Here We Are
Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? 23 Questions from Great Philosophers
by Leszek Kolakowski
Basic, 2007
(240 pages, $20.00, hardcover)
Reading the newspaper can be a demoralizing experience: explosions and elections, scandals and the stock market. Saturated with crises and politics, we might envy the Poles for the antidote of perennial philosophy they received in Leszek Kolakowski’s regular newspaper columns.
Now collected in the pocket-sized Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?, each of the 23 columns pulls out a single revealing idea from a major philosopher, usually prefaced by a driving question. Kolakowski’s accessible and insightful reflections are not meant to give a catalogue of names and buzzwords but to prompt the reader to enter the conversation and grapple with the ideas for himself.
Deeper Truths
Kolakowski, senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and an intellectual leader in the war against communism, does not canonize any particular philosopher. Nor does he propose any grand thesis for the history of philosophy or any overarching curve of progress or regress.
A Marxist in his early years, until he visited Moscow and saw the reality of Stalinism, he has spent enough time with grand theses. In this book, he is simply—and profoundly—enjoying great thoughts and marveling at our human ability to wonder and ask Why?
“William of Ockham was a nominalist who wanted to shave away scholastic paraphernalia” is a canned description of that medieval philosopher. True enough, Kolakowski agrees in his essay “Do Ideas Exist?”, but he goes on to ask, Why should we care?
What happens if we embrace Ockham’s idea that there are no universal natures or abstract entities, except in the language we concoct? Is a Chopin piano concerto, for example, merely “a piece of paper covered with musical notation? Or is it, perhaps, an event that occurred in Chopin’s mind? Or is it every particular instance of its performance?”
Moreover, what happens to theology and ethics if we accept Ockham’s belief that one only knows universal truths through divine revelation? Is the Decalogue just God’s “arbitrary decree,” and does it make sense to say that his commands are “good in themselves, independently of being decreed by him?”
When there is no shared human nature and all knowledge stems from individual experience, man finds himself in a lonely, egoistical world. His experiences, whether of God’s word or Chopin’s concertos, are personal and isolated; morality is divorced from reason and thus exiled from the public square, while aesthetics and metaphysics are wiped out altogether.
Amanda Shaw is a graduate of the Catholic University of America, is a junior fellow at First Things (www.firstthings.com). She attends the Church of Our Savior in Manhattan.
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