Leszek Kołakowski

Leszek Kołakowski
The social conditions that nourished and made use of this ideology can still revive; perhaps - who knows? - the virus is dormant, waiting for the next opportunity. Dreams about the perfect society belong to the enduring stock of civilization.

Leszek Kołakowski (23 October 1927 – 17 July 2009) was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He studied philosophy at Łódź University and in 1953 earned a doctorate from Warsaw University, with a thesis on Spinoza. He was a professor and chairman of Warsaw University's department of the history of philosophy from 1959 to 1968. In his youth, Kołakowski was a communist. However, he broke with Stalinism, becoming a "revisionist Marxist" advocating a humanist interpretation of Marx.

Sourced

• A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.
  • Metaphysical Horror (1988)

• We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.
  • "The Idolatry of Politics", U.S. Jefferson Lecture speech (1986)

• Communism was not the crazy fantasy of a few fanatics, nor the result of human stupidity and baseness; it was a real, very real part of the history of the twentieth century, and we cannot understand this history of ours without understanding communism. We cannot get rid of this specter by saying it was just “human stupidity,” or “human corruptibility.” The specter is stronger than the spells we cast on it. It might come back to life.
  • Introduction to My Correct Views on Everything

• When I collect my experiences, I notice that fascist is a person who holds one of the following beliefs (by way of example): 1) That people should wash themselves, rather than go dirty; 2) that freedom of the press in America is preferable to the ownership of the whole press by one ruling party; 3) that people should not be jailed for their opinions. both communist and anti-communist - 4), that racial criteria, in favour of either whites or blacks, are inadvisable in admission to Universities; 5 ) that torture is condemnable, no matter who applies it. (Roughly speaking "fascist" was the same as "liberal".) Fascist was, by definition, a person who happened to have been in jail in a communist country. The refugees from Czechoslovakia in 1968 were sometimes met in Germany by very progressive and absolutely revolutionary leftists with placards saying "fascism will not pass".
  • "My Correct Views on Everything" (1974)

• It would be silly, of course, to be either 'for' or 'against' modernity tout court, not only because it is pointless to try to stop the development of technology, science, and economic rationality, but because both modernity and antimodernity may be expressed in barbarous and antihuman terms.
  • "Modernity on Endless Trial" (1986)

• I do not know what postmodern is and how it differs from the premodern, nor do I feel that I ought to know.
  • "Modernity on Endless Trial" (1986)

• Culture, when it loses its sacred sense, loses all sense. With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection which could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is 'in principle' an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man's total autonomy and thus to deny man himself.
  • "The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture" (1973)

• The abolition of the market means not only that the consumers—that is all members of society—are robbed of virtually all choice of consumption and all influence over production; it also means that the information and communication are monopolized by the State, as they too need a vast material base in order to operate. The abolition of the market means, then, that both material and intellectual assets would be totally rationed. To say nothing of the inefficiency of production convincingly demonstrated in the history of communism, this economy requires an omnipotent police state. Briefly: the abolition of the market means a gulag society.
  • "The Self-Poisoning of the Open Society"

• The concept of original sin gives us a penetrating insight into human destiny.
  • "On the Dilemmas of the Christian Legacy"

• I, then a young and omniscient student (alas, I was soon to lose both these virtues)...
  • Metaphysical Horror (1988)

• Far from secularization inexorably leading to the death of religion, it has instead given birth to the search for new forms of religious life. The imminent victory of the Kingdom of Reason has never materialized. As a whole, mankind can never get rid of the need for religious self-identification: who am I, where did I come from, where do I fit in, why am I responsible, what does my life mean, how will I face death? Religion is a paramount aspect of human culture. Religious need cannot be excommunicated from culture by rationalist incantation. Man does not live by reason alone.
  • Interview with Nathan Gardels (1991)

• It seems to us that the past is our property. Well, on the contrary — we are its property, because we are not able to make changes in it, while it fills the whole of our existence.
  • Original: "Otóż przeciwnie – to my jesteśmy jej własnością, ponieważ nie jesteśmy w stanie dokonać w niej zmian, ona natomiast wypełnia całość naszego istnienia."
  • Klucz niebieski albo opowieści biblijne zebrane ku pouczeniu i przestrodze

• We sometimes imagine, under the influence of Spenglerian philosophy or some other kind of "historical morphology," that we live in a similar age [to the Romans], the last witnesses of a condemned civilization. But condemned by whom? Not by God, but by some supposed "historical laws." For although we do not know any historical laws, we are in fact able of inventing them quite freely, and such laws, once invented, can then be realized in the form of self-fulfilling prophecies.
  • "Looking for the Barbarians"

Main Currents Of Marxism (1978)

Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century.

Translation by P. S. Falla, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London, 2005, ISBN 978-0-393-32943-8

• Marxism was a philosophical or semi-philosophical doctrine and a political ideology which was used by the communist state as the main source of legitimacy and the obligatory faith.
  • New Preface, p. v

• The history of utopias is no less fascinating than the history of metallurgy or of chemical engineering.
  • New Preface, p. vi

• The social conditions that nourished and made use of this ideology can still revive; perhaps - who knows? - the virus is dormant, waiting for the next opportunity. Dreams about the perfect society belong to the enduring stock of civilization.
  • New Preface, p. vi

• Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century. It was a dream offering the prospect of a society of perfect unity, in which all human aspirations would be fulfilled and all values reconciled.
  • Epilogue, p. 1206

• In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be.
  • Epilogue, p. 1208

• But we may safely predict that Marx himself will become more and more what he already is: a chapter from a textbook of the history of ideas, a figure that no longer evokes any emotions, simply the author of one the 'great books' of the nineteenth century - one of those books that very few bother to read but whose titles are known to the educated public.
  • New Epilogue, p. 1214 (See also: Karl Marx - History - Statistics...)

Unsourced

• Buddyzm jest jedną z najpiękniejszych i najmądrzejszych wiar, jakie ludzkość stworzyła.
  • Buddhism is one of the best and wisest faith that humanity has created.

Quotes about Kołakowski

• As for those who dream of rerunning the Marxist tape, digitally remastered and free of irritating Communist scratches, they would be well-advised to ask sooner rather than later just what it is about all-embracing “systems” of thought that leads inexorably to all-embracing “systems” of rule. On this, as we have seen, Leszek Kołakowski can be read with much profit.
  • Tony Judt. "Goodbye to All That?" LRB Sept 21, 2006