A Talk with Leszek Kolakowski

...People are returning to places of worship in droves...

...Kolakowski: I agree completely...

...But, for one thing, Christianity has never succeeded in developing a genuinely theocratic system...

...It was subsequently run in theNL of March 29,1965...

...Kolakowski: I think such a possibility cannot be ruled out...

...Kolakowski was born in 1927 in the town of Radom...

...As a result, the idea of personal, individual responsibility has been increasingly questioned, until today nobody seems to bear any personal responsibility for anything...

...Now that we have come to our senses after a long period when it was so easy to ridicule absolute values, we can see how dearly we have paid for the convenience of skepticism and relativism...

...Mihajlov: You have used the expression "wake up," reminding me of another of Lev Shestov's sayings, to the effect that the awareness of the lost absolute is not yet an awakening, but merely a dream within a dream—only the discovery of the absolute constitutes a real awakening...

...RECOVERING THE ABSOLUTE A Talk with Leszek Kolakowski BY MIHAJLO MIHAJLOV ?olish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski was chosen last year by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the 15th annual Jefferson lecture...

...Shestov said, " People of genius usually beget idiots...

...In my essay I tried to analyze in particular three milestones in the degradation caused by the Enlightenment...

...Certainly this is not the kind of spiritual awakening we should be looking forward to...

...The first is general relativism...

...Yet that skepticism, by its internal logic, gradually overran all spheres of man's spiritual realm and culminated in various kinds of nihilism...

...Later, having rejected the dogma of historical determinism, he abandoned Marxism altogether and turned his attention to more traditional philosophical topics—ethics, metaphysics and religion...

...But these are merely tangible facts, not laws...

...Yet even ridiculous things of this sort arc symptoms of a serious problem, namely the awareness of a loss and an inability to find a solution...

...Kolakowski: It's quite possible...

...Kolakowski's scholarly and ideological concerns have evolved considerably over the past three decades...

...In asserting the deterministic view of development, you are following in the footsteps of the Enlightenment thinkers...

...we are just complaining, but our lamentations in no way affect the situation...

...The burden is relegated instead to an entity called society, which is charged with responsibility for everything, including each individual's behavior...

...Kolakowski's situation grew increasingly precarious with the regime's curbing of intellectual freedom during the '60s...

...This is one of the major reasons, it would seem, why our civilization is so enervated, why it has so much trouble justifying itself...

...Secondly, social resistance to the theocratic ways would be so strong in our society that I cannot imagine a religious resurgence in the shape of a theocratic tyranny...

...Mihajlov: But given that most of mankind nowadays either shuns traditional religions or espouses a religion merely in a formal sense, is there any way the rediscovery of absolute values can occur outside of the traditional churches and religions...

...You noted at the beginning of your essay that human rights can only be rooted in the principle at the foundation of the United States Constitution: that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights to pursue freedom and happiness...

...The source of all we have lost has always been religious mythology...

...Don't you think that so far we have only woken up in our dream...

...It was necessary that contacts with other civilizations should engender skepticism...

...Reading your essay I kept on coming back to Shestov's saying, because your principal idea, as I understand it, is that the idol of politics, universally worshiped by present-day humanity, reared its head after people had lost their personal channel to extrahistorical reality...

...You mentioned, though, that the Enlightenment was a necessary stage in the spiritual development of mankind...

...So our attitude toward science contains an element of ambivalence...

...Mihajlov: But can't we say that the Iranian theocracy embodies obsolete forms of religious consciousness...

...If I used the word "necessary," I meant necessary for something—not necessary in the deterministic sense...

...This is exactly what I meant when I asked whether the coming spiritual renaissance might arrive in traditional, centuriesold garb...

...One thing is certain: Intellectual, historical, sociological, and philosophical endeavors are useless...

...On the one hand, science is an idol expected to provide all sorts of joys and benefits...

...Thus alchemists gave rise to chemists...

...Mihajlov: But the things you mentioned are of the highest importance, for unless absolute reality is rediscovered, the idol of science, and hence the urge to remake the world in the scientific image, will be invincible...

...But the modern era has been marked by a distinctive phenomenon without parallel in world history: the so-called secularization process, which has grown to world-wide proportions...

...At any rate, I just can't imagine such a turn of events in traditionally Christian areas, whether Eastern or Western...

...On the other hand, we all know that the most important achievements of science have turned into deadly threats...

...But since Communism is no longer a Western or Eastern problem, but a problem of global proportions, a universal discovery of the absolute is apparently required if world totalitarianism is to be vanquished...

...In your writings you yourself assert that the spiritual domain is the sole basis for the human rights issue...

...Why not the whole world...

...Kolakowski: You are absolutely right...

...Mihajlov: Why just the West...

...It just goes to show —and numerous examples from human history bear this out—that there is no such thing as purely beneficial progress, that we have to pay dearly for anything we achieve...

...Many people who endured the Nazi concentration camps—for instance, the psychiatrist and founder of logotherapy Victor Frankl—and many former inmates of Stalin's Siberian concentration camps somehow or other did manage to find a road to the absolute...

...In 1966, after delivering a speech marking the 10th anniversary of the Polish October, he was expelled from the Communist Party...

...Mihajlov: You are surely right...

...The third point I wanted to put across is the loss of historical self-awareness, the loss of roots, the loss of the sense that the entire past is incorporated in our lives as an active component...

...Unfortunately, I have no answer...

...Mihajlov: As I see it, the main thrust of your essay is the need for absolute values, but there is a long way to go from realizing the loss of absolute values to finding them again...

...Kolakowski: True, human rights and the absolute worth of the human personality cannot be justified scientifically...

...My main idea was that the Enlightenment, though a necessary stage in the development of mankind, bore very dangerous fruit for our subsequent destiny...

...Whenever a new religion has emerged, it has never proclaimed itself a religion, but rather a discovery of the truth...

...But it is precisely science that is the chief idol of our time, and in a sense one can say that even the Communist movement is very close to science and technology—not in its theory of scientific socialism, but in its attitude toward the world, society, and man as a subject...

...Kolakowski: Quite possibly you are right...

...There may be little that is new or original in my musings, but I thought it would be useful to raise these three points...

...An essay based on his address, entitled "The Idolatry of Politics, "has now been published in several languages and forms the basis of his discussion here with the Yugoslav writer Mihajlo Mihajlov...

...Like Kolakowski, Mihajlo Mihajlov also felt compelled to leave his native country because of political oppression —beginning in his case with the banning of an article entitled "Moscow Summer" that incurred the wrath of Marshal Josip Broz Tito...

...Kolakowski: It is a difficult question to answer...

...In this sense, isn't it paramount to expose the belief in the total omnipotence of science as idolatry...

...I am sure the Communist challenge is not exclusively military and political, but that it also involves the problems of spiritual and religious resurgence of the West...

...And so today we are perhaps suffering from the baneful effects of the Enlightenment...

...Kolakowski: Yes, I agree...

...Mihajlov: Yes...

...He became prominent in the liberalizing movement that led to the "Polish October" of 1956, attracting attention with a brief but trenchant critique of Stalinism called "What Is Socialism...

...inl978, is currently a Special Analyst for Radio Free Europe...

...Kolakowski: By no means...

...From his early criticism of the Stalinist system he went on to articulate a Marxist humanism...

...otherwise they are merely arbitrary notions undeserving of serious notice...

...First of all, it is very unlikely that the discovery of the absolute could occur outside of humanity's religious tradition...

...Mihajlov: The reason I am asking this question is that there has been an obvious resurgence of religious sentiment around the world, particularly in Communist countries like Poland and, to a significant extent, in the Soviet Union...

...Mihajlov: If theory does not provide the answer, might not experience...

...Richard C. Hottetet, then a CBS News correspondent, obtained a copy that he sent to The New Leader, where it appeared in the issue of February 18,1957...

...Of course, the development of humanity would have been impossible without a revolt, at some point in history, against stagnationist tyranny, against petrified forms of thinking...

...In other words, it has exhibited ample capacity to adapt its idiom, or rather to absorb the idiom of new trends in civilization...

...His three-volume Main Currents in Marxism is widely regarded as a classic of post-Marxist thought...

...The second point of my essay is the unclear, uncertain and weak status of the very concept of human personality, which for practical purposes has been stripped of its legitimacy by the naturalistic worldview...

...An obvious illustration is the search for religious experience outside the scope of European culture, primarily in Buddhism and Hinduism...

...We can speak of a Christianity of antiquity, a Medieval Christianity, a Baroque Christianity, a Christianity of the Enlightenment epoch, and so forth...

...In your essay, you write that neither Jesus Christ nor Buddha succeeded in becoming universal...

...He now divides his time between Oxford's All Souls College and the University of Chicago...

...Kolakowski: Yes...

...This phenomenon also manifests itself in the blossoming of a variety of religious sects—some ephemeral, others simply moronic...

...These effects were pointed out as far back as the 19th century by astute minds like Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and some others, but today they are in plain view of anyone with eyes to see...

...Unfortunately, religious resurgence as often as not assumes a barbarous form, as witness Iranian theocracy...

...I can only say this...

...I had no intention of acknowledging the existence of any laws of history, or any necessary path of development...

...Whether or not it can develop such a language I don't know...

...So if there is no speculative way to the absolute, maybe only the concentration camp and death experience indicate the right direction...

...Mihajlov: I certainly agree that such an undertaking is particularly useful, especially at this historical juncture...

...Secondly, it is not only in Communist countries but also in the industrialized nations of the West that people, particularly young people, evince all manner of symptoms of alarm and a powerful urge to seek something else, something that our present civilization is unable to provide...

...Kolakowski: Of course it is idolatry...

...But I also think that the place occupied by science in the modern consciousness is not unambiguous...

...To be sure, there were theocratic leanings in the history of Christianity...

...A youthful convert to Marxism, hestudiedphilosophy at Lodz and eventually won a faculty position at Warsaw University...

...A frequent contributor to these pages since that time, Mihajlov, who came to the U.S...

...The piece circulated privately among Warsaw University students, however...

...It should be pointed out, though, that Christianity goes back 20 centuries, and throughout its history it has more than once changed its theological idiom and modified its liturgy...

...Mihajlov: You are constantly referring to "science," to the "scientific approach...

...Is my interpretation correct...

...His books include Russian Themes, Underground Notes, and Unscientific Thoughts...

...I do not believein those things...

...While these adaptation processes were never easy or painless, at each turn Christianity somehow managed to find new forms of expression for what it regards as the immutable truth...

...Mihajlov: Then we could be headed toward a replay of the Iranian drama, couldn't we...

...For if there does exist some law shaping the course of history, then there is every legitimate reason to try and learn this law, and thus to treat history in technological or rational terms...

...How, in your view, can they be rediscovered...

...One can trace certain trends, simple things like man's increasing mastery over various natural sources of energy with the passage of time...

...His idea was that the loss of nonpolitical, spiritual links among individuals, the loss of the sense of the eternal, the loss of roots, brought about the replacement of alchemy—which sought the stone of wisdom and eternal life—with crass chemistry, looking for such things as fabric dyes...

...Perhaps it's really true that it took all the horrors, all the nightmares of this century to wake us up to the realization that our civilization, which has been marching onward triumphantly through the centuries, still has a morbid streak...

...Mihajlov: Do you see any possibility of a renaissance of traditional religions, or do you think we are headed for a new discovery, the absolute regrasped in modern terms...

...And yet it is precisely our era, particularly over the last decade, that has given rise to a growing human rights movement...

...But this is a scientifically unprovable dogma, so again the whole problem boils down to the need for rediscovering the absolute worth of the human personality...

...Mihajlov: Your essay brought to mind a maxim of Lev Shestov's that sounded rather weird at the turn of the century, but tallies with your theme beautifully...

...Kolakowski: Discovery, or rediscovery of what was discovered a long time ago...

...No, there are no laws...

...It would be closer to the truth to say that all of human history is a process of accumulation of unexpected miracles...

...I mean, it is one thing to be aware of what you are missing, and another thing entirely to be able to reacquire it...

...Kolakowski: Of course, when we say "religion," the implication is of some external force...

...Kolakowski: You mean a religious revolution...

...they don't fit within the framework of the naturalistic scientific worldview...

...The only basis for such rights is our spiritual belief...

...Kolakowski: Maybe I have misstated my case...

...Publication of the article wasforbidden, reportedly by First Secretary WladyslawGomulka himself —who at a Party plenum shortly afterward charged Kolakowski with being the "ideological leader of revisionism...

...The Christian tradition has so far failed to come up with a modern language comprehensible to the men and women of the Western civilization...

...Do y ou think a rediscovery of absolute values can be accomplished through the reinvigoration of the ancient structures—the Roman Catholic Church, Orthodox Christianity, Islam—or do you think 20th-century man, conditioned as he is by 200 years of Enlightenment, is more likely to seek a new path toward an absolute that would be expressed in modern terms...

...Mihajlov: Thank you very much, Professor Kolakowski...

...In theanti-Semitic campaign of 1968 he was deprived of his university chair and quit Poland for the West...

...Indeed, I agree that what we are experiencing now certainly does not amount to a real discovery...

...Ours is the first civilization ever to have such an enfeebled religious component...