Leszek Kołakowski Quotes

There is no idea so obscure that someone could not come to regard it as self-evident.

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.

A certain degree of blindness as to the absoluteness of one’s own values may be indispensable to extract the valuable qualities from the world, the qualities whose value is believed to be the highest. It is possible that in order to realize one’s values one must have faith in their exclusive character.

If the gist of the controversy were to be expressed in a single sentence, one might say that the mechanists represented the opposition of the natural sciences to philosophic interference, while the dialecticians stood for the supremacy of philosophy over the sciences and thus reflected the characteristic tendency of Soviet ideological development. The mechanists’ outlook might be called negative, while the dialecticians ascribed immense importance to philosophy and regarded themselves as specialists. The mechanists, however, had a much better idea of what science was about. The dialecticians were ignoramuses in this sphere and confined themselves to general formulas about the philosophical need to “generalize” and unify the sciences; on the other hand, they knew more than the mechanists about the history of philosophy. (Eventually the party condemned both camps, and created a dialectical synthesis of both forms of ignorance.) (pg. 64)

From the point of view of the development of Marx’s theories, his early journalistic writings are important for two main reasons. In his sharp attacks on the censorship law he spoke out unequivocally for the freedom of the Press, against the levelling effect of government restriction (‘You don’t expect a rose to smell like a violet; why then should the human spirit, the richest thing we have, exist only in a single form?’), and also expressed views concerning the whole nature of the state and the essence of freedom. Pointing out that the vagueness and ambiguity of the Press law placed arbitrary power in the hands of officials, Marx went on to argue that censorship was contrary not only to the purposes of the Press, but to the nature of the state as such. (pp. 120-1)

To prevent the starving peasants from fleeing to the towns an internal passport system was introduced and unauthorized change of residence was made punishable with imprisonment. Peasants were not allowed passports at all, and were therefore tied to the soil as in the worst days of feudal serfdom: this state of things was not altered until the 1970s. The concentration camps filled with new hordes of prisoners sentenced to hard labour. The object of destroying the peasants’ independence and herding them into collective farms was to create a population of slaves, the benefit of whose labour would accrue to industry. The immediate effect was to reduce Soviet agriculture to a state of decline from which it has not yet recovered, despite innumerable measures of reorganization and reform. At the time of Stalin’s death, almost a quarter of a century after mass collectivization was initiated, the output of grain per head of population was still below the 1913 level; yet throughout this period, despite misery and starvation, large quantities of farm produce were exported all over the world for the sake of Soviet industry. The terror and oppression of those years cannot be expressed merely by the figures for loss of human life, enormous as these are; perhaps the most vivid picture of what collectivization meant is in Vasily Grossman’s posthumous novel Forever Flowing. (pg. 39)

… Marx and Bakunin were engaged in a conflict in which it is hard to distinguish political from personal animosities. Marx did his best to persuade everybody that Bakunin was only using the International for his private ends, and in March 1870 he circulated a confidential letter to this effect. He also saw the hand of Bakunin (whom he never met after 1864) on every occasion when his own policies were opposed in the International. Bakunin, for his part, not only combated Marx’s political programme but, as he often wrote, regarded Marx as a disloyal, revengeful man, obsessed with power and determined to impose his own despotic authority on the whole revolutionary movement. Marx, he said, had all the merits and defects of the Jewish character; he was highly intelligent and deeply read, but an inveterate doctrinaire and fantastically vain, an intriguer and morbidly envious of all who, like Lassalle, had cut a more important figure than himself in public life. (pp. 247-8)

The same ‘practical’ viewpoint is dominant in Marx’s conception of the cognitive functions of the mind and its role in the historical process; ‘practical’ is always regarded as implying ‘social’, and ‘social life is practical by its very essence’. So is the task of philosophy as defined in the eleventh Thesis, in what are perhaps Marx’s most-quoted words: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’ It would be a caricature of Marx’s thought to read this as meaning that it was not important to observe or analyse society and that only direct revolutionary action mattered. The whole context shows that it is a formula expressing in a nutshell the viewpoint of ‘practical philosophy’ as opposed to the ‘contemplative’ attitude of Hegel or Feuerbach – the viewpoint which Hess, and through him Cieszkowski, suggested to Marx and which became the philosophical nucleus of Marxism. To understand the world does not mean considering it from outside, judging it morally or explaining it scientifically; it means society understanding itself, an act in which the subject changes the object by the very fact of understanding it. (pp. 143-4)

It seems never to have occurred to Lenin that the root of these troubles lay in the fact that the whole system was based, as he constantly emphasized, on force and not on law. He demanded that people be imprisoned right and left for inefficiency, and then wondered why they were afraid to take decisions and referred them higher up whenever they could. He demanded vigilant supervision and exhaustive records, and yet was astonished at the amount of “pen-pushing”. His statement that “socialism equals Soviet power plus electrification” is often quoted; less often his statement, just after the Revolution, that “what socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything” (Meeting of the Central Executive Committee, 17 November 1917; Works, vol. 26, p. 288). He created a system in which, depending on the whim of a local party or police authority, any criticism might be regarded as counter-revolutionary and expose its author to imprisonment or death, and at the same time he urged the working people to be fearless in their criticism of the state apparatus. (pp. 489-90)

The destructive work of totalitarian machinery, whether or not this word is used, is usually supported by a special kind of primitive social philosophy. It proclaims not only that the common good of 'society' has priority over the interests of individuals, but that the very existence of individuals as persons is reducible to the existence of the social 'whole'; in other words, personal existence is, in a strange sense, unreal. This is a convenient foundation for any ideology of slavery.

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.

Carnap made a detailed analysis of Heidegger’<nowiki/>s statement, “Nothing nihilates,” in order to show that it is purely verbal, devoid of empirical meaning. (Incidentally, this is the only sentence from existentialist philosophy the majority of contemporary positivists appear familiar with.)

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.

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.

Rosa Luxemburg is an outstanding example of a type of mind that is often met with in the history of Marxism and appears to be specially attracted by the Marxist outlook. It is characterized by slavish submission to authority, together with a belief that in that submission the values of scientific thought can be preserved. No doctrine was so well suited as Marxism to satisfy both these attitudes, or to provide a mystification combining extreme dogmatism with the cult of “scientific” thinking, in which the disciple could find mental and spiritual peace. Marxism thus played the part of a religion for the intelligentsia, which did not prevent some of them, like Rosa Luxemburg herself, from trying to improve the deposit of faith by reverting to first principles, thus strengthening their own belief that they were independent of dogma. (pp. 94-5)