Is God Happy? Selected Essays by Leszek Kolakowski

• I bought this book in Poland while on a visit to Krakow, from the American bookstore
• I have never heard of him but he’s an authority among Polish scholars
• Born in 1927 died in 2009 – I hope this cover says you can smoke and live to be 81 years
• Kolakowski has a Doctorate in Philosophy with a focus on the history of modern philosophy and his work also covers the philosophy of science
• He’s rabidly anti communist, censored multiple times since 1956 and then expelled in 1968, banned from teaching. This year saw also the banning of Jewish thinkers as well
• This book is a posthumous publication, with an introduction by his daughter Agnieszka.
• It is divided into 3 sections:
  • Socialism, Ideology and the left
  • Religion, God and the Problem of Evil
  • Modernity, Truth, the Past and Some Other Things
• I didn’t like the editing, surprisingly there are many typos, grammatical errors and, for the last section, I would have ordered the essays differently to introduce some concepts first and then develop them later especially that this book is not an academic one and yet some of the essays were published in academic contexts.
• The essays run from 1953 up until 2007 and for some essays, before I finished them, I looked at the year of publication, thinking there was some kind of foreseight in them, but no he was fairly within his time. The essays all follow a classical structure: intro, body, conclusion. In general, the essays are a mix of rigor, sarcasm and humor. There are sections I didn’t understand and there are essays and sections that made me laugh, like for example his essay on unpunctuality; it seems he wasn’t punctual because in this essay he isn’t happy when people say x is notoriously unpunctual and he goes on to explain in a 4-page short, witty essay that only someone who is notoriously punctual can turn out to be unpunctual because only a person who fulfils the expectations of others on his punctuality can fail to fulfil those expectations; in other words, to say of someone that he is notoriously unpunctual is absurd
• The category I enjoyed reading the most was the first one on Socialism because it is filled with humor, expressed by someone who experienced socialism from the inside, who read all of the communist literature and who was courageous enough to express it, almost unfiltered. The opening essay sees him describing the average communist militant as someone who equates communism with the image of a better world, without bothering to understand how can Marxism, Leninism or Stalinism lead to that world. He goes on showing how this world is built like a house of cards and that socialist leaders know that if you pull one card, the entire structure crumbles down; this is why, in his opinion, censorship and repression are essential in these countries.
• In another essay, he asks what is socialism and goes on providing 81 negative statements answering this question; the one I liked the most is: “A state where history is in the service of politics.”
• In another essay in that category, Communism as a Cultural Force, Kolakowski states that the causes embraced by communists around the world had nothing to do with Communist doctrine. It’s important to untangle this amalgam which makes Communism the defender of noble causes, such as the oppression of one people by another as is the case in the Developing Countries under colonialism, or the communists’ protests against censorship (very funny). Kolakowski even goes to show that the October Revolution‘s slogans of “peace” and “land for the peasants” have themselves nothing to do with communist dogma
• In his essay, What is Left of Socialism, published in 1995, his opening paragraph states that Marx was a German writer, very learned, who died 119 years ago, lived in the age of steam and never saw a car, a telephone or electric light in his life. Such an opening sets the reader in the expectation of what Kolakowski will end up concluding: that Marx is certainly worth reading but that his writings can still explain anything in our world is a doubtful matter. He explains how five of Marx’s most important contributions to political thinking have all turned out to be false (p. 64-66). I think such essays are essential to demistify untouchable figures of figures and I look forward to the same happening to Darwin.
• There are reflections in this category of essays that, even though they originated in socialism, go beyond it, such as when he says: “Are racist and chauvinist tendencies more threatening or less when they are wrapped in universalist, humanitarian and pacifist phraseology?” Food for thought for our own generation which is embracing “positive racism” as a momentary reaction to past crimes but is incapable of taking its reflection of positive racism to the end. Taking the logic behind concepts towards its end is captured in the last category of essays.
• To conclude that section on Socialism, what I particularly liked is his “demonstration” about how the socialist ideal became embodied in the soviest communist theory of the single party. In doing so, he showed the contempt that Communism in its soviet form had for the proletariat. That is because both Marx and Lenin had little respect for the proletarian thinking in its contemporary form before it progressed to its mature form, as Marx wanted it to. The idea of the single party in early 20th century politics was achieved in two stages. In the first stage, Communists had to establish “a truth” which they found in Marxism because it had “scientific” truths about the class struggle and because Marxism articulated the interests of the Proletariat, which it elevated to the rank of the most progressive class. For Lenin, however, this class, unaided, had only a bourgeois consciousness, because a society torn by class struggle can only produce two ideologies. Since the bourgeois controlled all means, it follows that the peoletariat, unaided, by an all-controlling party, would fail to produce its own ideology. The party had to be all-controlling to fend off a possible bourgeois counter-attack and to prevent any potential tarnishing of the communist ideology, the only political truth as explained in Marxism.
  • I appreciate this essay for its contemporaneity with our own period. In my opinion, the same approach is taken by identitarians in their proclamation of a single truth: because the white man is biased since birth, unaided by an awakened party or group or council, he cannot comprehend the realities of any other identity.
• The second section is on Religion, God and the Problem of Evil. The first essay is titled Jesus Christ – Prophet and Reformer and Kolakowski takes an approach that other Christian thinkers had taken before him, namely to look at Jesus Christ without presupposing their faith and without any referencing to dogmatic texts. Kolakowski was interested in the philosophical Jesus, knowing quite well that Jesus is not a philosopher. He isn’t accommodating at all in this 1956 essay, which I found to be rather bold for a Catholic Poland at the time, even if of Communist appearance. I particularly enjoyed how Kolakowski summarizes each philosopher’s interpretation of Jesus; for Hegel, Jesus was a phase in human-historical knowledge and a sensory manifestation of God when man conceives of God as something in which he participates. On the other end is Kierkegaard, to whom Jesus as a person is a sterile item of historical information for us but that Christ is constantly true for Christians who make him contemporary to them. Probably two sides of the same coin? Even though Kolakowski states that he will not look at the Epistles of St. Paul, he does very briefly touch on them and treats St. Paul independently of Jesus, a mistake, in my opinion. Kolakowski does demonstrate the “Reformer” trait of Jesus and he stretches that impact all the way throughout history to our own time, wrapping up Marx in this, to whom the belief in the solidarity of the proletariat is directly traced back to Jesus. The essay expounds on the reforming Christ but says little on Christ the prophet. The essay closes on an important point- which was more or less previous expressed by Chesterton when he said: “The world is filled with Christian ideas gone mad“- which Kolakowski, still focused on looking at the philosophical Jesus, urges us to pay attention to the abstraction that we’re doing of Jesus’ values in their non-Chrsitian form, thereby running the risk that the demise of Christianity will inevitably erode the historical meaning of the existence of Jesus.
• The other essay I liked in this section is titled: Leibniz and Job: The Metaphysics of Evil and the Experience of Evil. Here also Kolakowski does a fantastic job in simplifying the concept of evil as it was thought of by the Stoics, Augustine, Leibniz and others. He tells us of Leibniz’ differentiation between moral evil and suffering and simplifies for us various philosophers’ understanding of the concept of omnipotence. God’s omnipotence is of course what thinkers of the problem of evil refute because how can their be evil under an omnipotent God? Kolakowski seems to favor Leibniz interpretation of omnipotence which -paradoxically- restricts it: to Leibniz God is omnipotent in that He created the laws of Maths and Physics but that even God cannot change these laws even if he wanted to do. In other words, non-man-made suffering is the result of these laws of nature (more on Natural Law in the last category of essays) and that God cannot mix up regularities -tamper with the universe- whenever He wants to. I don’t think the problem of Evil will be resolved or understood rationally and I think that a leap of faith is all we can do to apprehend the concept of Evil. In such situations where Philosophy and the Sciences fail to statisfy our curiosity, one turns to fiction and so I paste here a poem by Robert Frost which Kolakowski included in this essay. In this poem, Robert Frost puts words in God’s mouth as He speaks with Job. The poem is titled “A Masque of Reason“:
  • I’ve had you on my mind a thousand years
  • To thank you someday for the way you helped me
  • There’s no connection man can reason out
  • Between his just deserts and what he gets.
  • Virtue may fail and wickedness succeed…
  • Too long I’ve owed you this apology
  • For the apparently unmeaning sorrow
  • You were afflicted with in those old days.
  • But ut was of the essence of the trial
  • You shouldn’t understand it at the time.
  • I had to seem unmeaning to have meaning…
  • My thanks are to you for releasing me
  • From moral bondage to the human race.
  • The only free will there at first was man’s,
  • Who could to good or evil and he chose.
  • I had no choice but I must follow him
  • With forfeits and rewards he understood
  • I had to prosper good and punish evil.
  • You changed all that. You set me free to reign.
  • You are the Emancipator of your God.
• The last essay I want to talk about in this section is on Erasmus. Choosing Erasmus –eclipsed by the more modern Luther- for a topic on Catholic reformation demonstrates the classical philosophical learning of Kolakowski. Erasmus lived between the 15th and the 16th centuries which were centuries of a degenerate papacy and, as a result, almost every thinker during this period was talking about the need to reform the Church. Erasmus understood Christianity as a religion of Love not Law, of Faith rather than Works, but in his lifetime saw exactly the opposite when transactions governed the papacy. To Erasmus, a faithful relationship with a personal God would not justifiy the existance of an organized Church. Christianity is simple and fit for every layman to understand and does not need the bloatedness of rituals or ceremonial pompousness which characterized -and continues to in lesser ways- the Church. This approach to Christianity seemed to align with Luther’s who counted on the support of Erasmus during the early days of his schism from the Church. However, Erasmus never joined Luther in his reformation efforts because of profound differences between the two. In summarizing swathes of historical epochs and spectrums of philosophical thought, lies the real pleasure in reading Kolakowski. On this confrontation between the thiner and the theologian, Kolakowski says: Christianity is the continuation of the good aspects of man’s nature (Erasmus) not the triumphant consquest of nature by super-nature (Luther). The view of man as a vessel of evil, corroded by original sin, which must be smashed before human nature can give way to the sactifying power of God’s grace is what defines Lutheranism and is a rather bleak look at human nature, to which Erasmus couldn’t agree. It’s the first time I read something so simple about Erasmus and it’s only I need to get started with one of his books.
• The last two sections on Religion and on Modernity seem to be related because in the last category of essays on Modernity, the frequently discussed topic is that of Truth whether it is manifested in Justice, History or Relativism. There are 11 essays in this last section and Natural Law makes its appearance in maybe 9 of them. Natural Law has been mostly developped by Saint Thomas Aquinas to say that there is a Universal Truth and so laws are to be deduced rather than formulated. It’s a very Catholic approach to morality and this selection of essays confused me the most about Kolakowski. Was he a Catholic philosopher? It seems so from his attacks in that last part of the book on Empiricism, the Enlightenment, Historicism and basically anything relativist, ergo Hume. Atheism -and Nihilism of course- to Kolakowski is what mankind should not sink into at all costs. He says he’s not a Catholic philosopher and even not a believer. It is possible that he is a genuine critic of those un-Catholic schools of thought deriving from Hume’s empiricism which, when taken to their extreme, to the ultimate point of their logic, fail to enlighten man, produce nothing that is meaningful however useful (in the sense of being practical) their outputs might be. He can criticize the roots of nihilism and atheism while not finding the answer to the problem of Truth in Catholicism.
  To Kolakowski, these post-Hume ideologies are the root causes of modern Man’s anxiety in a godless age. I felt that his essay before last titled : Lot’s Wife or the Charms of the Past captures his own Truth. Even though this 1957 essay was not published in communist Poland until after the fall of communism, I felt it invited us to look at much more than the pre-communist past and into well intentioned utopian tenets -such as absolute freedom or absolute equality- which when simultaneously applied to society are impossible to exist and are necessarily mutually exclusive, rendering our search for the ultimate ideology, the One Truth, an oscillating pendulum’s movement never capable of attaining the Absolute in a world without an Absolute God.
• Which brings me to the essay which asks Is God Happy? And unfortunately, this is the weakest essay in that collection and I’m glad I did not cheat in that bookstore and started ploughing through that essay which served as an excellent marketing trick because I probably would have dropped the book and missed Kolakowski’s intellect, knowledge and humor. In short, it’s an essay about happiness, “something we can imagine but not experience.” It’s a 2006 essay, written towards the end of his life and so I’d like to use the old age card as an excuse for this essay.
• Lastly, the glaring weakness of these essays is a fault inherent to the essay form itself; in other words, the essay doesn’t permit the “proving” of a statement and that the reader of the essay must rely on the credibility of the author to accept statements like “There was almost no Communist involvement in the February’s Revolution” or in the last category when talking about Truth : “I believe there is gaudium de veritate, we simply like knowing things quite apart from any practical benefits to be derived from knowledge” or “It seems safe to say that no ideology […] is immune to the danger of being used as an instrument of oppression and slavery.“
• The bold text is my aide-mémoire for my planned review of this book to our Lebanon Book Club. Needless to say this book is highly recommended.