Panagiotis Kondylis

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Panagiotis Kondylis
20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolContinental philosophy
Western Marxism[1]
Conservatism[2]
Main interests
Social philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of culture

Panagiotis Kondylis (Greek: Παναγιώτης Κονδύλης; German: Panajotis Kondylis; 17 August 1943 – 11 July 1998) was a Greek philosopher, intellectual historian, translator and publications manager who principally wrote in German, in addition to translating most of his work into Greek. He can be placed in a tradition of thought best exemplified by Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli and Max Weber.[4]

Kondylis produced a body of work that referred directly to primary sources in no less than six languages (Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian and English), and had little regard for what he considered intellectual fashions and bombastic language used to camouflage logical inconsistencies and lack of first-hand knowledge of primary sources.

Life

Born in 1943 in the small community of Drouva (Δρούβα) in the municipality of

Marxist philosophy of history. Outstanding German historians Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck
were important guiding influences during his formative years in Heidelberg.

University of Athens, applying for a placement. His application was confronted with the distrust of the conservative faculty of the philosophical department. Although Kondylis was supported by the then well-known professor Theofilos Veikos, he still had to contend with the opposition of many university-based philosophers and subsequently did not succeed in commencing a career as an academic. Thereafter, he never expressed any wish for an academic career (expressing the view that "academic philosophy is dead and buried"),[6] although he was offered a lot of honorary placements, including by the University of Ioannina
, which he politely refused.

He died in Athens in 1998. His library of some 5000 titles based in his house in

Politeia, Athens was donated by his sister, Melpo Kondylis (Μέλπω Κονδύλη), to the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
in which a special "Kondylis" section exists in the campus library. In November 2008 a conference was held in Heidelberg honouring the memory of the late Panagiotis Kondylis. A similar event was held in Greece on 22 May 2008.

Work

The great bulk of his corpus was written in German, and most of his writings were translated by Kondylis himself into Greek. He was interested in a number of areas of study including: the

Derrida, Locke, Hauser
et al., and histories of modern Greek philosophy. Kondylis's best known books are: Die Aufklärung (The Enlightenment) and Macht und Entscheidung (Power and Decision) (see below).

Underlying themes

Kondylis claimed to be "scientific" in the sense of writing "descriptively" (and explanatorily), in separating Is (facts) from Ought (values), rather than writing "prescriptively" or "normatively". The thread running through all of Kondylis's writings (whether primarily focussed on the history of ideas, social ontology, historical sociology, geopolitics, etc.) is his position that the historical plethora and variety of individual, social and theoretical behaviour or endeavour unfolds against a backdrop of the anthropological law (or constants) of "power" and "decision". Such "power" and "decision" continually traverse a friend–foe spectrum within historically formed (and currently dynamic) societies characterised by varying degrees of multi-faceted social relations of individual and collective subjects (in and through which e.g. biological impulses are rationally justified and embellished so that their voice is heard as the command of ethics; the impulse of self-preservation manifests itself as "meaning of life"; and sexual urges are dressed up as "love"). Orientation, identity formation, hierarchisation, interpretation, the production of normative systems, ideologies, rationality as self-control and the abandonment or postponement of immediate gratification, etc., are all means through which power relations manifest themselves socially and distinguish human civilisations from the basic instinctual behaviour and unrationalised raw violence of the animal kingdom (in short: humans accept "meaning" in seeking power, whereas animals do not). As human societies become more complex (and materially wealthier), power and its self-intensification ceases to often coincide with mere physical superiority (as in the case of primitive conditions), and power is often objectivised through greater use of historically determined and relative ((re-)interpreted and often contested) symbols and values. However, raw physical power is always at least potentially available for use by individual and collective subjects who wish to maintain and expand their power. Even scientific knowledge is not beyond historical determination and polemical manipulation – but only scientific knowledge, if it consistently separates Is from Ought, can explain in terms of corroboration with empirical reality the abundant variety of human existence and "knowing".[7]

The Political and Man

Book cover of Das politische und der Mensch.

His final major work Das Politische und der Mensch (The Political and Man) remained unfinished at the time of his death, but nevertheless managed to present a unified social-scientific theory or "value-free" description of social phenomena, encompassing socio-ontological, sociological and historical aspects of the study of human affairs. Kondylis's conception of social ontology does not offer any fixed causalities or laws nor does it say what people ought to do or not do in any given situation or how their social action should unfold. The task of social ontology is accordingly not to reduce fluid and varied phenomena to basic samples and basic genetic factors; what is sought is to show the spectrum of the forces and factors, which can be constituted and become discernible only from the – irreducible and inexhaustible – diversity of form. Such forces and factors, of course, include certain constants such as striving for self-preservation through the expanding of one's own power, and the friend–foe relation, which exist in all societies and are actualised in concrete historical situations and therefore have concrete dimension and content e.g. when the dominant paradigm might be theocentrism or anthropocentrism or mass democratic post-Modernity. Much of the nearly completed first volume (three volumes had been planned by Kondylis) is an analysis of mass-democratic ideology in the social sciences while also dealing with methodological and theoretical questions such as the distinction between "socio-ontic observation" and "socio-historical observation" and the three key aspects of the social: the social relation, the political and man. Moreover, Kondylis examines the social relation as regards its "internal" mechanism of subjectivity and "external" mechanism of action, the friend–foe polarity and the social relation's continuity, in addition to exploring the concepts of understanding and rationality by way of an extensive examination and/or critique of numerous renowned authors such as Martin Buber, Émile Durkheim, Wilhelm Dilthey, Jürgen Habermas, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Niklas Luhmann, George Herbert Mead, Alfred Schütz, Talcott Parsons, Karl Popper, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber and Leopold von Wiese.

The Enlightenment and intellectual history

Book cover of Die Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus (The Enlightenment within the Framework of Modern Rationalism).

Apart from being a comprehensive survey of the major polemical trends in the European History of Ideas from the end of the Middle Ages and the subsequent turn against

Wittgenstein, and Zabarella
), producing scholarly works that not only have a handbook or reference text quality but also an ability to provide insight into the motive forces of development of, and changes in, the history of ideas in the European Modern Era (see also Conservatism below) before the onset of the new Planetary Era.

Power and De-cisio

The cover for the German edition of Power and De-cisio

In Macht und Entscheidung (Power and De-cisio)[8] Kondylis set forth the theoretical basis for his attitude to existence and his own endeavours as an author and social scientist. "Decision" is here conceptualised differently from its hitherto known varieties in decisionism; now it appears as a theory about the emergence of individual and collective worldviews. Such an emergence as a function of power i.e. self-preservation through self-enhancement (or self-intensification), always refers to enemy positioning, and as such always contains normative elements within itself. Kondylis examines the claimed bindingness and also ambiguity inherent in all ideologies and social institutions. Drawing from anthropology, philosophy, sociology and history, concepts such as value, value-freedom and nihilism are explored. It is claimed that the infinite variety of human perceptions, beliefs, ideologies, i.e. world-views, are nothing more than an effort to give personal interests a normative form and an objective character, deriving from a "decision" on what means should be used, who should be a friend and who a foe, in the big "Hobbesian" struggle for what is the most primitive and common goal of all humans – self-preservation. Therefore, personal and/or group world-views and ideologies in general are used as a weapon in everyday struggle for the purpose of power claims and self-preservation. Social and historical being and becoming consist of transitory existences – regardless of whether they invoke Reason and ethics or not – seeking power (in any one or more of its countless forms). That is how Nature's (and society's) creatures are, and they cannot do otherwise.

Conservatism

Book cover of Konservativismus. Geschichtlicher Gehalt und Untergang.

Kondylis's next book, Konservativismus. Geschichtlicher Gehalt und Untergang. (Conservatism. Historical Content and Decline.), like The Enlightenment, which broke new ground in its novel interpretation of such a pivotal period in European philosophy (see above), went against the grain of conventional wisdom on the history of conservatism understood simply as a reaction to the

Schlegel, and Stahl
.

While Kondylis identifies himself with Marxism, some view him as a conservative thinker. American

paleoconservative intellectual Paul Gottfried names Panagiotis Kondylis "one of the great conservative thinkers of our age".[9]

Theory of War

Book cover of the Greek edition of A Theory of War.

In Theorie des Krieges (Theory of War), Kondylis opposed

Clausewitz
's theory. According to Aron in Penser la guerre Clausewitz was one of the first writers condemning the militarism of military elites and their war-proneness (based on the famous sentence "war is a continuation of politics by other means"). Kondylis claimed that this was a reconstruction not coherent with Clausewitz's thought. Clausewitz was, according to Kondylis, morally indifferent to war from a theoretical point of view, and his propounding of the value of political rule over war had nothing to do with pacifistic claims. For Clausewitz war was just a means in the eternal quest for power in an often anarchical and unsafe world, and as such war could neither be a continuous phenomenon, nor cease altogether. In other words, war arose from the political (i.e. "political communication") in the wider sense of social existence encompassing society as a whole (inclusive of anthropological factors), and whether war occurred at a particular time or not depended on a correlation of social and political forces encompassing collective and individual input into any given state of affairs. Kondylis saw in Clausewitz a general theory of war with sufficiently inclusive and elastic conceptualisation which could cover all forms of strategy – even antithetical forms: from primitive guerrilla warfare to extremely technicised contemporary war, as well as the possibility of terrorism using advanced technology to cripple modern-day societies. Kondylis continued with an analysis of Lenin's, Engels's and Marx's theories of war, articles about military staff and politicians, technological and absolute war, and concluded (in the Greek edition) with an analysis of a possible Greek–Turkish war.

The Decline of Bourgeois Thought

Book cover of the German edition of The Decline of Bourgeois Thought- and Life-Forms.

In Der Niedergang der bürgerlichen Denk- und Lebensformen. Die liberale Moderne und die massendemokratische Postmoderne (The Decline of Bourgeois Thought- and Life-Forms. The Liberal Modern and the mass-democratic Post-modern), Kondylis used Weberian ideal-typical analysis to outline the great "paradigm shift" of post-Modernity from around 1900 onwards, in bringing to an end the previously dominant bourgeois-liberal hierarchical and humanist world-view, and ushering in a new era of mass-democratic pluralism and leveling of hierarchies based on mass-democratic social formations characterised by, inter alia, historically unprecedented mass production and mass consumption, atomisation and mobility, and, not least of all, the various forms of mass-democratic ideology. To this end, Kondylis made effective use of his distinction between the "synthetic-harmonising thought-form" and the "analytic-combinatory thought-form" in which the latter set aside the former during the same period as the setting-aside of classical bourgeois liberalism by mass democracy, which for the most part occurred as the re-interpretation and changing of liberalism in accordance with the needs of mass democracy, and not always as an open and programmatic clash between the two. The "synthetic-harmonising thought-form" and the "analytic-combinatory thought-form" distinction is applied by Kondylis to his extensive overview of developments in the arts (including literature, music, architecture, the visual arts, cinema), as well as of developments in philosophy, the sciences and commonplace mind-sets and ways of living, mainly from the second half of the 19th century until the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

Planetary Politics after the Cold War

Book cover of the German edition of Planetary Politics after the Cold War.

In Planetarische Politik nach dem kalten Krieg (Planetary Politics after the Cold War), Kondylis dealt with a number of matters e.g. conceptual confusion in the overtly polemical and unhistorical use of "conservative", "liberal" and "(social) democracy"; mass democracy as the world's first international social formation; the impact of communism on the 20th century; and "human rights" as predominantly American ideology but also amenable to interpretations contrary to American interests, i.e. the dissemination of universal human rights ideology will lead to a significant increase in international conflict and increase the worldwide trend towards anomy. The end of the Cold War in particular emerges as a pivotal point in history in which the European Modern Era finds itself in its historical twilight while coming full circle, absorbed by the Planetary Era which the European Modern Era itself inaugurated with the great geographic discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries. Planetary history gulps down its creator, European history – another one of the blaring examples of the unintended consequences of collective action in history.

Kondylis's published works as a whole can be seen as a unified series of analyses based on an unwavering adherence to empirical fact and logical consistency no matter what aspect of study is being emphasised at any given time. He sought to eliminate artificial academic boundaries between e.g. "philosophy", "anthropology", "economics", "history", "sociology" and "politics" by emphasising the interconnectedness of such disciplines from the point of view of "value-free" i.e. "power claim"-free and non-normative scientific understanding. He thought of himself as "an observer of human affairs" or "writer" or "historian of ideas, social historian and theorist" (always writing by hand), rather than as a "philosopher", producing a body of work that bears little resemblance to any other author, apart from perhaps Max Weber.

Books and articles

Books and articles published only in Greek
  • Η Ελλάδα, η Τουρκία και το Ανατολικό Ζήτημα. Athens: Γνώση, 1985 (Greece, Turkey and the Eastern Question).
  • Ο Νεοελληνικός Διαφωτισμός. Οι φιλοσοφικές ιδέες. Athens: Θεμέλιο, 1988 (The modern Greek Enlightenment. The philosophical ideas.).
  • To Αόρατο Χρονολόγιο της Σκέψης. Athens: Νεφέλη, 1998 (The Invisible Chronology of Thought. – three interviews with Panagiotis Kondylis.)
  • Μελαγχολία και Πολεμική. Athens: Θεμέλιο, 2002 (Melancholy and Polemics. – a series of articles by Kondylis, published posthumously.)
  • "Ταυτότητα, Ισχύς, Πολιτισμός", στο Ευ. Γκανάς (Επιμ.), Νέα Εστία, τ. 156ος, Αθήνα, Ιούλιος-Αύγουστος 2004, σσ. 6–19 ("Identity, Power, Civilisation" – 50 "notes" from the incomplete and unpublished third volume of The Political and Man).
  • "Διαφορά της δημοκρίτειας και επικούρειας φυσικής φιλοσοφίας, διδακτορική διατριβή του Karl Marx, Εκδόσεις Γνώση, out of print, μετάφραση του: "Differenz der Epikureischen von der Demokritischen Naturphilosophie", Dissertation von Karl Marx, Jena 1841.
English translations
  • English translations of Macht und Entscheidung (Power and Decision) and Planetarische Politik nach dem kalten Krieg (Planetary Politics after the Cold War) and of some other writings by Kondylis are available to be read free of charge: see link below "Panagiotis Kondylis website (English)".

Notes and references

  1. ^ Paul Gottfried, "The obsoleteness of conservatism", 25 November 2008: "Kondylis identifies himself with Marxism, broadly understood."
  2. ^ Paul Gottfried, "The obsoleteness of conservatism", 25 November 2008: "Kondylis identifies himself with Marxism, broadly understood."
  3. ^ During his lifetime he refused to publish any of his photographs. When asked for a photograph for a German academic yearbook, he chose to write a small note instead: "I cannot understand the relationship between a writer's appearance and the value of his theoretical work." This photograph was released publicly by his family posthumously.
  4. Durkheim, Cassirer, Schmitt and Aron
    were among the important points of reference in his thinking, notwithstanding the significant differences he had with some of these writers.
  5. Greek Communist Party
    ; df. Κονδύλης, Π. Το Αόρατο Χρονολόγιο της Σκέψης (ΑΧΣ), Νεφέλη, 1998, pp. 45, 51. However, in Kondylis's first known article, which most likely dates from 1964, entitled "Οι επαναστατικές ιδεολογίες και ο μαρξισμός" ("Revolutionary Ideologies and Marxism") in Μελαγχολία και Πολεμική. Athens: Θεμέλιο, 2002 (Melancholy and Polemics) Kondylis writes about the ideologisation of Marxism (as occurs with all initially revolutionary movements such as Christianity), and its distortion and conversion into a party-political and bureaucratic means of control, suggesting he had already moved away from dogmatic "faith" in communist revolution by the age of 21.
  6. ^ Letter to Bernd A. Laska of 16 June 1985, in Bernd A. Laska: Panajotis Kondylis – unfreiwilliger Pate des LSR-Projekts; Cf. Interview with Rudolf Burger in: Wiener Zeitung, 1. Juni 2007.
  7. ^ Kondylis, P. "Wissenschaft, Macht und Entscheidung", in H. Stachowiak (Hg.), Pragmatik. Handbuch pragmatischen Denkens, b. V, Hamburg 1995, 81–101; Kondylis, P. Das Politische und der Mensch. Soziale Beziehung, Verstehen, Rationalität. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 1999, pp. 573–575; Κονδύλης, Π. "Ταυτότητα, Ισχύς, Πολιτισμός", στο Ευ. Γκανάς (Επιμ.), Νέα Εστία, τ. 156ος, Αθήνα, Ιούλιος-Αύγουστος 2004, σσ.6–19.
  8. ^ The term De-cisio is provided by the writer in his introduction as the Latin translation of Entscheidung is preferred over Decision since Kondylis is referring to philosophical decisionism, the abstraction and re-arrangement of the external world by the subject in such a way that it appears meaningful to her/him. See "Introduction" in Panajotis Kondylis, Macht und Entscheidung, Klett-Cotta, 1981
  9. ^ Paul Gottfried, "The obsoleteness of conservatism", 25 November 2008: "Panajotis Kondylis (1943-), a Greek scholar who lives in Heidelberg and writes in German, may be, unbeknownst to himself, one of the great conservative thinkers of our age."

Further reading

External links
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