principle altogether, reply in simple negative to a question theology has solved in a positive way so unequivocally that it sometimes was deemed unnecessary to spell it out...
...The conflict between striving for individual self-affirmation and striving for self-annihilation—in other words, the conflict between fear of getting rid of one's self and fear of one's self—may be considered the most universal subject matter of philosophical thinking...
...goodness without universal toleration, courage without fanaticism, intelligence without apathy and hope without blindness...
...Order can be a handy slogan for the police as well as for a revolutionary...
...But this is exactly what philosophy concerns itself with, having inherited the problem from theological tradition...
...We declare ourselves in favor of the non-intellectual values inherent in an attitude the perils and absurdities of which we know...
...Thousands find consolation in imagining friendly inhabitants of other planets one day coming to the earth to solve the problems human kind cannot cope with...
...But theology has always been a projection of anthropology on nonhuman reality...
...In 1957 the magazine was suspended and was never revived...
...The exposure of the shortcomings of successive revelations was to lead to the discovery of a revelation free of shortcomings...
...But even if we disregard this one, we still have at our disposal a whole series of other explanations which are merely different ways of expressing the same thought, and which, unfortunately, give rise to all too many doubts to be satisfactory...
...Capricious divinity never reveals its secrets fully, yet a dimmed reflection of its wisdom does sometimes fall on mortals, depending on how much their owlish eyes can stand before being struck blind...
...His essay, "The Priest and the Jester," originally appeared in Tworezosc and gave rise to much critical discussion among Communist thinkers...
...Theodicy, therefore, is a method of transforming facts into values: a method thanks to which a fact is not only what it appears to be to an empirical imagination, but an element of special meaning in a teleologically arranged order...
...In short: for or against the hope of finality in existence and knowledge, for or against seeking support in absolutes...
...The object of another argument is to determine whether the absolute's decrees can be well known to man, how exactly they are known, whether—if they are known—they can be carried out, and whether the transgressor can claim ignorance of these decrees if they are not fully known...
...Avenarius and the empirio-critical group have investigated it in detail...
...this is so because a question fit to be answered presupposes a certain raison d'etre of that sphere of knowledge from which it derives...
...Philosophy is an effort to question incessantly all that appears evident, that is, to disavow existing revelations, Nevertheless, the untiring temptation to possess one's own revelation keeps on laying traps for critics...
...In 1955 the magazine was officially censured for its deviation policy—it had been especially critical of the "new class," the bureaucracy, and its police methods...
...Revelation is simply the absolute in the order of perception...
...The critique of this superstition would not be—we repeat—of great importance if it acted solely as a tranquilizing interpretation of matters past and irrevocable, and not also as an apology for situations that are, and whose inevitability can hardly be proved...
...If we put aside social conflicts bearing on the controversy over nature and grace, we can see, from the point of view of individual motivation, two contradictory tendencies: on the one hand, there is the desire to find outside oneself support for one's own existence, the desire which denotes fear of an individual, isolated life, a life relying exclusively on man's own decisions, and thus, in final terms, the desire to rid oneself of oneself, to jump out of one's skin...
...At the bottom of these controversies, there lies the antagonism of the same two tendencies which were present in nearly all the above-mentioned problems: on the one hand, the integrationist and monistic inclinations, a hope, in ultimate terms, of containing the world in one formula, or at least to discover a principle that would explain the whole of reality...
...for an interpretation of man in the categories of grace, or rather, in the categories of nature, that is, for or against assigning to the absolute all responsibility for our actions...
...It happens more often to a priest...
...The problem of revelation is the problem of the existence of ultimate data...
...Since the eighteenth century, that is, from the very moment when "History" or "Progress" in Europe made their way to the throne of the violently deposed Jehovah, it transpired that they could substitute for him successfully in his basic functions...
...The Individual and the Infinite...
...it may be called the metaphysics of values, or speculation on man's position in the cosmos, or, even, a discussion of historical progress...
...The most vital among them is the problem of revelation...
...A policeman's ideal is the order of a comprehensive dossier...
...In this regard, the history of ancient skepticism provides a highly revealing example: a doctrine which assumed the function of questioning all accepted truths and dogmas became itself an atrophied and barren dogma of questioning...
...The opponents of historical determinism—Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper—are continuing, in this sense, Pelagian soteriology...
...blessed be the sin which deserves such a savior...
...Thus, revelation is, in terms of usage, the textbook of the inquisitor...
...World Outlook and Daily Life...
...A jester must remain an outsider...
...In the strict sense of the word, this knowledge does not say what the qualities of God are, but instructs us as to the best way of paying homage to Him and how, by self-renunciation, one can approach His glory...
...Responsibility and History (published in the French Les Temps Modernes...
...thus God is and is not, He is all and nothing, maximum and minimum, affirmation and negation...
...For the same good reason, a philosophy must be regarded as illusionary if it is reduced to pure auto-reflection or else contained in the closed world of a monad...
...It was William James who, in radical formula, expressed the anti-monistic attitude toward knowledge: if the facts contradict each other, we still can accept each of them separately, since there is no reason to suppose that one inflexible elementary law rules the universe and arranges its history...
...The epistemological absolute appeared then to be as burdened with the dead weight of non-absolute knowledge as the Cartesian cogito, which is nothing else but a presumption of a fictitious thinker, a distilled intellectual substance, totally independent of all such content as experience and acquired knowledge have left to it...
...otherwise we may fall into a trap—a common one, to be sure—and define religion through religious feeling, characterizing the latter in a way which presupposes the knowledge of what religion is...
...It is accompanied by another question: to what extent is conceptual thinking able to encompass and express ultimate data...
...But the urgent need for finality, the need for revelation, is one of the needs most easily satisfied...
...The belief in eschatology, as well as the belief in theodicy, is an attempt to find for human life a support and validity outside that life —an absolute validity, a super-reality which any other reality lends meaning to and, in itself, does not require further interpretation by reference to something else...
...Strictly speaking, theodicy is always conservative where it justifies evil experienced by people independently of their own decisions...
...It is not difficult to see that the problem of the relation between the responsibility of the individual and the determinants acting upon him from the outside is, in all its complexity, as much alive today as it was at the time of the Council of Trent...
...and on the other hand, the pluralistic urge to disregard coherence in knowledge, a lack of ambition to construe a forest out of single trees, a readiness to accept single facts as absolute even if, when confronted, they should contradict each other...
...This transforming bf facts into values is no doubt a vestige of magical thinking, older than the speculative theologies, and presupposes the belief in the sanctifying or damning power of certain events, a belief which has no connection with the empiricallygiven data, while relating to intangible qualities...
...In its summary metaphysical shape, this principle implies that in nature—and thus also in the behavior of organisms and in thinking—there is a latent tendency to maximal reduction of effort and the use of the simplest means...
...in these matters, a choice is an appraisal...
...After studying philosophy at Lodz University he held various teaching positions at Lodz and Warsaw Universities...
...its relevance extends in both directions, toward the past and the present...
...Modern positivism has not saved itself, at least in its first phase, from the pursuit of the epistemological absolute...
...If this principle of universal tendency to equalize tensions and liquidate irregularities and differences were to be accepted, it would be possible to interpret the history of philosophy within the principle's framework, and all the previously mentioned forms of nostalgia for the absolute which have given substance to philosophical life for centuries would simply be individual cases of its line of action...
...Ideologies based on theodicy do not necessarily have to be conservative, although the majority of historical examples might make us think so...
...For to declare that certain data have the privilege of being final, is to deny the reality of everything that cannot be in some way reduced to them...
...In its modern version, theodicy deals with the rationality of history, that is, it tries to discover whether the unhappiness and suffering of the individual can find sense and justification in the universal reasons on which history rests...
...Let us remark in passing that the problem of original sin, very closely connected with the idea of nature and grace, also has its contemporary, although modified, form since it treats of the satanic element in man and thus also of rebellion against absolute power...
...Although every new form of thinking that tries to disassociate itself from the accepted absolutes, establishes, sooner or later, its own final absolutes, and although every rebellion against accepted truth eventually passes into a conservative state, it prepares the ground for a new phase in which its own absolutes become in turn the object of criticism...
...To him, critique would have been without meaning if it were not to stop at a static point, and so his critical task was to reach a point above all criticism...
...A jester does not jeer out of sheer contrariness...
...If, then, philosophy undermines the absolute, if it rejects the uniformity of the principles to which reality can be reduced, if it affirms the plurality of the world and the mutual non-reducibility of things, thereby affirming human individuality, it does not do so in the name of monadology, or in the name of the concept of the individual as a self-sufficient atom...
...The assumption that our present suffering must find compensation in some good in the future presupposes faith in the secret good qualities of unpleasant events, qualities connected with the all-wise order of the universe...
...reason does not precede will but rather the acts of will become simultaneously acts of understanding...
...Since we have at our disposal what is most certain and unshakable, all further thinking would be as smooth and easy as the motion of a glass ball on ice...
...We have tried to present the nature of this conflict as a constant struggle between two summarily defined but essential tendencies to which philosophy tries to lend a discursive character...
...he jeers because he mistrusts the stabilized world...
...Reflection on history has its main source in our dissatisfaction with history's results...
...they call it natural religious feeling...
...for or against theodicy, that is, for or against seeking justification in the absolute for every individual evil in this world...
...Thus philosophy, especially since it has developed the aspirations of a scientific discipline, eagerly calls upon science to bear witness to its ventures...
...Priesthood is not merely the cult of the past as seen through contemporary eyes, but the survival of the past in unchanged shape...
...11 Our list so far has been merely a loose collection of cases with one common feature...
...Faith and Reason The problem of the relation between faith and reason has also reappeared in a modernized form...
...The premise of this assumption is that the essence of motion is its opposite, namely, absence of motion...
...that the realization of essence is desirable...
...in the other, it may be an ideology sanctioning our active participation in human conflict—regardless of whether on the side of good or evil...
...We have observed the validity of this preponderance when, with astonishing speed, new mythologies replace old ones...
...As in Hegel's logic, alienation in mystical theology did not have to be a negative phenomenon: the absolute secretes its theophanies by force of the fatality of its own nature, and by secreting them becomes, so to speak, enriched because it can regain them anew...
...To state this is not tantamount to accepting the various and contradictory propositions these methods contain...
...Theodicy is thus part of contemporary philosophy...
...In particular, the entire evolution of European idealism has brought to light the basic quality of the Cartesian revelation which it shares with other revelations...
...Revelation All the above-mentioned matters bear on the relationship between man and the absolute, something historiosophy has inherited from theology...
...The jester could not do this if he himself were part of the good society, for then he would be, at the most, a drawingroom wit...
...Revelation is the eternal hope of philosophy...
...Probing into the problem of nature and grace can serve a manifold purpose: it may aim at finding in the world a principle in whose authority one is able to have total confidence, and which relieves man of his responsibility and solves all conflicts for him...
...The deliberations of the personalistic doctrines about the non-communicable character of personality are a projection into the human world inquiry of the questions which theology addressed to divinity...
...On this level, its action varies...
...redemption is a possibility open to all, although, on the other hand, it is anticipated that not everybody will make use of it...
...Roughly speaking, these were the questions that served as focal points for all theological discussions in the 16th and 17th centuries— debates on nature and grace, predestination and justification of one's faith and acts...
...In all cases, it is assumed that the absolute possesses both the legislative and the judicial power...
...Descartes undertook his act of criticism fully aware that there must be a limit to criticism...
...And the task which historical necessity has posed is being solved with, or against, the individual...
...This, however, is equivalent to justifying one's own doctrines by facts whose acceptance must be preceded by the acceptance of the same doctrine you try to justify...
...since the awareness of the thought process is the ultimate datum of cognition, the whole of reality cannot go beyond the thought process or, to use Gilson's words, "as we begin with the immanent world, so we end with it...
...a jester was merely a toy of the aristocrats...
...For our thought of reality is also part of it, no worse than the other parts...
...Motion realizes itself by annihilating itself or, in other words, motion is an infirmity or insufficiency of that which moves...
...But in its reverted motion it tends to annihilate itself, and again become identical with its genesis...
...it is a collection of unquestionable data...
...Taine's positivism had to find satisfaction in the "ultimate law" or the "eternal axiom" of reality, which discovers the unity of the universe, and to which all our knowledge must finally be reduced in some way...
...The problem of theodicy in its modernized version treats of "the wisdom" of history, that is, the problem of conceiving such an intellectual organization of the world in which evil, known to, or experienced by, us, discovers its "sense" and value enmeshed in the wise plans of history...
...And yet, led by the very same instinct which, as was said, lies at the bottom of the monistic tendencies of the human mind and gives birth to monistic interpretations of reality, we also want to formulate a coordinating principle which will permit us to span the conflicting views of the world in a systematic way...
...Nothing is as deeply rooted in man as the belief in a moral law of equalizing temperatures, that is, the belief that the world eventually will reach a state where our merits and rewards, our crimes and punishments are levelled out, where evil is avenged and goodness rewarded— in other words, a world in which human values attain their complete realization...
...there are few methods of thinking which do not tacitly subscribe to the Thomist principle whereby the aim of all motion is rest...
...All other fruits of philosophy are of little importance...
...In this case no more than in the previous instances do we want to imply that the troubles were illusory...
...each epoch which prides itself on having created a great scientific synthesis seems to reveal more and more of an orderly world—while presenting us with more and more general principles, compared to which all those known before appear incidental...
...a situation in which the human individual can rely only on himself, a situation in which he cannot "define" himself and identify himself absolutely with anything else...
...Our purpose here is to point to those essential elements in which modern secular thought is also compelled, either in negative or positive terms, to answer questions inherited from theological and pretheological, that is, magical, tradition...
...in man's seeking for himself and his acts a definition which refers him to something he is not...
...Marxist literature on the matter presents various motifs, usually revolving around solutions resembling those of the Council of Trent, which can be summarized as follows: acts that are contained within the framework of determinants derived from it...
...Some solutions to the enigma of nature and grace serve as ways of shedding responsibility, which the absolute takes upon itself...
...The jester's attitude is an endless attempt to reflect on the various arguments of contradictory ideas: an attitude dialectical by its very nature...
...This principle is again another version of the principle of economy, and can be used in this case for similar purposes...
...If this is so, then the existence of priests is justified, although this is no reason for joining their ranks...
...We declare ourselves in favor of the philosophy of the jester, that is, for an attitude of negative vigilance in the face of any absolute...
...The answer to the question is of highly practical value, for it determines whether we consider our daily chores a means of saving pennies towards a retirement pension in eternity for ourselves and mankind and therefore, perhaps, disregard current facts and such values as cease to matter when the now passes...
...The editors of DISSENT are pleased to print the first English translation of this remarkable philosophical and social essay by the distinguished young Polish writer, Leszek Kolakowski, whose writing has come to the attention of serious readers in both East and West during the past several years...
...A really independent existence is the prerogative of the absolute only...
...Someone who has suffered an irreversible misfortune can find solace in the thought that God has used his suffering for some (undefined) good in the world's order...
...And yet the nostalgia for revelation lives at the heart of philosophy, while the need for ultimate satisfaction has still not been extinguished in its faithful...
...and in almost every historical epoch, the philosophy of the priest and the philosophy of the jester have been the two most general forms of intellectual culture...
...In the first instance, it is simply the ideology of the helpless...
...In considering them, man wishes to discover to what degree certain elements, independent of him—physiological or historical— can justify him ex post, and to what extent they can supply him with an infallible guide to his future decisions...
...it points out the contradictions in what seems evident and incontestable...
...From the day that historical eschatology demonstrated its possibilities, human history became an argument for atheism: a different force took upon its shoulders the labor of God and, as He had done in the past, it could lull its unhappy subjects with the vision of a happy end...
...without them nothing could be achieved...
...We do not do this because we want to argue...
...The questioning of the idea of substance in favor of the metaphysical priority of other principles which were traditionally considered secondary predicates, has, in our century, appeared in theories which are otherwise completely different: Giovanni Gentile's actualism, Alfred Whitehead's and Bertrand Russell's theory of events, and Natorp's theory of relation—to mention only three cases, each of a different origin—all meet at a certain, quite distant, point in their genealogy, a point which, to each of these philosophers, would seem totally alien to his thought...
...Does history evolve in the direction • This essay appears in The Modern Polish Mind, published by Little, Brown & Co., edited by Maria Kuncewicz...
...the last eventuality was at one time formulated by Freud, and existentialist atheists have since put it in a different way...
...it is a way of communicating with the absolute...
...For instance, every time someone believes that the unhappiness and torment of people already dead may be avenged by history, or that centuriesold accounts of wrongs eventually may be settled justly, he demonstrates his belief in the last judgment...
...The translation is by Paul Mayewski...
...But the wealth of mystic theology was not lost either, and it retains its splendor in contemporary thought...
...We have done all we could to keep alive in our minds the main problems that in the course of centuries have troubled theologians, although today we formulate them in a somewhat different way...
...simply to overcome what is because it is...
...There are many varieties of the problem—biological, sociological, historiosophical, metaphysical...
...With regard to the first, one ought to note that the mystics were pioneers in the field of the pragmatic approach to knowledge...
...And yet this obsession with monism, the stubborn passion to arrange the world in accordance with a single unifying principle, this search for a magic formula to make reality decipherable, proves to be more lasting than all the other adventures of man's intellectual development...
...most often they are attitudes to life which express, if only unconsciously, a solution to the following problem: is the existence of each of us merely a collection of facts, one following another and exhausting itself within its duration, or is every fact something more than the mere content of the time which comprises it—namely, an anticipation, a hope for other facts to come, the revelation of a fragment of the final perspective of fulfillment...
...This is so because the absolute is impossible to describe without simultaneously describing its opposite, and by this very fact it betrays its fictitiousness...
...it is, at the same time, the idea of justifying acts undertaken in accordance with the inherent inevitability of history...
...Theologians have long tried to convince us that it is the creator-given-and-oriented gravitation that rules man's thought...
...published with permission...
...Let me mention four such attempts: One of them, formulated by Freud, and later ignored on the whole by his disciples, is the theory of the death instinct, i.e., the theory in accordance with which there exists in animated matter a constant nostalgia for reverting to the inorganic state, a constant tendency to reduce tensions and, ultimately, to liquidate them entirely—in other words, to discontinue organic processes altogether...
...all the finite fragments we distinguish in the universe, and the differences between separate things, are either a kind of pathological alienation which awaits its end in the universal return of the world to the absolute's womb, or else a deformed product of our imagination, which tries to impose upon an indivisible whole a principle of multiplicity and differentiation completely alien to it...
...any further motion on his part is illusory, as is the motion of a squirrel running up a rotating drum...
...Advanced by the first pragmatists and still retaining its force, the practical interpretation of knowledge is a generalized version of the mystics' program: let us ignore the question of what the world looks like "in itself" and accept instead scientific theories as practical guidance for our behavior under certain circumstances...
...Let every fact be its own explanation and the general knowledge elastic enough to react separately to any situation...
...In the intellectual life it has all the vices and virtues of an indiscreet person whose sense of respectability has not developed...
...The Priest and the Jester" is a work both of intellectual history and contemporary reflection...
...The progress of post-Cartesian philosophy was, to a considerable degree, a succession of imitations of the same procedure...
...Another doctrine has long been known in its methodological (Ock ham), as well as theological (Malebranche) and physicalist (Maupertuis), version...
...this is the Jansenist solution...
...it is the principle of economy...
...and it relies on the wisdom of history to bring about this realization...
...Secular eschatology places its confidence in the final judgment of history...
...There are various doctrines explaining the hunger for self-definition by reference to the absolute, a feeling which may well be hunger for nonexistence...
...on the other hand, we observe fear of the unreality of one's behavior and decisions, fear of harboring within oneself an alien force that not only carries out human intentions, but is also a will undertaking them instead of man...
...As the third accomplishment of mystic theology from which contemporary thought has borrowed, we mentioned questions dealing with the unifying interpretation of existence...
...Philosophy has never freed itself from the heritage of theology, which means that theological questions were only awkward attempts to solve riddles that are still haunting mankind...
...Any philosophic finality is nothing but a substitute for revelation which, being allegedly the starting point for theologians, is, in truth, all that is needed...
...But theodicies mostly do serve the following: the belief that, by an act of God or history, nothing in human life happens in vain is so powerful a stimulus to our inborn inertia and such a justification of our conservatism and laziness that, in practical life, it inevitably becomes a shield protecting human inertia against the pangs of conscience and rational criticism...
...and although it is sometimes practiced in the form of historiosophical abstractions, its acceptance or rejection expresses itself also in daily, common attitudes, in that semi-conscious practical philosophy which influences human behavior...
...Its starting point is also the point of attainment...
...in the absolute's plans, this division is irrevocably established, and the results are determined, and yet individuals voluntarily accede either to this or the other category...
...It would be simpler, would it not, to view religion as we know it in its historical formulae, as an instance of a more universal phenomena which may also occur outside religion...
...Yet, although it is true that philosophers entertained monarchs, their antics had their effect in earthquakes...
...this vision of Erigena contains in itself almost all the rudiments of dialectical logic...
...The other "great doctrines" of the 20th century, such as the philosophy of Bergson, for instance, never went beyond this initial phase and have remained in history as closed systems that may claim admirers but no offspring...
...for or against revelation, that is, for or against seeking a principle of knowledge that is permanent and inaccessible to criticism, and which gives us the guarantee of infallible thinking...
...As the fourth possibility on the list, we quote Sartre's formula maintaining that existence "for itself," that is, human existence—defined as pure negativity in relation to the rest of the world, freedom but a freedomprivatio—is imbued with a constant and contradictory desire to be transformed into an existence "in itself...
...The jester is he who, although an habitue of good society, does not belong to it and makes it the object of his inquisitive impertinence...
...Can any mode of thinking, even the most radical, escape this fate...
...And the strong links between conservative thought in the philosophic sense, and social conservatism and that inertia of public life which we call reaction, would be still another individual illustration of the said principle...
...The question as to whether the original reality has the character of substance, or whether its substantialness is a secondary phenomenon, an attribute of our perception, or even its creation, whereas the original reality is something not substantial—event, relation, act—this question is obviously of theological origin...
...he must observe "good society" from the sidelines, for only then can he detect the non-obvious behind the obvious and the non-final behind what appears to be final...
...Is each fact an absolute reality, or is it a section of the road at whose end peace awaits us...
...It does not seem possible to change this...
...In its modern version, it is the problem of utopia, that is, an attempt to break the historical absolute—power—against which any rebellion is seemingly condemned in advance to failure...
...Because the qualities of the absolute elude the investigation of the instruments at the disposal of human speech, which is used only for describing finite things, the only concept our knowledge has of the absolute is of a practical nature...
...in declaring that finality is the proper word for the character of observation sentences, Moritz Schlick presented us with another version of the same maneuver which, in so many other doctrines, was to provide us with secular substitutes for revelation...
...in the evolution of the very word "persona"—the mask—there took shape a difficulty which has tripped philosophers ever since...
...And so we see that the so-called philosophical "systems" which are supposed to give us certainty in the final stage of their investigation, give it to us always at the very beginning: by force of an almost automatically accepted succession, they begin by establishing sure knowledge, the absolute beginning of all reasoning...
...dialectics...
...motion reveals need, whereas need is the negative component of nature...
...In its most general version, this is the problem of determinism and responsibility, i.e.: in what sense and to what degree the human individual "can" or "cannot" resist the influence of forces which, independently of him, are shaping his behavior...
...In the mystical texts we also find the modern idea of alienation, as well as the idea of the world's development through its own negation...
...The atheists have their saints and the blasphemers are erecting chapels...
...All the explanations above represent, as one can see, translations of the same thought into four different tongues...
...This difficulty usually is solved by means of a rather simple slogan, "personality is inexpressible...
...Another doctrine accepts responsibility, but only under the condition that acts are performed in accordance with clearly defined rules whose acceptance inevitably must lead to effective results...
...thus, human kind is fatally divided into the chosen and the rejected...
...The statement is only meant as a recognition of the ability of these methods to go beyond the absolutes they advance, and to detect the hidden premises of their own radicalism...
...Revelation is "the first push" given to thought, after which thought moves onwards automatically...
...In all three departments, each of them a part of non-religious contemporary philosophy, the patronage of theodicy, and through it the patronage of magic, has not become obsolete...
...In the motion of philosophical thought, the absolute starting point predetermines everything else, and he who attains the absolute ceases to move...
...That is why in certain epochs the conflict between the philosophy of the jester and that of the priest resembles a contest between the irritating features of adolescence and the irritating features of senility...
...Every time man expects that some day the requirements of his nature will be satisfied, he professes his belief in eschatology, in the end of the world, and thus also in the finiteness of man...
...it would like to shed the nothingness which torments it, but nothingness, that is, freedom, is at the same time precisely what defines human existence...
...and yet the sources of social interest in it are similar to those in the past...
...Besides, we ourselves do not deny that our deliberations at this moment are somewhat reminiscent of the famous Liber Chamorum...
...The majority of the cited examples revealed that there exists in philosophy an antagonism centering on the same scheme: for or against eschatology, that is, for or against the ordering of the facts of current life by reference to the absolute which eventually is to be realized...
...It is a granite throne from which we can mete out verdicts without risk of error, and without which our rickety skeletons could not sustain us...
...Yet the belief in progress does not necessarily mean that one must indulge in chiliastic visions...
...Why should anyone wonder at the fact that humanity wants to realize the role which independent forces play in man's behavior...
...more precisely, the history of philosophy confirms that such conflict really exists...
...During this time he also edited Po Prostu, a weekly for young Communist intellectuals...
...Every critique presupposes an object to be criticized...
...what is aimed at may be the highest tribunal on whose justice one relies without fear, and which will allow no harm to be done to us if we adhere to its guidance...
...Freud's theory may be considered as the economy principle specifically applied to the organic world...
...If, then, the immanent world is the absolute of knowledge, it is, at the same time, all that knowledge can achieve...
...But every one of us has spiritual ancestors whose portraits he prefers not to display in the family dining room, though much malicious gossip goes on about them among the neighbors...
...But it is not the ordering of facts that is contrary to the anti-absolute philosophy...
...We draw these analogies not in order to ridicule an actually vital topic in philosophy, but rather to uncover the hidden rationality of theology's subject matter which, in the old version, has lost its vitality...
...This belief is of the same nature as any trust in the efficacy of magical practices...
...It is our opinion that there is more than one method which creates instruments to criticize itself over a relatively long period of time: in our century, we believe that this has been attained by Marxism and by phenomenonology and psychoanalysis...
...We concern ourselves with it every time we try to find out to what degree experience and rational thought can unequivocally resolve conflicts and what the role is of unprovable factors in our image of the world...
...We know only of methods which retain vitality because they have managed to develop instruments of self-criticism...
...a thought process in which we "put in brackets" transcendent reality presupposes that the latter was given to our thought, regardless of how many "distingua" are added to the word "given...
...the statement that ultimate data can have only an immanent character, whereas transcendent reality is provided, as Husserl said, with an epistemological zero indicator, presupposes that the ultimate data cannot be established without a clear concept of transcendency, while opinions about it were left in abeyance...
...Although sober observation does not support this optimism and points rather to the fact that no wages of history can balance the fate of an individual man, that the suffering of some contributes to the well-being of others, while the suffering of others serves no purpose and is simply what it is—bare suffering, that much of our life is ultimately spent in vain and there is no proof that it amounts to anything else...
...Yet it appeared now and again that the verbal definition of the original principle, which attributed an ultimate character to pure phenomena, had required an earlier use of a concept derived from outside these phenomena, thereby also requiring borrowing from certain data of natural knowledge...
...the question about the rationality of the indivisible whole which human personality is, is a real question...
...this is the Calvinist solution...
...The assumption that the subject can be identical with the object in the act of perceiving, is contradictory...
...for, indeed, theology begins with the conviction that truth has already been given to us and its intellectual effort lies not in pitting it against reality but in assimilating the essence of something that has been totally completed...
...In the intellectual life of societies, wherever the machinery of traditional beliefs has gone rusty, new myths flock into being, created en masse from technological progress and scientific achievements...
...But the role of the absolute manifests itself more directly in other matters, whose importance in the history of theology is well known and, in its modernized form, is still troubling not only philosophers, but all those who seek a rationale for their behavior...
...every philosophy aspiring to become "a system" questions the revelations of other systems only to establish immediately its own...
...and almost everyone, acting under the combined or conflicting pressures of tradition and personal experiences, has a more or less ready answer to it...
...At the same time, he must frequent good society so as to know what it deems holy, and to be able to indulge in his impertinence...
...Because the attainment of such a state would put an end to dissatisfaction with the results of history, it might be said that historiosophy has adopted as the main object of its hope a situation which leads to its own extinction...
...Risking the loss of current values in exchange for final values, illusory though they may be, and risking, on the other hand, the loss of greater values by pursuing current values—what, indeed, could be more banal than these two extremes between which our daily life oscillates...
...and in what sense is he then morally responsible for himself, or, to what degree can he place responsibility on other forces over which he has no power...
...it covers all the questions that primarily concern the rationality of certain elementary components of perception, and certain indivisible fragments of reality itself...
...We have no freedom to do this or that, but only freedom to do nothing at all...
...Neither is there anything strange in the desire to know not only the forces which act upon us in the form of energy transferers, but also the elementary and autonomous forces, that is, the absolute...
...We need revelation not so much for learning what the world is really like, as for being able to appraise other's opinions about the world...
...It is the option for a vision of the world that provides prospects for a slow and difficult realignment of the elements in our human action that are most difficult to align...
...Such a situation breeds fear which finds expression in man's seeking support in the absolute reality, and thus in self-annihilation...
...the explanation of the world in terms of the whole...
...an order which has tasted the satisfaction of a fully accomplished task...
...Others have remained within the bounds of historiosophical or metaphysical speculation, with no great chance of being solved otherwise...
...Traditional theodicies tell us that in the poverty of the condemned shines infallible divine justice, and that human misery reflects the glory of ultimate goodness...
...It is the antagonism of a priest and a jester...
...But when it tries to renounce its monistic hopes, it does just the opposite—it denounces science and explains that a scientific vision of the world is not a reconstruction of an organization actually inherent in the world, but the result of just such natural propensity of the human mind...
...although, then, this unifying and balancing vision of the world finds no support in our knowledge of it, the belief is so deeply rooted in our desires for compensation that it appears to be one of the truly irresistible intellectual superstitions known to man...
...The words quoted above are from the closing chapter of Spengler's The Decline of the West, but they may serve as a terse formula for a more universal tendency...
...Ultimately," one may say to oneself, "our fate is only a part of the universe, a fragment of the enormous whole where the suffering of the individual serves to enrich the universal good, where everything influences all, while the general order of things is maintained...
...Also the mystical problem of applying the concept of substance to the absolute has begun to flourish anew in our century...
...Theodicy The next matter, directly related to the first, is theodicy, also a part of theological heritage...
...to want to shed nothingness, to return to the world "in itself," is therefore tantamount to annihilating one's self as individual existence, and thus simply annihilating the existence itself...
...Riddles...
...for or against the unifying interpretation of the world, and thus, for or against such vision as lends every thing a meaning by referring it to the absolute, a manifestation, a part, or an accident of which it constitutes...
...Thinking, in its narrow sense which interests us here—that is, creative thinking—is a function which cannot be performed by an automaton...
...for no principle of universal criticism is safe from the antinomy of the liar...
...its function is to undermine the existing foundations and pull down the roofs...
...besides, the hope of formulating such a mode of thinking would mean a hope of achieving an ultimate method contrary to its very premises...
...so Socrates became Plato...
...to presuppose such an identity is tantamount to presuming immobility, a situation where no perception is possible...
...In this popularized version, answers need not be theses...
...Thus the theory of "Gestalt" appears in mystical texts in an almost perfect, although somewhat generalized, form, the modern equivalent of which can be found in Bergson's speculations rather than in the methodology of the "Gestaltists...
...because the affirmation of individuality is possible only in contradistinction to the rest of the world, in its relation to the world: relations based on factual dependence, responsibility, resistance...
...In philosophical thinking, this principle appears as the conviction that thought moves only because it is imperfect, and only to attain perfection, immobility...
...A philosophy which tries to do without the absolute and without the prospect of completion cannot, by its very nature, be a consolidating structure, for it has no foundations and desires no roof...
...to say that no categories of human speech apply to God is to say that every time we speak of Him all categories apply to Him...
...Airplanes now serve more effectively the purpose that horses once served, just as historiosophical reflections deal more effectively with the very problems once dealt with by the medieval disputes on the Trinity and irresistible grace...
...he who questions what appears to be self-evident...
...Our explanations are thus directed, if at all, against that attitude of contempt which free thinkers and rationalists adopt in regard to problems that were flesh for past ages, as if we ourselves were not engaged in solving the very same questions by means of a different technique...
...One ought not to wonder that we do pose such questions to ourselves...
...it is the preponderance of the simplicity of fall over the complexity of climbing to the top...
...Both the theory of the death instinct, and the principle of economy, as well as its kindred versions, are attempts to raise (or, if one prefers, to lower) the principle of increasing entropy to the dignified level of a universal metaphysical theory, applicable not only to all forms of energy that are known and presumed, but also to human behavior, feeling and thinking...
Vol. 9 • July 1962 • No. 3
