Leszek Kołakowski

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Leszek Kołakowski, Warsaw, October 23, 2007
Leszek Kołakowski with Zofia and Władysław Bartoszewski , Warsaw, October 23, 2007

Leszek Kołakowski (born October 23, 1927 in Radom , † July 17, 2009 in Oxford ) was a Polish philosopher , historian of philosophy and essayist . He is widely regarded as the most prominent Polish philosopher of the 20th century.

Life

Leszek Kołakowski came from a left-wing intellectual freethinker family . Kołakowski's father was killed by the Gestapo during the war . Kołakowski himself spent most of the time of the German occupation in a village in eastern Poland , where he lived in a country house with a large library, the holdings of which he finally knew by heart. In Łódź he attended the Catholic Skorupka School and continued his education at an underground high school after all higher schools had closed. After the war he finished his high school education and became a member of the communist youth organization ZMP.

After the end of World War II , Kołakowski began studying philosophy at the newly founded University of Łódź and became a member of the Communist Party . Even before completing his studies (1950), he gave lectures and published philosophical essays. In 1952 his first major work on Avicenna appeared . Later he was particularly interested in Spinoza .

Kołakowski was the assistant to Tadeusz Kotarbiński and later to Adam Schaff , the then leading Orthodox Marxist in Poland. With him he received his doctorate in 1953 with the work The Doctrine of Spinoza from the Liberation of Man (Polish) and has since taught at the University of Warsaw , where he became professor for the history of philosophy in 1959 , although the originally loyal Marxist had already received the “real existing socialism "had criticized:

"Socialism is not a state where there are more bureaucrats than workers and where cowards live better than the brave."

In " Polish October " (1956) Kołakowski was one of the spokesmen for the student opposition. In 1957, the 30-year-old Marxist revolted in the Warsaw magazine Nowa Kultura against the ideological determinism of history taught as a science, thereby shaking one of the pillars of Marxism, historical materialism. His “life in spite of history” would later become the catchphrase of a spirit of optimism. In 1957/1958 Kołakowski attended universities in Holland and Paris and returned to Warsaw at the end of 1958, where he took over a professorship for modern philosophy, which he held until 1968.

In 1966 Kołakowski was expelled from the Communist Party and in 1968 he was banned from teaching because of his advocacy for opposition students during the March riots . He went abroad and initially gave guest lectures at McGill University in Montreal . In 1969 he taught for a year in Berkeley (California) before he was appointed to the Adorno chair in Frankfurt a. In spring 1970 - at the suggestion of Jürgen Habermas , among others . M. received. Also because of protests by the student council of the Philosophical Seminary, which accused him of "lacking Marxist loyalty to the line", he instead accepted a position as a research professor at All Souls College in Oxford , to which he has been a permanent member since then.

Kołakowski's grave in Warsaw

From 1975 Kołakowski also gave lectures at Yale University , from 1981 at the University of Chicago , where he was a member of the philosophy faculty. Until the turn of 1989 Kołakowski was banned from entering Poland.

He died in Oxford on July 17, 2009 at the age of 81. His body was transferred to Warsaw on a plane of the Polish Air Force, received with military honors by Poland's Foreign Minister Sikorski at the airport and buried in a state funeral in the Powązki cemetery. The Gazeta Wyborcza headlined its obituary "Poland in mourning" and posthumously crowned Kołakowski "King of Central Europe".

plant

Kołakowski dealt in his publications with almost all areas of philosophy - including ethics , aesthetics and the philosophy of religion . However, his focus was on dealing with Marxism . He developed a philosophy that was strongly influenced by the early writings of Karl Marx , which is often referred to with the term " Humanistic Marxism ", but is also considered a critic of Marxism.

His main work The main currents of Marxism gives a comprehensive presentation of the various currents of Marxism as well as its social and intellectual historical forerunners and pioneers. At the same time, it represents an examination of one's own biography. Kołakowski describes Marxism as “the greatest fantasy of our century”. The work closes with the verdict:

“The self-deification of man, which Marxism gave philosophical expression, ends like all individual and collective attempts at self-deification. It turns out to be the farce-like aspect of human inadequacy. "

Awards

Kołakowski has received numerous awards. In 1977 he received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade , in 1983 he received the Erasmus Prize for Services to European Culture and was a MacArthur Fellow , in 1991 Kołakowski was honored with the Ernst Bloch Prize , and in 2007 with the Jerusalem Prize for the freedom of the individual in society . In 2003 he received the Kluge Prize for his life's work . He was also a member of the British Academy , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1970) and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts .

Fonts (selection)

  • The main currents of Marxism - emergence, development, disintegration . 3 Bde., Munich 1977–1978, ISBN 978-3-492-02310-8 .
  • The priest and the fool. On the theological legacy in contemporary thought. (1959) In: Man without an alternative. (1967), p. 224ff.
  • Man without an alternative. About the possibility and impossibility of being a Marxist . Translated from the Polish by Wanda Brońska-Pampuch , from the English by Leonard Reinisch, Piper 140 series, Piper, Munich 1964, new edition 1984, ISBN 3-492-00440-7
  • The philosophy of positivism . Series Piper, Munich 1971 (first in Polish 1966).
  • Fool and priest. A philosophical reader . Edited by Gesine Schwan, German by Heinz Abusch, Polish Library, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1984 ISBN 3-518-02682-8
  • Treatise on the Mortality of Reason. Philosophical essays. Piper, Munich 1967.
  • Doubts about the method. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz 1977.
  • Horror metaphysicus. Piper, Munich 1988, ISBN 978-3-492-03228-5 .
  • The key to heaven - edifying stories. Patmos 2007 (new edition, first edition 1957), ISBN 978-3-491-71308-6 .
  • If there is no God: The question of God between skepticism and faith. 2008 (new edition, first edition 1982), ISBN 978-3-579-06471-0 .

literature

  • Christian Heidrich : Leszek Kolakowski. Between skepticism and mysticism. New criticism, Frankfurt a. M. 1998, ISBN 978-3-8015-0280-5 .
  • Krzysztof Michalski : The fragility of the whole. Leszek Kolakowski on his 80th birthday . In: transit . No. 34, 2008, ISSN  0938-2062 , pp. 5-19 and digitally in Eurozine.
  • Bogdan Piwowarczyk: Leszek Kolakowski - witness of the present. Ulm 2000.
  • Gesine Schwan : Leszek Kolakowski. A political philosophy of freedom according to Marx. (Diss. Freiburg i. Br. 1970), Kohlhammer philosophica, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart among others 1971.
  • Gesine Schwan: Epilogue to Leszek Kolakowski: Fool and Priest. A philosophical reader . 2nd edition, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1995. 3-518-02682-8.
  • Steven Lukes: Leszek Kolakowski . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 172 , 2011, p. 201-211 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Obituaries:

  • Christian Heidrich: The priest and the fool . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 18./19. July 2009, 23.
  • Tony Judt: The Wisdom of Kolakowski . In: The New York Review of Books 56 (2009), No. 14, 6-7.
  • Gesine Schwan: The same dignity for all people. In: Die Welt, July 21, 2009.
  • Oliver vom Hove: The "King of Central Europe" . In: Die Furche, August 13, 2009.

Web links

Commons : Leszek Kołakowski  - album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Leszek Kołakowski  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "Gazeta Wyborcza": Philosopher Leszek Kolakowski dead DA-imNetz.de
  2. ↑ Quoted from Oliver von Hove: The "King of Central Europe" . In: Die Furche , August 13, 2009, p. 12.
  3. ↑ Kołakowski is not coming to Frankfurt. Die Zeit, December 1970, retrieved on August 11, 2017 .
  4. ↑ a b Oliver von Hove: The "King of Central Europe" . In: Die Furche , August 13, 2009, p. 12.
  5. ^ Kołakowski: The main currents of Marxism. Vol. 3, Piper: Munich 1978, p. 567.
  6. ^ Kołakowski: The main currents of Marxism. Vol. 3, Piper: Munich 1978, p. 575.
  7. ↑ cf. friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de (PDF file; 207 kB)
personal data
SURNAME Kołakowski, Leszek
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish philosopher and writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 23, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Radome
DATE OF DEATH July 17, 2009
Place of death Oxford , England