Leszek Kolakowski is explaining, without excusing (see the last sentence) the involvement, fully or in various degrees, of intellectuals in the political power, for dozen of years or only at the beginnings. It is the temptation of power, but not necessarily in itself, but as a framework allowing him to influence those who effectively own this power. As Raymond Aron, in "Opium des intellectuels" said: „L’intelligentsia supporte mieux la persécution que l’indifférence”.
Word Power
Leszek Kolakowski
The New Republic, vol. 203, nr. 18, 1990
The intellectuals: In God's menagerie, are they necessary? For what? Are they mediators or producers? If the latter, what do they produce? The word is just a tool of mediation: Are they, then, producers of tools of mediations? Since the earliest periods of the division of labor, mediators have probably been useful and necessary; they carried products from one location to another and were compensated in return. They did not produce anything, but they were indispensable to the spatial distribution of products. It was, still, physical work, the transferal of material goods.
In the history of trade economy, the division of labor continued to develop, but the tradesman did not need to move about any longer; he simply organized business, worked with a pencil and words. No longer did wealth require a physically visible form. Money separated more and more from material appearances: at one time it was cattle, then gold, then bank notes and bonds; and today our wealth consists mostly of electronic impulses in a bank computer, something invisible, almost abstract and incomprehensible. For centuries there has existed a comparatively numerous category of people who are no longer mediators in the old sense, but who deal with the substance of mediation itself; these people are bankers, usurers, and stockbrokers, and the medium of exchange has become a commodity itself.
The same has happened to the word, that is, to the medium for exchanging and mediating commodities of mind. Besides people who professionally transmitted information, doctrines, commands, traditions, and so forth -- besides teachers, prophets, scribes, priests, and messengers -- there emerged a class of people who utilized the word as working material, just as bankers used money. In their hands the word became autonomous, ceased to be a mere medium of exchange. It was treated as a value in itself. The invisible substance of the word asserted itself as an independent area of reality, instead of being functionally related to the transmission of information, of truths or lies, of feelings or wishes.
The sphere of power, which perhaps emerged originally from military and organizational functions, had assumed independence even earlier. And when these three auxiliary tools of communication and organization established their own domain of existence and their own principles, when they became autonomous, modern civil society was built on the three pillars of money, power, and the word. A process of self-enlargement and self-creation advances continuously in all these areas; and the money experts, the power holders, and the word architects (that is, the intellectuals) are agents in this marvelous process of self-accumulation. Owing to them, money produces more money, power produces more power, words produce more words.
The notion that this is really production has been repeatedly attacked, mostly by unsuccessful back-to-nature ideologies, which appeared within the last 150 years as a variety of anarchistic utopian ideas. Nothing, it was said, is actually produced in the spheres of money, power, and word. The existence of these three entities is only apparent; they are nothing, in reality, and cannot be more than instruments of communication. Their pseudo-independence, moreover, serves to perpetuate the irrational privilege of unproductive and idle social classes. As for the intellectuals, what are they but intellectual profiteers, producers of hollow words, babblers, parasites who continuously exploit their pretended superiority to strengthen or improve their own privileged status? The entire history of the anarchistic movement reflects a suspicion, even a hatred, of intellectuals.
It is hardly necessary to mention that all these execrations and attacks on intellectuals originated with intellectuals. It is tempting to view the act of questioning the usefulness of intellectuals as a practical antinomy: one must be an intellectual oneself in order to thunder convincingly against intellectuals. There is no other profession with such an innate tendency to question continuously its own legitimacy. At times we do ask, to be sure, why generals, or government, or bankers? But those questions are not asked by generals, or government officials, or bankers. And even if intellectuals do find good or bad reasons to justify their own existence, the frequency of such examination betrays a bad conscience, or at least the feeling that their legitimacy is never secure, or that the social or moral foundation of their work is not definite.
Why do intellectuals feel compelled to defend their right to exist? The answer is not difficult, and seems to be founded in the nature of language, hence of human existence. Ever since objects, actions, and attributes were named by Adam, reality, which had been perceptible without words, could not remain the same. The word does not operate only as the substitute for an object in certain circumstances, and it may not just represent or replace an object: the object itself is perceived through mediation of the word, it is provided with meaning in the process of perception. Not only is the word necessary to reproduce reality, it is also reality's co-producer. The object is what it is only within a linguistic network, only as its particle. The known world corresponds to this network, not on the basis of conventional symbolization, but in reciprocal determination, without either side taking precedence. The world is not simply reproduced in language, it is appropriated only in the form of language.
Since language is productive, moreover, it does not simply encompass the world. It also anticipates the possible and examines the unreal, even the impossible. It has the future tense, the interrogative form, the modus irrealis at its disposal. Thus it tends to question everything, including itself. It is a peculiarity of language that it has become not only autonomous, but self-reflective. Money became autonomous, but it cannot call itself into question. The word can. The intellectuals, therefore, those masters, manipulators, and tamers of the word, are producers of all possible worlds and all-questioning, all-doubting revolutionaries.
In saying this, we already presuppose a certain notion of the intellectual. Speaking of intellectuals as a class, we do not think of all those who simply convey the word as mediators, but more particularly of those who use it to obtrude a particular world perception on others, thereby to create a new world. A priest, who works primarily with linguistic means, is not as such an intellectual; it is his task to preserve in ritual the holy word of religious tradition, to transmit the inherited wisdom in sermons. Neither is a teacher as such an intellectual, when he endeavors to convey to the young the accumulated stock of knowledge and the techniques of thinking. Indeed, even scholars -- linguists, historians, or archaeologists -- are not intellectuals, as long as they attempt to remain true to the material found or discovered in order to describe it, and as long as they minimize their own intervention in the process. The intellectual is not a researcher or a discoverer in the strict sense. He lays claims beyond that: he uses the word to suggest his own world interpretation. He does not wish to transmit truth, but to create it. He is not a guardian of the word, but a manufacturer of it.
Is he, then, by definition, a liar? No, at least not necessarily. In lying, the word is used legitimately, so to speak: when we lie, we remain within the borders of the factual, we simply reverse, hide, or disfigure the facts as we know them. Lies are a normal component of human behavior in military, public, and private matters, and they do not require creative powers. Intellectuals are not liars, but seducers. A lie may occasionally aid in their work, of course, but it is not absolutely necessary. Drawing on the resources of the word, intellectuals desire to obtrude or to suggest a view of the world that facts alone -- presented correctly or incorrectly -- could never produce.
A view of the world does not emerge from an accumulation of facts. It requires words to interpret, to judge, and to order the facts. Thus, by attempting to uncover, that is, to produce, the meaning of facts, the intellectuals -- philosophers, poets, writers of fiction, political thinkers -- turn out to be ideologists. That is to say, they uphold an idea of the world as it ought to be, and from it they derive a picture of the world as it is, not in the sense that what exists converges with what is desired, but in the sense that from a world desired or imagined rules are derived for how the facts of the existing world must be interpreted -- for what the facts, in their essence, are.
The intellectuals, at least in their own estimation, are masters and rulers of the word, not its servants. For that reason, they are destroyers of tradition, even if they attempt to preserve it with the best of intentions. To defend tradition on one's own means to question it. Plato wished to ban poets from the ideal state. He believed, rightly, that poets destroyed the legacy of morals through their manner of portraying the gods. But one may go further: even those who venerate tradition are dangerous when they appear as intellectuals. Had Plato followed his own argument, he would have recognized that he, too, would fall victim to his rules. The ideological state -- Plato's ideal republic as well as the modern totalitarian state -- does not need intellectuals, in the sense of people who independently question and take a position; it needs those who preserve the word of tradition, which provides legitimacy to established power without concessions. But the intellectuals -- sophists in Socrates' Athens, early medieval dialecticians, or philosophers in the eighteenth century -- always make themselves natural enemies of stability, either by relying on self-supported reason or by referring to other sources of wisdom independent of the ideological state.
All this is sufficiently obvious. Less obvious is the difficulty we encounter in distinguishing clearly between defenders and destroyers of established ideologies in the past and the present. Every established ideology occasionally has to make headway against unexpected circumstances and new dangers. When existing and proven means will not suffice, it takes people with a more imaginative faculty than the common ideological warrior to forge new intellectual weapons: it takes intellectuals. Usually they attempt to beat the enemy with his own weapons, to appropriate to themselves various components of a doctrine in order to render it innocuous within the transmitted ideology. The independent force of the word, however, carries them almost inevitably further than the defense requires; and for all their good intentions, they become destroyers of what they were determined to defend.
Indeed, they are often unable to avoid such destruction in order to succeed. Who was a more loyal guardian of church doctrine than Aquinas, when he attacked the Averroists' demands for the full autonomy of secular reason? In attacking them, however, he defined specific rules for how secular reason should be separated from faith, and established the boundaries of its relative autonomy. With this clear distinction, he exposed church doctrine to the same danger against which he had sought to defend it: from his adversaries he adopted a category that then solidified its rights against the church and Thomism.
Or, at the opposite pole in Christianity, who was a more irreconcilable enemy of secular reason, of dialectics, of philosophy than Calvin? By pitting his profound biblical conservatism against the haughtiness of scholasticism, however, he destroyed trust in the continuity of the Church as a source of interpretation of the doctrine. For the task of interpretation, he left to future generations only the very secular reason that he had vigorously condemned. In spite of Calvin's intentions, he created an intellectual environment that soon nurtured the advocates of natural religion and the deists: Descartes, with his irrefutable proofs of God's existence, contributed decisively to the development of European atheism, and the profoundly pious Bayle became the teacher par excellence of all the skeptics of the Enlightenment. The boundaries between great teachers and great heretics are never certain.
Or, to take a contemporary example, who was a more loyal bedfellow of communism than Lukacs? And yet all through his life he never managed to get on with the Party, and was repeatedly stigmatized as a renegade. His mind was not satisfied with being faithful; he aspired to improve Communist doctrine and to defend it even more forcefully than the Party chiefs, which led him to various errors. Intellectuals are responsible to a large extent for the spread and the consolidation of the Communist world, but they contributed enormously to its decline as well. Sooner or later, obedience proved to be unbearable; and those among the intellectuals who did not completely renounce obedience and attack the doctrine from the outside, those who attempted to improve it from within, were especially destructive.
To have intellectuals within the pale of an ideological institution causes endless vexation. At the same time, however, it shows that the institution is still alive, and still willing, to a certain degree, to confront new intellectual situations. In this sense, it is possible to say that Christianity is steadily alive and that communism is not.
The question of the so-called responsibility of the intellectual has been discussed for decades. Such debates are generally fruitless. Why should intellectuals be specifically and differently responsible than other people, and for what? If they are seducers, then they are able to seduce either to good or to evil. Still, as far as the distinction between good and evil in moral or political matters is concerned, are intellectuals necessarily more reliable, are they less fallible guides, than other people? Hardly. One would have thought that people who know somewhat more than most about the precariousness of all our judgments, who know better than most the history of many deceitful hopes and the failures of many excellent ideas, ought to be more reasonable in their political choices. As we all know, however, this is not always the case. The long history of the terrible errors that many intellectuals in our century have committed in their political choices has been described repeatedly; and it probably has contributed to the significant decline of their authority as leaders in political matters.
To talk about responsibility in the abstract is simple and unproductive: the intellectuals are hardly less divided, and not necessarily for any better reason, than everybody else. In the case of the intellectuals, the only specific matter for which they are professionally responsible is the good use -- that is, the most upright and least misleading use -- of the word. It is less a matter of truth than of the spirit of truth. Nobody can promise that he will never be mistaken, but it is possible to preserve the spirit of truth, which means never to abandon a vigilant mistrust of one's own words and identifications, always to know how to retract one's own errors, to be capable of self-correction.
If this sounds like trite nagging, so be it. One should consider, however, that no other profession (if the term profession is appropriate) creates a better opportunity for neurosis. No other profession creates so many colliding pretensions. Intellectuals often aspire to be prophets and heralds of reason, but those roles are incompatible. Occasionally boasting of it, they want to be intellectually independent; yet because of this independence, they experience a need for identification more than other people, and the very matter of which they boast generates in them a feeling of inferiority. Often they experience their freedom and their independence as a desert that renders them useless and isolated. But the tension between intellectual independence and total identification with an idea or a cause can never be resolved, except when the independence is given up. The need for identification may result in an almost unbelievable loss of critical reasoning, as has been confirmed by all the well-known intellectuals who identified themselves with Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism, and various fanatical sects.
One would expect intellectuals to be interested in freedom of speech -- for professional reasons, if not for reasons of principle. Usually that is the case. But they desire something else, too: they want to be heard. And the only sure way to be heard is to enjoy a word monopoly. The intellectuals cannot create such a monopoly themselves; it can only be granted to them by a despotic power, at the price of their being enslaved. There are reasons to believe that, in the first phase after the Russian Revolution, the intellectuals contributed to their own subsequent destruction, as various groups attempted to secure privileges or even a monopoly from the rulers.
Freedom of the word, moreover, is by no means universally accepted by intellectuals as a matter of course. It is remarkable that Heidegger, in an interview posthumously published by Der Spiegel, confirmed his criticism of academic freedom, which originated in Nazi times; it was, he said, merely a 'negative freedom.' (As if there is any other freedom than a 'negative' one.) Marcuse's fierce attacks against the idea and the practice of tolerance also come to mind. Such cases are the result of dreams of a monopoly on words, guaranteed by governmental powers. This is expressed, of course, as the claim to a monopoly on truth.
Among such intellectuals, perhaps some would be willing (this is only a suspicion) to accept employment as privileged court philosophers to enlightened despots. Oddly enough, though, there are no enlightened despots in our century, no absolute rulers, as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who support intellectuals for the price of a flattering dedication or other occasional encomiums, but otherwise leave them the freedom of creation. Today's despots need intellectuals inasmuch as they are no longer intellectuals, inasmuch as they can be bought as slaves and devote all their work to their masters. In the century of totalitarianism, the time of enlightened autocrats has passed.
And still more interesting is the cult of power that runs through the history of intellectuals, covertly or in articulated form. The paradigm, of course, is Nietzsche, on the brink of his final intellectual deterioration in Turin, who voiced his violent attack against Christianity as the glorification of disease. The sad prophet of health and vigor was a genius of seduction, no doubt, but he was also a model to those who were never satisfied with their role as powerless word producers.
Are we talking about matters that belong to the past? To some extent, perhaps. After so many horrible mistakes, intellectuals are on the whole probably more careful in their political commitments. Compared with the enormous vogue of Stalinism, the attraction of Maoism (a period, fortunately, that has passed as well) proved to be weaker, even at the peak of its popularity. There is much less willingness to offer unconditional support to existing ideologies, and more of an inclination to keep a distance from political matters, with a consequent tendency to withdraw into more secure and specialized areas. As a result, we probably have fewer influential lunatics and swindlers, and also fewer teachers.
Still, the circumstances that create an incurable uneasiness for intellectuals, that nurture their contradictory feelings, are always present. On the one hand, there is the contempt for ordinary people; on the other hand, the desire for solidarity with the oppressed and the poor, which often results in a purely cerebral identification with ideologies that have made themselves champions of the demands of the masses. The contempt for ordinary people was, to a large degree, a part of the anti-Americanism of European intellectuals, to which the German war emigrants to the United States contributed. This tendency was expressed frequently by the Frankfurt School. One could almost feel the envy mixed with the abhorrence of the culture of the American middle classes, of people who were successful technologically as well as in shaping democratic institutions, but did not read Kant, did not listen to Bach, did not confer on intellectuals a superhuman status of honor.
A never-ending inner struggle takes place in the souls of intellectuals. They are torn between a feeling of their superiority, their special mission, and a secret envy of humans whose work bears visible and verifiable results. Writing about the superiority of criticism compared to literature, Wilde argued that it is generally easier to make something than to talk about it: it is easier to make a bed than to describe the process of making it. Mickiewicz, by contrast, wrote 'that it is more difficult to live well through one day than to write a long book.' I don't know if Wilde ever attempted to make a bed, but Mickiewicz's remark appears to be inhumanly exaggerated.
Perhaps intellectuals have the 'right' to feel insecure about their status, about the value of their work. What tangible results does the work of an intellectual yield? There are, of course, several examples of intellectuals who exerted an enormous influence on their eras, and thus on the course of world history. But we must note that, first, such examples represent only a small number of the relatively large population of intellectuals; second, that a long time must usually pass before such influence is measurable; and third (this is the most embarrassing), that the real results are forever contestable and uncertain.
The original model of the intellectual in modern history was certainly Erasmus of Rotterdam, but even today his historic role is controversial. Was he a restorer or a destroyer of Christianity? Too many more or less arbitrary criteria must be considered to answer such questions unequivocally. Similar questions may be asked about almost all great intellectuals who have contributed to Europe's intellectual and political history, again without reaching definite answers. Tensions between a typical intellectual like Melanchthon and a popular tribune like Luther could hardly be avoided, and when intellectuals attempted to be popular leaders or professional politicians themselves, the results were usually far from encouraging. The marketplace of words, with all its dangers, is a more appropriate place for intellectuals, in the end, than a king's court.
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