Leszek KolakowskiThinkers

Consciousness is like unconsciousness, something that has never existed. There is only a discontinuity between silence and declarations in the agent. Exteriority is installed in the agent by the 'code of everyday signs and it is only on the basis of this code that he can think or not think, remain silent or break his silence.

Consciousness is merely a tool and aspect of the total life and not at all the standard and the condition of life which is of supreme value.

Exchange-value is nothing else but the living labour of man transformed into an alien force submitted on the market to the anonymous laws of exchange. It is man himself in his objectified and alienated form taking the shape of an autonomous anti-human power.

Existence is the state of belonging to or being part of the world and is grasped only insofar as it concerns belonging to the world.

False consciousness is thiinking that cannot be aware of its own sources.

Ideology is an organic incapacity to be aware of the social situations and of the interests which mould one's mental work.

Knowledge is decreasing rather than increasing with science. Man, by increasing his power over nature, extends the distance between his technological skill and his capacity to understand.

Martin Heidegger's philosophy is an example of the 'knowledge of domination' in the serve of a repressive society.

Phenomenology is a mode of inquiry that, for example, sees vagueness as a property of my intuition about which, ironically enough, I can gain clarity by studying not vagueness as such, but rather by studying 'this clear act of perception toward vagueness'.

Psychologism is the idea that logic is not obligatory commands, but simply state empirical facts. The consequences of thought, then, are not logical consequences of thought but causal relations be tween facts of our consciousness.

Psychologism is the wrongheaded idea that thinking is a psychological process and that logic describes the laws of thinking.