Metaphysical Horror

by Leszek Kołakowski, Agnieszka Kołakowska (Translation)

For over a century, philosophers have argued that philosophy is impossible or useless, or both. Although the basic notion dates back to the days of Socrates, there is still heated disagreement about the nature of truth, reality, knowledge, the good, and God. This may make little practical difference to our lives, but it leaves us with a feeling of radical uncertainty, a feeling described by Kolakowski as "metaphysical horror." "The horror is this," he says, "if nothing truly exists except the Absolute, the Absolute is nothing; if nothing truly exists except myself, I am nothing." The aim of this book, for Kolakowski, is finding a way out of this seeming dead end.

In a trenchant analysis that serves as an introduction to nearly all of Western philosophy, Kolakowski confronts these dilemmas head on through examinations of several prominent philosophers including Descartes, Spinoza, Husserl, and many of the Neo-Platonists. He finds that philosophy may not provide definitive answers to the fundamental questions, yet the quest itself transforms our lives. It may undermine most of our certainties, yet it still leaves room for our spiritual yearnings and religious beliefs.

The final sentence of the book captures the hopefulness that has survived the horror of nothingness when Kolakowski asks: "Is it not reasonable to suspect that if existence were pointless and the universe devoid of meaning, we would never have achieved not only the ability to imagine otherwise, but even the ability to entertain this very thought—to wit, that existence is pointless and the universe devoid of meaning?" The answer, of course, is clear. Now it is up to readers to take up the challenge of his arguments.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Metaphysics, History, Poland, Polish Literature, Religion

135 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Distinguished Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He is best known for his critical analysis of Marxist thought, especially his acclaimed three-volume history, Main Currents of Marxism. In his later work, Kolakowski increasingly focused on religious questions. In his 1986 Jefferson Lecture, he asserted that "We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.”

In Poland, Kołakowski is not only revered as a philosopher and historian of ideas, but also as an icon for opponents of communism. Adam Michnik has called Kołakowski "one of the most prominent creators of contemporary Polish culture".

Kołakowski died on 17 July 2009, aged 81, in Oxford, England. In his obituary, philosopher Roger Scruton said Kolakowski was a "thinker for our time" and that regarding Kolakowski's debates with intellectual opponents, "even if ... nothing remained of the subversive orthodoxies, nobody felt damaged in their ego or defeated in their life's project, by arguments which from any other source would have inspired the greatest indignation."

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

No, this is not Thomas Ligotti (or the first season of True Detective for that matter): this is serious metaphysics written by a professional philosopher. Although the original dilemma he confronts may be similar to Ligotti's, the tentative solutions he suggests--indeed the fact that he even bothers to suggest a solution—puts his work in a different category entirely.

Decartes opened the pit of metaphysical horror by entertaining radical doubt about the reliability of our senses. He attempted, by his Cogito Ergo Sum, to build a bridge to the Absolute, but instead he merely established consciousness as the unbridgeable island of experience. But what is consciousness exactly? Is it just a single individual who is thinking? Or is it just thinking itself, a manifestation of the Absolute?.

This is where the horror comes in. If I am the only thing there is, then I am nothing, and if the Absolute is the only thing there is, then the Absolute is nothing too. It is precisely in the connection between the two that meaning arises.

Kolakowski takes us on an instructive trip through the land of philosophy showing us how philosophers both ancient and modern either tried to avoid the pit of horror or attempted to describe the scenery on either side of it. He admits though, that philosophers are still investigating the same questions the pre-Socratics and Socrates raised centuries ago, and have yet to come up with any definitive solutions. “A modern philosopher,” Kolakowski says, “ who has never experienced the feeling of being a charlatan is such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.”

Kolakowski—who writes in a clear, readily accessible style—is definitely worth reading. He even suggests a few tentative solutions to the problem of the pit—an Absolute growing in knowledge and love toward the individual self, the individual self advancing toward the Absolute through community and consensual experience--that involve ignoring the Cartesian divide and moving on.

But, as I said, his answers are tentative, because Kolakowski is the kind of philosopher I like. It is no accident that Metaphysical Horror ends not with a statement, but with a question.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Monday morning sitting in a cafe on Market Street, I finished Leszek Kolakowski’s Metaphysical Horror – the last book I read in 2007. What a perfect finale!

This deceptively slim volume is a minimal masterpiece, a miniature of philosophical thinking on the epic scale. To say that Kolakowski wears his erudition “lightly” reduces to a cliché the quality I found most engaging in this book – his spry sense of comedy, his genuine modesty and resignation about the intractable subject of his book: “of the questions which have sustained European philosophy for two and a half millennia, not a single one has been answered to general satisfaction.” He isn’t joking. Yet the book never loses its air of a jeu d’esprit entertaining ultimate truths.

I won’t attempt to summarize his argument– because his little book is an amuse-bouche for intellectuals and deserves to be savored on its own terms. I found it compulsively readable, not least because it engages 2500 years of philosophy in so few pages with so much wisdom. Metaphysical Horror isn’t one of those “very short introductions” to its topic; it’s an exuberant, occasionally profound, example of a rich mind in the act of thinking. Readers won’t so much absorb a set of conclusions as participate in the excitement of the chase, trailing Kolakowski through one bristling labyrinth after another.

[Theo Logos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Profound. Provoking. Funny. Leszek Kolakowski’s Metaphysical Horror is my favorite book of philosophy. It is the book I am reading on the beach in my Goodreads portrait picture. Rather than muddle Kolakowski’s brilliance with a summery, I give you his own words (those that particularly struck me). If they don’t move you, nothing I can add will.

”A modern philosopher who has never experienced the feeling of being a charlatan is such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading."

”For well over a hundred years, a large portion of academic philosophy has been devoted to explaining that philosophy is either impossible or useless or both. Thereby philosophy proves that it can safely and happily survive its own death by keeping busy proving that it has actually died."

”The very fact that we are, in every moment, in the 'moving' present (as opposed to the divine eternal present), losing forever the moment just passed, amounts to saying that we can never be sure what it is 'to be' because the direct experience is not of being, but of unceasingly losing our existence in the irretrievable 'has been'”

”If good equals peace and harmony, perfect good equals perfect peace and harmony, and this means the perfect absence of tension, and thus, ultimately, absolute undifferentiation and immobility, or One. The more unity, the more goodness. And so, when good reaches the point of completeness, it loses any recognizable quality of goodness; by achieving perfection, the goodness vanishes. Life, at least in the sense we are able to conceive, involves differentiation and tension; one reaches a complete peace by reaching lifelessness."

”The very use of language is not innocent: every sentence we utter presupposes the entire history of culture of which the language we use is an aspect. No word is self-transparent. None may pretend to hand over to the hearer the unadulterated world to which it is supposed to refer. Whatever reality the word conveys, it is a reality filtered through the thick sediment of human history we carry in our minds, though not in our conscious memory...Spoken of, the world is never naked."

[Szplug · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's difficult to improve upon Jim Coughenour's 2007 review, which perfectly captures the élan and compressed brilliance of the impishly wise Pole throughout this wafer-thin metaphysical dance across two-and-a-half millennia of human existence, a mental performance of cognitive leaps and intuitive bounds in pursuit of an Ego or Absolute which, when finally pinned down, does not dissipate or collapse into a null singularity, a quest ofttimes conducted in defiance of rational protests or empirical resistance and against unyielding linguistic limitations.

Kołakowski probes the variety of incongruent arguments advanced by various thinkers from a chain of cultures differing in time and place that have, through their combined lack of achieving any conclusive settlement of the philosophical problems, endowed humanity with a Metaphysical Horror - an existential malaise that has plagued it with growing severity since the dawn of the Enlightenment. In effect, the learned author proposes that metaphysics suffers from a form of Gödel's incompleteness theorem - no contained system can determine perfect verities or knowledge without hobbling itself through self-reference or self-contradiction; without possession of a pure language that predated existence/creation, humanity cannot escape from this epistemological limitation.

Does this stop Kołakowski? Hell no! The dance is what matters, not which partner you wind up with and the prize that you claim. With his beautiful mind leading the way, suggestions and alternatives are proffered that weave together the currently estranged threads of knowledge and myth - the former bearded with rationality , the latter aligned with religion - into an ontology that might tend towards quietening the Horror into a bearable pang.

I have to say, this didactic guided tour by the genial magister comes as a bracing tonic fresh upon the heels of a bleak nihilistic spirit bombing by Thomas Ligotti. His own interpretation of the religio-mythical strains inherent in humanity strike a chord I am very sympathetic to, and drawn towards. What I wouldn't give to be able to spend a single night talking to, learning from, and drinking with this perspicacious paradigm of a Polish polymath! The prose is pitch-perfect throughout, the erudition effortless; and each avenue of investigation segues into the next with alacritous ease, less concerned with the ultimate answers to the questions it raises and examines than with how the questions themselves are such a necessary and ineradicable component of our very humanity. I cannot think of a recent tome comprising a mere one hundred-plus pages - and of the same approximate size as a calculator - that proved as pure a delight to read and roiled the sedimentary layers of the mind with such pleasant vigor.

[JCJBergman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kołakowski is one of the most underrated philosophers that deserves everyone's attention. After recently finishing his "Is God Happy: Selected Essays" I had to read another of his books. This, like the previous, is absolutely brilliant.

Like with my review of his other book, I will not get into the contents of the book itself but praise Kołakowski's style and rigour. The writing is clinical, concise, and captivating. If you want a serious examination of what he describes as our existential status of "Metaphysical Horror" - the search for the Absolute, or certainty and meaning in the cosmos - then you're set for a philosophical tour de force with Kołakowski's book.

Specific passages worth contemplating:

“A modern philosopher who has never experienced the feeling of being a charlatan is such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.” (p. 01)

“The Absolute is supposed to redeem the world, to save it from this never-beginning and never-ending death. In its eternal present everything is preserved, everything is protected and made permanent; nothing ever perishes. The Absolute provides the ultimate support for the existence of anything; it is the final subjugation of time. In order to perform this function, however, it must be not only immune to time but also perfectly self-contained and indivisible; consequently, we can never know how the (apparent) Nothingness of the universe is restored to the glory of being in the Eschaton's eternal unity without blasting that unity asunder. And since the Absolute […] cannot be conceptually reduced to anything else, its name, if there is one, is Nothing. So Nothing rescues another Nothing from its Nothingness.
This is the metaphysical horror.” (p. 58-59)

“[I]nsofar as the Absolute looms indistinctly on the horizon of all possible languages, invincibly elusive, never pinpointed, always groped for, it cannot, within the limits of our conceptual capacities, be conceived of as a person or a god. No communication with it is possible or needed; it cannot be addressed as 'Thou'. It is, rather, a symbolic entity, a powerless but extremely important constitutional monarch who lends the universe of things, minds, events and gods continuous ontic legitimacy but does not govern. Without it the lowest Nothingness would reign supreme. The Ultimum explains nothing, in the ordinary sense of the word 'explain'; we cannot define the sense in which it endows anything with reality, truth or goodness. But it is perhaps a necessary condition for anything's being real, true or good. The God-person, if He is the real governor of His universe, is not the Absolute — at least not in terms of what we can, however awkwardly, express. Hellenized Christian philosophy and some mystics say that He is both, despite our inability to make this identity clear. To say more, our minds and linguistic resources would have to expand beyond their present borders. But perhaps we are too bold to state with such confidence that this can never happen, and that we have reached the uppermost barriers of experience and speech.” (p. 59)

“The [metaphysical horror] has two poles: the Absolute and the self, or the Cogito.
Both are supposed to be bastions that shelter the meaning of the idea of existence. The former, once we try to reduce it to its perfect form, uncontaminated by contact with any less sublime reality, turns out to fade away into nothingness. The latter, on closer inspection, seems to suffer the same fate.” (p. 60)

“This is perhaps the most distressing feature of the entire history of philosophical debate about the Absolute. If the intuition of existence itself is indeed both perfectly simple and perfectly resistant to all attempts to express its content conceptually, we should accept it as it is — basic, irreducible, and naturally comprehensible to everyone. But if such an intuition existed, it would surely be strange for it to be forgotten. Assuming, however, that it was torn apart and finally consigned to oblivion by philosophers' attempts to analyse the unanalysable (and this was perhaps Gilson's contention), can the destructive work of philosophers be undone? If it can, it is probably not through further intellectual mediation, but rather by an outright dismissal of philosophy.” (p. 70)

“[T]here is no access to an epistemological absolute, nor any privileged access to absolute Being, such that might result in reliable theoretical knowledge. (This last restriction is needed, for we cannot a priori deny the reality of mystical experiences which provide some people with this privileged access; but their experience cannot be forged into a theory.) This double denial need not lead to pragmatic nihilism; it is compatible with the belief that metaphysical, non-pragmatic insight is possible as a result of our living within the realm of good and evil and experiencing good and evil as our own. But it does explain why philosophy, like Peter Pan, never matures.” (p. 106)

“But then we are back at the very beginning of our horror. For how can I opt for a particular language (or angle from which to see the world, or rule for interpreting all of experience) and stick to it without believing that it has privileged cognitive powers? And if I claim to have at my disposal a higher, or even an absolute, language, then either this language is suitable only for talking about other languages, not about the reality they refer to, or it is a standard language of which all other languages are incomplete dialects. If the latter, then such a language really is a divine tongue, absolute and embracing all conceivable points of view. But such a tongue is impossible. Even God, when talking through the mouths of prophets, has to translate Himself into a human language; the translation is inevitably distorting, and we have no access to the original. And if the former, then I cannot say so. For although my particular language (the first-degree language; the language of things) may not make any claims to a privileged position, there is no way I can express the absence of this privileged position in that language; to do so I would have to abandon my language and turn to a super- (or meta-) language. But in such a language my particular position would be inexpressible.” (p. 110)

“One might ask why, if the universe is indeed a secret book of the gods with a coded message for us, this message is not written in ordinary language rather than in hieroglyphics whose decoding is discouragingly arduous and, above all, never results in certainty. But this question is futile, for two independent reasons. First, it assumes that we do know, or can imagine, what the universe would be like if its message and meaning were clearly readable and unambiguously displayed before our eyes.
But we do not know this, and we lack the kind of imagination necessary to imagine it. Second, it is possible that if we knew why the message is hidden, or partly hidden, it would no longer be hidden — in other words, that concealment of the reasons for which it is hidden is a necessary part of its being hidden.
There are people who claim to be able to break this perplexing code (albeit only in part, never fully); but they do not necessarily attribute their success to some kind of gnostic initiation or privileged access to an esoteric treasury of knowledge. Rather, they claim to have adopted a special spiritual attitude, opened themselves up to the voice of the meaning-carrying Mind; and they say that anyone can 'tune in' in this way. They might be wrong, of course, and certainly those of us who do not wish to hear this voice cannot be brought round by their arguments; rather, we will classify them as victims of delusions. But if they are right, and the voice really is audible to anyone who wants to hear it, then the question 'Why is the message hidden?' is the wrong question.
And is it not reasonable to suspect that if existence were pointless and the universe void of meaning, we would never have achieved not only the ability to imagine otherwise, but even the ability to entertain this very thought — to wit, that existence is pointless and the universe devoid of meaning?” (p. 128-9)

[Aaron Cliff · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is Metaphysical Horror? Leszek posits that the grounds for any kind of ontological and epistemological certainty - the Divine and the Ego - have been so developed by the philosophers that they have become Nothing. How is this so? We'll start with the first developed; The Divine. The Divine, as ontologically and conceptually one, has rid itself of any kind of signifier that could be placed on it - even the signifier that it is above signification. This is so because unity can broker no addition by definition. At this point, we do not have anything we can say of it; which is to say all we can say of it is nothing. Hence, if we cannot conceptualize it, nor speak of it, nor experience it, how can it be anything besides nothing?

The same for the Ego. Descartes began the position that the Ego is the grounds for all ontology or at the very least epistemology, and his work was dismantled by philosophers in the same way the Divine was. The Epistemological certainty of the Cogito is grounded in the intuited nature of the ego. I simply know that I am, and the absolute bedrock of this perception is unquestionable. Perhaps, but how do I express this? If done, the very nature of this expression presupposes the vehicle of this expression, which is language, which means that there was something epistemologically prior to the intuition, the language used to phrase it. Further, the very nature of the Ego is that it is oriented to other things, be it the outside world, concepts or our memories. It cannot operate outside of reference to an outside world, and so it cannot be an absolute, impregnable first principle, as its very nature presupposes other existences for it to relate to. When you try to conceive of "I," you always conceive of it as "I in the World."

This then is the metaphysical horror: that we cannot find any epistemological certainty in the philosophical Deity or Ego. You can agree or disagree with Leszek, however on his part he by no means admits that the book is closed on these problems and that, as our questioning is natural, we should by all means continue it because it creates strong cultures. I think that the world is full of enough evidence to prove the existence of God, but I know because I believe, and the pagan will never come to an understanding of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This God can only make himself known to us, precisely because he is far above my thoughts and ways, and I am infinitely estranged from him through my sin. But since God has made himself known to us, this revelation is the grounding for all my Epistemology and Ontology

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slim little book that contains all the metaphysics I'll ever be able to grasp, and a good deal more that will remain beyond me. Kolakowski must have been a wonderful teacher--he writes so clearly and engagingly, with a combination of incisive logic and self-effacing modesty. Only a few times did I have to look up words--illapse; aseity--but when I did they turned out to be the perfect choices. He summarizes the meaning of the title: "...the horror metaphysicus, as we have seen, has two poles: the Absolute and the self, or the Cogito. Both are supposed to be bastions that shelter the meaning of the idea of existence. The former, once we try to reduce it to its perfect form, uncontaminated by contact with any less sublime reality, turns out to fade away into nothingness. The latter, on closer inspection, seems to suffer the same fate." The author talks around this problem, which has plagued us since the Enlightenment, with apt and clear reference to philosophers I can never hope to read or understand. He discusses at length the difficulty of putting any important philosophical concepts into language: we are trapped by our inability to say anything about "meaning" without being reduced to self-contradiction.

He is amusing, for example, about theologians' insistence on reducing mythological language to more analytical language: "The standard comment of theologians is that the language of Scripture is 'anthropomorphic' because it has been adjusted to the meagre capacity of our minds, which are unable to grasp the hidden metaphysical message. This would be more persuasive if they--the theologians, or at least some of them--did not also claim to have a dictionary with the aid of which the divine Word, as it stands, can be translated into the proper, exact idiom of their science...Myths are not 'really' theories. They are not translatable into some non-mythical language that is supposedly better at conveying their genuine content to us. The belief that we can clarify this content or make it intelligible by a translation of this kind is no less deluded than the belief that we can explain the meaning of a musical work to someone by describing 'what it is about.'"

The author is not under the illusion that metaphysical questions will ever be answered to everyone's satisfaction; but he is not pessimistic either. He ends the book gently teasing those who despair at the meaningless of the universe: "Is it not reasonable to suspect that if existence were pointless and the universe void of meaning, we would never have achieved not only the ability to imagine otherwise, but even the ability to entertain this very thought--to wit, that existence is pointless and the universe devoid of meaning?"

[Airam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not so sure why, but this is one of the books I come back to the most. It's very light and the problems are addressed in a very concise manner, yet it is quite thought provoking.
Philosophy... is a mess. If you haven't yet come to grips with this fact, maybe give this book a try.

[The Lazy Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

A work of astonishing intelligence, and written with such poetic and profound grace that one could almost call it art. In fact, I insist that one should. I never thought that philosophical treatises investigating the nature and conception of metaphysics would give me goosebumps but here we are.

"The Absolute is supposed to redeem the world, to save it from the never-beginning and never-ending death: in its eternal present everything is preserved, and everything protected and made permanent, nothing ever perishes; it produces the ultimate support the existence of anything, it embodies the final subjugation of time.

And since Absolute, like time-its defeated but living foe- cannot be conceptually reduced to anything else, its name, if there is one, is Nothing. And so, a Nothing rescues another Nothing from Nothingness.

This is horror metaphysicus."

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a bit of a hard time comprehending this abstruse little volume. It abandons Kolakowski's humorous writing style in favor of a dense parsing of, basically, the entire history of Western thought on the Absolute, with smatterings of Buddhist/Hindu thought thrown in for good measure. I enjoyed his constant teasing out of every angle with persistent questions -- "But why? Why is it so?" -- about the simplest assumptions we humans make. I gather, from the sly ending, that Kolakowski definitely believes in some universal mind behind or in or through our mind that endows life with meaning. It's not exactly a ringing endorsement for God/the Absolute, but it's possibly better than the alternative -- that we're all meaningless automatons spinning into more meaninglessness.

[rodion]

а чё не плохо

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite an interesting book for being so compact. It works on two levels. The first is more or less a history of philosophy. Takes the major trends of metaphysics and in a nutshell shows how every polar position lacks something which can only be found in its opposite. Most of the book is a history lesson in failure for the West to answer its own fundamental questions over thousands of years.

The second aspect of the book, although scored lightly, is the author's insistence that this failure is not itself important. My own interpretation of the thesis is like the search for true love. If you look for it, and fail to find it, it doesn't mean that nothing has been gained. It's almost ironic that Kolakowski should have titled/translated the book "Metaphysical Horror" as it's far more uplifting than a lot of recent philosophy.

[Maurizio Manco · Rating 4 out of 5]

"L’uso stesso del linguaggio non è innocente: ogni enunciato che noi pronunciamo presuppone l’intera storia della cultura di cui il linguaggio che noi usiamo è un aspetto. Nessuna parola è auto-trasparente. Nessuno può fingere di consegnare all’ascoltatore il mondo incontaminato a cui pensa di riferirsi. Qualunque realtà la parola comunichi, è una realtà filtrata attraverso gli spessi sedimenti della storia umana che noi portiamo nella nostra mente, anche se non nella nostra memoria cosciente." (p. 58)

[Zoonanism · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such splendid pace, in a slim volume Kołakowski covers so much. After just getting past the first 10 pages I felt a strange happiness, as if at last one was in the company of an honest elder who is sharing true and valuable insight gathered from years of scholarship.

[the_deepest_black]

"Jeśli wszechświat jest zależny od Absolutu - cokolwiek by to miało znaczyć - to ten musi być istotnie jedyny" (221).

Absolut "nie dopuszcza rozróżnienia między tym, czym jest, i tym, czym być może; jest wszystkim czym może być" (222).

"Jeśli dobro jest z definicji zawsze aktualne [...] idea wolności ludzkiego wyboru jest nie do utrzymania" (265).

###

"Skoro założenie, iż świat nie istnieje, nic nie zmienia w moim doświadczeniu i skoro z definicji wszelkie rozróżnienia dotyczące "stanu świata" tylko wtedy mają sens, gdy można je opisać w terminach empirycznych, to świat, który istnieje, jest empirycznie nieodróżnialny - a więc nieodróżnialny w ogóle - od świata, który nie istnieje: nie tylko dla praktycznych celów, ale i dla dociekań czysto teoretycznych światy te są tożsame" (211).

"możemy się obyć bez 'istnienia' w metafizycznym sensie, tj. obecności do siebie samych odniesionych bytów, których własności pozostają bez związku z tym, czym są, albo nie są postrzegane, nazywane oraz identyfikowane w procesie naszej komunikacji" (213).

"Wierzymy, że osoba ludzka ma wartość sama w sobie, a nie tylko jako komiwojażer wynajęty przez Naturę do wytwarzania plemników i komórek jajowych dla kontynuacja gatunku" (284).

"Czyż nie narzuca się podejrzenie, że gdyby 'być' nie było 'do czegoś', a świat byłby pozbawiony sensu, to nie tylko nigdy nie zdołalibyśmy sobie wyobrazić, że jest inaczej, lecz nawet pomyśleć nie bylibyśmy w stanie tego właśnie, że 'być' nie jest w istocie 'do czegoś', a świat jest pozbawiony sensu" (288).

[Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book years ago, when I was trying to have more patience with epistemology. I have since given up on the grounds that no one should study epistemology unless they're willing to set aside a whole separate budget for the headaches it's certain to create.

This book acknowledges a lot of my frustrations with the subject matter, and does as much as humanly possible to make it less aggravating to read about. It's writing style is abnormally clear for this subject matter; usually when talking about theories of knowledge language ends up contorted to such extremes it's safe to say it only looks like strings of familiar words. Likewise it offers simple (but not simplistic) descriptions of the ideas it deals with, so while some background knowledge is useful, it doesn't feel like you need to have read and re-read every notable work in western philosophy to follow it (as is sometimes the case).

Unfortunately, while I think the book is one of the better examples of it's kind, it hasn't cured my distaste for epistemology. The books insistence that it's one of the (of not the) most important question philosophy has to contend with doesn't convince me. The suggestion that how things can be known is one of the most fundamental questions you could deal with (given that almost every other question ever presupposes that you can know something about the world) still doesn't inspire me to spend time puzzling it out.

[Aleksander · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Metaphysical Horror" by Leszek Kolakowski, one of Poland's most renowned philosophers, explores philosophy's perpetual, unsolvable problems - problems that are fundamentally intertwined with life itself.
While acknowledging anti-philosophical arguments that claim philosophizing is pointless, Kolakowski demonstrates that the value lies not in finding definitive answers, but in the intellectual journey itself. He examines and critiques various philosophical traditions, from Neoplatonists to Christian mystics and Enlightenment thinkers, revealing the limitations in each approach.
The book culminates by showing how this very philosophical uncertainty - our inability to reach absolute truth - is itself what opens up the infinite possibilities of human thought and existence. The "horror" of having no final answers becomes paradoxically liberating, creating space for endless exploration and meaning-making.

[Josh Issa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book I am going to have to read again in a couple years. The arguments are really hard for me to follow, but as best as I could follow they were a spectacular tracing of philosophy's history of thinking about existence... and how it always ends up with an Absolute God so beyond anything that it bears no relation to creation or it ends up with a mind that can't know anything. The discussion especially around the nature of God's "goodness" and how it really doesn't mean anything if you track what people are saying is really fascinating.

The horror consists in this: if nothing truly exists except for the Absolute, the Absolute is nothing; if nothing truly exists but myself, I am nothing.

[Attay Kremer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kolakowski's Metaphysical Horror is an original take on the most fundamental meditation of modern philosophy: scepticism. While the path that Kolakowski traverses is both interesting and philosophical compelling, sweeping through metaphilosophy and the scholastic theology of Nothingness, and while his writing is both clear and occasionally clever, still the book was a little dry. I found that reading through 10 pages in a row was already making impatient.
I would recommend the book to and all philosophically inclined readers, but one must be warned that it begs you to put it down, and weighs too much to read for longer periods of time.

[Ermina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ova knjižica mi je otvorila oči. Oduvijek sam imala čudan konflikt sa filozofijom (posebno metafizikom), a Kolakowski mi je tu malo pomogao. On u ovoj knjizi propituje sve metafizičare i njihove teorije (uspostavljajući još ponešto od svoje metafizike). Pitanja koja ja ekstrapoliram iz ovog djela jesu: šta je to filozofija pa može postavljati i odgovarati na pitanja kakva su postojanje Boga, bitak, egzistencija, Apsolut? Čini mi se da je filozofija samo fetišizirano razmišljanje koje je dobilo svoju naučnost i koje je proglašeno zanimanjem... Da ne serem više: stvorili smo nauku oko razmišljanja i postavljanja pitanja, stavili je na pijedestal i sad masovno onanišemo na nju :D

[Ejansand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes, there are books that come along and help you remember why you love what you do in the first place. This is one of those books. A little gem that is, at root, a set of questions and meditations that produce more and more questions.

But that is, after all, the human character - we have to know, and can’t stop trying to know. In other words, this is an example, I think, of philosophy at its finest.

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is not a good introduction and assumes prior knowledge of existing philosophers and arguments. The writing is also full of academic elitist snarky pretension which made me close the book after 30 pages.

[Hesham · Rating 5 out of 5]

indeed its a horror , and to think otherwise is a squared horror ² !

[Patrycja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kołakowski has a way of showing me my assumptions, undermining them and thus making me a tiny better thinker. Will always come back for more.

[Nima · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of thought on gods, death, and the horror connected to these matters.

[Valerie İpek Madsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's very interesting, but I'm not in the right place mentally to finish this right now. Befitting title!

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

overall a good assessment of Western Philosophy's shortcomings and the value it has despite this. his reasoning is a bit spurious at some points - (may expand on this further if I return to this volume) - presenting certain things as axiomatic that I don't believe are necessarily true but he displays a remarkable level of erudition in such a short, breezy book.

[Iraff · Rating 4 out of 5]

i do remember this being pretty cool.

[Francis Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

good