Leszek Kołakowski

Phantom

What philosophers busily try to put in abstract and often abstruse terms, a mystic simply sees. From time to time, he describes his experience of accidentality of the things created, saying that the world is an illusion. So bluntly expressed, the thought is, of course, unacceptable to the Judaic, Christian or Islamic faiths, because each of them invariably proclaims the reality of all that God has called into existence (otherwise Jesus would only be a phantom), but is traditionally embedded in the Buddhist and Hindu heritage.

What is in the present, on closer examination shrinks to an elusive point, which by definition disappears as soon as we try to catch it. Thus, anything that is “in” time, never “is”; you can talk about it as something that was or will be, but these expressions are only meaningful when the perceiving subject is assumed. Things that do not have memory, owe their continuous identity only to our minds, but in themselves they hold no past and no future, so no identity whatsoever.

We bestow perseverance to the world of things that are subject to destruction, and thus keep it in existence; but in the very act of mental creation of the world, we become aware of the lack of our own identity, if it has to be something more than the content of individual memory. This in turn means that whatever is, is timeless. In this way, we go back to the great initiators of European metaphysics, Parmenides and Heraclitus, who, from two opposite sides, set in motion this dizzying carousel of concepts: what changes, is not; what is, is beyond time; if there is nothing out of time, nothing exist.

Leszek Kolakowski – If there is no God

Alienation

The point of departure is the eschatological question: how is man to be reconciled with himself and the world? According to Hegel this comes about when Mind, having passed through the Agony of the Cross, which is the travail of history, finally comes to understand the world as an exteriorization of itself; it assimilates and ratifies the world as its own truth, divests it of its objective character.

Marx, like Hegel, looks forward to man’s final reconciliation with the world, himself, and others. Following Feuerbach against Hegel, he does not see this in terms of the recognition of being as a product of self-knowledge, but in the recognition of sources of alienation in man’s terrestrial lot and in the overcoming of this state of affairs. On the other hand, he disagrees with Feuerbach’s view that alienation results from the mythopoeic consciousness which makes God the concentration of human values; instead, he regards this consciousness as itself the product of the alienation of labour.

Alienated labour is a consequence of the division of labour, which in its turn is due to technological progress, and is therefore an inevitable feature of history. Marx agrees with Hegel against Feuerbach in seeing alienation not merely as something destructive and inhuman but as a condition of the future all-round development of mankind. But he dissents from Hegel in regarding history up to the present time not as the progressive conquest of freedom but as a process of degradation that has reached its nadir in the maturity of capitalist society.

Alienation means the subjugation of man by his own works, which have assumed the guise of independent things. The commodity character of products and their expression in money form has the effect that the social process of exchange is regulated by factors operating independently of human will. Alienation gives rise to private property and to political institutions. The state creates a fictitious community where human relations inevitably take the form of a conflict of egoisms. The enslavement of the collectivity to its own products entails the mutual isolation of individuals.

Leszek Kolakowski – Main Currents of Marxism. Vol. 1, Recapitulation

The Success of Solipsism

Thinkers obsessed with a vision of monistic order, who are trying to reduce all kinds of human behavior, all thoughts and all responses to one type of motivation, invariably succeed.

We can, for example, decide that human self-affirmation in their significance (“the will to power”, the pursuit of excellence, etc.) is the basic impulse which dominates all patterns of behavior, including sexual; we can also carry out the reduction in quite a different direction… There are no such facts imaginable (not to mention actually known) that could ever make a stubborn monist not to be right, no matter how he determines his fundamental principle of explanation.

Monistic reductions are always successful and convincing: Hegelian, Freudian, Marxist, Adlerian – each of which is resistant to allegations, while consistently closed in its dogma, and not trying to make any concessions in favor of common sense; its explanatory mechanism can function indefinitely. This also applies to the vicissitudes of myths, symbols, rituals and religious beliefs.

Leszek Kolakowski

The best of all possible worlds

The claim that beliefs in themselves do not have a grain of truth, and at the same time that an important or even guiding social role of religion is to meet the needs of cognition, is logically impeccable. We never lack arguments to justify the doctrine in which, for whatever reason, we want to believe.

Of course, faith would not be needed, if the course of world affairs applied directly and reliably to the norms of justice, as this would mean that we live in Paradise. Adam and Eve did not believe in the existence of God in the sense in which their descendants believed, as they lived in a real theocracy under direct and visible rule of God.

There is no such thing as rational worship. If we talk about God’s qualities and works as objects that can be conceptually separated, it is only because in this way our finite minds try to capture Infinity, which we can not understand.

Neither party was convinced, nor will probably ever find the arguments of the opposing party convincing, which is also a common fate of all the fundamental questions in philosophy for the past twenty-five centuries.

Leszek Kolakowski – Religion: If there is no God