Library of Congress Announces Winner of First John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences on November 5, 2003.Readers,
I re-edited this copied text to concentrate on Leszek Kolakowski's biography
only, because it is an interesting alternative for the Wikipedia link.
Pieter
Arnhem September 14, 2006
P.S.- For the original article read;
www.loc.gov/today/pr/2003/03-195.htmlLeszek KolakowskiProfessor Kolakowski, who now resides in Oxford, England, was born in
Radom, Poland, in 1927, is a philosopher focused on important questions, an historian of human thought, an essayist of enormous range, and an outstanding spokesman for, and exemplar of, European culture.
Professor Kolakowski is the author of more than 30 books and 400 other writings in a wide variety of formats and in four languages: primarily in
Polish, but also in
French,
English and
German. His principal lines of inquiry have been in the
history of philosophy and the philosophy of religion.
Dr. Billington, the
Librarian of Congress commented: "
Very rarely can one identify a deep, reflective thinker who has had such a wide range of inquiry and demonstrable importance to major political events in his own time. Out of deep scholarship and relentless inquiry, Leszek Kolakowski made clear from within the Soviet system the intellectual bankruptcy of the Marxist ideology, and the necessity of freedom, tolerance of diversity and the search for transcendence for reestablishing individual dignity. His voice was fundamental for the fate of Poland, and influential in Europe as a whole. In addition to his sustained anti-dogmatic philosophical inquiries, he writes essays that are readable, provocative, and sometimes ironic and humorous. With charm, resourcefulness and gentle self-mockery, he raises questions about the sometimes mindless modernity of contemporary Europe and North America. He is a true humanist: philosopher, intellectual historian and cultural critic. Throughout his creative life he has asked big questions with the kind of intellectual honesty and depth."
When he was 10 years old, Kolakowski's family was deported by the Germans to central Poland. He did not attend school, but read books with occasional private lessons and took his final exams as an external student in the underground school system. He eventually studied philosophy in
Lodz and earned his doctorate from
Warsaw University in
1953, later becoming a professor and chairman of its section on the
history of philosophy (
1959-68). An
orthodox Marxist at first, he was sent by the party in 1950 to Moscow on a course for promising communist intellectuals. It was there that he initially became aware of "
the enormity of material and spiritual desolation caused by the Stalinist system."
The death of Stalin in 1953 stirred ferment in Poland with calls for democratization and conflict in the party ranks. In
June 1956 worker riots in
Poznan resulted in many deaths, and in October of that year
Gomulka was chosen as party leader in defiance of Moscow. Kolakowski had by then become one of Poland's leading
revisionist Marxists. His publication of "
What Is Socialism?" --
a short, incisive critique of Stalinism -- was banned in Poland, but circulated privately and was translated into English the next year. Disillusioned with the
stagnation of communism, he became increasingly outspoken. He was
expelled from the party in
1966, dismissed from his professorship two years later, and went into exile.
But his works, appearing in underground editions, continued to shape the opinions of the Polish intellectual opposition. His essay "
Theses on Hope and Hopelessness," in the Paris Polish-language journal
Kultura (
1971) proposed an
evolutionary strategy designed to weaken the system. His concept inspired the activities of the Committee for the Defense of Workers and of the "
Flying University," of which Kolakowski was a foreign member.
The relationships between freedom and belief, examined in many different contexts, have been lifelong themes of his scholarly work, and are displayed fully in a wide range of essays written in a non-technical language and accessible to a wide range of readers. In his, "
The Death of Utopia Reconsidered" (
1983), he explains his view of philosophy:
After leaving Poland, Kolakowski became a visiting professor in the department of philosophy at McGill University (1968-69), the University of California, Berkeley (1969-70), and a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford (1970). Based in Oxford since then, he spent part of 1974 at Yale, and from 1981 to 1994 was a professor part-time in the Committee on Social Thought and the department of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He has been a fellow of scholarly societies in many countries and has received numerous academic honors and awards.
What Kolakowski exemplifies and defends is the treatment of every individual as a rational and freely acting subject, aware that there is a spiritual side of life, able to have faith, yet eschewing absolute certainty of either an empirical or transcendental sort. It is the essence of a vibrant human culture to honor the universality of human rights while welcoming conflict of values, and repeated self- questioning, with what he calls "
an inconsistent scepticism:"
For more than a half century, Professor Kolakowski's scholarship has analyzed and affirmed both the underlying values and the
desirable diversity of the European heritage. He has been a "
Theoretician of European culture" as the heading proclaimed over the bibliography of his previously banned works that was published in Poland as it was passing from communism to freedom in 1990.
Beginning in 1958 with
The Individual and Infinity, a lengthy book on
Spinoza, Kolakowski published a series of major studies on a wide range of European philosophers:
The Philosophy of Existence,
the Defeat of Existence (1965),
Positivist Philosophy from Hume to the Vienna Circle (1966, reprinted 2003),
Husserl and the Search for Certitude (1975), works on
Bergson (1957 and 1984), and
Metaphysical Horror in 1988. He was dealing sympathetically with the thought of, respectively, an unorthodox Dutch Jew, French existentialists, agnostic English and Austrian empiricists, a German phenomenologist, a French believer in intuition and "
the life force," and those who seek divine answers for human concerns.
Kolakowski's early advocacy of Marxism placed him in initial opposition to traditional Polish Catholicism. But it was more in the spirit of
Erasmus'
Praise of Folly (
Lof der Zotheid), than of Marxist atheism that he wrote his most famous early essay, "
The Jester and the Priest," expressing his preference for the former. He developed a deep interest in the religious dimension of human experience in general and in the Christian base of European civilization in particular.
In 1965 he published in Polish a monumental study that he had been working on since 1958:
Religious Consciousness and the Church: Studies in 17th Century Non-denominational Christianity. (It has been translated into French, but not yet -- like many of his other major writings -- into English.) In this work, he brought to life a vast array of little-known thinkers from all over Europe who embraced Christian ideas, but radically rejected affiliation with any existing church. In opposition to the Church's "law," they all favored a religion of direct "grace." The research for this book led him deeper into the mystical mode of knowing and confirmed his distaste for institutionalized "truth" -- taken then to mean statist Marxism more than dogmatic Catholicism. His many writings on religion suggest the validity of the continuing quest for transcendent answers along with the near certainty that absolute answers are unobtainable in philosophy and dangerous in politics. His 1973 lecture, "
The Revenge of the Sacred on Secular Culture," contends that the sacred is essential for culture as an ordering structure.
He deals with deep questions in a non-didactic and often ironic and gently self-mocking way in the treatises "
If there is no God: on God, the Devil, Sin and other Worries in the So-called Philosophy of Religion" (1988). In his, God Owes Us Nothing (1985), he reflects on what he calls "Pascal's sad religion" of belief in a "hidden God" not reachable by reason. The conversion to Christianity of the great 17th century scientist plunged Pascal, like the modern man he prefigures, into what Kolakowski describes as "a never-ending state of suspense and doubt on the one matter that was really important."
Out of his sustained and disciplined study of philosophy, Kolakowski crafted his best known and most influential work: his three-volume
Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution (1976-78). Written in exile from Poland, it was, and remains, the most lucid and comprehensive history of the origins, structure and posthumous development of the system of thought that had the greatest impact on the 20th century. It was a prophetic work, written at a time when Marxism still provided the ideological glue for a Soviet system that was thought to have an indefinite life expectancy. He described with his customary objectivity the main ideas and diverse currents of Marxist thinking, but at the same time characterized Marxism as "the greatest fantasy of our century... [which] began in a Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalin."
His ideas informed the
anti-totalitarian youth movement inside Poland, and he became an adviser and active supporter in exile of the
Solidarity movement that challenged and began unraveling in a non-violent way the Soviet system in Eastern Europe. As one of the leaders of Solidarity put it:
Some of Kolakowski's recent writings have been seen as a
powerful alternative to the triumph of
post-modernism and its
deconstruction of the idea of truth. One reviewer wrote:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Praise_of_Folly