Leszek Kołakowski: philosophy and the yearning for absolute

Abstract

In philosophy, we call the absolute to that which is detached from everything, that is by itself unrelated to anything. The absolute is, then and by definition, ineffable and incommunicable. It is only possible to reveal its contours through the myth. Without myth, says Leszek Kołakowski (1927-2009), knowledge is not possible. In this work, we will see that the thought of the Polish philosopher is articulated around the problem of the foundation and the limits of knowledge. It is a question that he understood as the longing of philosophy: to give a reason for that absolute that manifests itself in the philosophy of history under the aspect of the utopia of fraternity, and in epistemology as the utopia of certainty. We will defend, however, that this cannot be the longing of philosophy, since, inasmuch it pretends to provide knowledge, it cannot evade the limits of intersubjectivity. Consequently, we will explain that the theory of communicative action formulated by Jürgen Habermas provides a better account of a rationality that finds in ordinary communication the faculty of giving and asking for reasons about what we consider true and correct.