Metaphysical Horror (Penguin Philosophy) Book

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.