Czeslaw Milosz: Tradition Confronts Postmodern Nihilism

Czeslaw Milosz issues from a time and place when making a distinction between the ethos of a poet, essayist or philosopher seemed an unnecessary and imprudent indiscretion. His resplendent work on political philosophy, The Captive Mind, is along with Camus’ The Rebel one of the most insightful and historically accurate critiques of Marxism, and its entrenchment in twentieth century thought. The Captive Mind is unrivaled by theoretical and abstract treatises in its sheer ability to grasp the human face of political reality under totalitarian regimes.

Milosz’s Formation Under Totalitarianism

As a poet and essayist, Milosz’s philosophical attention to detail and the pathos that his thought puts on display are exemplary of the man of letters. Milosz represents a cultural and political tradition of Eastern European writers and thinkers who have informed America about the disquieting reality of life under Fascism and Communism.  Milosz is in the company of distinguished writers like Solzhenitsyn, Popper, Kolakowski, Koestler, and Paul Hollander. Among these thinkers, we encounter some who have lived in the belly of Communism and have enlightened Western democracies about realpolitiks – what really takes place in systems ruled by doctrinaire and radical ideologues – and its necessary outcome, what Marxism call praxis.

Milosz’s formation as a man and thinker took place in the 1930s and ‘40s, a time that saw Europe in the grasp of the two dominant radical ideologies of the twentieth century: Fascism and Communism. This was to form the backbone of The Captive Mind. From the perspective of Christian humanism, Milosz’s work gives us an opportunity to revisit the essential human qualities that totalitarianism must squash for dictatorship to rule with an iron fist.

What we encounter in totalitarian reality and its logical outcome is more revealing than what abstract theories assert. In the process, we discover the value of Christian humanism. Totalitarianism in the twentieth century destroyed personal responsibility and autonomy. Communism needs theoretical baggage to legitimize its quest for absolute power. Theory, the plaything of some intellectuals, is communism’s outlet into the culture war in Western democracies: refutation of the universal logos that underpins the reality of the human condition.

Totalitarian governments cannot afford that its citizens remain autonomous persons. This poses a threat to their quest to consolidate power. Individual liberty threatens the theoretical, utopian foundations of promising the re-distribution of goods, and equality; communism ultimately fails to re-distribute the essence of human nature.

Intellectuals that buy into communism’s promised Elysium do so from a pathology that is rooted in what Max Scheler recognized as resentment (ressentiment).

In a curious bent of justice, intellectuals who work diligently to secure the triumph of radical ideologies that censor autonomous subjects, claim to be the most committed.[1]

Milosz recognized that to take up arms – literally or figuratively – for the sake of these two murderous twentieth century ideologies is to practice an intellectually lazy and morally dishonest form of hypocrisy. His early experience with both ideologies bears this out:

Of course, World War II broke out as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which contained a clause stating that the Polish state would be divided between Hitler and Stalin. The Soviet Union’s occupation of Eastern Poland resulted in mass deportations to the depths of Soviet Asia and in incredible suffering. The Soviet system yields little to the German in terms of cruelty. Those who are surprised by Polish hostility toward the Soviet Union fail to consider that every second family in Poland had someone who was deported to Soviet camps and prisons.[2]

Milosz: To Begin Where I Am

Milosz’s book To Begin Where I Am is an alluring work. The book is a collection of essays that have appeared elsewhere, and that range in scope from literary criticism to his life-long attention to the historical significance of the twentieth century in Western civilization. For Milosz’s readers, these essays augment what they already know of his thought.

The tone of the essays is established, when the author writes in the preface, entitled “My Intention”: “I cannot expel from memory the books that I have read, their contending theories and philosophies, but I am free to be suspicious and to ask naïve questions instead of joining the chorus which affirms and denies.”[3]

To Begin Where I Am bears witness to the genesis of Milosz’s thought. One notable aspect of Milosz’s thought that is evidenced in his essays is his sincerity as a thinker. The exploratory nature of the essay genre enables readers to witness the genesis of thought. The conviction that man is a transcendent being informs all Milosz’s writing. His thought is founded on the Christian defense of differentiated persons. His essays explore the search for life-affirming values, lost possibilities, and the criminal atrocities that have issued from accursed radical ideologies.

What does it mean for an essayist to defend differentiated persons? The clash of ideologies that we witnessed in the twentieth century ignores man’s essence. This anthropological question, as the Spanish philosopher, Julian Marias, has formulated it recognizes man as an existential being who must maneuver through the objectifying forces of the physical universe. Contrary to differentiation of the human person, the totalitarian impulse operates on the premise that man is merely an instance of the natural process of objectification.

The History of Ideas 

Human history is long, stretching back to a time before man began to take notice of his past. On the other hand, the history of ideas is not.

Ideas do not possess an infinite, inflationary gravitas. Ideas correspond to a stubborn universally valid system of principles that, while showing a propensity for variation and improvisation, nevertheless adhere to a fundamental and undeniable core of human truths. Like a bubble that will burst when overinflated, ideas correspond to truth.

This is the meaning of folly in Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly.

A close analysis of the history of ideas demonstrates that intellectuals often muddle up and obfuscate matters that are transparent to common sense. The intellectual framework that has served totalitarian regimes so effectively is rooted in a profound – albeit all-too-human pathology of envy, egoism, and resentment. Here, we must ask, what is the nature of man? Because this undeniable pathology lies at the very heart of human history, we ought not to allow our better sense to become clouded by the need to rewrite history. The latter has served as a euphemism to create the Soviet New Man. The problem is that the human condition is hardly recognizable once it has become intellectualized.[4]

Boredom in the modern world, Milosz tells us, defaces ideas. One recent example of the destruction of man’s capacity for thought has been given a name that is appropriately descriptive of this activity: Deconstructionism. All that has preceded us, allege the proponents of this new intellectual fashion, has oppressed us – now the time has come to create history anew. Notice the inherent hypocrisy in admitting that deconstructionism aims to create history.

Intellectuals often put the cart before the horse in their incessant forceful treatment of reality. When addressing empirical questions, many intellectuals ignore the reality of the world around them. Milosz is correct in assuming, “When we’re very young, we can understand some things, but to digest them, if they’re to penetrate into our core, well, for that certain experience is required. That’s why so many things go right past us and so very little takes root.”[5]

If experience is indeed fleeting and transient, what is needed is a mechanism to freeze it in its tracks, as it were. This mechanism is reason. What is required is not abstract forms of reason. Instead, binding, all-encompassing reason that unifies experience, and which enable us to decipher and understand it. Experience alone teaches nothing.

Milosz is essentially a philosopher of life. Our preoccupation with vital forms of existence does not preclude that we offer a reasonable account of reality. Even at his most involved, when describing cultural and philosophical themes, Milosz’s rootedness in the rhythm of life is unwavering.

Milosz’s concern with formal questions of aesthetics addresses the latter’s propensity to become removed from reality. Inherently central to Milosz’s view is his idea that thought is – at best – an approximation to reality. Because of the richness and complexity of the latter, the best that a writer can do is pay allegiance to the essence of reality.

The problem with formalist thought, as Milosz conceives it, is the self-referential and circular regard for itself. This is the downfall, he tells us, of this type of literature. This is also encountered in theoretical science. The overbearing philosophical materialism of the twentieth century – the view that reduces all reality to matter – is the proposition that fuels communism, as it also does science. Base materialism, as manifested in its many variants, is always found at the core of destructive sociological, political, and psychological theories that continue to be promoted in the twentieth first century. Milosz makes this clear in an interview:

Yes, there’s been an incredible proliferation of fields that are self-enclosed circles. Our basic curiosity about the world, which calls out to be studied and understood, is disappearing. In the humanities, structuralism is, of course, one instance of that complete self-enclosure around issues concerning the means of expression. And so, there’s no longer any question of saying, Fine, but what does the text have to do with reality? The entire question loses its meaning, because there is no reality. Reality disintegrates into the means of expression. Even the idea of truth, or untruth, disappears. All means of depicting reality are equally valid. The means themselves becomes the subject of study. But there’s the basic and utterly simple question: What does that have to do with the cow over there in the meadows? There is no cow – only the word “cow,” which enters into combinations with other words. But its relation to that animal with the horns and the hoofs, that we don’t know.[6]

Milosz’s prescience as a poet and thinker places him in the company of thinkers who refuse to cater to the exigencies of life by becoming affixed to self-indulgent ideologues and intellectual fashions. The latter represents a profound failure of imagination. This failure often occurs when life becomes fragmented, thus, we opt for abstract theories to grasp and dominate the human condition. This is the perennial existential question that asks: “When is reality too much to bear?”  The ferocity of postmodern man, Milosz argues, originates in the desire to re-work the principles that inform a godless universe. Yet, even when godless, we are still not content to bear our fate.

Milosz instructs us to reconsider why we continue to pounce on human reality with the assault of our fashionable theories. With unabashed arrogance, we demand that human reality bent itself to our demands. We create monstrous and aberrant institutions that rule us with an iron fist from cradle to grave. In the process, people who possess a bankrupt spiritual make-up are elevated to the priesthood of the cult that explains man as the residue of a primitive biological process.

Milosz, Independent Thinker

Independent thinkers have always been a minority. Whether writers or obscure private citizens, the attempt to capture the essence and meaning of the human condition through our sweat and toil remains a time-proven rare bird. In a time when mass driven forms of communication exist for their own sake, how many people succumb to the temptation and seduction of social-political propaganda? Today, it is not enough to be a private citizen, to be concerned with bringing up our children, and remain loyal to those who have earned our love and respect. Instead, we are ordered to enlist our vital energy in causes that materialists find suitable grist for the mill of radical ideology.

If Milosz is convincing as a thinker and essayist, it is because his readers are offered a clear and sincere glimpse into the trajectory of his life, from a small boy in Szetejnie, Lithuania to his exile in California.

Perhaps the clearest of his effusions on the value of Christian humanism and the place of man in the cosmos is his “Letter to Jerzy Andrzejewski.” The letter was written to his friend in 1942, at the height of totalitarianism in Europe. In the letter, Milosz argues that man is an autonomous entity, not a collective reality that can be exploited by the state. This essay is an example of the classical humanistic defense of man as a differentiated, self-reflecting being. The essay counters what Milosz convincingly argues to be the predominant abstract rendition of man that has been “contaminated by the corrosive acids of the work of philosophers whose goal it was to prove that ‘man’ is an abstraction, that ‘Man’ with a capital M does not exist, that there are only tribes, classes, various civilizations, various laws, and various customs, that history is filled with the struggle of human groups, and that each of them brings along different ethics, different customs, and a different worldview.”[7]

What best characterizes Milosz as an independent thinker is his incessant desire to locate the essence of his life in the mere fact of existence, what he refers to as “being here.” Milosz’s work aims to convey the idea that the thinker ought to communicate what others may not readily understand. His openness to remain awed by the totality of being – and not fear what any reader or critic may interpret from such sincerity – is a fine example of humility. The humility of the writer, he suggests, is found in the willingness to think aloud alongside his readers in a search for transcendence. In lieu of this belief, he attests that the value of human communication is always an acknowledgement of our individual limitations. The purpose of sincere communication between a writer and his readers, like the elenchus practiced by Socrates, is to attain to an upward spiral of mutual transcendence.

In To Begin Where I Am, Milosz demonstrates a deeply felt and sophisticated ability to combine profound thought with the sensitivity of the poet. In the rare instances when these conditions meet, one cannot help but realize that we live in a time when the meaning of words has become a hollow game of pretension. Therefore, Milosz considers the twentieth century a tragic and insolent age that detracts from a genuine attempt to grasp the nature of naked experience. He explains: “I am experiencing this second half of the twentieth century so intensely – kinetic sculpture, new music, fashions, the streetscapes of great cities, social mores – that am constantly amazed by the bond which, in theory, must exist between me and a certain young man in Wilno in the 1930s.”[8]

Milosz’s Thoughts on Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Leo Shestov

In “The Importance of Simone Weil,” Milosz offers penetrating observations on the nature of grace and transcendence in the thought of Weil and Camus.  For Milosz, Simone Weil’s uncompromising temperament was a sign of someone who refused to belittle herself in the presence of moral Lilliputians. Milosz suggests that Weil and Camus were modern Cathars, for if they outwardly rejected God, it was precisely for love of God, and the impossibility of his justification. This essay on Weil showcases his philosophical insight that serves as a fiduciary to the professional philosopher.

Milosz’s disapproval of existentialism springs from his concern that the rigidity found in schools of thought only serve to ossify thought. Milosz’s transition from commentary on Shestov’s thought and temperament to Simone Weil, and Camus is admirable. Drawing a line from Shestov, the impetuous Russian maverick, to the solitary Weil, Milosz explores the nature of philosophical vocation.

The question of Camus and Weil as Cathars is an interesting one and not just the result of a passing glance. Milosz’s appropriation of Camus’ thought on God and the nature of the absurd is a moving tribute to the French thinker. He explains: “Camus, in my opinion, was also a Cathar, a pure one, and if he rejected God, it was out of love for God because he was not able to justify Him. The last novel written by Camus, The Fall, is nothing else but a treatise on Grace – absent grace…”[9] What is so instructive about Milosz’s understanding of Camus is that he captures the essence of Camus’ desire for truth.

Camus partakes in the spirit of philosophy. He reflects aloud with his reading public. Jabbing and probing in his quest for truth, he does not fall in the trap of becoming doctrinaire. This requires great perspicuity and sincerity on behalf of the writer. It also demands that the reader come up to the level of the material that he has chosen to read or study and not pander to the stranglehold that radical ideology has on postmodern life.

Perspective is not a problem for intellectually honest thinkers, given that all who think and write must possess a set of fundamental truths. Bias is the problem. Bias precludes our ability to embrace any truth that lies outside our ideological mechanism.

A keen observer of the rise of the totalitarian State, Milosz is quick to recognize the inherent connection to truth that Camus’ thought displays. Camus’ notion of revolt is addressed by Milosz as symbolic of existential inquietude – a view of life that asks, “Is this all?” The Algerian thinker’s courage in not subjugating his conception of revolt, what is a stoic regard for life into the domain of a virulent ideology, makes him wholly original in lieu of other twentieth century thinkers.

It is easy to miss the essence of revolutionary intention, for it is usually obscured by sentimental and moralistic slogans. It is also easy to argue that what happened had to have happened. Marxism wanted to act against the Devil but let him in through a loophole in doctrine. That is, because of its scientific ambitions, Marxism glorified necessity, which supposedly was to be the midwife of men’s freedom. In this manner, terror acquired the sanction of a Weltgeist invested with all the trappings of an evil demiurge. This was none too friendly a blessing for any better tomorrow. And thus, in the countries ruled by Marxists, the Prince of Lies put on a performance that made all his previous exploits pale by comparison.[10]

It is instructive to read what intellectuals of the caliber of Czeslaw Milosz write about others. What do they see in the work of other writers that they lack in their own?  What are the fundamental principles that motivate writers and thinkers to bare the essence of their being on an empty page?  Can we ascertain any lasting knowledge and wisdom from such works?  If we answer affirmatively, we have little choice but move toward the practice of what inspires us. This must first be grounded in private life, and then allowed to spread to the public by those of sound common sense and good intentions. The latter is what Wilhelm Dilthey means by autognosis.

If we assert, as we have done since the 1960s, that there is no knowledge, and that all notions of truth and morality are relative to place, time, race, gender, and creed, we find ourselves in the laughable situation that even children solving their own disputes never indulge in.

Adults are not children. Adults come armed with the baggage of diverse lives that, for reasons that are too divergent to enumerate, have often invested too much stock in placing human reality in brackets. It is human reality that man’s incessant wrath is directed against. Milosz can enlighten us here: “Our age has been justly called the age of new religious wars. That would make no sense if the Communist revolutions were not rooted in metaphysics; that is, had not been attempts to invest history with meaning through action.”[11]

Milosz points out that human history has become bloated with new forms of egotistical violence. He suggests that man’s maladjustment and hate of human reality is best manifested in Communism’s disdain for the free market. If everyone cannot possess sight, then we will rip out the eyes of those who can see. This will level the field, we are told.

The reality is that the free exchange of goods and ideas is a natural human disposition. Its negation, on the other hand, is brought about by the type of people who a long time ago took to raiding. On a sinister level, the latter also appears natural to man. Robbery, pillaging, envy, sloth, and calumny are as natural to the human condition as weeds are to a flower garden. Milosz does not miss the importance of this condition. He writes, “The liberation of man from subjection to the market is nothing but his liberation from the power of nature, because the market is an extension of the struggle for existence and nature’s cruelty, in human society.”[12]

Milosz is gracious. He is a humble man who believes that thinking and writing are the pressing concerns of people who simply want to live. This is the condition that keeps him and others like him freethinkers. His commentary on Leo Shestov is revealing not only of the thinker who was born in Kiev in 1866, but also of philosophy and philosophical vocation. Milosz’s essay on Shestov is insightful yet subtle. This is Milosz at his best.

Shestov, Milosz writes, is not an existentialist, rather a man who is concerned with existence. What is the difference between a dog and a canine?  This is the crux of Milosz’s point. The dog is what one finds astray, roaming the streets. The canine, on the other hand, one never encounters at all – unless in a laboratory or a genealogical text on dog evolution. Milosz’s point is easy to comprehend.

Milosz ascribes to Shestov’s philosophy the raw quality and fresh air of an original thinker. Milosz’s reasoning addresses the nature of thought in Russia. Because Russia has lagged in scholastic, theological, and philosophical formation, its thinkers act as proto first men who must think on their own. This partly explains the acumen of thinkers like Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Solovyov. Milosz places Shestov in this category. His argument is provocative: “Perhaps Shestov exemplifies the advantages of Russia’s ‘cultural time lag’: no centuries of scholastic theology and philosophy in the past, no university philosophy to speak of – but on the other hand a lot of people philosophizing and passionately at that, on their own.”[13]

That Milosz measures the Russian cultural condition against philosophy elsewhere is profoundly important to our own predicament today. Shestov’s concern for questions of existence is never exhausted and never forms into a rigid “existentialism.” The important appeal of his thought, Milosz argues, cannot be undermined:

Shestov was a well-educated man, but he lacked the polite indoctrination one received at Western European universities; he simply did not care whether what he was saying about Plato or Spinoza was against the rules of the game – that is, indecent. It was precisely because of this freedom that his thought was a gift to people who found themselves in desperate situations and knew that syntactic cocoons were of no use any more.[14]

Milosz’s work is never a self-referential treatment of writing. It is instead a conscientious exploration of the relationship between man and the sublime. Writing, Milosz tells us, is what ought to result from a recognition that aesthetic values are always hierarchical. The book ends with an essay entitled, “Notes About Brodsky,” where Milosz practices a currently unfashionable form of good will: complementation.

Milosz’s essays demonstrate his ability to navigate through diverse reflections: the nature of the autobiographical essay, political discourse, and meditations on the value and function of literature. His writing is a meditation on the nature of man and the struggle to embrace personal autonomy, when man has “grown accustomed to the absurdity that surrounds us and that clearly contradicts common sense.”

The book is brought to a close with aphorisms from “Notebook.” At the end of this short section, Milosz writes, “Of necessity, we have grown accustomed to the absurdity that surrounds us and that so clearly contradicts common sense; the endurance of systems based on this absurdity has seemed to us incomprehensible, but since once already, during the last war, we became convinced that people are punished for a lack of reason, we asked ourselves if this new proliferation of absurdity foreshadows something, or if, in expecting punishment, we are making the mistake of thinking by analogy.”[15]

Notes:

 1  What a colossal and misguided decision was Sartre’s attempt to foster a kingship between existentialism and the brutal realpolitiks of the Soviet regime. Need we be reminded that existentialism begins with regard for the concrete subjective “I” that emotes and reflects? The dialectical materialism that is the backbone of Communism is the opposite: the necessary destruction of the subject “I” to deify the collective.

 2  Ewa Czarnecka and Aleksander Fiut. Conversation with Czeslaw Milosz. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1987, 83.

 3   Czeslaw Milosz. To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, 2.

 4   Andre Glucksmann addresses this problem better than most contemporary thinkers: “At the end of the Second World War, two French intellectuals set about finding where they stood in the world’s course. One, Maurice Merleau Ponty, examined the stenographic record of the great trials which Stalin organized in Moscow. The other, Jean-Paul Sartre, found in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit the same intellectual passions which caused the Bolshevik leaders to become filled with dread, to kill themselves, or to be put to death. In a century and a half nothing had changed, except that the esoteric treatise had been re-written as the stenographic record of world events. The ‘subjects’ endeavour once more to discard all ‘subjectivism’, so as the better to coincide with the ‘rock, the driving force of history known in those days as ‘the socialist fatherland’). The thoughts and works of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were catalogued under the heading ‘existentialism’, and as such they were promptly ‘refuted’. The scenery has varied, refutations have followed refutations, but the same play has now been performed for two centuries: the subject is still running, pursued by the shadow of his subjectivism, trying to leap into the central fire that governs all things. With the improvement in means of communication, he sets off to the antipodes, teaching, on his outward journey, progress, historical take-off or revolution to people whom he does not know, and being taught himself on his return. He proclaims yet again the final world conflict, changing its geography only to tell the same story. If the subject can’t change, perhaps he has to find a new public?” See: Andre Glucksmann. The Master Thinkers. Translated by Brian Pearce. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1977, 185.

 5 Ibid. Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 289.

 6 Ibid., 307.

 7 Ibid, 200.

 8 Ibid, 439.

 9 Ibid., To Begin Where I Am, 253.

10 Ibid., 242.

11 Ibid., 241.

12 Ibid., 241.

13 Ibid., 264.

14 Ibid., 264.

 15 Ibid., 440.

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