Who Are We?[br]Leszek Kolakowski, [i]My Correct Views on Everything[/i]

My Correct Views on Everything, by Leszek Kolakowski; edited by Zbigniew Janowski, South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005. viii + 284 pp.

Leszek Kolakowski is among the most prominent political and religious thinkers of our time. This volume brings together essays and addresses, spanning the period from 1956 to 2003, illustrating the connection of the political and philosophico-theological strands of his thought. The first of the three parts of the volume, “Amid Moving Ruins,” presents some of the most incisive criticisms of Marxism and Soviet Communism one will ever find. Kolakowski is both witty and blunt. He knows the Marxist-Leninist world from the inside—and by laborious self-extrication from its sway.

This is exemplified in his satirical “rejoinder” to the left-wing British historian E. P. Thompson, which exposes the intellectual dishonesty that has too often overtaken intellectuals who, in their alienation from the West, were willing to rationalize the flaws and cruelties of Communist regimes. In this and the other pieces of part one, Professor Kolakowski shows his appreciation for the complexities of political and social life, and his judgment of the abstract fantasy of ideological attempts to manage and harmonize these complexities.

We recall that the transformation of society foretold in Marx’s thought requires the dictatorship of the proletariat. This must mean the suspension of procedural rights and the rule of law, coupled with the conviction that a proletarian dictatorship will be self-liquidating when its work is done. That its work could never be completed is not a theoretical assumption but an empirically verified fact. Procedural rights and the rule of law were not constructed in order to prevent human perfection but out of the realization that human perfection is impossible, that dictatorships are dictatorships (proletarian or otherwise) and subject to all the temptations of power and brutality that spring forth when political power is unchecked.

Kolakowski brings before us once again the old question, “Was every attempt to implement all the basic values of Marxist socialism likely to generate a political organization that would bear the unmistakable marks of Stalinism?” His answer is: Yes. This is because the leader whose task is to implement the ideology must insist on unswerving loyalty and obedience, while those under him are tempted to appeal to the ideology itself. The resulting divided loyalty is intolerable. The leader will equate the ideology with his own insight and implementation of it. Thus even the most loyal are, to the leader, suspect; everyone is a potential threat to the revolution towards socialist perfection, even the most loyal party members. Kolakowski calls this the “egalitarianism of slavery,” which is at the essence of totalitarian regimes:

The liberal concept of freedom implies that my freedom inevitably limits the freedom of my fellow men, and this is indeed the case if the scope of freedom coincides with the scale of ownership. Once the bourgeois order is replaced by a system of communal property, this machinery no longer has any purpose. Individual interests converge with universal ones, and there is no more need to shore up society’s unstable equilibrium with regulations that define the limits of individual freedom…nothing is left except the individual and the human species as a whole…they will have no need of political institutions or traditional national ties to mediate this experience of their identity.

Liberation, on these grounds, means unity in collective identity. This unity precludes politics, as Aristotle saw in his observation that the polis requires different kinds of people. In the sinister Nazi version, “The Third Reich was an exquisite example of the ideological state…the truth of which was guaranteed by the higher wisdom of those in a privileged cognitive position…the supreme race and its leaders…have a deeper insight which no arguments based on ordinary logical criteria could invalidate.”

Embedded in Marxism is a soteriological myth, disguised in the language of the social sciences of the nineteenth century, which demands the unification of civil society and politics. The myth suggests that a communal way of life can be erected on an individualist foundation, the impossibility of which has been laid out by numerous thinkers as, for example, Benjamin Constant in his distinction between the ancient and the modern ideas of liberty. This putative harmony was to lead to the withering away of the state, making the end of politics to bring politics to an end. But the Marxist eschaton is a fantasy:

I believe that socialist thought in its traditional areas of concern (how to ensure for working society more equality, more security, more welfare, more justice, more freedom, more participation in economic decisions) cannot at the same time entertain prospects of the perfect unity of social life. The two kinds of preoccupation run against each other. The dream of perfect unity could be realized only as a caricature that would deny its original intention…the initial intention was the opposite of what grew out of it. But this initial intention is not, as it were, innocent. It could scarcely be realized in any very different form, not because of contingent historical circumstances but because of its very content.

Yet Kolakowski still finds it worthwhile to read Marx as one would read a classic work of the past, perhaps as a peculiar manifestation of the ambiguity of the enlightenment tradition, and for its residual inspiration to social justice: “The socialist ideal is dead as a project for an ‘alternative society,’ but as a statement of solidarity with the underdog and the oppressed…the ideal, not the system, still has its uses.” This is faint praise in light of everything else Kolakowski says. Such solidarity can come from other places, and with better understanding of how to foster the improvement of the underdog. Indeed, this comes to sight when Kolakowski turns his attention explicitly to theological issues in part two, “What Is Wrong With God?”

Kolakowski’s detailed study of the Christian sects of the Reformation revealed to him futurist obsessions analogous to the ideological derangements in Marxism. It is a basic fact of the human condition, he says, to undergo “frustration and reversal of human foresight.” By contrast, what Christianity really shows is that God’s ways are inscrutable and that “we cannot comprehend them by intellectual cognition alone.” “Any social Utopia which purports to offer a technical blueprint for the perfect society now strikes me as pregnant with the most terrible dangers.” Evil, he insists, is always lurking in human affairs.

But how shall we respond to this fact? Kolakowski reviews the Augustinian proposal that evil is the privation of good, a falling into nothingness, together with the alternative Manichaean explanation that there are two contesting divine powers of good and evil. Philosophically, the problem is to fathom the “cause” of evil in the world. The dualist explanation has the appeal of accessibility to human reason, but it is also defective as a meditation on what we mean by “God” and what we mean by freedom of the will. Alternatively, there are various materialist, naturalistic circumlocutions which refer to evil acts without so naming them. Among other things, this promotes the illusion that such things can be treated and removed from the human situation. In Communist thinking the same act may be either criminal, because counter-revolutionary, or right, by fulfilling the proletarian mission. Evil, however, marks the sense of a humbling, mysterious, and ineradicable feature of the human condition. Kolakowski, without resolving what is perhaps irresolvable, shows us that the Christian legacy far surpasses the Marxist alternative.

In “Jesus Christ—Prophet and Reformer,” Kolakowski characterizes the Christian legacy of “genuinely new precepts” which influence us whether or not we believe in Christ’s divinity: the primacy of love over law, the hope of removing violence from human relations, that we must not live for bread alone (repudiation of materialism), the wretchedness of temporal existence. Kolakowski expresses both concern and revulsion at the use of these precepts to foster quietism and apathy towards social reform. He argues for their inspiration to continual efforts to make wrongs right under the theological constraint of knowing that we have no power to attain perfection. One can see here his mediation between what he accepts as the residually valid element in the Marxist critique of social life and the profundity of the Christian vision of the limits of human, temporal existence. Kolakowski preaches Jesus as the exemplary human being who taught us to “confront the world and ourselves without resorting to violence…that radical authenticity in which, and only in which, every human being can give true life to his own values.” This Jesus is the leaven of our culture, and Kolakowski asserts the indispensability of this transdenominational Christian disposition.

Marxism aside, what about scientistic rationalists for whom the “God question” is anachronistic, a non-question? Kolakowski concedes to them the salutary effect of ridding Christianity of superstition. But he does not think science as such entails scientism or the demise of Christianity. Rather, the problem is to distinguish adequately the boundaries of the sacred and the profane. This is complicated by the need for a reformed theological language adequate to our time. However well or badly we respond to this task, Kolakowski is confident that Enlightenment rationalism can never be secure because concern for the profane cannot eliminate the anxiety about the sacred, just as concern for the sacred cannot liberate us from the profane: “…the Absolute can never be forgotten. God’s unforgettableness means that He is present even in rejection.”

The third part, “Who Are We?,” ranges across many topics of interest. In numerous ways Kolakowski asserts that, in the third millennium, we will need to redis-cover our religious roots as the secular, historical understanding comes to seem more and more inadequate. This is not a prediction—Kolakowski rejects the disastrous history of the predictive mode—but more a voice crying in the wilderness. The Enlightenment has turned against itself, using reason to undermine rationality. Enlightenment generates disillusionment and anxiety. This can be an opening to transcendence, but also a catalyst for fanaticism. A skeptical stance seems called for but is not to be seen as indifference to the sacred. Universities properly understood should play an important role here. They are the places where a cultural legacy can be preserved and transmitted, where the distinction between explanation and prescription can be learned, and where intellectual virtues are revered and practiced.

But of course the anxieties of the post-Enlightenment world are present in the universities in the most concentrated and sophisticated form. The intellectual virtues do not teach neutrality but they do preclude political propaganda. The university is neither to be neutral to the life of the mind nor to the exploration of the sacred and the profane. Nor does Kolakowski think the university can be indifferent to the political and social context in which it operates; but it has a special manner of responding insofar as it rejuvenates the civilizational inheritance in its charge. Whatever else it does, the university must always keep the latter in mind as it chooses how to respond to contingent and unforeseen circumstances. There is no formula for this. One might say that it all depends on the university possessing an adequate self-understanding. This in turn requires unrelenting thoughtfulness of what it has been, and of what we have been.