Czesław Miłosz:

Old-World Values Confront

Late-Modern Nihilism

Pedro Blas González

Czesław Miłosz issues from an age and place when making a distinc-
tion between the ethos of a poet, an essayist, or a philosopher seemed an
unnecessary and imprudent indiscretion. His resplendent work on political
philosophy, The Captive Mind, is along with Albert Camus’ The Rebel one
of the most insightful, historically accurate, and devastating critiques of
Marxism and its entrenchment in twentieth-century thought to date. As
such, The Captive Mind is unrivalled by other “theoretical” and abstract
treatises in its sheer ability to grasp the vital essence of political reality
under totalitarian regimes.
As a poet and an essayist, Miłosz’s philosophical attention to detail
and the pathos that his thought exhibits is reminiscent of two other recent
Nobel Prize winners, Octavio Paz and Joseph Brodsky. Miłosz is part of
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. In this respect Miłosz keeps some very distin-
guished company with writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Karl Popper,
Leszek Kołakowski, Arthur Koestler, and Paul Hollander. Among these
thinkers we encounter some who have lived in the belly of communism
and who have enlightened western democracies about realpolitik—of
what really takes place in systems ruled by doctrinaire and radical ideo-
logues—and its necessary outcome, what some like to call “praxis.”
Miłosz’s formation as a 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 historical context
was to form the backbone of The Captive Mind. From the perspective of

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154    Pedro Blas González

humanism, this context is very important because it gives us an opportu-

nity to revisit the essential human qualities that have to be subsumed by
totalitarianism in order for such governments to rule with an iron fist.
What we encounter in totalitarian reality and its logical outcome is
always more revealing than what abstract theories assert. In the process,
we also discover what the values of humanism truly are, as well as what
takes place when these values are stunted. The history of twentieth-century
totalitarianism is the refusal to grant personal autonomy to the individual.
Like personal, egotistical, garden-variety struggles for power, communism
only needed the “intellectual” baggage to legitimize its quest for absolute
power. “Theory,” as the plaything of some intellectuals, was to be this
outlet. Finding it necessary to fight the universal logos that underpins the
reality of the human condition, anti-humanistic “theory” creates a man-
made order that shamelessly seeks only to benefit its creators.
This predatory world is sharply contrasted with the necessary respect
that open, democratic societies give to individualism. As a sincere writer
and thinker, Miłosz could not have it any other way. Totalitarian govern-
ments cannot afford that its citizens remain autonomous individuals. Not
only is this a threat to their ability to rule, but individual liberty also threat-
ens its utopian theoretical foundations, which promise the redistribution of
goods and equality, because totalitarianism fails to redistribute the essence
of human nature.
Intellectuals who buy into this promised Elysium do so from a founda-
tion that is rooted in what Max Scheler has recognized as a central value of
man: resentment. Intellectuals, if we are to assume that good will and rea-
son is their raison d’être, cannot work from ignorance. By definition, then,
intellectuals possess a rational capacity to put two and two together and to
defend the forms of human reality, if not the governments and institutions,
that allow for the exercise of personal autonomy and personal liberty.
It is also important to recognize why radical ideologies must remain
antihumanistic in nature. When confronted with embracing humanistic
values, either secular or religious, or becoming “committed” to a radi-
cal ideology, such committed thinkers have very limited choices indeed.
The pollination of the now overly used word “commitment” frustrates all
attempts to understand the psychology of some intellectuals.
Commitment to radical ideologies may in fact prove to be just that,
the self-serving commitment to personal gain. This perspective minces
no words, nor does it take any prisoners. Having to choose between the
 Czesław Miłosz    155

indefensible and the intrinsically defensible goodness of moral humanism

is often no more than a calculated career move.1 While the average citizen
may assert his envy, jealousy, and hatred—moral and character inadequa-
cies—in the limited scope of the private realm that they inhabit, writers
and thinkers by design do not have this luxury. Yet this broader arena, one
that should be the source of thoughtful and measured analysis, is precisely
the opportunity sought by those who seek to propagate the raw and primi-
tive emotions that all radical ideologues solicit from its practitioners.
Another viable option that sincere thinkers have when pinned against
history, as some commentators like to suggest, is to safeguard the sanctity
of the individual. In a curious bent of imagination, writers who imagine
themselves as victims while actually working diligently to secure the tri-
umph of radical ideologies that stomp on autonomous subjects, are the
ones who, in a self-congratulatory display, claim to be the most visibly
“committed.” Twentieth-century intellectuals and academics were well
represented by the likes of these sanguine, disingenuous characters.
Miłosz 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 of these ideologies bears this out. He explains:

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

Miłosz’s book To Begin Where I Am is a fascinating work. The essays

in this collection originally appeared elsewhere and range in scope from

1.  What a colossal and misguided decision was Sartre’s foray into attempting to fos-
ter a kinship between existentialism and the brutal realpolitik of the Soviet regime. Need
we be reminded that existentialism begins with regard for the subjective “I” that emotes
and reflects? The dialectical materialism that is the backbone of communism is the exact
opposite: the necessary destruction of the subject “I” in order to deify the collective.
2.  Ewa Czarnecka and Aleksander Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, trans.
Richard Lourie (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), p. 83.
156    Pedro Blas González

literary criticism to the historical significance of the twentieth century in

Western civilization, which was a topic of lifelong interest. To the reader
familiar with Miłosz, these essays can augment what they already know
of his thought. But this is also a work that helps to introduce Miłosz’s
thought in a more comprehensive manner to readers who may not know of
his skills as an essayist.
The tone of these essays is quickly established in Miłosz’s preface,
entitled “My Intention,” where he writes: “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 wit-
ness to the genesis of his thought. One notable aspect of Miłosz’s thought
that is evidenced in his essays is his sincerity as a thinker. The probing
and exploratory nature of the essay as a genre allows the reader to view
how thought is manifested. Miłosz’s conviction that man is a transcendent
being informs all of his writing, and his work is founded on the humanis-
tic defense of differentiated and autonomous man. Taken together, these
essays create a sense of the passage of time and the sincerity of a lived
humanism. With regard to the twentieth century, Miłosz’s essays bear
witness to a search for values and lost possibilities and to the criminal
atrocities that have issued forth from accursed radical ideologies.
What does it mean for an essayist to defend “autonomous man”? This
question launches itself at us in some very curious ways. This is a concern
that should be posed first to intellectuals. The battle of ideologies that we
witnessed in the twentieth century is truly nothing more than our inability
to agree on what to embrace as our definite rendition of man’s essence.
This anthropological question, as Julian Marias has so clearly formulated
it, has everything to do with our notion of man as an existential being who
has to maneuver through the objectifying forces of the physical universe.
The totalitarian impulse, as we have had more than ample opportunity
to witness and verify by now, is moved by the view that man is merely
another instance of this natural process of objectification.
Human history is long, stretching back to a time even before man
began to take notice. The history of ideas, on the other hand, is not. Instead,
the latter is like the numerical value of the digits zero through nine, which
very young children quickly learn in school. Learning that these digits can

3.  Czesław Miłosz, To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2001), p. 2.
 Czesław Miłosz    157

be arranged in what is essentially an infinite myriad of magical combina-

tions, the child learns to maneuver through mathematical reality with ease.
Ideas, unlike mathematics, possess not an infinite, inflationary gravi-
tas, but rather the opposite. Ideas correspond to a stubborn universally
valid system of principles that, while showing a propensity for variation
and improvisation, nevertheless always adhere to a basic and undeniable
core of human truths. Like a bubble that will only admit to a given, finite
level of inflation, ideas, too, have their fundamental worth and corre-
spondence to the truth, which in practice are always connected to human
reality. This truth explodes radical ideologues as would a land mine to the
gentlest touch.
Intellectuals may claim, at face value, to represent reason and intel-
ligence, at least from the perspective of the average, reality-soaked citizen.
But this is already an overstatement. A close analysis of the history of
ideas quickly proves that intellectuals actually muddle up and obfuscate
matters that are transparent to common sense. The intellectual framework
that has served totalitarian regimes so well is rooted in a profound—albeit
all-too-human—pathology of envy, egoism, and resentment. Here, again,
we must ask what is the nature of man. Because this undeniable pathology
lies at the very heart of man’s history, we ought not to allow our better
sense to become clouded by the need to rewrite history. This, of course,
has served as a euphemism for the necessity of creating “the new man.”
The problem is that the human condition is hardly recognizable once it has
become intellectualized.4
4.  André Glucksmann has understood this problem perhaps better than most who
have addressed it: “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 refu-
tations, 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
158    Pedro Blas González

Boredom in the modern world, Miłosz tells us, has brought about
entirely new categories of thought that are based on our ability and inge-
nuity to negate and destroy. In some recent instances, this activity has
even acquired a name that is accurately descriptive of this very activity:
deconstruction. All that has preceded us, allege the proponents of this new
intellectual barbarism, has oppressed us, and now the time has come for
us to create our own history. What greater vindication and moral freedom
than to break with all that binds us to hard reality? Notice the inherent
hypocrisy in admitting—by definition, no less—that we too are creating
history. The belief that fuels these diverse modes of “anti” culture, history,
and reason is partly motivated by a desire to no longer abide by what
are often difficult, restrictive rules. If we no longer have to abide by the
principles of the physical world, from which the human condition cannot
escape, then we obtain a mode of newfound “consciousness” of libera-
tion. Like spoiled children, we refuse to be subjected to forms of life—of
existence—with which we do not agree. This state of mind may not equate
to the notion of “false consciousness” that Marx described, yet it is in
precisely this direction that materialism has taken us.
Intellectuals often put the cart before the horse in their incessantly
forceful treatment of reality. When addressing empirical questions, most
intellectuals simply ignore the reality of the world around them. As Miłosz
correctly assumes, “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 the
mechanism to freeze it in its tracks. This mechanism is reason. But what
is required is not just any abstract form of reason. Instead, a binding,
all-encompassing reason that attempts to unify the value of a given experi-
ence with those that have preceded it, which allows us to decipher and
understand it. What follows any experience, then, is based on our ability to
underscore the latter. Again, experience alone teaches us nothing.
Miłosz is essentially a poet of life. Our preoccupation with vital forms,
however, does not preclude the fact that one does not reach out for a

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 André Glucksmann, The
Master Thinkers, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 185.
5.  Czarnecka and Fiut, Conversations With Czesław Miłosz, p. 289.
 Czesław Miłosz    159

reasonable account of reality. Even at his most involved, when describing

cultural and philosophical themes, his rootedness in the rhythm of life is
unwavering. When faced with the question of which he resembles most, a
“formal” or realist poet, he does not flinch in regarding himself as one who
tries to describe reality.
His concern with “formal” questions of aesthetics has to do with
the propensity of aesthetics to become removed from reality. Inherently
central to Miłosz’s view is his notion that thought is always, at best, an
approximation to reality. Because of the richness and complexity of real-
ity, the best that a writer can do is pay allegiance to its essence.
A major setback of formalist thought, as Miłosz conceives it, is its
self-referential and circular regard for itself. This self-regard is charac-
teristic of this kind of literature, but it is also the domain of theoretical
science. The dominant philosophical materialism exercised in the twen-
tieth century—the view that only matter exists—is the proposition that
fuels communism as well as science. Base materialism, as manifested in
its many variants, is always found at the center of other destructive socio-
logical, political, and psychological theories that we continue to promote.
Miłosz 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, structural-
ism 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

Miłosz’s prescience as a poet and thinker places him in the company

of those who refuse to cater to the exigencies of life by becoming affixed
to puerile and self-indulgent ideologies or intellectual fashions. The latter

6.  Ibid., p. 307.

160    Pedro Blas González

are representative of a profound failure of imagination. This failure often

occurs when life becomes too unsystematic or fragmented and we opt for
abstract theories in order to grasp, and even dominate, the human condi-
tion. This is the perennial existential question: “Just when is reality too
much to bear?” The ferocity of modern man, Miłosz argues, comes about
through the desire to rework the principles that inform a godless universe.
But even when godless, we are still not content to bear our fate.
Miłosz 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 bend itself to our demands. We
create monstrous institutions that rule with an iron fist from cradle to cof-
fin. In the process, people of primitive spiritual makeup are elevated to
the priesthood of a cult that explains man as the residue of a primitive
biological process.
Independent thinkers have always been a minority. Whether sought out
by writers or obscure private citizens, capturing 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 will succumb to the temptation and seduction
of their politically soaked messages? Today, it is not enough to be a private
citizen, to be concerned with bringing up our children, or to be loyal to
those who have earned our love and respect. Instead, we are ordered by
these priests to enlist our vital energies in causes that these materialists
regard as suitable grist for the mill of radical ideology. By all measurable
accounts, this technique works marvelously.
If Miłosz is convincing as a thinker and essayist, it is precisely because
the reader is 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 humanism and the place of man
in the cosmos is his now well-known “Letter to Jerzy Andrzejewski.” The
letter was written to his friend in 1942, at the height of totalitarianism in
Europe. In the letter, Miłosz argues that man is an autonomous entity and
not a collective reality that can be exploited by the state. This particular
essay is an example of a classical humanistic defense of human existence
as a differentiated, self-reflecting being. The essay counters what Miłosz
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
 Czesław Miłosz    161

capital M does not exist, that there are only tribes, classes, various civili-
zations, 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 Miłosz as an independent thinker is his inces-
sant desire to locate the essence of his life in the mere fact of existence,
or what he refers as “being here.” All of Miłosz’s work aims to convey a
feeling that the thinker ought to communicate what others may not readily
understand. This openness to becoming awed by the totality of being—and
to not fear what any reader or critic may interpret from such sincerity—is
a fine example of humility. The humility of the writer, Miłosz 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 com-
munication is always an acknowledgement of our individual limits. The
point of sincere communication, like the elenchus practiced so brilliantly
by Socrates, is to attain to an upward spiral of mutual transcendence.
In To Begin Where I Am, Miłosz 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. This is perhaps why Miłosz considers the
present to be a tragic and insolent age that impedes any genuine attempt to
grasp the nature of naked experience. To this he adds: “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
In “The Importance of Simone Weil,” Miłosz offers penetrating obser-
vations on the nature of grace and transcendence in the thought of Weil
and Camus. For Miłosz, Weil’s uncompromising temperament was a sign
of someone who refused to belittle herself in the presence of moral Lillipu-
tians. Miłosz observes that both Weil and Camus were modern Cathars, for
if they outwardly rejected god it was precisely for love of God, and thus
for the impossibility of his justification. Miłosz’s essay on Weil showcases
his philosophical insight in a manner that serves as a model to the profes-
sional philosopher.
7.  Ibid., p. 200.
8.  Ibid., p. 439.
162    Pedro Blas González

Miłosz’s disapproval of existentialism, for instance, springs from

the concern that the rigidity found in schools of thought only serves to
ossify thought. Miłosz’s transition from his commentary on Lev Shestov’s
thought and temperament to Weil and Camus is truly admirable. Drawing
a line from the impetuous Russian maverick to the solitary Weil, he man-
ages to say a great deal about the nature of philosophy as a vocation.
The question of Camus and Weil both being referred to as Cathars
is an interesting one and not just the result of a passing glance. Miłosz’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 seems so instructive about Miłosz’s understanding of Camus is
that he captures the essence of Camus’ continual desire for truth. While
it remains true that existentialism is an exploration for truth, and how this
truth is manifested in the individual, the same is not necessarily the case in
other schools of philosophy.
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, of course, requires great
perspicuity and sincerity on behalf of the writer. It also demands that the
reader rise to the level of the material that he has chosen to read or study,
as the case may be. Not pandering to the stranglehold of a radical ideology,
Miłosz’s thought moves about wherever reason, if not just a reasonable
approach to the human condition, will lead him. Perspective is never a
problem for a thinker, given that all who think and write must possess and
embrace a set of fundamental truths. What is so destructive to one’s ability
to seek truth is bias. Bias precludes our ability to embrace any truth that
lies outside of our prescribed ideological viewpoint. This is also a fine
example of masochism and self-slavery. The danger in bias, however, is
that it forces radical ideologues to supply intellectually dishonest excuses
for the indefensible.
A keen observer of the developments of the rise of the totalitarian
state, Miłosz is quick to recognize the inherent connection to truth that
Camus’ thought displays. Camus’ notion of revolt is addressed by Miłosz
as symbolic of a wanting or disquietude, suggesting a view of life that
9.  Miłosz, To Begin Where I Am, p. 253.
 Czesław Miłosz    163

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. Miłosz writes:

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 demi-
urge. 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 always instructive to read what intellectuals of Miłosz’s caliber

write about others. What do they see in the work of others 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 this affirmatively, we then have little choice but to 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. But 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, or creed, we then find ourselves in a laughable
situation, beyond even the arguments of a children’s dispute.
But adults are not children. Instead, adults come saddled with the bag-
gage of lives, and, for reasons that are too different to enumerate, they have
often invested too heavily in placing human reality in brackets, regardless
of the outcome. It is human reality, after all is said and written, against
which man’s incessant wrath is directed. Again, Miłosz 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

10.  Ibid., p. 242.

11.  Ibid., p. 241.
164    Pedro Blas González

Perhaps nowhere else is Miłosz’s acumen in understanding man’s his-

tory and how it has become bloated with new forms of egotistical violence
more representative than when he recognizes that man’s maladjustment
and hatred of human reality is best manifested in communism’s hatred
of the free market. If not everyone can possess sight, then we will rip
out the eyes of those who can see; doing so will level the field, we are
told. If a better world can come about through the free enterprise of goods
and ideas, then people of good will be the ones to discover it. And so we
have. Primitive man’s exchange of goods in the form of barter is a form
of this understanding, one that fashionable “theory” cannot deny. The
interplay that existed between these early people is already an indication
of a form of understanding that has progressed from mere instinct to the
consciousness of survival. Primitive man’s relationship to each other and
their surroundings can be described as already metaphysical in nature. As
nomadic entities who eventually settled into tiny villages, their concerns,
fears, and aspirations are in keeping with our own space-age existential
concerns. It is one thing to roam the earth aimlessly, like animals, and
another altogether to have a purpose to our movement. Drying, salting, or
dehydrating food resulted in raids by those who knew what was at stake
but who did not care to cultivate their own work ethic and imagination.
Both of these are central human traits.
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
those same entities long ago resorted to raiding. Yet, on a more sinister
level, the latter behavior also seems very natural to man. Robbery, cal-
umny, pillaging, envy, and sloth are as natural to the human condition as
weeds are to a flower garden. Miłosz 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
Miłosz is gracious. He is a humble man who imagines that thinking
and writing are nothing if not the pressing concerns of one who simply
wants to live. This is the condition that makes him, and others like him,
freethinkers. His commentary on Shestov informs us not only about the
thinker who was born in Kiev in 1866, but also about philosophy and
the philosophical vocation. This is Miłosz at his best. While academics

12.  Ibid.
 Czesław Miłosz    165

write obtuse, scholastic texts that do not depart from narrowly calculated
presuppositions, thinkers can accomplish much more by starting from an
exploratory, essayistic principle. The latter’s topic of choice is irrelevant.
This attests to the nature of genius. Miłosz’s essay on Shestov is insightful
yet subtle.
Shestov, Miłosz writes, is not an existentialist but rather one who is
concerned with existence. What is the difference between what we call a
dog and a canine, some will ask? This is precisely the crux of Miłosz’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. This point is easy to comprehend. Of
further interest is the fact that none of this matters much to the animal.
This does not mean that we do not encounter a real animal.
Miłosz’s reasoning in ascribing to Shestov’s philosophy the raw
quality and freshness of an original thinker has everything to do with
the nature of thought in Russia. Because Russia has lagged in scholastic,
theological, and philosophical development, its thinkers cannot help but
to act as prototypical first-men, who must think on their own and without
much precedent. This serves partly to explain the abilities of Dostoevsky,
Berdyaev, and Solovyov. Shestov, too, falls into this category. Miłosz’s
argument is highly provocative: “Perhaps Shestov exemplifies the advan-
tages 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 Miłosz has come to measure the Russian cultural condition as
against philosophy elsewhere is profoundly important to our predicament
today. Shestov’s concern for questions of existence is never exhausted and
thus never forms into a rigid “existentialism.” Yet the important appeal of
his thought, Miłosz argues, cannot be disputed:

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

13.  Ibid., p. 264.

14.  Ibid.
166    Pedro Blas González

Miłosz’s work, consequently, is never a self-consuming treatment of writ-

ing; rather, it is a conscientious exploration of the relationship that exists
between man and the sublime. Writing, for Miłosz, is instead what ought
to result from a recognition that aesthetic values are always hierarchical.
To Begin Where I Am ends with an essay entitled “Notes About Brodsky,”
in which Miłosz practices a currently unfashionable form of good will:
complementation.
This collection of essays demonstrates Miłosz’s ability to navigate
through such diverse reflections as: the nature of the autobiographical
essay, political discourse, and meditations on the value and function of
literature. Miłosz’s writing is always a meditation on the nature of man
and the struggle to respect personal autonomy when man has “grown
accustomed to the absurdity that surrounds us and that so clearly contra-
dicts common sense.” The book is brought to a close with aphorisms from
“Notebook.” At the end of this short section, Miłosz 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

15.  Ibid., p. 440.