Table Of ContentTHE PRESENCE OF
M Y T H
THE PRESENCE OF
M Y T H
Leszek Kolakowski
Translated by
Adam Czerniawski
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI is professor in the Committee on
Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy at the University
of Chicago and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University.
The author of some twenty-five books, he is perhaps best known for
his monumental three-volume Mainstreams of Marxism. Among his
many honors, Professor Kolakowski was the 1986 Jefferson
Lecturer, the highest honor conferred by the U. S. government for
outstanding achievement in the humanities.
First published in France in 1972 as Obecnosc mitu (Issue 224
in the Biblioteka Kultury) by the Institut Litteraire, Paris.
© 1972 by Leszek Kolakowski. A German translation w as
published in 1973: © R. Piper & Co. Verlag, Miinchen 1973.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1989 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1989
Printed in the United States of America
98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 90 89 54321
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kolakowski, Leszek.
[Obecnosc mitu. English]
The presence of myth / Leszek Kolakowski: translated by
Adam Czemiaw'ski.
p. cm.
“First published in France in 1972 as Obecnosc mitu
(Issue 224 in the Biblioteka Kultury) by the Institut
Litteraire, Paris”—T.p. verso.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-226-45041-4
1. Myth. 2. Culture. 3. Man. I. Title.
B4691. K586303413 1989
128—del 9 88-37054
CIP
fe) The paper used in this publication meets
the minimum requirements of the American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Libraiy Materials, ANSI Z39.48 1984.
CONTENTS
Preface to the English Edition vii
Preface ix
1 Preliminary Distinctions 1
2 Myth within the Epistemological Inquiry 9
3 Myth in the Realm of Values 19
4 Myth in Logic 34
5 The Mythical Sense of Love 44
6 Myth, Existence, Freedom 51
7 Myth and the Contingency of Nature 61
8 The Phenomenon of the World’s Indifference 69
9 Myth in the Culture of Analgesics 83
10 The Permanence and Fragility of Myth 110
11 Conclusion 130
Index of Names 137
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
This is a very, very old book. It was written in Polish in 1966; but
the censoring authorities, despite the lengthy efforts of the pub
lishing house, forbade its publication in Poland. It was eventually
published in Polish in France in 1972 by Institut Litteraire, and
in German translation by Piper Verlag. When I was reading it
after so many years, it struck me how strongly my philosophical
language was then dependent on German and French (mainly
German) phenomenological and existential idiom, and to what
extent this influence contributed to a stylistic heaviness which was
probably avoidable. This was the reason why it could be trans
lated relatively smoothly into German (according to my experi
ence Polish and German are virtually the same language if we
leave aside vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and phonetics); whereas
to render it in English turned out to be an extremely arduous task
in which, in spite of the hard and skillful work of my friend Adam
Czerniawski, some clumsiness could not be avoided. If I had been
compelled to write it in English, I would have probably expressed
the same idea in another text. Too late.
Chicago, 20 July 1988
PREFACE
This little book is a concise summary of a nonexistent treatise,
which its potential readers will in all probability be spared. I
wanted it to be brief and, therefore, as far as possible, devoid of
examples, historical anecdotes, footnotes, names, quotations, ex
tensive classifications, digressions, reservations, and polemics.
The price of the virtue of brevity are the vices of a certain dryness,
monotony, and inadequate documentation. Nor is it a learned
treatise (particularly in the realms of religious studies, mythogra-
phy, sociology, or the psychology of myth), but an attempt to
present a certain point of view with regard to a sensitive problem
constantly present in the philosophy of culture. This problem
concerns the localization in culture of mythopoeic production in
relation to the structural characteristics of human consciousness.
The term “myth,” whose precise definition I do not attempt
and whose meaning, so I assume, emerges from the discourse as a
whole, requires a certain initial stipulation. Its range overlaps the
range demarcated by the study of religion. It covers a group—
essential, it is true, but numerically insignificant—of religious
myths, that is, the myths of Beginning. It also includes certain
constructions, present (be they hidden or explicit) in our intellec
tual and affective life, namely, those which conditioned and
mutable elements of experience allow us to bind teleologically by
appeal to unconditioned realities (such as “being,” “truth,” and
“value”). I attempt to justify this identification through a basic
identity of functions which these various products of human
spiritual life perform. I also attempt to explain how the inev
itability of these functions in cultural life can be explained, and
also in what sense they are not capable of coexistence with its
technological and scientific efforts.
The mythological character of these derivative constructs
constitutes the guiding notion of this discourse. Their parity with
myth in the primary sense of the word comes about as a result of
one particularly significant function. I do not therefore take into
account those qualities of myth—especially their narrative
qualities— which validate a search for their extensions in works of
artistic imagination.
Such a generalized employment of a word which already has
its rules of application more or less fixed may be open to criticism.
But I could find no other which would better designate the realm
I am concerned with. Relying on the authority of A. N. White-
head, I may add that the whole of philosophical endeavor
depends on attempts at constructing concepts which are more
and more general, for whose designation the existing vocabulary
is never sufficiently rich. If one prefers to avoid arbitrary coinage,
one has therefore to make use of words which lie closest to the
projected realm and to give them an extended meaning. In philo
sophical reflection inherited words usually appear incompetent
through excessive usage, while rashly constructed neologisms
quickly turn into insufferable oddities, as numerous examples
demonstrate. It is therefore safer to try out the possibilities em
bedded in existing terminology, taking care not to be carried
away without resistance by its inertia and maintaining an alert
ness to meanings which are smuggled even subconsciously into
the classification of the world in colloquial speech. All attempts at
exposing hidden implications of language may be useful.
I attempt to employ the generalized concept of myth as a net
to catch a permanendy constitutive element of culture, and thus
to create a somewhat different principle of classifying phenomena
than is most often accepted in the philosophy of culture. I am
convinced that the crucial boundary between the mythological
layer of culture and its technological and scientific layer runs
differently from what might be judged on the basis of most gener
ally known functional interpretations of man's mythological
creativity. The “differently” is not, however, simply the outcome
of a different meaning arbitrarily assigned to the term “myth."
On the contrary, that altered sense arises from the conviction that
religious mythologies are a certain variant or a historical particu
larization of a phenomenon which mav be grasped in a more
fundamental characterization; and that the essential functional
bond links these mythologies with products found in all human
intercourse (and in our civilization as well); in intellectual ac
