LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI
467
various classes. On the other side, we know what makes the essence of
being human and what this essence requires for its actualization; only on
this condition may we employ words like
alienation, liberation oj
mankil'ld, the end oj alienation,
and the like. Everything is historically
determined, but the imminent, ultimate state of humanity - called "the
beginning" rather than "the end" of genuine history, to be sure -
amounts to the fulfillment of human vocation. Consequently,
not
everythil'lJ?
is historically detennined.
The Marxian utopia, however, may hardly be described as
"historicism" in the proper sense. It certainly included the belief that
there are "historical laws" that are soon to bring us a perfect world. The
past is unimportant, the task of the anticipated future is to sink it into
oblivion. The meaning of the past can be grasped only from the vantage
point of the expected
Ultimum.
The future, something that is not given
empirically, defines the meaning of the present and of the past.
[n
itself,
history is unproductive; it gives no guidance for action and no access to
truth, or it does so only in a perverse way, insofar as it takes the meaning
from the nonexistent future. And so, history, the last rampart whereby
the Enlightenment shielded itself against nihilism - its own creation - and
in which people hoped to rediscover the source of meaning, broke under
its own weight and was unable to perform its task. The historical man
split into two figures, and on both sides history was falling, step by step,
into irrelevance.
For those who drew the utopian dreams from Marxian ideology,
history was no more than a pretext, supporting their faith in a
quasi natural inevitability which would soon give life to their fantasies.
Messianic expectations operated as a right to apply any means and any
form of violence in order to bring about the millennium. What is, let
alone what has been, is unimportant; only the future matters. The
nonexistent has more weight - indeed, more being - than what is pal–
pably real. The historical man has gotten rid of history.
Historicism, which conceives of history as an all-encompassing, all–
exhausting, self-grounding Absolute, ended up in the denial of history as
well. The logic of this peculiar self-emptying seems simple.
[t
has been
noted that people held different beliefs in different periods and different
civilizations, and historicism was a theoretical extension and elaboration
of this old discovery. And this meant that nothing is valid in itself. To say
that something is valid for an historical epoch, for a
Zeitgeist
or a civiliza–
tion, amounts to a matter-of-fact statement that this or that passed for
valid or true or obvious in this cultural setting. The adjective "valid" has
no special meaning apart from this fact. Therefore, the universal relativism
needs no history anymore. The path from historicism in that sense to
simple, all-swallowing relativism was straight.
[n
the next phase it was
