Leszek Kolakowski’s ethical views, like his other theoretical views have undergone considerable change, evolving from the Marxist approach to one that is religious. On the ground of his language this change means the acknowedgement of transcendental options and a refutation of empiricism. In the conflict of these two fundamental options, I believe, is inscribed Kolakowski’s whole research work.1

Kolakowski defines the meaning of ‘empiricism’ and ‘transcendentalism’ in his article ‘Cultural Reproduction and Forgetfulness.’2 The general tendency of empiricism consists in interpreting the vadility of the rules of thinking as a linguistic constraint. Hence, the significance of moral norms should be considered a wrongly formulated issue, for these norms are not universally valid, but (only) certain social facts.

Transcendental philosophy (Platonism, Kant, phenomenology and theological and religious currents), on the other hand, tries to demonstrate that in between random linguistic rules and observations there is spread the area of intellectual and moral needs, which are not analytical truths but create permanent spiritual values which define us as human beings and regulate the development of science.3  Such a general formulation obviously does not include all the ethical propositions offered by Leszek Kolakowski; they merely mark an axis determining the transformation of his views.

In his early works Kolakowski already anticipated a category which he now defines as ‘religious perception’, combining an act of comprehension with a validating moment. It was his view in the fifties that Marxist doctrine is not and cannot be inferred from empiricism by a theory or true description (even if constantly modified) of the reality which surrounds us. In Marxism, acts of comprehension are combined with an imperative to fight for ‘the right cause’, reflection walks hand in hand with a moral act and will, and description is confused with a norm. In other words, one who understands Marxism knows instantly what reality should be like.4 

Having accepted this point of view the philosopher criticises the Catholic Church, the major ideological enemy, from the ethical point of view. Christianity, maintained Kolakowski, has to be rejected due to its morally suspicious genesis: its essence is constituted by the belief that man is of no value, but is sinful and helpless in relation to this fate. Kolakowski’s stronges objection was the idea of man’s total submission to God and his earthly representative – the Church.5

In 1955-57 Kolakowski carefully analyses dialectical materialism which brought the major change in his views when he rejected Marxism based on F. Engels’ works in favour of K. Marx’s approach, defined by Kolakowski as a generic anthropologism (subjectivism) as a consequence of empirical assumptions. This approach assumes that the world, which was originally a kind of chaos, is constituted by humankind. Its so-called ‘natual division into inanimate objects, animals and people appears as an artifact within the framework of anthropologism. Human activity organises the world’s chaotic substance.6 Such an ontological solution has its consequences for ethics. First of all, Kolakowski rejected all kinds of conservatism, related to unchangeable reality and ‘the existing character of values.7 A conservative way of thinking about codes, capable of clearing all doubts and setting each situation. Such codes, he thinks, are based on three fundamental assumptions: 1. a belief in the symmetry of obligations and duties; 2. a belief in the homogeneous character of value; 3. an acknowlegement of the adequacy of goodness and obligation.

All such codes were subjected to his critical examination.

1. The assumption of the symmetry of obligations and duties has a destructive influence on ethical behaviour, since obligation and duty exclude each other. Every compulsion–and obligation is compulsion–destroys the essence of ethical activity as not subjected to obligation.

2. Belief in an homogenous system of values, which allows hierarchical order, is a myth for ethical decisions are conditioned by the situation and are impossible to universalise.

3. The postulate of a code cannot be maintained for it is not true that goodness and obligation walk hand in hand as sometimes one has to choose the lesser evil.

Finally, argues Kolakowski, conservatisms along with their codes are a hidden escape from an open perspective; a fear of realising one’s own freedom and the lonesomeness of humankind in nature. They are expressions of a desire to live in an absolutely safe, because programmed world.

Kolakowski confronts us with the pathos of the non-illusory self-realisation of one’s own position in reality. Man, being inherent in nature, at the same time transcends it and in this way loses his positive natural place.8 He is not only born, he does not only work, reproduce and die, but he also fills these moments with a non-natural sense: love is something more than desire, death is not only the end to the working of an organism, etc. Such cognitive activity brings about a number of specifically human anxieties, concerning the necessity of an ageing process, sense of dying, non-biological meaning of love etc.

Kolakowski emphasises very strongly the fact that this ‘falling out’ of the mechanism of nature does not reveal an attachment to an ‘other’ world–man as a species exists in a total isolation, having no higher resorts. In particular the idea of God would deprive him of what is the best and the most difficult– the absolute responsibility for himself.9 

Thus man’s position in the world leads to a paradoxical situation. For it forces him to create additional, super biological meanings, realising at the same time that he creates them. Kolakowski defines this precisely: man has to live in the sphere of myth. Value is one of the fundamental variants of myth. The acknowledgement of ‘the heaven of values’ seems to lead to a negation of freedom sinice it imposes a completed pattern of behaviour. According to Kolakowski, nihilism originates from a resolution not to undergo any pressure from an existing absolute goodness and such norms. However, assuming an absolute freedom, that is not being determined by anything, nihilists reject the mental outfit of culture, falling again into the dependence upon biological impulses. Nihilism negating values in the name of, freedom ends up with even more dominant constraints. Trying to transcend the alternative: absolutism-nihilism, Kolakowski draws an outline of the solution, which is close to scepticism, in his fundamental work ‘Small Ethics.’10 

Kolakowski believes that ethics in not restricted to the analysis of the word ‘ethics,’ but is a search for answering the question of what are goodness and evil, and how to justify the norms of our behaviour.

He assumes the intrumental approach to goodness (in a sense: penicillin is good as cure for tuberculosis) and goodness in itself. He also differentiates between rightness and goodness, between moral and legal norms.

The fundamental ethical question about the justification of moral norms, originates from the clash of various ethical traditions and the possibility of breaking ethical bans and orders without evident and immediates consequences11  (as happens in the case of ignoring the law of gravitation).

Before presenting his own solution Kolakowski offers a critique of the empirical approach represented by emotivism, utilitarianism and instinctivism, and the transcendental approach represented by Kantian philosophy, the intuitionism and ethical solutions in the spirit of Christianity.

a. Emotivism assumes groundlessly that evaluating judgements are connected with emotions in a necessary way, whereas there are no significant reasons to believe that whenever we formulate a moral judgement we express emotions.

b. Utilitarianism, on the other hand, is based on a false analogy used by Mill, who claimed that since being visible results from being seen, then being desirable, that is being worthy of desire, results from desiring something. It is wrong because being worthy of seeing does not result from being seen, thus also being worthy of desire does not result from desire. Utilitarianism assumes and empirically disputable premise that people always desire happiness, and has trouble with measuring ‘the concentration’ of this happiness.

c. Instinctivism interprets moral norms as special artificial surrogates or substitutes of natural impulses determined by the laws of self-preservation (and preservation of species). This is contradicted by the idea of the infinite value of every individual or a postulate of the universal force of ethical norms (not to mention contempt for earthly goods).

d. In his critique of Kant, Kolakowski points to the weak grounding of practical reason and the possibility of avoiding a categorical imperative. For it seems possible to base one’s deeds on a motive of one’s own profit, while not accepting it in the case of others. Kant’s norm, which requires approaching people as ends in themselves, remains an elevated form of belief in the infinite value of personality which however is only a belief.

e. The beliefs of intuitionists related to the discovery of norms as goodness, which are valid always and everywhere, soon turned out to be uncritical attempt at universalising the patterns of one’s own culture and environment.

f. Kolakowski examines Christianity with a special attention. He is particularly interested in religious perception which manifests good and evil as properties of the world, different from pleasure and suffering. However its character is exclusive and remains inaccessible to those upon whom the grace of faith is not conferred.

Solutions of the problem of goodness and evil and justification of the most general moral norms are, according to Kolakowski, trapped in a vicious circle.

Nieither can transcendental conditions of cognition and moral norms be justified by empirical means, nor can empirical rules lay claims to transcendental grounds. Each option assumes the kind of legal validity which it later confirms. However, the lack of unquestionable criteria does not, in Kolakowski’s view, determine the acceptance of an ethical solution nor does it interfere with the attempts to build a minimal code concerning the rights of a human being and prohibitions which must not be violated.12

In constructing such a code he assumes: a. a universal character of moral norms; b. noninference of obligation from goodness or goodness from obligation; c. the existence of absolute moral norms and actions which are evil under any circumstances (for example torture, leaving others in danger); d. noninference of moral norms from the history of philosophy.13  These assumptions are usually made legal by the fact that they operate within a certain tradition.14

The above statement points to Kolakowski’s involvement in a fundamental problem consisting in the simultaneous acknowlegement of the universality of moral norms and the awareness of their local character. This problem is further discussed by the philosopher in a way that starting with his Mala etyka/ Little Ethcs leads toward the transcendental option. It is confirmed by his other publications Reprodukcja kulturalna i zapominanie / Cultural Reproduction and Forgetfulness (1980), Kant i zagrozenie cywilizacji / Kant and Menace to Civilisation (1981), ‘Jesli Boga nie ma’/ ‘If There is no God’ (1982), ‘Horror metaphysicus’ (1988).

In Cultural Reproduction and Forgetfulness Kolakowski investigates two different styles of the development and growth of culture. In natural sciences and technology this development takes place through a negative selection, which results in the fact that only the most recent theories are considered significant. A physicist does not have to bother with the history of his discipline. Whereas in the case of philosophy, art and religion, we can talk about enrichment and growth – Plato’s system is as important as Kant’s, Goethe’s works cannot be described as ‘less advanced’ than modern works, the Decalogue is not only a human creation of the remote past. Kolakowski formulates a thesis that there are certain invariants which generate an ‘enriching growth’. He recons among them, first of all, the ability to differentiate between good and evil, searching for super-biological sense in love, acknowledging values to be autotelic. Kolakowski considers the ability to differentiate between good and evil (that cannot be reduced to pleasure and displeasure) as particularly significant. ‘Neither heaven nor the earth’ knows it.15

However, he realises that cultural variations can be subjected to various interpretations. In the theories evolving from Darwinism they constitute the answers, common to the whole animated world, to the changeable living conditions.16 In Kolakowski’s view, this results from a wrong assumption, determining the organic character of human being, its complete immersion in the world of nature.17 Naturalism appears in two basic versions. For the first, culture is an expression of man’s extraordinary adaptive abilities, whereas the second, on the contrary, assumes that the whole culture, and in particular ethical systems, are artificial limbs as the impotent instincts of our species.

Kolakowski considers these two kinds of naturalism to be totally inadequate as is a more theoretically sophisticated view approaching culture as a product of man’s needs – autonomous in relation to instincts, but after all evolved from them. For they do not explain how it happened that creatures, whose needs were confined to getting food, copulation and protecting against the elements, and who are said to invent art and religion in order to better satisfy these needs started to value these inventions for some unknown reasons. Obviously, due to the essential and inevitable lack of acquaintance with the origins of humanity, religion or ethics, biologisms and functionalisms in general cannot be finally validated as rejected.

Finally, Kolakowski admits that cultural invariants can neither be defined in biological categories18  nor inferred from the empirical investigations of history or anthropology. They are certain normatives defining the boundaries of history and anthropology, resigning from which destroys the continuity of the history of mankind, and introduces an insuperable distance between civilisations, epochs or nations, eliminating a notion of humankind as nonsense.19 Kolakowski accepts the transbiological character of invariants determinig the essential difference between men and animals, although obviously the language in which they are expressed has a historical form. He continues his arguments on mankind and ethics in ‘Kant and the Menace to Civilisation’.

He engages in polemics with a view to rejecting the so-called idea of abstract man in favour of a belief that there are only concrete people or individuals defined biologically and historically. Such a refutation arises the status of anthropology and psychology to the position of norming the essence of humanity, the acts of thinking or definition of value regarding its contents. An axiological consequence for this attitude is the rejection of the differentiation between good and evil, other than the acts of valuation performed concretely by people. This makes values relative and leads to nihilism.

According to Kolakowski, by affirming the idea of an abstract man Kant resists nihilism. Humanity is not, in his view a generealization of the properties of empirically defined individuals, but a result of participation in the area of rational necessities and moral imperatives, which cannot be established empirically.20 He demnstrated the noninference of goodness from what people consider to be good, and the noninference of obligation from actual deeds. Kolakowski agrees with this, believing that the notion of humankind is a moral notion which if rejected leaves no ground for questioning, for instance, slavery or its ideology.21

However, Kolakowski agrees with Kant only partially, for he acknowledges God as guarantor of both ethics and a theory of cognition or metaphysics. This results from the fact that Kolakowski belongs to the post-Cartesian model of philosophy for which the problem of ‘the bridge’ i.e. of moving from a subject to an object, constitutes a fundamental philosophical issue. Kolakowski, like Descartes, considers God a guarantor of being, truth and (he adds) goodness. The absolute is a requirement allowing one to talk resonably about being, truth and goodness.22 

I shall try to produce the arguments in favour of the following quasi-Cartesian thesis: Dostoyevsky’s famous saying: ‘If there is no God everything is allowed’ is in force not only as a moral norm [...] but also as an epistemological principle.23 

This ethical dependence upon the Absolute requires a more detailed formulation. First of all, investigating the religious justification of ethics Kolakowski realises the specific character of this discipline, for moral norms can be violated without immediate effects. In his view, we accept them not in acts of intellectual acknowledgement of the truth inherent in them, but trough the sense of guilt when we violate them.24 This guilt is not a simple fear of punishment, but is "an act in which is questioned one’s own status in the cosmic order (I would say an ‘existential’ act if I did not feel aversion to this adjective); it is not a fear of revenge but a sense of threat in the face of one’s deed which violates the world’s harmony, a fear originating from the violation of taboo, not law. It is not only me who is endangered by the atrocity of my deed; the whole universe is in danger of being plunged into chaos and uncertainty."25 

The guilt which results from the violation of a taboo is connected with an ability to perceive the invisible, sacred face of secular objects, qualities and event.26  It is an elementary instrument which enables one to impose the rules of behaviour and give them the form of orders and obligation.27

A sense of guilt, an ability of self-experience in the categories of evil, are the primary elements in the cognitive order–only when doing evil do I know what goodness is.28 Goodness, on the other hand, remains primary ontologically and its foundation is God (sacrum). The relationship between the sacral reality and goodness is revelated in a special kind of perception: "in which cognitive intuition, a sense of belonging to the universal order established by the wisdom of providence and adoption of moral commitment are one."29 Such experience is a result of initiation and not rational agrumentation. Belonging is always proceed by an evidence (Jesus said: but you do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep, John 10:23). Thus ethics has its foundation in religion.

However, philosophers refused to accept a religious solution and continued their search for a metaphysical sense of goodness. Kolakowski points to the awkward consequences of this project in his magnificent Horror metaphysicus. In the Neo-Platonic tradition, he writes, Goodness was identified with the One, whereas the contents of this goodness remained completely unknown. A similiar vagueness occurs in traditional metaphysics, identifying Goodness with Being (the Absolute which is a Person at the same time). According to the scholastics God is good in a sense of taking care of his creation, but this is not why He is good; His kindness is an expression of immanent kindness: kindness in itself, for the Absolute would be good even in nobody knew about it, even if He was the only one to exist.

But what is kindness-in-itself? How should one approach its meaning? Nobody knows.30  It is true that some people see divine kindness manifested in His acts and events, but that does not indicate kindness in itself. There is no passage, believes Kolakaowski, from the transcendental ‘existential kindness’, ‘kindness in itself’ to the revelated kindness. Good as a property in itself does not account for divine goodness and kindness or vice versa. But in Kolakowski’s view the idea of God-Goodness does make sense and can be made comprehensible in a mythological context. Goodness in mythologies is associated with harmony and peace, whereas evil is associated with chaos, war and destruction. Metaphysical speculations bring about super sublimation of mythological intuition, making perfect goodness and perfect harmony from goodness as order and harmony, and finally the ultimate, absolute stillness which is the Unity that is the Absolute. There appears the principle: the more goodness the more unity, thus where there is the most goodness there is the most unity, which is fulfilled in the most perfect way by the idea of Good.

However, such being escapes all comprehension except from the sublime minds of metapyscians.

And in this way the Absolute, which was to account for an act of existence, reduces itself, as a result of its own perfection, to non-existence and ceases to have anything in common with anything. Due to its highest reality it turns into unreality.31 

The most famous attempt at clarifying the Good-goodness (evil) relation, undertaken by Leibniz, involves us in other problems. In his view, God, choosing our world from an infinite number of other possibilities, was guided by his fatherly care, whereas creating the world free from necessity he was subjected to a metaphysical compulsion. According to Kolakowski the differentiation between knowledge and goodness bears serious consequences–for proving the existence of God, acquiring knowledge about Him, one has to produce separate evidence of God’s goodness. For Leibniz it was obvious that goodness is a necessary attribute of the Creator’s existence, whereas for Kolakowski it is not. Leinbniz simply continues the ideas of St Thomas Aquinas who infers goodness from the divine perfection, whereas Kolakowski thinks that the belief in goodness of the most real is an arbitrary assumption, while moving from the goodness of creation to the creator’s kindness is an unjustified manipulation.32  In order to justify it we need some knowledge on the co-capacity of goodness and being–but that is just what remains unknown.

Not only are the notions of goodness and the Absolute beyond comprehension, but also the idea of God as the only creator seems to negate man’s freedom as the absolute condition of a moral subject’s self-constitution. Kolakowski writes:

If there is only one source of the existence of goodness, one source of energy in all works of nature and art–to maintain the notion of free will requires many sophisticated endeavours.33 

 

While negating metaphysical speculations, yet Kolakowski holds firmly to his thesis on the necessary religious justification of ethics. However, God is deprived of the metaphysical ‘qualities’–simplicity, infinity, eternity etc. The speculative knowledge of God, he writes, is idle cognitively and useless in life.34

As guarantor of ethics, God is accessible in a completely different way–in a myth. This cannot be conceived of as a doctrine, as a set of statements, for myths cannot be rendered in theological or secular language.35 The language of the Bible, in particular, is not a revealed doctrine. The ultimate reality is best manifested in rites, cults and art.

Why is divine cannot, in Kolakowski’s view, be given directly, revealed in its completeness or approached theoretically. At the very most it can be revealed in the just mentioned allusive way. Religious and artistic acts are most suitable for awakening a sense of comprehension, some kind of transitory fulfilment in which the highest reality is given. Kolakowski repeats many a time that they cannot be reforged into any theory.36

He claims that the knowledge of God is not so much a cognitive act as a function of devotion or artistic intuition. The Church doctors, mystics and fathers of the Christian Churches always associated cognition of the divine matters with piety, hope, faith, obedience and righteousness. They knew that God is accessible to the subjects of high moral standards.

Kolakowski continues this ways of thinking, producing the arguments in favour of God’s existence ‘from self-experience of himself as a moral subject’.37 He formulates an assumption on the creative character of moral acts, which is a consequence of the thesis of the equal range of goodness and being. As a result, by doing good a moral subject multiplies being, whereas by spreading evil he draws the world into the chaotic nothingness. As God is not separate from the world (Kolakowski gets close to emanationism) by doing good one can claim His ‘growth’. What is more, an ethically good activity has its cognitive side. Knowledge that: "acquaintance with the Absolute is a certain face of our spiritual life as a whole, especially the way in which we perceive good and evil as being our own, is a part of the Buddhist, Judaistic, Christian and Platonic heritages. That in this experience we not only get access, however disturbed, to the kingdom of Being, but we either enrich or impoverish this being [...] is dispersed through the whole history of civilisation, in myths as well as in philosophical investigations."38 

In the language of myths this experience is expressed as a belief that God rejoices or grieves at man’s behavour, by contrast in metaphysical discourse, it is revealed with hope for absorbing the world by God without destroying its diversity, with the firm conviction that humankind leads all creation to the final reconciliation with the Creator, that God becomes something out of nothing in a soul, etc.

The belief that it is possible to attain knowledge of God ‘when the opportunity arrives’, as if a self-experience of oneself in the categories of good and evil, is called by Kolakowski the idea of ‘practical reason,’ but it is neither Kantian nor pragmatic. This is not a Kantian idea because it does not infer the rules of practical reason from the universal norms of transcendental rationality, valid for any possible reason, and it approaches the path leading toward God as direct in the practical experience of good and evil in oneself. It is not pragmatic because it does not make use of a criterion for its justification.39

Thus Kolakowski’s proposition for grounding ethics in God has the character of a hermenutic circle: in order to experience God one has to behave morally, but moral behaviour has no sense (justification) without experiencing God. What is more Kolakowski seems to accept a certain pecular understanding of God, which reveals a sense of evil at the same time. For God, according to Kolakowski"

Gives birth to the world in order to as if fulfill Himself in its body; He has to create something which is strange to Him and see Himself in the mirror of finite minds, and when He absorbs back these alienated creations. He becomes richer; the magnificent and dreadful world’s history is God’s own history, perhaps His cosmic Golgoteha, a preliminary condition for His ultimate glory.40 

 

In such a perspective man and God share the same destiny, the common goal and common guilt–the original perplexity of God (his original sin) brings later recovery and reconciliation. Kolakowski softens the pathos of this solution, by such questions, constantly present in his reasoning, as: why should we believe in it?

There are no ulitimate arguments, knowledge is always proceed by belief. But it is important what kind of belief it is. Kolakowski’s belief is the interpenetration of ethics, moral acts and religion. If we reject them as phantasmagorias nothing protects us against the ominous ‘everything is allowed’.