Review of "Why is there Something rather than Nothing?"

Why is there Something rather than Nothing?: Questions from Great Philosophers, Penguin Books, 2008 

Leszek Kołakowski (1927 – 2009)

I recall reading one of Leslek Kolakowski's books in the early 1980s.  It was a book called simply Religion.  I remember its being a gripping read. Leszek Kołakowski (1927 – 2009) was a Polish philosopher and, more correctly I believe, a historian of ideas on a par with another scholar, Isaiah Berlin. Kołakowski is best known for his critical analyses of Marxist thought, especially his three-volume history: Main Currents of Marxism.

In 1986, Kołakowski was selected to give the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honour for achievement in the humanities.  Kołakowski's lecture, "The Idolatry of Politics", includes his much-quoted aphorism, "We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are."

Why is there Something rather than Nothing?: Questions from Great Philosophers does exactly what it says on the tin.  This is neither an introduction to philosophy nor a history of the subject.  Rather it is the subtle distillation of that history of philosophy by one of the twentieth century’s finest philosophers.  The task of any philosopher is to ask the hard questions and never to be satisfied with cheap, trite or less-than-satisfactory answers.  Mr. Kołakowski asks us to consider and explore these perennial questions with him.  He invites us to be clear questioners as well as thinkers.

The questions the author asks include: (i) Can nature make us happy? (ii) What is happiness anyway? (iii) What is justice? (iv) What is peace? (v) What is truth? (vi) How can we know anything? (vii) Why is there evil in the world? (viii) Does God exist? and (ix) Can we really believe what we see? He encourages us to ask many more questions, too.

Kołakowski distils the thought (and/or way of thinking) of the following philosophers for us: Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Augustine, Anselm, Eckhart, Aquinas, Ockham, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Pascal, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers and without any regard to chronology Plotinus who is the subject for his final chapter.

Now, we find all these philosophers in our standard history of philosophy.  However, what I like about this book is that Kołakowski distils one major question from each philosopher and explains it as if he were sitting in a fireside seat beside us.  Then, after decanting his thoughtful liquor for us, he lists the questions that each of these philosophers mentioned above raise in our minds.  Unfortunately, women philosophers are singularly lacking in the history of philosophy and there is not even one mentioned in this book, never mind any other standard work of philosophy.  However, I would have assumed that Kołakowski would have been acquainted with the work of Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt.

In his introduction our author tells us: “I would like rather, to approach these great philosophers by concentrating on one idea in the thought of each – an important idea, an idea that was fundamental to his philosophical construction, but also one that we can still understand today; an idea that touches a chord in us, rather than being simply a bit of historical information.” (p. ix) This introduction to philosophy aims at moving us at a human level (that is, engaging us as a whole human being) as well as at an intellectual one.

I learnt much extra about each of the philosophers above through this book because it is so passionately written.  For sure, you may disagree with the author, but true to his philosophical honesty and authenticity, Kołakowski would have it no other way.

This is an elegant book, written by one who has grasped the central ideas in the history of philosophy.  It may be more correctly called an exposition of the development of philosophical ideas along the lines of that other great historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin than a straight-forward introduction to the history of philosophy.  Essentially, our learned author shows us that timeless ideas always remain just that, timeless, perennial and at the core of human existence.