NEW BRITAIN, Conn., Nov. 20 (AScribe Newswire) -- Following is commentary by Dr. M.B. Bisupski. Dr. Biskupski is Professor of History and holder of the Stanislaus A. Blejwas Endowed Chair in Polish and Polish-American Studies at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut.
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Recently, the Library of Congress, after two years of most deliberate considerations, named Leszek Kolakowski the first winner of the Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities. The prize carries with it the not inconsiderable sum of $1 million in addition to its Olympian prestige. In his native Poland, Kolakowski is a figure of enormous stature, an icon in the struggle for victory over communism and the re-establishment of national freedom. In the West, however, his renown is largely confined to academic circles. Now this will change, as well it should, for Kolakowski is the man who buried Karl Marx, a funeral long overdue.
In his youth Kolakowski was both a precocious intellect and a devoted communist. His intellectual promise earned him a trip to Moscow where he observed the future and found it both not working and quite repulsive. By stages, Kolakowski began an intellectual reconstruction. First, he broke with the Stalinism of his youth becoming a so-called revisionist Marxist, then a leader in the Marxist-humanist camp. This caused him to lose his privileged position as a professor at Warsaw University, and expulsion from the Party and linked him with the opposition movement in Poland. Gradually, Kolakowski realized the Stalinist system of his youth was not an aberration but a logical product of the Marxist system whose genealogy he brilliantly reconstructed in a huge work, Main Currents of Marxism published in 1976-1978. By that time, Kolakowski had concluded that the intellectual passion of his youth was little more than an elaborate fraud maintained not be the power of its argument but by a quasi-religious faith in its message, believed in spite of the inculpating evidence of reality.
The first time I met Kolakowski, in Los Angeles in 1970, he was a Marxist revisionist. The next time, more than 20 years later, he had already proclaimed Marxism a pseudo-religion which had exhausted its ability to convince or convert; a mere "repertoire of slogans."
As Kolakowski dismantled the Marxist project he simultaneous constructed an intellectual defense of European civilization based upon faith in the transcendent and the realization that human freedom rests on foundations grasped by religion but denied by Marxism. In this quest, which at 76 he still pursues with intellectual vigor and overpowering erudition, Kolakowski has provided a vast intellectual defense for an essentially Christian understanding of the Western tradition. This assumes that we cannot answer all questions in this veil of tears but we must try to do so and that we are ennobled by the effort. This realization that we cannot know the truth but must seek it with humility requires us to treat all claims to infallibility with skepticism knowing that there can be no paradise on earth and those who would urge us to construct one are both blasphemers and fools. It is an irony of our time that Kolakowski, probably a non-believer, has observed that Europe is "Christian by birth" while Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who proclaims himself a Roman Catholic, would exclude such a reference from the EU's constitution. The Polish philosopher has had cause to reflect more profoundly on the civilization of the West then the politicians of Western Europe.
As a young man, Kolakowski began the intellectual assault
on the Temple of Marxism and the graven idols of that cult
now lie in the dust. He has, more than any other, destroyed
the intellectual foundations upon which the Marxist claim to
allegiance has rested. In the last few decades Karl Marx has
been solemnly buried in Poland. Lech Walesa's Solidarity
movement organized the funeral; Karol Wojtyla celebrated the
obsequies, but the ironic eulogy was prepared by Leszek
Kolakowski. By destroying the intellectual pretensions of
this once mighty force, Kolakowski has helped save Poland
and the West and thus is one of the few truly great figures
of the modern world.
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