I had waited to post an obituary of Kolakowski, because of the time that news of his death became known. So here's the obituary from The Times.
Leszek Kolakowskis academic field was hard to pin down. He was at once philosopher, historian, theologian, political scientist and literary critic. As a philosopher he radically changed his views several times during his life in ways that reflected the postwar political developments of his native Poland.
He began as an enthusiastic Marxist, becoming chair of Warsaw Universitys philosophy department. Later, he became one of the regimes most outspoken revisionists, advocating a democratic, humanist Marxism. But he then rejected that too, concluding that a democratic communism would be like fried snowballs.
His thoughts led to his expulsion from the party and, later on, his sacking from his position at the university. He was forced to flee Poland in 1968, whereupon he took up an international career, teaching on both sides of the Atlantic, at Berkeley and Oxford. By that time he had ceased to regard himself as Marxist, and his professorship at Berkeley left him highly critical of the left wing, in particular of the student New Left.
Despite having a reputation for massive erudition, he was far from being an ivory tower academic. His ideas were often prescriptive, and he formulated the concept of constructing selforganised social groups that would gradually and peacefully expand the spheres of civil society within totalitarian states. Many believe that this directly inspired the dissident movements in Poland in the 1970s that led to Solidarity and the collapse of the communist monopoly of power in 1989.
Leszek Kolakowski was born in Radom, Poland, in 1927. His father was a publicist, and in his youth he was often surrounded by books. He later recalled that when he was a boy, during the German occupation of Poland in the Second World War, he spent a lot of time at a country house reading from its library. After the war he joined the Communist Youth Organisation (ZMP) and enrolled at the University of Lodz to study philosophy. He quickly excelled at his studies and went on to complete a doctorate at Warsaw University in 1953. He taught at Warsaw University from 1950 to 1959 and also at the Polish United Workers Partys school until 1954. He was also a staff member of
Po Prostu, a weekly run by communist intellectuals.
Stalin tightened his grip on Poland in 1952 and introduced a new constitution. Workers protests ensued and, by 1956, the calls for a relaxation in political repression had reached fever pitch. Kolakowski became one of the leading voices for democratisation in Poland, and the so-called October thaw brought an easing of some of the restrictions on cultural expression.
Although the basic political system had not changed, Polish poets and novelists soon took advantage of the new-found intellectual freedoms. In 1959 Kolakowski wrote an important essay,
The Priest and the Jester, in which he confronted Marxist dogmatism with a sceptical eye that was symbolised by the character of the jester. Its publication made him the best-known philosopher in Poland at the time. With courageous indignation, he made thinly veiled criticisms of basic Marxist doctrines and, as a result, he was labelled as a revisionist.
Kolakowski became head of history of modern philosophy at the University of Warsaw in 1959. His career there did not run smoothly. His books were banned and, after a controversial speech that he made in 1966 on the tenth anniversary of the October thaw, he was expelled from the Polish United Workers Party. Two years later he was fired from the university, and he escaped from Poland in 1968 with his Jewish wife during the extreme nationalist campaign against Zionists. For the next 20 years it was forbidden to refer to his works.
In 1969 Kolakowski taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He arrived at the height of 1960s left-wing US student radicalism. It was a considerable shock for him. The students views did not sit well with what he had experienced in Poland and his reputation as a left-wing thinker evaporated as quickly as his Marxist views.
He wrote then: There are better arguments in favour of democracy and freedom than the fact that Marx is not quite so hostile to them as he first appears.
Kolakowskis criticism of the Left became increasingly trenchant as his career developed in the West. In 1978 he wrote three volumes called
Main Currents in Marxism. It was a comprehensive overview of the movement and examined the origins and theory of dialectical materialism and his amazement at how communism had become the rallying point for so many different and mutually hostile forces.
His critique ran from the Classical philosopher Plotinus, whose work Kolakowski considered foundational, right through to Maoism. At the end of the epilogue of the third volume, he concluded: At present, Marxism neither interprets the world nor changes it: it is merely a repertoire of slogans serving to organise various interests, most of them completely remote from those with which Marxism originally identified itself.
Kolakowski came to treat all utopian visions of society with suspicion, believing that their victory would lead to a totalitarian nightmare and the utter downfall of civilisation.
However, he also rejected what he considered to be their opposite, namely armchair scepticism, which he thought would condemn us to a hopeless stagnation. Thus utopian ideals for society such as the concept of human fraternity could be regarded as a guiding sign and a regulative rather than a constitutive idea. In light of his belief that no perfect model exists for societys ills, the important thing was to find practical, workable solutions.
After his appointment in the 1970s as a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, Kolakowski became increasingly interested in ethics, metaphysics and religion. In particular, he wrote about the modern failure of the modern West to provide a workable substitute for Christianity, believing that a cult of reason had, for many, made it unworkable. Furthermore, since religious cosmology was thought by many to have been discredited, he thought that it followed that Christian morality too could no longer guide them either. His criticism then was aimed at how many in the West try to assert our modernity, but escape from its effects by various intellectual devices, in order to convince ourselves that meaning can be restored or recovered apart from the traditional religious legacy of mankind.
Kolakowski also attacked what he saw as modernitys moral pluralism that, he thought, in many instances involved an unthinking homage to the cultures of others. By refusing to make critical value judgments about other civilisations one was, he thought, diminishing the value of ones own culture. In his essay
Looking for Barbarians he argued that there was a need for people to receive a concrete moral education on the difference between right and wrong to maintain society and self-respect.
His profound knowledge of the history of religion led him eventually to deny the idea that science had a monopoly on truth and meaning. Though he considered that modern Christianity represented a painful compromise between the philosophy of Ancient Athens and the mystical texts of Jerusalem, he did not reject its value. Scientific evidence, for him, remained based on an act of faith, just as much as religion. To define science as true simply because it had a more immediate practical application to problem solving seemed arbitrary.
Kolakowski offered a critical analysis of a wide range of arguments for religious beliefs. He sought to understand them through their historical, anthropological and cultural backgrounds. In Christianity, for example, he saw the development of God from a basis in early Greek philosophy of the One, later merged with the Jewish concept of a loving God. Thus he maintained a cultural and human conception of religion.
He also held that rational inquiry could never settle religious questions such as whether or not God exists. Nor could it ultimately provide a satisfactory foundation for morality. His approach was, ultimately, unpalatable to both religious believers, whose faith he explained culturally, and scientists, whose knowledge he thought was ultimately based on faith.
For all the breadth of his intellect and the struggles that he endured in his career, Kolakowski often displayed a surprising vein of humour and self-irony. He wrote a full-length book entitled
The Epistemology of the Striptease, and in his book
Metaphysical Horror, he observed: 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.
Kolakowskis many academic honours included the US Library of Congress Kluge Prize in 2003.
He is survived by his wife, Tamara, and their daughter.
Leszek Kolakowski, philosopher, senior research fellow, All Souls College, Oxford, was born on October 23, 1927. He died on July 17, 2009, aged 81
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6722105.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=1972202
Need anything more be said?
Someone should have mentioned that earlier!
