Leszek Kołakowski

Leszek Kołakowski (/ˌkɒləˈkɒfski/; Polish: [ˈlɛʂɛk kɔwaˈkɔfskʲi]; 23 October 1927 – 17 July 2009) was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas.

Leszek Kołakowski
Kołakowski in 1971
Born(1927-10-23)23 October 1927
Radom, Poland
Died17 July 2009(2009-07-17) (aged 81)
Oxford, England
EducationŁódź University
University of Warsaw (PhD, 1953)
AwardsPeace Prize of the German Book Trade (1977)
Erasmus Prize (1983)
Kluge Prize (2003)
Jerusalem Prize (2007)
Era20th-/21st-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolContinental philosophy
Marxist humanism
InstitutionsUniversity of Warsaw
Notable ideas
Humanist interpretation of Marx

He is best known for his critical analyses of Marxist thought, especially his three-volume history, Main Currents of Marxism (1976). In his later work, Kolakowski increasingly focused on religious questions. In his 1986 Jefferson Lecture, he asserted that "[w]e learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are".[2]

Due to his criticism of Marxism and Communism, Kołakowski was effectively exiled from Poland in 1968. He spent most of the remainder of his career at All Souls College, Oxford. Despite being in exile, Kołakowski was a major inspiration for the Solidarity movement that flourished in Poland in the 1980s and helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to his being described by Bronislaw Geremek as the "awakener of human hopes".[3][4]

Biography

Kołakowski was born in Radom, Poland. He did not enjoy formal schooling during the German occupation of Poland (1939–1945) in World War II, but he read books and took occasional private lessons, passing his school-leaving examinations as an external student in the underground school system. After the war, he studied philosophy at Łódź University. By the late 1940s, it was obvious that he was one of the most brilliant Polish minds of his generation,[5] and in 1953, he earned a doctorate from Warsaw University with a thesis on Baruch Spinoza in which he viewed Spinoza from a Marxist point of view.[6] He served as a professor and chairman of Warsaw University's department of the history of philosophy from 1959 to 1968.

In his youth, Kołakowski became a communist. He signed a denunciation against Władysław Tatarkiewicz. [7] From 1947 to 1966, he was a member of the Polish United Workers' Party. His intellectual promise earned him a trip to Moscow in 1950,[8] where he saw communism in practice and found it repulsive. He broke with Stalinism, becoming a "revisionist Marxist" advocating a humanist interpretation of Karl Marx. One year after the 1956 Polish October, Kołakowski published a four-part critique of Soviet-Marxist dogmas, including historical determinism, in the Polish periodical Nowa Kultura.[9] His public lecture at Warsaw University on the tenth anniversary of Polish October led to his expulsion from the Polish United Workers' Party. In the course of the 1968 Polish political crisis, he lost his job at Warsaw University and was prevented from obtaining any other academic post.[10]

He came to the conclusion that the totalitarian cruelty of Stalinism was not an aberration, but a logical end-product of Marxism, whose genealogy he examined in his monumental Main Currents of Marxism, his major work, published in 1976 to 1978.[11]

Leszek Kołakowski

Kolakowski became increasingly fascinated by the contribution that theological assumptions make to Western and, in particular, modern thought. For example, he began his Main Currents of Marxism with an analysis of the contribution that various forms of mediaeval Platonism made, centuries later, to the Hegelian view of history. In the work, he criticized the laws of dialectical materialism for being fundamentally flawed and found some of them being "truisms with no specific Marxist content", others "philosophical dogmas that cannot be proved by scientific means" but others being just "nonsense".[12]

Kołakowski defended the role which freedom plays in the human quest for the transcendent.

His Law of the Infinite Cornucopia asserted a doctrine of status quaestionis: for any given doctrine that one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of arguments by which one can support it.[13] Nevertheless, although human fallibility implies that we ought to treat claims to infallibility with scepticism, our pursuit of the higher (such as truth and goodness) is ennobling.

In 1968, Kołakowski became a visiting professor in the department of philosophy at McGill University in Montreal and in 1969 he moved to the University of California, Berkeley. In 1970, he became a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He remained mostly at Oxford, but he spent part of 1974 at Yale University, and from 1981 to 1994, he was a part-time professor at the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Although the Polish communist authorities officially banned his works in Poland, underground copies of them influenced the opinions of the Polish intellectual opposition. His 1971 essay Theses on Hope and Hopelessness (full title: In Stalin's Countries: Theses on Hope and Despair),[14][15] which suggested that self-organized social groups could gradually expand the spheres of civil society in a totalitarian state, helped to inspire the dissident movements of the 1970s that led to Solidarity and eventually to the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe in 1989. In the 1980s, Kołakowski supported Solidarity by giving interviews, writing and fundraising.[3]

In Poland, Kołakowski is revered as a philosopher and historian of ideas but also as an icon for opponents of communism. Adam Michnik has called Kołakowski "one of the most prominent creators of contemporary Polish culture".[16][17]

Kołakowski died on 17 July 2009, aged 81, in Oxford, England.[18] In his obituary, philosopher Roger Scruton wrote Kolakowski was a "thinker for our time" and that regarding Kolakowski's debates with intellectual opponents, "even if [...] nothing remained of the subversive orthodoxies, nobody felt damaged in their ego or defeated in their life's project, by arguments which from any other source would have inspired the greatest indignation".[19]

Awards
Kołakowski in 2007

In 1986, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Kołakowski for the Jefferson Lecture. Kołakowski's lecture "The Idolatry of Politics",[20] was reprinted in his collection of essays Modernity on Endless Trial.[21]

In 2003, the Library of Congress named Kołakowski the first winner of the John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities.[22][23]

His other awards include the following:

Bibliography
  • Klucz niebieski, albo opowieści budujące z historii świętej zebrane ku pouczeniu i przestrodze (The Key to Heaven), 1957
  • Jednostka i nieskończoność. Wolność i antynomie wolności w filozofii Spinozy (The Individual and the Infinite: Freedom and Antinomies of Freedom in Spinoza's Philosophy), 1958
  • 13 bajek z królestwa Lailonii dla dużych i małych (Tales from the Kingdom of Lailonia and the Key to Heaven), 1963. English edition: Hardcover: University of Chicago Press (October 1989). ISBN 978-0-226-45039-1.
  • Rozmowy z diabłem (US title: Conversations with the Devil / UK title: Talk of the Devil; reissued with The Key to Heaven under the title The Devil and Scripture, 1973), 1965
  • Świadomość religijna i więź kościelna, 1965
  • Od Hume'a do Koła Wiedeńskiego (the 1st edition:The Alienation of Reason, translated by Norbert Guterman, 1966/ later as Positivist Philosophy from Hume to the Vienna Circle),
  • Kultura i fetysze (Toward a Marxist Humanism, translated by Jane Zielonko Peel, and Marxism and Beyond), 1967
  • A Leszek Kołakowski Reader, 1971
  • Positivist Philosophy, 1971
  • TriQuartely 22, 1971
  • Obecność mitu (The Presence of Myth), 1972. English edition: Paperback: University of Chicago Press (January 1989). ISBN 978-0-226-45041-4.
  • ed. The Socialist Idea, 1974 (with Stuart Hampshire)
  • Husserl and the Search for Certitude, 1975
  • Główne nurty marksizmu. First published in Polish (3 volumes) as "Główne nurty marksizmu" (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1976) and in English (3 volumes) as "Main Currents of Marxism" (London: Oxford University Press, 1978). Current editions: Paperback (1 volume): W. W. Norton & Company (17 January 2008). ISBN 978-0393329438. Hardcover (1 volume): W. W. Norton & Company; First edition (7 November 2005). ISBN 978-0393060546.
  • Czy diabeł może być zbawiony i 27 innych kazań, 1982
  • Religion: If There Is No God, 1982
  • Bergson, 1985
  • Le Village introuvable, 1986
  • Metaphysical Horror, 1988. Revised edition: Paperback: University of Chicago Press (July 2001). ISBN 978-0-226-45055-1.
  • Pochwała niekonsekwencji, 1989 (ed. by Zbigniew Menzel)
  • Cywilizacja na ławie oskarżonych, 1990 (ed. by Paweł Kłoczowski)
  • Modernity on Endless Trial, 1990. Paperback: University of Chicago Press (June 1997). ISBN 978-0-226-45046-9. Hardcover: University of Chicago Press (March 1991). ISBN 978-0-226-45045-2.
  • God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal's Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism, 1995. Paperback: University of Chicago Press (May 1998). ISBN 978-0-226-45053-7. Hardcover: University of Chicago Press (November 1995). ISBN 978-0-226-45051-3.
  • Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal: Essays on Everyday Life, 1999
  • The Two Eyes of Spinoza and Other Essays on Philosophers, 2004
  • My Correct Views on Everything, 2005
  • Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?, 2007
  • Is God Happy?: Selected Essays, 2012
  • Jezus ośmieszony. Esej apologetyczny i sceptyczny, 2014
gollark: Oh, and it's all a giant maze of interlocking abstraction layers which manage to somehow erase decades of Moore's law because someone wanted to ship an entire browser for their desktop app or something, and which nobody actually understands.
gollark: Even the lowest level hardware stuff is vulnerable to weird exotic side channels, there's unauditable proprietary code running lots of stuff, and even outside of that people just cannot seem to write consistently secure code.
gollark: Actual implanted cybernetics are somewhat worrying because I don't really trust computers at this point, especially higher-performance ones.
gollark: All the cool people™ would run BrainLinux or something, and occasionally be blinded by incomprehensible driver problems.
gollark: You don't need *that*, just some method of projecting onto glasses in decent resolution without horrible focus problems, probably some way to blot out background too, and some kind of gesture control system (specialized gloves or radar maybe).

See also

References
  1. "Noam Chomsky Reading List". Left Reference Guide. Retrieved 8 January 2014.
  2. Leszek Kołakowski, "The Idolatry of Politics," reprinted in Modernity on Endless Trial (University of Chicago Press, 1990, paperback edition 1997), ISBN 0-226-45045-7, ISBN 0-226-45046-5, ISBN 978-0-226-45046-9, p. 158.
  3. Jason Steinhauer (2015). "'The Awakener of Human Hopes': Leszek Kolakowski", John W. Kluge Center at Library of Congress, September 18, 2015; accessed 01 December 2017
  4. "Philosopher Awarded Library's New Kluge Prize". Washington Post. 11 May 2003.
  5. McGrath, Alister (2010). Mere Theology. London: SPCK. p. 144. ISBN 978-0281062096.
  6. "Leszek Kolakowski: Polish-born philosopher and writer who produced". Independent.co.uk. 29 July 2009. Retrieved 3 February 2018.
  8. "Leszek Kolakowski". Telegraph.co.uk. 20 July 2009. Retrieved 3 February 2018.
  9. Foreign News: VOICE OF DISSENT, TIME Magazine, 14 October 1957
  10. Clive James (2007) Cultural Amnesia, p. 353
  11. Gareth Jones (17 July 2009) "Polish philosopher and author Kołakowski dead at 81". Reuters
  12. Kołakowski, Leszek (2005). Main Currents of Marxism. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. p. 909. ISBN 9780393329438.
  13. Kołakowski, Leszek (1982). Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. ASIN B01JXSH3HM., p.16
  14. Leszek Kołakowski (1971): Hope and Hopelessness. In: Survey, vol. 17, no. 3 (80)
  15. Kołakowski : In Stalin's Countries: Theses on Hope and Despair (1971). osaarchivum.org
  16. Adam Michnik (18 July 1985) "Letter from the Gdansk Prison," New York Review of Books.
  17. Norman Davies (5 October 1986) "True to Himself and His Homeland," New York Times.
  18. Leszek Kolakowski. Encyclopædia Britannica
  19. Scruton, Roger. "Leszek Kolakowski: thinker for our time". opendemocracy.net. Open Democracy. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  20. Jefferson Lecturers. neh.gov
  21. Leszek Kołakowski (1990) "The Idolatry of Politics," p. 158 in Modernity on Endless Trial. University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-45045-7.
  22. "Library of Congress Announces Winner of First John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences". Loc.gov. Retrieved 3 February 2018.
  23. Leszek Kołakowski, "What the Past is For" (speech given on 5 November 2003, on the occasion of the awarding of the Kluge Prize to Kołakowski).
  24. "Doktorzy Honorowi Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego". Retrieved 7 August 2019.
  25. "John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity (The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress)". Loc.gov. Retrieved 15 February 2017.

Further reading
  • Azurmendi, Joxe & Arregi, Joseba: Kołakowski, Oñati: EFA, 1972. ISBN 8472400530.

[]Category:Polish philosophers]]

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