Human dignity in a Polish mind

In 1989, the writer Paul Gray published an intriguing interview in the AD2000 journal in which he asks the great agnostic late 20th-century Polish philosopher, Leszek Kołakowski (1927-2009), to comment upon the state and role of the Catholic Church.

He answered plainly that the role of the Church was “the salvation of souls” and that to obscure this is to abandon her key spiritual and transcendent essence altogether. The philosopher also expressed his support for the important place in civilisation of the Church’s educational and witness role in building up the dignity of the human person, upon which all subsequent social teaching was based.

He says in the interview: “Of course, our Pope (John Paul II), in his various pronouncements, has very strongly stressed the idea of human rights as an idea of fundamentally Christian origin, which I think is true. What I mean is that this idea, in spite of all historical conflicts covering it, is essentially of Christian origin.”

Kołakowski would argue, despite his evident admiration of the monumental labours of Pope John Paul II in articulating a theological philosophy of the human person, more needed to be done to clarify and communicate Catholic social teaching.

It is hard to overstate the importance of Kołakowski not only to philosophical writing and popularisation but in Eastern European history.

A consistent theme in his thought was the value and dignity of the human person, even if this notion is not entirely empirical: “It is difficult to define what human dignity is. It is not an organ to be discovered in our body, it is not an empirical notion, but without it we would be unable to answer the simple question: what is wrong with slavery?”

He began his academic work as a committed Marxist. As one author writes: “For young people who survived the war, Marxism was the promise of a better world, built on a sense of moral integrity, and seemed an ideological counterweight to fascism.”

Many Polish academics had been exiled or executed by the occupying forces of Nazi Germany, however most were not drawn to Marxism as an alternative. At the universities, the Polish phenomenologists and the Catholic Thomists continued to provide a lively presence.

One of the rising Polish proponents of phenomenology synthesised with Thomist metaphysics was Fr Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II. Many decades later, the Polish philosopher would visit the other Polish philosopher and Pope in his Castel Gandolfo palace.

Kołakowski began to realise that most of the applications of Marxist ideology were markedly inhumane. In 1950 he recognised “the enormity of material and spiritual desolation caused by the Stalinist system”.

In part, the philosopher recognised that the more he grew in humility and integrity, the more the scales fell from his eyes. As he wrote with his typical ironic tone in his work, My Correct Views on Everything: “I was almost omniscient (yet not entirely) when I was 20 years old, but, as you know, people grow stupid when they grow older. I was much less omniscient when I was 28 and still less now.”

At first he became a leading thinker in a cultural/historical school in Warsaw, which sought a type of revisionist Marxism – a communism with “a human face” or a type of “personalist” Marxism in which the individual human person and his or her dignity held a place.

He was condemned for this position by the ardent Marxists, expelled from the party and had all his academic titles stripped and his works banned.

He was exiled to the West where he would find posts at Yale and Chicago Universities, McGill University (1968-69), the University of California, Berkeley (1969-70), and as a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford (1970). He was much rewarded for his writing, particularly for his ability to communicate with those outside the academic community.

He said: “We’re wrestling with fundamental issues and these ought to be understandable to people who are not academics and are not professionally committed to this sort of endeavour.”

Despite this official condemnation in his homeland, Kołakowski’s thought played a vital part in providing an intellectual and ethical basis for the growing dissident movement in Poland, especially amongst the unions and workers groups. His works were circulated in underground (samizdat) form.

He is considered one of the fathers of the solidarity movement in Poland, which would eventually be active in the overthrow of communism in Poland and Western Europe.

In 1989 Kołakowski published his powerful and important work, Main Currents of Marxism, which has been described as “an intellectual ‘death certificate’ of Marxist thought written thirteen years before the actual burial of communism in 1989”. In this book Kołakowski says emphatically, “a monstrous edifice of lies, exploitation, and oppression”.

Despite his critical opposition to Marxism, Kołakowski warned that Western liberalism devoid of notions of the common good is not a “spiritually” sustained notion of human dignity or public virtues.

His later writings about the loss of the sacred and the contribution of the sacred to a society’s coherence have relevance to all the formational work we are undertaking today at the Thomas More Centre:

“Many people have seen uprootedness as a distinct mark of our times; this widespread feeling of insecurity, of the absence of spiritual shelter, naturally found ideological or philosophical expression. We shed our archaic 'irrational' habits of mind not to enter the glorious kingdom of rationality but, on the contrary, to adopt new habits which disregard the idea of rationality altogether.”

Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre