Panagiotis Kondylis
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Panagiotis Kondylis (Παναγιώτης Κονδύλης, Panajotis Kondylis, Panagiotes Kondylis, Kondilis) (17 August 1943 — 11 July 1998), was a Greek philosopher and historian of ideas in the tradition of thought best exemplified by Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Clausewitz and Max Weber. Other thinkers such as Montaigne, Montesquieu, Spinoza, La Mettrie, de Sade, Marx, Nietzsche and Carl Schmitt were important influences on his thinking. Kondylis claimed to be "scientific" in the sense of being "descriptive" rather than "prescriptive" or "normative". He called his view „descriptive decisionism“.
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[edit] Life
Born in Olympia in 1943, Kondylis studied classical literature at the University of Athens as well as philosophy, history and political science at the Universities of Frankfurt and Heidelberg, where he earned his PhD with the comprehensive study of the early years of Hegel, Schelling und Hölderlin: Die Entstehung der Dialektik (The formation of dialectics). Kondylis has been awarded the Goethe Medal in 1991. As recipient of the Humboldt Prize he was in 1994/95 a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. Kondylis was independent, though, a „Privatgelehrter“ (private scholar) who never aspired to an academic career — except later stages of his life where he entered into discussions with the Philosophy Departement of the University of Athens. When he died in 1998 because of medical error in a Greek hospital, he had no family of his own and was not married. His library of some 4.000 titles based on his house in Politeia, Athens was donated by his sister, Melpo Kondylis, to the Aristotle University of Thessalonikiin where a special "Kondylis" section exists in the campus library. In November of 2008 a conference is going to be held in Heidelberg honouring the memory of the late Panajotis Kondylis. A similar event has been held in Greece in 22 of May.
[edit] Work
The bulk of his corpus was written in German, almost all of his writings were translated by Kondylis himself in Greek. He was interested in a number of areas of study including the philosophy of war and Clausewitz' s theories which he analyzed, as well as the work of Hegel and Marx, Enlightement, Modernity and their Critics, Western Civic culture and its decay, even International Affairs. He has also been a prominent interprator and translator as he has translated in Greek -and also written a preface- about Machiavelli and Carl Schmitt. He has been occupied with the greater spirits of European Modernism and critcs such as Hegel and Marx. Kondylis Hermeuneutics follow a certain methodology; he is aiming at reconstructing fundamental anthropology -in the wider sense- and fundamental philosophical views even if the writer does not explicitly does so, or either tries to show the connection between ideology and philosophical writings and the concept of Enemy- Friend as hes does p.e. with Marx and Hegel based in one of their texts about the "problem of the east". His best known books are: Die Aufklärung (The Enlightenment) and Macht und Entscheidung (Power and Decision). In his book Theorie des Krieges (Theory of War) Kondylis opposes Raymond Aron' s liberal interpretation of Clausewitz's theory. According to Aron in Penser La Guerre Clausewitz was one of the very 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 claims that this a reconstruction not coherent with Clausewitz's thought. Clausewitz was, according to Kondylis, morally indifferent to war, and his advices of political rule over war have nothing to do with pacifistic claims. For Clausewitz war is just a means to the eternal quest for power in an anarchical and unsafe world. He continues with an analysis of Lenin's, Hegel's and Marx's war theory, articles about military staff and politicians, technological and absolute war and with a famous analysis of a possible Greek-Turkish war.
In Macht und Entscheidung (Power and Decision) Kondylis claims that all human ideologies, perceptions and beliefs were nothing more than an effort to give to our personal interests a normative form and an objective character, deriving from our "decision" on what means we should use, who should be our friends and who our foes in our big Hobbesian struggle for — what was the most primitive and common goal among all humans — self-preservation. Ideologies are nothing more than a part of our personal "world-construction" (κοσμοκατασκευή) and our world-construction is a subjective view of the world deriving from our interests and Hobbesian survival instincts. From this point of view, he claimed that ideology and opinion in general are used as a weapon in our everyday struggle for claims of "power" and self-preservation.
[edit] about Kondylis
"while we advance into the 20th century we discover that in 70's Haidelberg there was a Scholar of Philosophy who continued Max Weber's tradition more creatively than all professional scholars of Political Science, Sociology and Philosophy [...] and his project is now necessary after Comte and Marx." Volker Gerhardt, Die Zeit
[edit] Books
- Die Entstehung der Dialektik. Eine Analyse der geistigen Entwicklung von Hölderlin, Schelling und Hegel bis 1802. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979. 729 S. ISBN 3-12-911970-1 (The Formation of Dialectics)
- Die Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981. 725 S. ISBN 3-12-915430-2 (The Enlightenment within the Rationalism of Modern Times)
- Macht und Entscheidung. Die Herausbildung der Weltbilder und die Wertfrage. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984. 129 S. ISBN 3-608-91113-8 (Power and Decision — World Views and the Problem of Values)
- Konservativismus. Geschichtlicher Gehalt und Untergang. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986. 553 S. ISBN 3-608-91428-5 (Conservativism — Historical Content and its Decline)
- Theorie des Krieges. Clausewitz - Marx - Engels - Lenin. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988. 328 S. ISBN 3-608-91475-7 (Theory of War)
- Die neuzeitliche Metaphysikkritik. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990. 614 S. ISBN 3-608-91330-0 (Criticism of Metaphysics in Modern Times)
- Der Niedergang der bürgerlichen Denk- und Lebensformen. Die liberale Moderne und die massendemokratische Postmoderne. Weinheim: VCH-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1991 ISBN 3-527-17773-6 (The Decline of the Bourgeois Forms of Thinking and Living)
- „Nur Intellektuelle behaupten, dass Intellektuelle die Welt besser verstehen als alle anderen. Interview von Marin Terpstra mit Panajotis Kondylis. In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 42,4 (1994), S. 683-694 (Only Intellectuals claim that Intellectuals have a better Understandling of the World than all other Men)
- Planetarische Politik nach dem kalten Krieg. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 1992 ISBN 3-05-002363-5 (Planetarian Politics after the Cold War)
- Montesquieu und der Geist der Gesetze. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 1996 ISBN 3-05-002983-8 (Montesquieu and the Spirit of the Laws)
- Grundzüge der Sozialontologie. Band 1: Das Politische und der Mensch. Soziale Beziehung, Verstehen, Rationalität. Aus dem Nachlass hg. von Falk Horst. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 1999 ISBN 3-05-003113-1 (The Political and Man — from the literary remains of P.K.)
- Das Politische im 20. Jahrhundert. Von den Utopien zur Globalisierung. Heidelberg: Manutius-Verlag 2001 (Sammlung von 19 Artikeln aus den 1990er Jahren) ISBN 3-934877-07-9 (The Political in 20th Century — compilation of 19 articles from the 1990s)
- Machtfragen. Ausgewählte Beiträge zu Politik und Gesellschaft. Darmstadt: WBG 2006 (enth. Nachdruck von Macht und Entscheidung, von 6 thematisch zugehörigen Artikeln und dem Interview mit Marin Terpstra) ISBN 978-3-534-19863-4 (Questions of Power — Reprint of Power and Decision plus 6 pertinent articles)
Books published only in Greek
- Melancholy and Polemics, editions Themelio, 2002 (Μελαγχολία και Πολεμική series of articles of Kondylis, published posthumously)
- Invisible chronology of Thought, editions Stigmi (Αόρατο Χρονολόγιο της Σκέψης Interviews of Pnagiotis Kondylis with German and Greek journalists and Scholars)
