Kołakowski Against Relativism

I have recently had the pleasure of aquainting myself with Leszek Kołakowski’s essays collected in Is God Happy? published by Penguin. I discovered Kołakowski through an essay of Tony Judt’s, and was immediately intrigued by his intellectual trajectory. Kołakowski was a Polish philosopher who was forced from his homeland for his criticism of Stalinist orthodoxy and moved to England. He had some fame at the time as a dissident Marxist humanist, but by the move to England had already abandoned his earlier position and came to see Stalinism not as an abberation but as a logical consequence of Marxism. In the 1970s he wrote and published Main Currents of Marxism, a deeply ambitious intellectual history of Marxist philosophy from pre-Marxist origins to Stalinist and revisionist present considered to be his magnum opus. Having written this, his interest in Marxism and Marxist philosophy subsequently declined and he took to further developing his interest in the philosophy of religion.

Is God Happy? is divided into three parts. The first contains a couple of essays from Kołakowski’s early Marxist period, but far more on totalitarianism; especially but not exclusively on its Stalinist variant. It concludes with My Correct Views on Everything, a rejoinder to an open letter from E.P. Thompson criticising Kołakowski’s turn against Marxism. As Judt observes, it is a spectacular demoltion job, making apparent a wide moral gulf between the two. The second part contains essays on largely religious themes, most of which are still of interest to a purely secular reader¹. The third and final part contains essays on a collection of philosophical themes, including an enjoyable defence of unpunctuality and several on the theme of relativism and in particular its implications for moral epistemology.

While the first and second parts of this collection were expected territory given what I already knew of Kołakowski, his writings on relativism were a pleasant surprise for me. It’s on these essays written from the 1980s to the 2000s I wish to focus: The Demise of Historical Man, On Our Relative Relativism, Is There a Future for Truth?, and On Reason (And Other Things). All four essays raise closely related concerns, and all four essays offer the same essential criticism of relativism. It’s on this criticism I want to focus.

Kołakowski loosely defines (Cartesian) rationalism as the belief that the “criteria of validity in the intellectual realm are the same as those applied in scientific procedures”. These standards could be applied as firmly to ethics or to religious belief as to anything else, and led in the Englightenment to the deposing of both God and natural law as sources of absolute moral authority. As Nietzsche later identified, the deposing of these sources of authority also led to the absence of clear criteria for defining good and evil. For Kołakowski, Nietzsche’s intellectual project was a nihilistic quest to make us face the consequences of this: a world without God, without meaning, without truth, and without a concept of good or evil. Nietzsche is thus in this sense the ur-relativist.

One of the reactions to the Enlightenment’s challenge to dearly-held sources of morality, dealt with in The Demise of Historical Man, was the Romantic movement’s attempt to reject Englightenment rationalism by taking Hegelian capital-H History as a source of moral authority. Very, very loosely², Hegelian History is not merely a series of events in the past, but a process with a distinctive motivation and direction through which the world spirit is developed. It is teleolgical, in that it converges towards an end goal. For Hegel this was the Prussian state, for Marx this was communism, for Francis Fukuyama in The End of History this is liberal democracy.

For Kołakowski, this new Romantic historicism necessarily gave way to a form of relativism. Because history in practice is defined by mutability and constant change, all one can say is that “what is good and rational today was absurd and wrong yesterday, and may also be wrong tomorrow”. One ends up falling into a historical relativism similar to Montaigne’s scepticism³: “just on one side of the Pyrenees, unjust on the other”. Historicism thus for Kołakowski undermines itself as a source of truth, because to say something is true for a particular era is to, implicitly, admit that there is no such thing as truth in the “normal” (absolute) sense.

A second form of Hegelian historicism arose not from the Romantics but from the Enlightenment as a reaction against the very nihilism which for Kołakowski it caused. This historicism was rooted in the notion of progress: the idea that History trends towards an absolute state of human development. Marxist and Fukuyamaian Hegelianism both belong to this variant of historicism. Implicit in the idea of progress are criteria of human development external to history, which therefore do not depend on the present historical moment.

There is however for Kołakowski a tension between the notion on the one hand that our present ideas and beliefs reflect our current historical moment and so are limited, and the notion that we can anticipate a final fulfilment of human development. Most developed in the Marxist notion of false consciousness, this tension is that present ideas can only be assessed by the criteria of this final state. We thus lack the criteria with which we can assess the present. Historicism in either form thus logically gives way to nihilism. With the death of the utopian movements of the 20th century comes a relativism unmoored from historicism.

Yet, as he repeatedly expresses throughout all three essays, Kołakowski is dissatisfied with relativism or nihilism. The core problem is what it means for our ability to make ethical judgements. One variant of pragmatism⁴ (a philosophy where usefuless rather than truth serves as the criteria of knowledge) considers societal consensus to be a grounding for morality. If a society generally agrees that slavery is evil, then it is evil. The problem that remains for Kołakowski is that all the statement “slavery is evil” can mean is that “people in this society consider slavery evil”. This is dissatisfying because one would prefer to be able to state that slavery is evil in absolute and universal terms.

I have drawn primarily though not solely on The Demise of Historical Man in sketching Kołakowski’s views above, but one finds approximately the same argument in the other, later essays. In Our Relative Relativism more explcit are the early signs of trouble for capital-T Truth in the early modern scepticism of figures such as Montaigne or Descartes⁵, it is the Enlightenment proper which firmly signals the death of God. Hume, and Kant contributed significantly to the possibility of a pragmatic conception of truth wherein knowledge is only the content of particular perceptions⁶. Hegel’s contribution to relativism has already been elucidated, while Darwin too is considered implicated by Kołakowski, because the theory of evolution can be taken to suggest that human reason is not a Truth-seeking tool, but rather a tool for survival. Considered in thus way, it lends weight to the pragmatist notion that the measure of knowledge ought to be success in controling the external world, rather than Truth. Across all of the essays however, the death knell for Truth is sounded firmly and irrevocably by Nietzsche.

I will skip over some of the content of these essays, which further considers the sources of our present relativism and the extent to which postmodernism has or hasn’t made inroads into the sciences and the humanties. Kołakowski also at times raises concerns around empirical truth, and not merely moral truth, which I feel I have under-discussed in this summary. But instead, I want to move to whether Kołakowski believs there is a route to refuting relativism, and its implications for both ethics and for epistemology. At times Kołakowski notes that pragmatism poses few problems either for scientists or “ordinary people”⁷. Science can be conducted equally well in a setting rooted in criteria of acceptability as one rooted in a criteria of truth. In other essays in the collection neglected here - Crime and Punishment and On Natural Law - Kołakowski defends both the notion of good and evil and the notion of natural law; the latter of which would give an absolute grounding to the twin notions of good and evil lacking in relativist or pragmatist frameworks.

Yet, when directly considering the problems raised by relativism Kołakowski is a pessimist. In Our Relative Relativism, he asserts that there “is no way back the old unsullied order; no amount of nostalgia will reverse the course of change nor undo its alarming, perhaps calamitous, effects”. Yet, in Is There a Future for Truth?, he asserts that the rational animal “has little use for the various definitions of Truth suggested by philosophers; it wants to know how things are”. For this reason alone, we will not stop asking questions about meaning. We enjoy knowing things, not merely for some practical purpose as in pragmatist philosophy, but for the joy of truth itself.

Footnotes