In his book Modernity on Endless Trial, Ko?-akowski shows how the tendency to believe that all human problems have a technical solution is an unfortunate inheritance from the Enlightenment - "even," he notes, "from the best aspects of the Enlightenment: from its struggle against intolerance, self-complacency, superstitions, and uncritical worship of tradition". There is much about human life that is not susceptible to human remedy. Our allegiance to the ideal of unlimited progress is, paradoxically, a dangerous moral limitation that is closely bound up with what Ko?akowski calls the loss of the sacred. "With the disappearance of the sacred," he writes, "which imposed limits to the perfection that could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilisation - the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is 'in principle' an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man's total autonomy and thus to deny man himself."

These are wise words, grippingly pertinent to an age conjuring with the immense technological novelties of cloning, genetic engineering and other Promethean temptations.

We pride ourselves today on our "openness" and commitment to liberal ideals, our empathy for other cultures, and our sophisticated understanding that our way of viewing the world is, after all, only our way of viewing the world. But Ko?akowski reminds us that, without a prior commitment to substantive values - to an ideal of the good and (just as important) an acknowledgement of evil - openness threatens to degenerate into vacuousness. "The denial of ‘absolute values' for the sake of both rationalist principles and the general spirit of openness threatens our ability to make a distinction between good and evil altogether." Given the shape of our post-Soviet world, perhaps it is that admonition, even more than his heroic demolition of Marxism, for which Ko?akowski will be honoured in the coming decades.