Chciałem Go pożegnać. Kilkakrotnie próbowałem napisać choć parę słów. O Nim samym. Okazało się, że nie potrafię. Udało mi się tylko przedstawić Jego poglądy na reizm Tadeusza Kotarbińskiego, ale uczyniłem to gdzie indziej. Muszę tu poprzestać na ofiarowaniu Mu tego, co napisałem na Jego dziewięćdziesiąte urodziny, w osiemdziesięciolecie naszej przyjaźni.

Author tells the story of his close and very long-lasting acquaintance with Leszek Kołakowski as well as commentates on his intellectual biography and achievements as political and literary essayist, philosopher, historian of ideas, and public figure. In particular, he describes in details the first half of Kołakowski’s life, namely the period when he made his long journey from being communist in his student years to becoming as a young scholar the leading figure of Marxist revisionism in the late fifties and, (...) after a time, a principled critic of Marxism itself and a fervent anti-communist.In many respects, Kołakowski’s itinerary was not exceptional but it had at least two noteworthy characteristics. First, in opposition to quite a few other cases, his way away from communism turned out to be scholarly fruitful as it resulted in an uniquely indepth historical research, covering the founders, the golden age and the breakdown of so called “scientific socialism” (his voluminous work Main Currents of Marxism remains one of the best and the most comprehensive monographs of the topic). Second, Kołakowski’s abandoning of his former Weltanschauung was followed by his discovery of religion as an extremely important part of human experience and sine qua non condition of the survival of civilization, permanently menaced by barbarians. However, it is to be doubt whether he may be considered as a convert or a religious thinker in the strict sense of the word since he believed in horrors of the absence of God rather than in the real presence of his in the world. As defender of transcendence and tradition, Kołakowski certainly became a kind of catholic-Christian without denomination but as acritical philosopher remained at the same time highly skeptical about everything. Dreaming of solid fundaments, he was all his life an uncompromising enemy of any fundamentalism. Being nostalgic about the Absolute, he was incurable anti-absolutist. (shrink)