The humanities gets its due
Nobel-size recognition came to the humanities last week when the Library of Congress awarded the $1 million John W. Kluge Prize to Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish philosopher whose intellectually and morally exacting work inspired the movements that brought down communism in his native land. The intent of the prize, says Librarian of Congress James Billington, is to honor lifetime achievement in the human sciences the way the Swedish Academy recognizes work in the natural sciences and other fields.
Prominent American scholars have been quick to praise the prize as a much-needed boost for a field--and an ideal--that has been under assault in recent decades. While postmodernists deconstruct the idea of the human, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence threaten the physical base of human identity and individuality. And around the world, ideals associated with humanism are attacked as Eurocentric constructs.
To such challenges, Kolakowski's books and essays offer a strong rebuttal. "There is an urgency and vitality to his work," says Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, qualities he attributes to energies unleashed by the larger struggle against communism.
Rebel. Kolakowski once lived at the center of that effort. A true-believing Marxist and a sharp critic of Catholicism, he drew crowds to his University of Warsaw lectures in the 1960s. But he soon began to trouble authorities by criticizing what he saw as Stalinist corruptions of the communist ideal. Fond of iconoclastic thinkers such as Spinoza and Pascal, Kolakowski ultimately concluded that communism was "the greatest fantasy of our century." Barred from the university in 1968, he began a life of exile, teaching in Canada and the United States before ending up at Oxford. Yet the connection with his homeland remained strong. His 1971 essay "Theses on Hope and Hopelessness" set forth the strategy of gradual, peaceful, and broad-based resistance that culminated in the Solidarity movement of the 1980s.
While supporting the resistance in his homeland with advice and money, Kolakowski moved through philosophical skepticism and relativism to a growing regard for religion as a necessary foil to senseless nihilism. His best work, including Modernity on Endless Trial, explores the political implications of the tension between secular, scientific rationality, and the transcendent religious idealism that gave rise to it. One unchecked by the other produces authoritarian monsters--the Inquisition, on one hand, or Nazi death camps and Soviet gulags, on the other. The only hope--and this is what Kolakowski calls the West's greatest legacy to the larger world--is the ability to live without certainty. "In the doubt which Europe entertains about herself," he writes, "European culture can find its spiritual equilibrium and the justification for its pretensions to universality."
Speaking to U.S. News, the 76-year-old philosopher resists grand predictions about where the world is heading in the age of globalization. "The Cold War had the advantage of making the political landscape more clear," he says almost wistfully. "Here was freedom and here was slavery, or half-slavery, or despotism. Now everything becomes blurred."
But when pressed on whether he thinks the gospel of the free market will suffice, Kolakowski drops his usual circumspection. "Without the market, we become slaves," he says. "With the market, we have to be watchful all the time to keep intact valuable human relationships--solidarity, friendship, love--none of which can be arranged by the forces of the market alone."
Humanism, Kolakowski might add, is about leaving the big questions open.
This story appears in the November 17, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.