Philosophy Made Simple

I further expected that the preoccupations of the great thinkers would help to better grasp the dilemmas and difficulties of modernity–in short, some discussion of why the ideas of these philosophers matter, here and now.

It would have been illuminating and helpful if Kolakowski had raised in each chapter the question that concludes his discussion of Nietzsche: “Can we find any meaning to our existence in the Nietzschean chaos, any way to live in the belief that life is worth living?” You could, of course, substitute for “Nietzschean chaos” “Augustinian chaos,” or “Hegelian” or “Kantian,” and other precepts or propositions examined here.

“Can we find any meaning in .  .  .  ” applied across-the-board could have been the key question that Kolakowski does not raise in the rest of his book.

Instead, this is a fragmented collection of stabs at the views of these philosophers and, especially, their grapplings with the existence of God and some basic issues of epistemology. Particularly regrettable is the absence of a conclusion, or summation of the major themes and propositions dissected. This makes a reviewer’s task difficult, since he cannot discuss the author’s views of each of the 23 philosophers. And the lucidity of Kolakowski’s exposition is greatly (and often unhelpfully) influenced by the questionable clarity of some of the authors he examines.

Of course, he cannot be blamed for not making crystal clear the murkier ideas of Saint Augustine, Bergson, Hegel, or Kierkegaard. An observation he makes about Edmund Husserl applies to several of the authors discussed: “It is hard to talk about Husserl without recourse to his own terminology, for his writings teem with neologisms.”

These terminologies often interfere with clarity and understanding. The modern reader is also likely to have some trouble absorbing some of the observations of Saint Augustine, such as this one:

It is no small task to summarize the key contributions and questions raised by 23 philosophers “who opened up new directions of thought for future generations.” They’re not grouped in any way, but listed more or less chronologically, beginning with Socrates (469-399 B.C.) and ending with Husserl (1859-1938). In the original work, first published in Polish, there were an additional seven, removed at the publisher’s request to save space. Apparently Kolakowski had to undertake the unenviable task of excising Aristotle, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Hobbes, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Plotinus. Space does not permit to list the 23 retained, but there seems to be a preponderance of thinkers preoccupied with the existence of God, or at any rate a focus on issues of religion.

I would have liked to know what criteria Kolakowski used for selecting these philosophers, especially in light of the omission of such figures as Aristotle, Bacon, Bentham, Erasmus, James, Marx, Mill, Rousseau, and Russell, among others. In his short introduction Kolakowski notes that he did not intend to provide “some sort of a super-condensed textbook, encyclopaedia or dictionary” but wished “to approach these great philosophers by concentrating on one idea in the thought of each–an important idea, an idea that was fundamental” to his philosophy.

The title offers a further clue. Kolakowski, himself a religious believer, suggests that “there is something rather than nothing,” and I assume that this “something” is an allusion to God, divinity, or the supernatural. At the same time, while discussing the views of these philosophers, Kolakowski does not exactly make a case for religious belief, or the existence of God; he seems to take it for granted.

There is also an occasional coyness in his reluctance to take a position about the propositions and beliefs under examination here. For example, he writes this about St. Anselm:

Well, has it not been axiomatic that faith is independent of (if not outright antithetical to) reason? And if so, is it worth rediscussing? (Tertullian famously proposed, “Credo quia absurdum.”) Regardless of who gets the credit for the originality of this venerable idea, the reader would like to know what Leszek Kolakowski thinks about the matter, especially given those ironic quotation marks around the word irrational, and his own convictions are only occasionally glimpsed, as at the end of his summary of the thoughts of Epictetus:

While few, whether believers or non-believers, would quarrel with such sentiments, Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? raises far more questions than it answers. And the major, nagging question this survey of thinkers has inspired in me is this: Could so many of these writer-philosophers be as abstruse and irrelevant as they seem to be, or have our intellectual sensibilities coarsened to such a degree that we cannot grasp the importance of their thoughts?

Paul Hollander is the author, most recently, of The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries and Political Morality.