LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI
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nothing more is needed."
The German mind is not satisfied with this solution. It seems,
rather, to say: "Consensus is never enough. I want to know whether or
not slavery is in fact evil, and not only what people think about it.
Without this knowledge, when one says, 'Slavery is evil,' one says noth–
ing more than that the majority in this or that society believes it is evil.
Such an equation is contrary to what people really seek to say and to the
meaning they assign to their words; when I say, 'Slavery is evil,' I mean
that slavery indeed, in itself, is evil, and not that this is what other peo–
ple, or most of them, believe. Second, this equation implies that while
today slavery might be evil, in the past, when it was believed normal, it
was not evil at all. And yet, people who fought against slavery did so
because they were convinced it was evil; it ran counter to human dignity;
without this belief, slavery would never have been abrogated. Assuming
that slavery will be established again and seen as normal, it will in fact be
good, as the words 'good and evil' have no other sense." Thus, the
German mind wishes to know what is good or evil, real or unreal, true
or false. It found its strong expression in the Kantian and Husserlian
tradition; it even invaded the Frankfurt School, which never gave up the
hope that one might rediscover the
Logos,
free from contingency, that
provides us with really binding rules, both for thinking and for issuing
value judgments.
The historical man may have wasted away or died off, but his off–
spring, the carrier of generalized relativism, lives and flourishes. Various
characteristics of our time may hypothetically explain his resilience. Only
one of them is the all-pervading spirit of popular scientism, which rejects
everything that cannot be assessed in terms of visible goods; whereas the
distinction between good and evil, not unlike that between true and
false in a nonpragmatic sense, seems to be void according to these crite–
ria. The other reason is probably the will to resist the ideological fanati–
cism, religious or secular, whose antihuman energies we could observe so
often in our century. This praiseworthy resistance to fanaticism, however,
seems frequently to be a disguise for another attitude: Relativism is con–
venient insofar as it sanctifies our
indifference,
and it is our indifference to
which we would like to give a good name - as if there were no differ–
ences between fanaticism and the search for truth, as if nihilism were a
reliable barrier against fanaticism.
And so, there are reasons why historical man was born and why he
withered away - though not without progeny. In the face of the pro–
gressive enfeeblement of religious faith and of confidence in a wise and
immutable Nature, our culture set up History as a court of justice, which
one may still trust if one prefers not to give in to the pressure of nihilism.
And yet his contrivance proved to be weaker than the cultural force
