Metaphysical Horror

Metaphysical Horror Leszek Kolakowski

Basil Blackwell

Copyright © Leszek Kolakowski 1988 First published 1988 Basil Blackwell Ltd 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK Basil Blackwell Inc. 432 Park Avenue South, Suite 1503 New York, NY 10016, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of "binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Kolakowski, Leszek Metaphysical horror. 1. Metaphysics 1. Title 110 B945.K7/ ISBN 0-631-15959-2 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Kolakowski, Leszek. Metaphysical horror / Leszek Kolakowski. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-631-15959.,-2 1. Metaphysics. 2. Philosophy. 1. Title. B4691.K5863M47 1988 190-dc19 Typeset in 12 on 14pt Garamond by OMB (Typesetting), Abingdon, Oxon. Printed in Great Britain by Billing and Sons Ltd, Worcester

Contents

On Philosophers· 1 On Philosophy· 1 On Philosophy's Self-martyrdom· 2 Its Self-derision· 7 Its Self-yearning. Jaspers (1) . 8 Its Survival . 11 On What Is Real . 11 Cartesian Dreams. Recycling the Cogito (1) . 21 Alibi. The Curse of Time· 27 The Absolute (1) . 29 The Absolute (2) . 33 Divine Persons and Unpersons. Is God Good? Cruor Dei· 36 Damascius and Two Kinds of Nothingness· 43 Divine Nothingness in Christianity· 49 On All Possible Languages (1) . 51 Recycling the Cogito (2) . 56 On Husserl . 59 On Merleau-Ponty . 61 v

Contents Ego as a Quasi-absolute . 66 On De-Cartesianization . 69 On Spinoza . 73 On Jaspers (2) . 75 Leibniz and All Possible W orIds . 77 On Creation, Divine and Human· 82 Alter-ego . 96 On All Possible Languages (2) . 98 Reading the W orId . 113 Index of Names· 121

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ON PHILOSOPHERS

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A modern philosopher who has never experienced the feeling of being a charlatan is such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading. For centuries philosophy asserted its legitimacy by asking and answering questions it had inherited from the Socratic and pre-Socratic legacy, that is, how to distinguish the real from the unreal, the true from the false, the good from the evil. There is one man with whom all European philosophers identify themselves, even if they dismiss his ideas altogether. This is Socrates - a philosopher who is unable to identify himself with this archetypal figure does not belong to this civilization.

ON PHILOSOPHY

At a certain moment, however, philosophers had to face, and to cope with, a simple, painfully undeniable fact: among questions that have sustained the life of European philosophy for two and a half millennia not a single one has

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ever been solved to our general satisfaction; all of them remain either controversial or invalidated by philosophers' decree. To be a nominalist or anti-nominalist is culturally and intellectually as possible today as it was in the twelfth century; to believe or not to believe that one may tell phenomena from the essence is as admissible as it used to be in ancient Greece; and so is to think that the distinction between good and evil is a contingent convention or that it is embedded in'the order of things. You may still be a respectable person whether you believe or refuse to believe in God; no standards in our civilization prevent you from thinking that language reflects reality or that it creates it; and you are not barred from good society if you accept or dismiss the semantic concept of truth. Whatever matters in philosophy - and this means: whatever makes philosophy matter at all in life - is subject to the same options that have persisted since the unidentifiable moment when independent thought, disregarding the mythological legacy as a source of authority, arose in our civilization. The vocabulary and the forms of expression have changed, to be sure, and many mutations have occurred - thanks to the number of great minds who appear occasionally in every century - yet the kernel which keeps philosophy alive is unchanged.

ON PHILOSOPHY'S SELF-MARTYRDOM

Various strategies have been devised to deal with this apparently self-defeating status of philosophy. The least reliable but the most successful, at least in terms of a philosopher's self-confidence, consists in denying that the situation just described obtains at all. Some questions are declared meaningless and thus non-questions; the mean2

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ingful ones are soluble, not unlike scientific problems, and many have actually been solved - if some people are not ready to accept the solution, they only thereby display their intellectual ineptitude. Die-hard analytical philosophers and old-style phenomenologists who openly philosophize within the framework of this strategy are now, however numerous, endangered species. The second strategy embraces a variety of relativistic ways out. The meaning of philosophical questions, like all others, is defined either by the rules of a linguistic game or by a historical setting, a specific civilization within which they were uttered, or else by the considerations of usefulness. There are no obligatory standards of rationalityand therefore there is no such thing as validity tout court. A philosophical tru(h, a _solutioll of the problem may indeed be -valid but, if so, it is~ali