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Mostrando postagens com marcador Leszek Kołakowski. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Leszek Kołakowski. Mostrar todas as postagens

quarta-feira, 29 de agosto de 2018

Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009) - Tony Judt (NYRBooks, 2009)

http://rosiebell.typepad.com/files/kozalowski.pdf
The New York Review of Books | September 24, 2009
Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009)
Tony Judt
I heard Leszek Kolakowski lecture only once. It was at Harvard in 1987 and lie was a guest at the seminar on political theory taught by the late Judith Shklar. Main Currents  of Marxism had recently been published in English and Kolakowski was at the height of his renown. So many students wanted to hear him speak that the lecture had been moved to a large public auditorium and guests were permitted to attend. I happened to be in Cambridge for a meeting and went along with some friends.
The seductively suggestive title of Kolakowski's talk was "The Devil in History." For a while there was silence as students, faculty, and visitors listened intently. Kolakowski's writ­ings were well known to many of those present and his penchant for irony and close reasoning was familiar. But even so, the audience was clearly having trouble following his argument. Try as they would, they could not decode the metaphor. An air of bewildered mystification started to fall across the auditorium. And then, about a third of the way through, my neighbor—Timothy Garton Ash—leaned across. "I've got it," he whispered. "He really is talking about the Devil." And so he was.

Leszek Kolakowski at the opening of the Académie Universelle des Cultures, Paris, January 29, 1993


It was a defining feature of Leszek Kolakowski's intellectual trajectory that he took evil extremely seriously. Among Marx's false premises, in his view, was the idea that all human shortcoming are rooted in social circumstances. Marx had "entirely overlooked the possibility that some sources of conflict and aggression may be inherent in the permanent characteristics of the species."1Or, as he expressed it in his Harvard lecture: "Evil ... is not contingent but a stubborn and unredeemable fact." For Leszek Kolakowski, who lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland and the Soviet takeover that followed, "the Devil is part of our experience. Our generation has seen enough of it for the message to be taken extremely seriously."2
Most of the obituaries that followed Kolakowski's recent death at the age of eighty-one altogether missed this side of the man. That is hardly surprising. Despite the fact that much of the world still believes in a God and practices religion, Western intellectuals and public commentators today are ill at ease with the idea of revealed faith. Public discussion of the subject lurches uncomfortably between overconfident denial ("God" certainly does not exist, and anyway it's all His fault) and blind allegiance. That an intellectual and scholar of Kolakowski's caliber should have taken seriously not just religion and religious ideas but the very Devil himself is a mystery to many of his otherwise admiring readers and something they have preferred to ignore.
Kolakowski's perspective is further complicated by the skeptical distance that he maintained from the uncritical nostrums of official religion (not least his own, Catholicisrn) and by his unique standing as the only internationally renowned scholar of Marxism to claim equal preeminence as a student of the history of religious thought.3Kolakowski's expertise in the study of Christian sects and sectarian writings adds depth and piquancy to his influential account of Marxism as a religious canon, with major and minor scriptures, hierarchical structures of textual authority, and heretical dissenters.
Leszek Kolakowski shared with his Oxford colleague and fellow Central European Isaiah Berlin a disabused suspicion of all dogmatic certainties and a rueful insistence upon acknowledging the price of any significant political or ethical choice:
There are good reasons why freedom of economic activity should he limited for the sake of security, and why money should not automatically produce more money. But the limitation of freedom should be called precisely that, and should not be called a higher form of freedom.4
He had little patience for those who supposed, in the teeth of twentieth-century history, that radical political improvement could he secured at little moral or human cost—or that the costs, if significant, could be discounted against future benefits. On the one hand he was consistently resistant to all simplified theorems purporting to capture timeless human verities. On the other, he regarded certain self‑evident features of the human condition as too obvious to be ignored however inconvenient:
There is nothing surprising in the fact that we strongly resist the implications of many banal truths; this happens in all fields of knowledge simply because most truisms about human life are unpleasant.5
But the above considerations need not—and for Kolakowski did not—suggest a reactionary or quietist response. Marxism might be a world-historical category error. But it did not follow that socialism had been an unrnitigated disaster; nor need we conclude that we cannot or should not work to improve the condition of humanity:
Whatever has been done in Western Europe to bring about more justice, more security, more educational opportunities, more welfare and more state responsibility for the poor and helpless, could never have been achieved without the pressure of socialist ideologies and socialist movements, for all their naiveties and delusions.... Past experience speaks in part for the socialist idea and in part against it.
This carefully balanced appreciation of the complexities of social reality—the idea that "human fraternity is disastrous as a political program but indispensable as a guiding sign"—already places Kolakowski at a tangent to most intellectuals in his generation. In East and West alike, the more common tendency was to oscillate between excessive confidence in the infinite possibilities for human improvement and callow dismissal of the very notion of progress. Kolakowski sat athwart this characteristic twentieth-century chasm Human fraternity, in his thinking, remained regulative, rather than a constitutive, idea.6
The implication here is the sort of practical compromise we associate today with social democracy—or, in continental Western Europe, with its Christian Democratic confrère. Except, of course that social democracy today—uncomfortably burdened with the connotations of "socialism" and its twentieth-century past—is all too often the love that dare not speak its name. Leszek Kolakowski was no social democrat. But he was critically active in the real political history of his time, and more than once. In the early years of the Communist state Kolakowski (though still not yet thirty) was the leading Marxist philosopher in Poland. After 1956, he shaped and articulated dissenting thought in a region where all critical opinion was doomed sooner or later to exclusion.
As professor of the history of philosophy at Warsaw University he delivered a famous public lecture in 1966 excoriating the Communist Party for betraying the people—an act of political courage that cost him his Party card. Two years later he was duly exiled to the West. Thereafter, Kolakowski served as a reference and beacon for the youthful domestic dissenters who were to form the core of Poland's political opposition from the mid-1970s, who provided the intellectual energy behind the Solidarity movement and who took effective power in 1989.
Leszek Kolakowski was thus an entirely engaged intellectual, notwithstanding his contempt for the pretensions and vanities of "engagement." Intellectual engagement and "responsibility," much debated and idolized in continental European thought in the generation following World War II, struck Kolakowski a: fundamentally vacant concepts:
Why should intellectuals be specifically responsible, and differently responsible than other people, and for what?... A more feeling of responsibility is a formal virtue that by itself does not result in a specific obligation: it is possible to feel responsible for a good cause as well as for an evil one.
This simple observation seems rarely to have occurred to a generation of French existentialists and their Anglo-American admirers. It may be that one needed to have experienced firsthand the attraction of utterly evil goals (of left and right alike) to otherwise responsible intellectuals in order to understand to the full the costs as well as the benefits of ideological commitment and moral unilateralism.
As the above suggests, Leszek Kolakowski was no conventional "continental philosopher" in the sense usually ascribed to the phrase in contemporary academic usage and with particular reference to Heidegger, Sartre, and their epigones. But then nor did he have much in common with Anglo-American thought in the form that carne to dominate English-speaking universities after World War II—which no doubt accounts for his isolation and neglect during his decades in Oxford.7The sources of Kolakowski's particular perspective, beyond his lifelong interrogation of Catholic theology, are probably better sought in experience than in epistemology. As he himself observed in his magnum opus, "All kinds of circumstances contribute to the formation of a world-view, and ... all phenomena are due to an inexhaustible multiplicity of causes."8
In Kolakowski's own case, the multiplicity of causes includes not just atraumatic childhood during World War II and the catastrophic history of communism in the years that followed, but the very distinctive setting of Poland as it passed through these cataclysmic decades. For while it is not always clear exactly where Kolakowski's particular thinking is leading, it is perfectly evident that it never carne from "nowhere."
The most cosmopolitan of Europe's modern philosophers—at home in five major languages and their accompanying cultures—and in exile for over twenty years, Kolakowski was never "rootless." In contrast with, for example, Edward Said, he questioned whether it was even possible in good faith to disclaim all forms of communal loyalty. Neither in place nor ever completely out of place, Kolakowski was a lifelong critic of nativist sentiment; yet he was adulated in his native Poland and rightly so. A European in his bones, Kolakowski never ceased to interrogate with detached skepticism the naive illusions of pan-Europeanists. whose homogenizing aspirations reminded him of the dreary utopian dogmas of another age. Diversity, so long as it was not idolized as an objective in its own right, seemed to him a more prudent aspiration and one that could only be assured by the preservation of distinctive national identities.9
It would be easy to conclude that Leszek Kolakowski was unique. His distinctive mix of irony and moral seriousness, religious sensibility and epistemological skepticism, social engagement and political doubt was truly rare (it should also be said that he was strikingly charismatic—exercising much the same magnetism at any gathering as the late Bernard Williams, and for some of the same reasons10). But it does not seem unreasonable to recall that for just these reasons—charisma included—he also stood firmly in a very particular line of descent.
His sheer range of cultivation and reference; the allusive, disabused wit; the uncomplaining acceptance of academic provincialism in the fortunate Western lands where he found refuge; the experience and memory of Poland's twentieth century imprinted, as it were, on his mischievously expressive features: all of these identify the late Leszek Kolakowski as a true Central European intellectual—perhaps the last. For two generations of men and women, born between 1880 and 1930, the characteristically Central European experience of the twentieth century consisted of a multilingual education in the sophisticated urban heartland of European civilization, honed, capped, and side-shadowed by the experience of dictatorship, war, occupation, devastation, and genocide in that selfsame heartland.
No sane person could want to repeat such an experience merely in order to replicate the quality of thought and thinkers that such a sentimental education produced. There is something more than a little distasteful about expressions of nostalgia for the lost intellectual world of Communist Eastern Europe, shading uncomfortably dose to regret for the loss of other people's repression. But as Leszek Kolakowski would have been the first to point out, the relationship between Central Europe's twentieth-century history and its astonishing intellectual riches nevertheless existed; it cannot simply be dismissed.
What it produced was what Judith Shklar, in another context, once described as a "liberalism of fear": the uncompromising defense of reason and moderation born of firsthand experience of the consequences of ideological excess; the ever-present awareness of the possibility of catastrophe, at its worst when misunderstood as opportunity or renewal, of the temptations of totalizing thought in all its protean variety. In the wake of twentieth-century history, this was the Central European lesson. If we are very  fortunate, we shall not have to relearn it again for some time to come; when we do, we had better hope that there will be someone around to teach it. Until then, we would do well to reread Kolakowski.
l“The Myth of Human Self-ldentity,” in The Socialist Idea: A Reappraisal, edited by Leszek Kolakowski and Stuart Hampshire (Basic Books, 1974), p. 32.
2“The Devil in History,” in My Correct Everything (St. Augustine's), p. 133.
For a representative instance of Kolakowski's approach to the history of religious thought, see, for example,God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal's Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism (University of Chicago Press, 1995). It would not he too much to say that Kolakowski was a twentieth-century Pascalian, cautiously placing his bet on reason in place of faith.
4Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 226-227.
Kolakowski and Hampshire, The Socialist Idea, p. 17.
6Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial, p. 144.
Elsewhere, his achievements were copiously acknowledged. In 1983 he was awarded the Erasmus Prize. In 2004 he was the first recipient of the Kluge Prize of the Library of Congress, where he had been the Jefferson Lecturer twenty years previously. Three years later he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize.
8Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Volume III: The Breakdown (Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 339. I am grateful to Leon Wieseltier for reminding me of this reference.
9Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial, p. 59. For Edward Said, see Out of Place: A Memoir (Vintage, 2000).
10At a party in his honor following the Cambridge lecture, I recall watching with bemused admiration and no little envy as virtually every young woman in the room migrated to the comer where a sixty-year-old philosopher, already wizened and supported by a cane, held court before their adoring eyes. One should never underestimate the magnetic attraction of sheer intelligence.

domingo, 11 de janeiro de 2015

Deus esta' feliz? A pergunta faz sentido? - Leszek Kołakowski responde...

Um texto antigo, mas sempre atual, pois responde a uma pergunta, na verdade sem responder, sobre as relações dos homens com os seus deuses e a busca da felicidade (terrena, espiitual?)
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Is God Happy?
By Leszek Kołakowski
The New York Review of Books - December 20, 2012

The first biography of Siddhartha, the future Buddha, reveals that for a long time he was entirely unaware of the wretchedness of the human condition. A royal son, he spent his youth in pleasure and luxury, surrounded by music and worldly delights. He was already married by the time the gods decided to enlighten him. One day he saw a decrepit old man; then the suffering of a very sick man; then a corpse. It was only then that the existence of old age, suffering, and death—all the painful aspects of life to which he had been oblivious—was brought home to him. Upon seeing them he decided to withdraw from the world to become a monk and seek the path to Nirvana.

We may suppose, then, that he was happy as long as the grim realities of life were unknown to him; and that at the end of his life, after a long and arduous journey, he attained the genuine happiness that lies beyond the earthly condition.

Can Nirvana be described as a state of happiness? Those who, like the present author, cannot read the early Buddhist scriptures in the original, cannot be certain; the word “happiness” does not occur in the translations. It is also hard to be sure whether the meaning of words like “consciousness” or “self” corresponds to their meaning in modern languages. We are told that Nirvana entails the abandonment of the self. This might be taken to suggest that there can be, as the Polish philosopher Henryk Elzenberg claims, happiness without a subject—just happiness, unrelated to anyone’s being happy. Which seems absurd. But our language is never adequate to describe absolute realities.

Some theologians have argued that we can speak of God only by negation: by saying what He is not. Similarly, perhaps we cannot know what Nirvana is and can only say what it is not. Yet it is hard to be satisfied with mere negation; we would like to say something more. And assuming that we are allowed to say something about what it is to be in the state of Nirvana, the hardest question is this: Is a person in this state aware of the world around him? If not—if he is completely detached from life on earth—what kind of reality is he a part of? And if he is aware of the world of our experience, he must also be aware of evil, and of suffering. But is it possible to be aware of evil and suffering and still be perfectly happy?

The same question arises with regard to the happy residents of the Christian heaven. Do they live in total isolation from our world? If not—if they are aware of the wretchedness of earthly existence, of the dreadful things that happen in the world, its diabolical sides, its evil and pain and suffering—how can they be happy in any recognizable sense of the word?

(I should make it clear that I am not using the word “happy” here in the sense in which it might mean no more than “content” or “satisfied,” as in “Are you happy with this seat in the airplane?” or “I am quite happy with this sandwich.” The word for happiness has a broad range of meaning in English; in other European languages its meaning is more restricted, hence the German saying “I am happy, aber glücklich bin ich nicht.”)

Both Buddhism and Christianity suggest that the ultimate liberation of the soul is also perfect serenity: total peace of the spirit. And perfect serenity is tantamount to perfect immutability. But if my spirit is in a state of immutability, so that nothing can influence it, my happiness will be like the happiness of a stone. Do we really want to say that a stone is the perfect embodiment of salvation and Nirvana?

Since being truly human involves the ability to feel compassion, to participate in the pain and joy of others, the young Siddhartha could have been happy, or rather could have enjoyed his illusion of happiness, only as a result of his ignorance. In our world that kind of happiness is possible only for children, and then only for some children: for a child under five, say, in a loving family, with no experience of great pain or death among those close to him. Perhaps such a child can be happy in the sense that I am considering here. Above the age of five we are probably too old for happiness. We can, of course, experience transient pleasure, moments of wonderment and great enchantment, even ecstatic feelings of unity with God and the universe; we can know love and joy. But happiness as an immutable condition is not accessible to us, except perhaps in the very rare cases of true mystics.

That is the human condition. But can we attribute happiness to the divine being? Is God happy?

The question is not absurd. Our conventional view of happiness is as an emotional state of mind. But is God subject to emotion? Certainly, we are told that God loves His creatures, and love, at least in the human world, is an emotion. But love is a source of happiness when it is reciprocated, and God’s love is reciprocated only by some of His subjects, by no means all: some do not believe that He exists, some do not care whether He exists or not, and others hate Him, accusing Him of indifference in the face of human pain and misery. If He is not indifferent, but subject to emotion like us, He must live in a constant state of sorrow when He witnesses human suffering. He did not cause it or want it, but He is helpless in the face of all the misery, the horrors and atrocities that nature brings down on people or people inflict on each other.

If, on the other hand, He is perfectly immutable, He cannot be perturbed by our misery; He must therefore be indifferent. But if He is indifferent, how can He be a loving father? And if He is not immutable, then He takes part in our suffering, and feels sorrow. In either case, God is not happy in any sense we can understand.

We are forced to admit that we cannot understand the divine being—omnipotent, omniscient, knowing everything in Himself and through Himself, not as something external to Him, and unaffected by pain and evil.

The true God of the Christians, Jesus Christ, was not happy in any recognizable sense. He was embodied and suffered pain, he shared the suffering of his fellow men, and he died on the cross.

In short, the word “happiness” does not seem applicable to divine life. But nor is it applicable to human beings. This is not just because we experience suffering. It is also because, even if we are not suffering at a given moment, even if we are able to experience physical and spiritual pleasure and moments beyond time, in the “eternal present” of love, we can never forget the existence of evil and the misery of the human condition. We participate in the suffering of others; we cannot eliminate the anticipation of death or the sorrows of life.

Must we, then, accept Schopenhauer’s dismal doctrine that all pleasant feelings are purely negative, namely the absence of pain? Not necessarily. There is no reason to maintain that the things we experience as good—aesthetic delight, erotic bliss, physical and intellectual pleasure of all kinds, enriching conversation, and the love of friends—must all be seen as pure negation. Such experiences strengthen us; they make us spiritually healthier. But they cannot do anything about either malum culpae or malum poenae—evil or suffering.

There are, of course, people who consider themselves happy because they are successful: healthy and rich, lacking nothing, respected (or feared) by their neighbors. Such people might believe that their life is what happiness is. But this is merely self-deception; and even they, from time to time at least, realize the truth. And the truth is that they are failures like the rest of us.

An objection could be raised here. If we have absorbed true wisdom of the higher sort, we might believe, like Alexander Pope, that whatever is, is right; or, like Leibniz, that we dwell in the best of all logically possible worlds. And if in addition to accepting something like this intellectually, in addition, that is, to simply believing that all must be right with the world because it is under the constant guidance of God, we also feel in our hearts that this is so, and experience the splendor, goodness, and beauty of the universe in our daily life, then can we not be said to be happy? The answer is: no, we cannot.

Happiness is something we can imagine but not experience. If we imagine that hell and purgatory are no longer in operation and that all human beings, every single one without exception, have been saved by God and are now enjoying celestial bliss, lacking nothing, perfectly satisfied, without pain or death, then we can imagine that their happiness is real and that the sorrows and suffering of the past have been forgotten. Such a condition can be imagined, but it has never been seen. It has never been seen.

Leszek Kołakowski was professor of philosophy at the University of Warsaw until March 1968 when he was formally expelled for political reasons. He was later a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He was the author of several books, including Main Currents in Marxism. The article in this issue will appear in the collection of essays Is God Happy?, to be published in February by Basic Books. He died in 2009.
Translated from the Polish by Agnieszka Kołakowska.