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Soc (2013) 50:422425DOI 10.1007/s12115-013-9681-x
BOOK REVIEW
Leszek Kolakowski, Is God Happy? Selected Essays
New York: Basic Books, 2013. 352 pp. $28.99. ISBN: 9780465080991
Collin May
Published online: 24 May 2013# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
When a well-known and respected author with a number of literary and scholarly accomplishments to his credit passes away, it is expected that, within a few years of his death, a collection of the authors essays will appear for public consumption. These collections normally include a broad range of his work, spanning his literary career from youth to seniority. In 2009, noted Polish philosopher and historian of ideas, Leszek Kolakowski died at the age of 81 years; in 2013, a collection of his essays appeared under the interrogative title: Is God Happy?
Kolakowski was best known in philosophic circles for his extensive three-volume study of the origins, rise and eventual decay of Marxism in his Main Currents of Marxism published between 1976 and 1978. His intimate familiarity with Marxism, both as a theory, having been educated in Polish universities following World War II, and as praxis, having lived under a Marxist-Leninist regime, left him well-placed to write with authority on the promise and disaster Marxism wrought on the twentieth century.
But for a man like Kolakowski, Marxism alone was too narrow a pre-occupation. It was not simply the thoughts of Marx, nor was it the incarnation of those thoughts in the array of Marxisms that afflicted so many and dazzled many more, that ultimately interested this man of ideas. Marxism was part of the western heritage, it arose, along with fascism, anarchism and socialism, from pressing issues besetting nineteenth century Europe. And despite its presumed passing into history, something of its essence remains deeply imbedded in our western world even today.
It is this sober conviction, that Marxismthe blessings it announced and the evil it deliveredgoes deeper into our
western past and carries on with us into our future endeavors, that gives these essays both their abiding currency and their common focus.
As a collection, the book divides into three sections. The first treats Marxism, socialism, the left and ideology generally. The second focuses on religion, and its companion themeevil. The third section runs the gamut of modern concerns, but focuses mainly on the problematic of reason, truth and the uncertainty that gnaws at our contemporary satisfactions. In each section, the author covers his intellectual terrain with finesse and his well-known sense of cheek. These essays are not technical, but they are subtle, engaging and profound, appealing to an audience that seeks out humane learning.
Having said that, the most obvious question surrounding this book is: Why the title? What does Gods happiness have to do with matters of human reason in our present age, with Marxism or even with evil since evil, one would assume, works its will on man rather than the omnipotent. Is God Happy? is itself a title drawn from the final essay in the second section, the section on religion, on the absolute.
To appreciate this odd title, is to appreciate both Kolakowskis wide-ranging mind and its attention to the whole of western history. Even as the collection opens on the themes of socialism and ideology, we see the author moving to a broader plane. While manoeuvring deftly in the technical details of Marxist theory, Kolakowski quickly goes to the nub of the matter. His early essays from his time as a professor in Poland speak to the death of gods as even in those post-Stalin years, the vacuous intellectual and spiritual state of life under Marxist-Leninism was readily apparent. From here, Kolakowskis more recent works contained in this first section branch out and envelop western culture, history and life.
The striking essay, Communism as a Cultural Force seeks to understand not simply the hideous nature of a
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technical version of Marxism but how communism was embraced by so many, and beyond that, how it truly embedded itself in western cultural life as a driving, and often dominant force, something fascism and Nazism failed to do beyond their specific countries of origin. Communism attracted a range of thinkers, artists, intellectuals. So convincing was its attractions that radical socialism in general attached itself to Marxism, emerging as the brutal carrier of socialist revolution out of World War I. An odd fate for a movement and a theory that had little impact and few adherents in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In any case, Marxism and socialism became intertwined and those ideas, that history, still determine a great deal of how we approach the world today, even among those minds formed long after its fall in 1989.
So what remains of this Marxism that became the hallmark of socialist revolution? On the one hand, Kolakowski points to the indelible mark it made on the left. But here we must be careful. Communism itselfreal lived communismwas a political game on a grand scale, played often by the hawks, as Kowlakowski calls them. At the same time, there were many fellow travellers, those on the left who sympathized with communism. These were the butterflies; useful idiots in the West who could be relied on by Soviet apparatchiks to come to their defence, but otherwise were disregarded and disdained by the hawks. The odd point that Kolakowski emphasizes is that many an ex-communist saw the error of his ways. There are numerous works by disillusioned communists from the Soviet Union and its satellites. By contrast, Kolakowski points out that, to his knowledge, there has not been a substantial work by anyone on the progressive left accounting for the failures of the butterflies. Progressivism, for the most part, and despite some accommodations to the victory of western capitalist forms, has merrily gone on its way as though the intellectual, moral and political failings of one of western mans bloodiest periods, was simply a blip on the radar screen. For progressives, the unity of egalitarian humanity remains just over the next rise.
But to fail to see that progressivism was ensnared in much more than a blip, to fail to bring such underlying entanglements to light, leaves us in the West still very entangled. And the nature of the entanglement is, as many observers have underlined, the lie. The lie, made famous by Solzhenitsyn, and many others, is now almost synonymous with the all-encompassing structure of Soviet life, its abysmal decay, cloaked in the lie that would torture reason to its breaking point as total oppression wrapped itself in the rhetoric of total liberation. As Kolakowski puts the matter: We have lived through the experience of totalitarian regimes. What was new in them was not genocide, or even ideological genocide, so much as the successful technique of total intellectual appropriation.
Total intellectual appropriation; going straight for the soul as Tocqueville adroitly described it long before it showed its true colors. This is the key element that renders totalitarianism total: it fabricated, and continues to fabricate, a completely self-evident, hence purely objective and immediate explanation of all human processes and instances. It makes everything intelligible according to its mechanisms, and nothing that is or is becoming escapes its grasp. It at once accounts for each fact, while absolutizing its own project as the only rational moral value. The universal comes entirely into view.
And from here we move almost naturally into the topic of religion. From a religious perspective, and most certainly from that of the Christian view on the world, the purely rational effort to make evident the universal and the absolute runs straight into teeth of evil, that most stubborn of realities.
For all his fame as a commentator on contemporary Marxism, Kolakowski wrote extensively on religion, especially Christianity, and on the problem of evil. In the essay Leibniz and Job: The Metaphysics of Evil and the Experience of Evil, Kolakowski surveys the various approaches to this weighty topic. From the notion that it is the mere privation of the good, to evil as an entity on par with the good, to the outright denial that there is any meaningful distinction between the evil and the good, Kolakowksi moves deftly through each response. Regardless of the approach, evil comes to light as a problem, perhaps more for man than any being, precisely because it is what escapes us, what we cannot explain. Christian theologians always faced the dicey topic of why God allowed evil by placing it in the context of free will: God must allow evil in order for humans to exercise free will. In effect, God who is the source of all being, must allow that which is wholly contrary to being to come into being in order to allow we humans to choose, to activate our reason.
And so the argument goes, but it is largely elusive because it is difficult to reconcile the universal perfection of God with the presence of evil, to reconcile the metaphysics of evil with the experience of evil. But Kolakowski is not simply asking us to remember recent evil done in the name of communism and fascism, to localize it to the twentieth century, and let humanity go happily on its way to unity. Even today, despite our most self-righteous intentions, evil persists unabated, because it is the inexplicable, the indeterminate, what cannot be systematized. He sees that the evil done in the twentieth century on such a total and massive scale served the purpose of overcoming the prior evil worked by modern individualist capitalism; by the modern world in which we all live. And that brings us to modernity itself and its own efforts at bidding farewell to evil.
Modernity is, once again, a vast topic. Its exact meaning, its intentions and its effects are still disputed. Why it arose,
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what it opposed and what it proposed, are contentious; Kolakowski avers to this when he notes that some see modernity as a wholesale attack on Christianity and classical reason, while others see it more as Christian caritas secularized. In any case, what comes into focus in the third group of essays is the decay of reason in modernity, of truth, of truth as adequatio in Kolakowskis words. Modernity is well-known as the attempt to rationalize the world, to bring it under universal and necessary mechanical laws, which, when applied to matter, would banish the old superstitions of both Christ and Plato. Precisely, to master the unintelligible, to redeem evil.
The result, however, was that modernity devastated the very notions of reason and truth altogether. From the moment Hume, for conservative purposes, launched his attacks on causality and knowledge of general propositions, modernity turned on its own. Truth as adequatio, as the capacity for humans living in common to arrive at reasoned agreement on norms of behaviour, stood little chance. From there, it was a quick step to Marxist regimes that subsumed truth under the aims of the revolution, of history, of the redemption of society by total intellectual appropriation, to the absolute truth.
The twentieth century was the political battleground where ideological extremes engaged one another, and we generally believe that the battle ended relatively well; that democracy won out. And we believe that truth and reason, or at least of a sort sufficient to recognize the universality of human equality and the advance of science and commerce, have survived.
But the overall effect of Kolakowskis essays is to prod us with profound doubt on this matter. Today, we believe we have made progress, with our human rights, our inclusivness, our community, our transparency, accountability and equality: we believe ourselves free of total intellectual appropriation. But in our world obsessed by recognition of endlessly multiplying identities as our absolute value and economic facts as unalterable necessity, there is very little room for our human reason to operate, especially in the public, in the political realm.
Does this mean we are heading toward a Tocquevillian soft-tyranny without seeing the writing on the wall, or something even worse? Kolakowskis final words in the closing essay of this volume leave us with an impression of his views: Our sky is never entirely unclouded; it was ever thus, and people have always known it. I do not say that we are rushing towards catastrophe; only that, like Alice, we must make a huge effort and run very fast to stay in the same place.
This statement caps off a discussion of the potential for western civilization to once again become enamoured of ideological terrors as so much of it was in the twentieth
century. Kolakowski suggests that the materials for terror have always been at our disposal and any symbol, including the idea of equality, can become a means for totalitarian excess. But, as Kolakowski notes, today we must run very fast just to avoid falling back into the totalitarian quagmire. Why is this? Precisely because of the darkness into which we have cast reason and truth, and because of the tools we have constructed in support of total intellectual appropriation. These remain our contemporary situation, however much we progressives would like to congratulate ourselves on our successes.
So would Kolakowski have us turn back into the arms of the Church, or some ancient ideal of classical reason? That is not his prescription in these essays. After all, one must note his praise for the goals of nineteenth century socialism, and his wavering as to whether modernity is simply reducible to its hostility to Christianity, as if modern achievements in terms of political rights and equality are nugatory. And one could argue that modernity itself has been chastened by its history and its outcomes though on its own, it apparently lacks the tools to deal with the irreducibility of evil. But on this score, Christianity, in its heyday, was hardly more successful, though it has resources as regards evil that elude the modern world, specifically a very fulsome view of man as more than economic necessity and the recognition of rights.
Our contemporary intellectual appropriation is totalizing and it is global, and perhaps one could legitimately contend that it can only be met on this vast plain by that other much older universal institution: the Christian Church, the City of God in its Roman form. And one can again argue that the Roman Catholic Church has itself been chastened by modernity, and even made its peace with it in a more sensible way than its progressive critics who pander to our contemporary prejudices.
Still, Kolakowski does not let us rest satisfied by the sentimentality of retreat into the arms of ecclesiastic authority. Because once again, evil persists for Kolakowski in a real sense. Kolakowski is not simply content with the Christian responses to evil, in large part because he is measuring these responses by the most desirable human good: happiness. Hence the title Is God Happy? And the answer: no, God is not happy. God may be blessed, but happiness is a human desire, and even to dwell in blessedness with God is not pure happiness for humans since there is still a remainder in hell. There have been many attempts to realize happiness, and all are failures in their own way. Much of western history swirls around these attempts: pax romana, Christendom, the rights of man, the workers utopia, the new world order. Kolakowskis final words on the matter are among his best, coming from the final paragraph of the essay, Is God Happy?
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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.
Collin May is a corporate and securities lawyer practising in Calgary, Alberta. Educated at Harvard, Paris and Dalhousie Law School, Collin has published numerous book reviews on works in political philosophy and history.
Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013