Böcker av Ryszard Legutko

Translation of: Triumf czlowieka pospolitego.

This new series of scholarly reflections on the interpretation of Socratic philosophy is an inviting combination of intuition and meticulous analysis. Ryszard Legutko provides the reader a monumental service in his confrontation of the most important and influential literature written on the subject to date. He likewise opens the conversation to European contributions and renders Socrates truly a figurehead of future philosophy far beyond being a pillar in ancient thought. Legutko argues that Socrates was systematic, and his moral views were ultimately grounded in his theory of knowledge that was composed of logically connected propositions (logoi). Reading Plato, Legutko's intuition that Socrates was quite the opposite of the quirky, ironic, and enigmatic character is supported by his demonstration of Socrates' consistency, unity, and hierarchy of thought. He extends Socrates' coherency to a criticism of the democratic mind, framing him even less as a random spit-fire and more the grounded observer. Socrates, argues Letgutko, is well aware of the importance of general concepts and he intended to free these concepts from democratic distortions and give them firm and independent foundations. In short, 'the way of the gadfly' is a beautiful and precise exploration of order that seeks to be changed by the awareness of this order, and how to wield concepts apart from the motives of arrogance and chaos--neither of which represent nature, and therefore are foreign to the way of the gadfly.

This book has two currents. The first is an analysis of the three concepts of freedom that are called, respectively, negative, positive, and inner. Negative freedom is defined as an absence of coercion, positive freedom as an ability to rule oneself and others, inner freedom as being oneself; that is, being the author of one's decisions. Each concept is analyzed both in terms of its development in the history of ideas and in terms of its internal logic. The major problem of negative freedom is to find widely accepted rules according to which this freedom can be distributed. Positive freedom's major difficulty is to define what constitutes a free person. The greatest dilemma with inner freedom is how to correlate it with the proper interpretation of the human self. The book advances the thesis, and this constitutes the other current of its narrative-that we have been witnessing the advent of a new form of despotism, much of it being the effect of liberalism's dominant position. Precisely because it took a reductionist position, liberalism has impoverished our view of freedom and, consequently, our notion of human nature with its political, moral, and metaphysical dimensions.

This work wrestles with the emancipatory ideology promulgated by postmodernists, libertarians and liberal thinkers. The author mourns not simply the loss of faith in classical Western culture, but the way in which that loss is becoming a central point of identity.