Exiled philosopher to be buried in Poland

Jul 20, 2009, 16:48 GMT

Warsaw - Philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, considered one of the masters of Polish humanities, will be buried in his native Poland, officials said Monday as the country remembered the anti- Marxist dissident.

The body of Kolakowski, who died Friday at 81 in Oxford, England, is to be brought by plane to Poland for an official military ceremony, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said.

Kolakowski was a 'philosopher and writer, who we long place among the biggest masters in Polish humanities,' Adam Michnik, a former leader of the Solidarity trade union that helped overthrow communism in Poland, said last year on Kolakowski's 80th birthday.

He was remembered by film director Agnieszka Holland as an authentic individual who 'wasn't interested in proving that he was right,' according to the Polish Press Agency.

The once devoted member of the communist party fled Poland in 1968 after authorities took away his right to lecture and publish as punishment for his turning away from Marxist thought to become a harsh critic of the country's regime.

Born in 1927 in Radom, Kolakowski studied at an underground high school while Poland was under Nazi occupation. He later studied philosophy at universities in Lodz and Warsaw before joining the communist party in 1947.

He taught Marxism and Leninism at the University of Warsaw until 1966, when he was stripped of his party membership card for straying from the official Marxist canon.

Kolakowski taught briefly at the University of California, Berkeley. But the Polish professor is most closely associated with All Souls College at Oxford, where he taught from 1970 until his retirement.

A prolific writer, Kolakowski wrote some 30 books that include a three-volume criticism of communism titled Main Currents of Marxism. He has also written on existentialism, religion and epistemology.

Polish scholars called him a well-liked professor who was one of the great figures of Polish scholarship.

He wrote that communism crumbled like mummified remains when it was brought into fresh air.

He said in a lecture at the Australian National University: 'I do believe, indeed, that the dream of an everlasting universal brotherhood of humankind is not only unfeasible but that it would cause the collapse of our civilisation if we took it seriously as a plan.'

But for anti-communists in Poland, Kolakowski wasn't just a prolific thinker but a symbol of intellectual freedom.

Kolakowski contributed to the victory of democracy in communist Poland, former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told the Polish Press Agency.

While abroad Kolakowski backed Solidarity, the union lead by Lech Walesa, that held strikes through the 1980s that helped topple communism in 1989.

Kolakowski said the role of philosophy wasn't just to deliver truth, but to build the spirit of truth.

'And this means: never to let the inquisitive energy of mind go to sleep,' he said at a lecture in 1982, a year after martial law was declared in his homeland. 'Never to stop questioning what appears to be obvious and definitive.'