Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009) is a hero in Poland — Order of the White Eagle, buried with military honors, a minute’s silence in parliament — yet almost unknown in the Oxford, Berkeley, and Montreal that sheltered his exile. Kit Wilson’s essay argues that remembering him only as the author of Main Currents of Marxism misses the point.
What makes Kołakowski worth reading:
- The range: treatises on Spinoza, Husserl, and Bergson; The Presence of Myth, Religion: If There Is No God, Metaphysical Horror, God Owes Us Nothing — plus essays on liberalism, exile, genocide, snobbery, boredom, and gardening.
- “In Praise of Inconsistency” (1958): absolute consistency is impossible and disastrous — “it is only thanks to inconsistency that humanity has kept alive on this earth.”
- “Modernity on Endless Trial” (1986): modern culture abandoned God but refuses nihilism, so its “explicit orthodoxy… consists of patching up” — Marxism, History, Existentialism, and Nature as surrogate religions.
- The twist on rationalism: the most “rational” systems (Descartes’s cogito, positivism’s verification principle) betray a craving to stop thinking — “automatic thought is not really thought: it is the antithesis of thought.”
- His fear for modernity: the “disappearance of taboos” — rationality that corrodes the taboo system “corrodes its ability to survive.”
Kołakowski was an “inconsistent atheist” who called the gospel “the great power” he was attached to; asked directly about belief, he replied “God knows.”
The essay’s closing diagnosis: Kołakowski is neglected precisely because he is “too modest, too temperate, too cautious for our times” — the era of patching up prefers certainties, and his wisdom was to keep the contradictions in view without pretending to resolve them.