LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI
15
movement had an analogous attitude to its sacred texts (memory),
which could be reinterpreted and applied in new conditions without
undermining the eternal validity of the originals. The movement was
supposed to be embedded in the great plan of History, and its aim was
to further the realization of this plan; thus, it acquired both its univer–
sal meaning (substance) and its mission (future-directed ness, i.e., antic–
ipation). It had a hierarchy and a supreme authority, whose members
were empowered to pass judgment on the validity of its particular ele–
ments (body).
It
considered itself appointed by History as the carrier of
truth and the leader of mankind on its march to ultimate salvation, but
it could also point to a well-defined origin in time (an identifiable begin–
ning), namely the birth of the collective Messiah. Similarly with the clas–
sical Freudian movement, where we can observe a fairly exact parallel
with the Apostolic Succession: the healing art may be practiced only by
those who have been anointed by another who has been similarly
anointed, and so on down to the initial, self-anointed Founder (the only
one who could, and did, apply the liberating therapy of psychoanalysis
to himself; no one after him was able to repeat this feat).
Both ideological movements and religious bodies consider themselves
to be the bearers of truth; the claim to truth is inscribed into the very
meaning of their existence. Such a claim is not among the criteria of
identity which can be applied to other continuous entities, nations or
individuals. But such entities do make a claim which may be considered
roughly analogous, namely a claim to legitimacy. Both persons and
nations claim legitimacy by the very fact of their existence: they are
there, so they are legitimate . Moreover, they are there necessarily, not
contingently: both persons and nations, in their act of self-assertion,
assert the necessity of their existence, for they cannot conceive of a
world from which they are absent.
There is one more thing that should be mentioned . The assertion of
self-identity, whether by an individual, by an ethnic group, or by a reli–
gious body, always involves a danger: a desire to dominate others. In
defending his legitimacy, an individual may easily come to feel that he
must affirm it by expanding his power; a nation will protect its identity
by hostility to other nations, by conquest and domination; a religious
body, as the bearer of truth
par excellence,
is easily tempted to believe that
its right and its duty is to desttoy the enemies of truth, i.e., other religious
communities and forms of faith. Even if we admit that the desire to assert
one's identity by hostile expansion is by no means always and everywhere
inevitable, the truth remains (however Nietzschean it may sound) that it
is ultimately the stuff of which most of the world's history is made.
