The Origins of Kondylis' Political Thought Part 2

By Sokratis Vekris

The Philosophical Encounter Between Kondylis and Lykiardopoulos

Fast forward thirteen years: Kondylis has completed his studies in Greece and has translated ten titles from Italian, German, English, and French into Greek for Kalvos publishing company. He has also recently submitted his doctoral dissertation at the University of Heidelberg. The books he translated reflect his interests at that time: Ideology by John Plamenatz; The Social History of Art by Arnold Hauser; History of Bourgeois Society by Leo Kofler; The Philosophy of the French Revolution by Bernard Groethuysen, to name a few.¹ Between the translations and the dissertation intercede also two unpublished small essays, the first focusing on utopian constructions (1971), the second on Lukacs (1975).² His almost two-hundred-page introduction to the translation of Machiavelli’s writings, published in 1971, signifies also Kondylis’s entrance to the scholarly world.

While at first glance the subject of his dissertation—the emergence of dialectics in German idealism—seems to be detached from his earlier historical and political inquiries, in reality it constitutes a continuation and a deepening of it. It represents an examination of the prehistory of Marxism,³ and more specifically, of its all too glorified method: the dialectic. The title of the dissertation was Die Entstehung der Dialektik: Eine Analyse der geistigen Entwicklung von Hölderlin, Schelling und Hegel bis 1802 [The Emergence of Dialectics: An Analysis of the Intellectual Development of Hölderlin, Schelling and Hegel until 1802] and its purpose is to show that dialectics, the pulse of Marx’s theoretical system, arose out of a metaphysical need and was an “idealistic construct”.⁴

At any rate, our focus here is not on Kondylis’s dissertation, but rather on a theoretical exchange he had with his old friend from the journal Martyries, Gerasimos Lykiardopoulos, one year after its submission. This is a theoretical encounter that Kondylis wanted to translate and publish in German,⁵ but for different reasons did not manage to. The discussion was initiated in November 1977 by Marios Markidis, who published an article in the journal Simeioseis titled “Erich Fromm: The Fear of Freedom and its Cure”. The article is presented in the form of a letter addressed to Antonis Lavrantonis, who had previously expressed orally his reservations about Fromm’s attempt to revitalize the vocabulary of “atheist humanism”. In his article, Markidis expounds on Lavrantonis’s positions and expresses also a moderate ‘metaphysical distrust towards the social dogma of man’.⁶ A few months later, Kondylis wrote an article aiming to shed further philosophical light on the reservations expressed by Marios Markidis. An exchange of philosophical ideas between Kondylis and Lykiardopoulos ensued, which centered around the same political and ethical predicament: the texture and fate of revolutionary ideologies. Ioannidis is right to observe that the exchange between the two philosophers is essentially a ‘dispute between a Thucydidean and a romantic conception’⁷ of human affairs.

This exchange between Kondylis and Lykiardopoulos holds great importance for several reasons. Firstly, it is the first publication in which Kondylis outlines a rough framework of his philosophical system. The two essays published in the journal Simeioseis serve as a precursor to central ideas that some years later would become developed and refined in his primary philosophical work, Power and Decision. Thus, these two relatively compact essays also serve as an introduction to the philosophical principles guiding Kondylis’s thought and offer insight into the chronological development of his ideas. Furthermore, these essays are significant because they elucidate how Kondylis’s philosophy diverges from approaches aiming to retain their emancipatory character, and more specifically from what he would later call ‘militant theories of decision’. Kondylis firmly emphasizes the complete and irreversible separation between the Is and the Ought while Lykiardopoulos refuses to make this distinction the cornerstone of his thought. In reality, we are dealing here with a Kantian and a Hegelian reading of Marx.⁸

Let us now delve deeper into this interesting philosophical discussion. Kondylis’s initial essay is titled “The Old and the New Deity” and its objective is to provide further substantiation for Markidis’s thesis. His motivation lies in scrutinizing the philosophical presuppositions of what is broadly termed the “atheist humanist” tradition. As a result of this scrutinization Kondylis draws certain unfavorable conclusions about the nature and destiny of emancipatory thought. The main core of his argument is relatively straightforward: all ideologies and worldviews share a common conceptual structure, which can be subjected to scientific examination.⁹ Conflicting ideologies do, of course, appeal to radically opposing ideas, but this difference pertains only to their content. A historian of ideas seeks to identify the identity of their conceptual structure and should not be distracted by content variations.¹⁰ The distinction between the conceptual structure and the content of a given worldview constitutes a step towards the understanding of how human thought functions in general. It also mirrors the form and content distinction founded in the science of logic— an observation of primary importance because Kondylis believes that typical logic has the capacity to remain historically neutral, with its fundamental principles (the law of contradiction, the principle of identity, etc.) being used by various agents to prove different points.

Let us return to our main topic. After establishing the critical distinction between the conceptual structure and the content of a given worldview, Kondylis seeks to synthesize the diversity of existing worldviews into a single, coherent, and representative formula. To be comprehensive, this formula must take into consideration the inherent historical plasticity of human thought. Kondylis argues that there are sufficient grounds to believe that every historical worldview is rooted in an explicit or implicit dualism, dividing the world into an Empirical Here (Εντεύθεν/Diesseits) and a Transcendental There (Εκείθεν/Jenseits).¹¹ This dualism suggests that the Transcendental There embodies the true essence of the world, with the Empirical Here conforming to the dictates stemming from the transcendental constructed reality. In other words, the dictates that emanate out of the Transcendental There form and shape the worldview of a given society.

In essence, Kondylis addresses here the classic problem of metaphysics and attempts to provide a theoretical solution that renders this issue more comprehensible. One of his central aims is to elucidate how intertwined the construction of a metaphysical worldview and the production of moral principles are.¹² Every philosophical construction, according to Kondylis, bears the imprint of this dualism and in its quest for intellectual supremacy it nullifies opposing worldviews, having as an aim to expand its own sphere of influence. The various modern theories of human “alienation” —whether they come from the Left or from the Right—are merely variations of this primordial human need, since they implicitly or explicitly imply that the current state of man is not yet perfected or completed—a better version of humanity is to expected to emerge when this or that theoretical dictate is realized in the future. It is important to note that the historical actors must remain unaware of the distinction discussed above. By overlooking what they share with their adversaries (the identity of conceptual structure), they can find the necessary psychological motivation to oppose them and fight them.¹³

To illustrate this idea further, Kondylis considers the recurrent historical phenomenon of two religions vying for spiritual supremacy. The theoretical foundations of their respective doctrines are clearly based on this dualism, and Kondylis’s formula captures successfully this dynamic. Complications arise, however, when historical actors embrace and profess a certain version of secularized humanism. Kondylis is in this case equally adamant: secular humanism is making use of the exact same conceptual structure that is so characteristic of the religious worldview. It may occasionally instill in us the impression that it carries its own unique and peculiar logic,¹⁴ which cannot be deduced to religious forms of reasoning, but this is only an optical illusion.

Kondylis here draws from scholars like Karl Löwith,¹⁵ Rudolf Bultmann,¹⁶ Carl Schmitt,¹⁷ Reinhart Koselleck,¹⁸ and the Lexikon Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe to support his argument that modern (atheistic) modes of thought bear striking structural similarities to premodern (theistic) ones. There is no need here to delve into the details of each separate study to which Kondylis refers. Suffice it for now to mention that the idea of progress, central to modernity’s self-understanding, is considered by these scholars as a secularized adaptation of the Christian eschatological view of history. Kondylis takes this conceptual appropriation seriously for understanding the mechanisms of ideologies and worldviews. The distinction between conceptual structure and content, along with the recognition that a social group must appropriate its opponent’s conceptual structure to rise to dominance, are two central motifs that Kondylis seizes upon, and which shape the core of his approach to the history of ideas.

Kondylis thus claims that “atheist humanism”, knowingly or unknowingly, adopted the conceptual structure of Christianity. To explain this paradoxical development, Kondylis turns his attention to what is generally seen as the culmination of modern atheistic and emancipatory thought: the writings of Karl Marx. He begins his analysis by noting that Hegel expanded the semantic meaning of history to the extent that it virtually eliminated the traditional metaphysical distinction between Transcendental There and Empirical Here.¹⁹ This led to the elevation of new abstract concepts (notably, the human subject and history), whose function was to provide a substitute for the lost transcendental realm. In other words, the notions of history and humanity were recruited to recompensate for the loss of the traditional metaphysical realm—modernity, as every historical epoch, was in search of its own idols.

Marx too followed closely this pattern, further emphasizing the idea of man as the master of his historical destiny.²⁰ However, according to Kondylis, Marx’s analyses suggest that the idea of man does not correspond to the empirical man of his society. The realization of philosophy, taking the form of a classless society, is thus postponed to the future. Kondylis remarks: ‘the “alienated” Here of man pales in comparison to the immaculate There, which serves as the absolute standard of reference and comparison’.²¹ To this Kondylis adds that the ontologizing of the immaculate There would not have been achieved if Marx had not presupposed a theory of human nature and if he had not implicitly considered man as being capable to achieve the “good” and the “rational”.

In summarizing his discussion regarding the ideological nature of the concept of progress and the complementary belief in the “alienation” of man, Kondylis makes an observation of crucial importance. This observation allows us to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the motivations that lie behind his own philosophical project. Kondylis points out that Hegel’s and Marx’s utilization of history reflect an ‘ideological employment of historicism’ which should not be expected to arrive at a more ‘scientific theory of human nature’.²² Most practitioners of historicism have typically emphasized that ‘everything in the human world is the product of its historical causes, that it is made by its specific temporal context […] so historicism led to the denial of an eternal human nature or reason’.²³ Kondylis seems to suggest that this approach requires modification. He remains a resolute historicist in the sense that he denies the existence of an eternal human reason. Nonetheless, he seems to be calling for a radicalization of historicism itself. The fundamental insight of historicism, that everything in the human world is historically conditioned, has the potential to lead us to a deeper understanding of the very nature of what it means to be human to the extent that such a theory would be composed out of strictly historical, empirically falsifiable, material. In short, Kondylis views history as a tool to develop a theory of human nature, rather than the other way around. He is acutely aware of the theoretical pitfalls associated with the postulation of a dogmatic theory of human nature that would limit human historical activity to either its spiritual or biological component.²⁴ In fact, one of the central goals of his book Power and Decision is precisely the overcoming of this dualism. At any rate, Kondylis considered authors like Thucydides to have already arrived at similar conclusions.²⁵ His personal mission consisted in reviving their anthropological approach by renewing its terminology and making it match the standards of modern scientific discourse.

Lykiardopoulos responded to Kondylis’s philosophical objections with an eloquent and impassionate essay. While Lykiardopoulos agrees with the main points of Kondylis’s argumentation and shares the Frankfurt School’s concerns about the risks associated with developing a new positive, emancipatory doctrine, he is nonetheless unable to accept Kondylis’s value-nihilistic claims, which ‘eliminate the contradiction from the world’²⁶ and reduce all worldviews to the “identity of the conceptual structure”. The Greek essayist remarks that ‘our objection towards these sentences is not directed against their logical validity […] but rather against their tautological method, which is encapsulated in these sentences in a form of a conclusion’.²⁷ These remarks bear the stamp of Adorno’s negative dialectics and the latter’s attempt to develop a philosophy which aims at ‘the dissolution of standpoint thinking itself’.²⁸

In a typical dialectical fashion, Lykiardopoulos contends that Kondylis uses the ‘myth of truth’ to ‘destroy the ‘truth of myth’,²⁹ that is, he clings to a mythical concept of philosophical “truth” which enables him to undermine or overlook the genuine suffering inherent in human life. In a similar vein, Lykiardopoulos argues that Kondylis’s equation of every thought into a rigid logical formula extinguishes the diversity and singularity of human life, treating them as mere semblances and deceptions. Lykiardopoulos essentially accuses Kondylis of perpetuating the inherent fallacies of the ‘logic of identity’, which ‘always seeks to deny, repress, and violate otherness, difference, and singularity’.³⁰ He simply cannot tolerate the idea that thought is eo ipso an instrument of power, since the real ‘issue is how each one of us lives and dies’.³¹ The Greek essayist concludes that ‘contradiction is an integral element of thought’³² and as such it cannot be subordinated to rigid logical formulas.

Kondylis continues the dialogue with an essay titled “The Bright and the Shadowy Sides of Visions”. He immediately expresses his surprise at Lykiardopoulos’s acceptance of his individual observations while rejecting the larger conclusions drawn from them and accuses his interlocutor of making unwarranted logical leaps and of misinterpreting his theses.³³Kondylis clarifies that he never claimed that the employment of his concept of the “identity of the conceptual structure” negates the plurality of historical manifestations. Instead, his text highlights the complementary relationship between the two concepts.³⁴ The “identity of conceptual structure” is the common source which enables different historical actors to encounter each other and fight for the same space. Consequently, Lykiardopoulos’s accusation that Kondylis reduces the manifold of human experience to the simple is outright false. His philosophical motivation is exactly the opposite: he seeks to find epistemological tools through which he could render to an extent graspable the capacity of historical agents with completely different ideological convictions to fight for the same space.

Kondylis faced similar criticism multiple times during his lifetime, and it is thus worthwhile to open a parenthesis to delve further into the matter. Whether Kondylis employed philosophical formulas like the one presented above or utilized Weberian “ideal-types” to capture the dynamics of historical and sociological phenomena, the primary accusation remained consistent: his approach to human affairs is perceived as indifferent to the multifaceted nature of human reality. Let us closely examine the reasons Kondylis put forth to justify his scientific activity. Kondylis reminded Lykiardopoulos that while nobody has ever consumed a “fruit” in their entire life, but only an “apple”, a “banana” and so forth, we are still obligated to use the term “fruit” for the sake of precise communication.³⁵ Consequently, abstract philosophical or historical schemata are necessary for accurate scientific communication and are indeed unavoidable, even in the most basic usage of language.³⁶ Generic protestations against philosophical or historical abstractions are futile and do nothing more than signify the protester’s dissatisfaction with the inherent limitations of human cognitive abilities.³⁷The real issue for Kondylis is not the use of abstraction, which is unavoidable, but rather its effectiveness in capturing the essence of inherently dynamic phenomena. In a letter to his friend Spyros Tsaknias, Kondylis explained why a critique of his book The Decline of Bourgeois Civilization missed the essence of scientific activity.

The major -and basically, the sole- criticism of my book consists in the argument that it condenses reality in one schema and that it thus leaves out of the picture the real agonies of human beings, the antithetical currents, etc. This is an allegation that can be raised against every book that is driven by an ambition to generalize […]. But [conceptual] schemes and abstractions are entirely inescapable, as anyone should know who uses the word “fruit”, although, as Hegel says, nobody ever ate a “fruit” but an apple, an orange, etc. In my book I emphatically stress that the conceptualization of reality and reality itself are two completely different things.³⁸

The last sentence is crucial. Kondylis explains that his conceptualization of reality and actual reality are two distinct things. Hence, he clearly admits that his theory is only an interpretation of reality and does not claim to have discovered its ultimate essence. Following Max Weber’s methodology of the social sciences, Kondylis insists that the use of abstraction in science is legitimate provided that the scientist clarifies that his formulas are not reality itself, but just a means to rationally reconstruct it. Discussing the role of “ideal types” in the social sciences, Weber writes:

an ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidely emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct (Gedankenbild). In its conceptual purity, this mental construct (Gedankenbild) cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality. It is a utopia. Historical research faces the task of determining in each individual case, the extent to which this ideal-construct approximates to or diverges from reality […] the ideal-type is an attempt to analyze historically unique configurations or their individual components by means of generic concepts.³⁹

One could argue that Kondylis’s ‘morphology of thought’⁴⁰ is an attempt to apply Weberian mental constructs in the domain of thought rather than in history. In a letter to Lavrantonis, Kondylis explains: ‘it is very difficult for one to find something better than the study of thought structures’.⁴¹ Since Kondylis believes that human thought is a historical activity, and not something which occurs outside the temporal and spatial boundaries of any given concrete situation, the application of such mental constructs in the sphere of the mind could be considered legitimate to the extent that they can withstand the tribunal of empirical verification. In fact, Kondylis seems to believe that the superiority of his approach is derived precisely from its ability to remain as closely attached to history as possible and from its capacity to bring within its purview a plurality of human phenomena. Therefore, Kondylis requests that critics like Lykiardopoulos demonstrate explicitly how and in what sense his abstract philosophical schema is unsuitable for describing a particular object of study.⁴² He would, together with Wilhelm Dilthey, claim that ‘the best way to find out whether a knife is sharp is to use it. The fruitfulness of a method can only be established by making discoveries by means of it’.⁴³Furthermore, Kondylis challenges Lykiardopoulos’s assertion that he treats the differences between conflicting sides merely as phenomenal. He contends that the battle between these sides is infused with the existential vitality so characteristic of human social life.⁴⁴ What Kondylis considers phenomenal is the claim by historical actors that their worldview represents the “true” reality and their subsequent calls for the eradication of human suffering and domination. On the one hand, Kondylis emphasizes the catalytic roles of ideas in shaping human experience. On the other hand, he deems it scientifically unacceptable to accept their content at face value. Therefore, he seeks to create an interpretive scheme which would explain the paradox that human beings are existentially dependent on the content of specific ideas, which, from a scientific point of view, cannot be deemed legitimate.⁴⁵

Lykiardopoulos responds that Kondylis still operates within the epistemological illusion of organic wholeness, an illusion which has tormented European philosophical consciousness at least since Descartes. For Lykiardopoulos and other members of the Simeioseis circle, such epistemological fantasies are not only impossible but also politically regressive. According to Lykiardopoulos, Kondylis appears to be seeking a conclusive Hegelian Aufhebung, a philosophical synthesis which would encompass the entirety of human activity through stifling conceptual schemes. In his closing sentences, Lykiardopoulos remarks that ‘no matter how much craft of abstraction I try to assemble, I cannot see into a man who is being crashed nothing else than what he is today’.⁴⁶ This final judgment echoes once again the teachings of critical theory, and in particular Adorno’s perspective that ‘the only philosophy which can be responsible practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption’⁴⁷ and that ‘the need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth’.⁴⁸

Ioannidis has accurately observed that Kondylis’s and Lykiardopoulos’s philosophical exchange revolves around a crucial passage from Karl Marx:

For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to present its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution comes forward from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society, as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.⁴⁹

As mentioned at the beginning of the exposition, it is the paradox of revolutionary process that which is truly at stake in this discussion. Kondylis forcefully asserts that history’s testimony has convincingly demonstrated that every single liberating vision of society ultimately transforms into a new form of domination. The task for Kondylis consists in comprehending the deeper philosophical, sociological, and anthropological reasons underlying this transformation by utilizing available historical material to formulate a theory of human nature. Five years before this exchange, Kondylis had described succinctly his philosophical standpoint in a letter addressed to his friend, Antonis Lavrantonis:

Unfortunately, I do not have enough reserves of delusions to work for the good of humanity. The only thing I have in sufficient amount is the theoretical curiosity, and I use it to study the mechanisms of mutual devouring or the mechanisms of the ideological whitewashing of this mutual devouring, which is one and the same thing.⁵⁰ On the other hand, Lykiardopoulos perceives Kondylis’s scientific realism as a capitulation to existing conditions, as a refusal to acknowledge that every social organization harbors inherently possibilities of social and political salvation.

Ultimately, Kondylis’s understanding of Marxism as an ideology among others led him to the relativization of modernity in toto. Having to a large extent absorbed the teachings of the German historicist tradition, Kondylis attempted to address the challenge of epistemological skepticism through a radicalization of historicism’s foundational premises. The ascertainment of the relativity of worldviews constitutes for Kondylis the first step toward the construction of a sound scientific theory of human affairs, i.e. of a political anthropology that takes into consideration the inherent plasticity of the human condition. Contrary to a number of currents of the second half of the twentieth century, which, forced by the disasters and the disappointments of the first half of the century, refused to develop an anthropology in positive terms, and usually found refuge to the declaration of a negative of anthropology or the ‘death of man’, Kondylis believed that such adversities provided the perfect material out of which a political anthropology could be constructed. His ‘morphology of thought’ was only the first step towards this direction.

1. For the full list of the books he translated during that period see Gisela Horst, Panajotis Kondylis: Leben und Werk – eine Übersicht (Königshausen & Neumann, 2019), p. 509

2. Panajotis Kondylis, „Zur geistigen Struktur der utopischen Konstruktionen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts“ In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 2003-04, Vol.51 (2) (2003-04), pp.299-310 & Panajotis Kondylis, “Die Hegelauffasung von Lukacs und der marxistische Linkshegelianismus“, in: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Vol.48 (2), pp.341-350

3. Panagiotis Kondylis, “Panagiotis Kondylis: I am surprised when someone agrees with me”, in Διαβάζω, vol. 384 (April 1998), p. 122. The same reasons are given in another interview: Panajotis Kondylis, „Nur Intellektuelle behaupten, dass Intellektuelle die Welt besser verstehen als alle anderen“, in: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 42, no.4 (1994), p. 685

4. Panajotis Kondylis, Die Entstehung der Dialektik: Eine Analyse der geistigen Entwicklung von Hölderlin, Schelling und Hegel bis 1802 (Klett-Cotta: Stuttgart, 1979), p. 14

5. Antonis Lavrantonis, “The Formative Years of Panagiotis Kondylis”, in: Σημειώσεις [Simeioseis], vol. 54 (Athens, Dec.2000), pp. 32-33

6. Marios Markidis, “Erich Fromm: The Fear of Freedom and its Cure”, in Panagiotis Kondylis et al, The Old and New Deity (Athens: Erasmos, 2003), p. 27

7. Giannis D. Ioannidis, “A Comment on the Dispute between P. Kondylis and G. Lykiardopoulos”, in: Νέος Ερμής ο Λόγιος, vol. 12 (Autumn 2015), p. 143

8. See the relevant remarks by Aron: ‘Kant or Hegel? Must Marxist thought be interpreted in the context of the Kantian dualism of fact and value, or scientific law and imperative, or in the context of the monism of the Hegelian tradition? […] The Kantians argue that one cannot proceed from fact to value, from a judgment of reality to a moral imperative; hence one cannot justify by an interpretation of history as it occurs. Marx analyzed capitalism as it is; to advocate socialism involves a decision of a spiritual order. The opposing school of Marxism asserts that the subject who understands history is engaged in history itself. Socialism, or the non-antagonistic society, must necessarily emerge from the present antagonistic society; moreover, the interpreter of history is led by a necessary dialectic from the observation of what exists to the desire for society of another type. […] For them, the vision of total history is inseparable from what they call an engagement, a commitment. […] It is impossible to dissociate the taking of a position concerning reality from the observation of reality itself’. In: Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol I, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver (1965; reis., New York: Anchor Books, 1968), pp. 191-192.

9. Panagiotis Kondylis, “The Old and the New Deity”, in Panagiotis Kondylis et al, The Old and New Deity (Athens: Erasmos, 2003), p. 32

10. Ibid.

11. Panagiotis Kondylis, “The Old and the New Deity”, in Panagiotis Kondylis et al, The Old and New Deity (Athens: Erasmos, 2003), p. 32. The similarities between Kondylis’ conceptual formula and Koselleck’s “space of experience” and “horizons of expectations” is particularly striking. Reinhart Koselleck, ““Space of Experience” and “Horizon of Expectation”: Two Historical Categories”, in: Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Koselleck introduces these categories to formulate a theory of historical time, aiming to provide historians with a framework to understand how historical actors perceive their relationship with time. The term “space of experience” elucidates how various historical actors interpret their own past, while “the horizon of expectations” illuminates how they envision their futures and the potential opportunities that lie therein. We won’t delve deeper here into Koselleck’s idea that the distinction between these two categories had expanded during modernity (Neuzeit), creating a novel -and perhaps dangerous- understanding of historical time. What needs to be highlighted, however, is the resemblance between these two concepts and Kondylis’ notion that every worldview or ideological schema is grounded in a dualism that separates the experience of the historical actor into an Empirical Here and a Transcendental There.

12. The problem is undoubtedly as old as philosophy itself. There are good reasons to believe, however, that the work of Friedrich Nietzsche played a crucial role in shaping Kondylis’ belief that metaphysical systems are intrinsically connected to morality. Nietzsche writes: ‘the moral man, however, supposes that what he has essentially at heart must also constitute the essence and heart of things’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 14

13. Panagiotis Kondylis, “The Old and the New Deity”, in Panagiotis Kondylis et al, The Old and New Deity (Athens: Erasmos, 2003), p. 32

14. The strongest argument in favor of the self-sufficiency of modernity’s social and political imperatives has been given by Hans Blumenberg in his Die Legimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1976). Kondylis takes issue with what he deems to be the logical fallacies of Blumenberg’s position some years later. He writes: ‘It is a superficial to think that the true driving force behind the cognitive impulse of the modern era was “the movement of research and inquiry in and of itself and as such”. Blumenberg, in his attempt to demonstrate the intellectual autonomy of the modern era and, simultaneously, the superiority of the mode of thought that he himself prefers, overlooks the world-theoretical decision that enabled the modern era to confront the problem of theoretical curiosity: the latter was set into motion by the conviction that other objects of knowledge, besides the divine, are susceptible to rational understanding and worthy of theoretical attention. There is no such thing as “curiosity in and of itself”; rather, there is always a specific curiosity, felt by concrete individuals in concrete situations. The fact that representatives of modern rationalism—whose subjective self-understanding Blumenberg takes at face value without historical and psychological reservations—wanted to present theoretical curiosity as an absolute entity is […] a polemical argument that aimed to establish, in an anthropological sense, the right of the individual to detach their thinking from the theological framework of orientation.’ Panagiotis Kondylis, Ο Ευρωπαϊκός Διαφωτισμός [The European Enlightenment], vol. I (Themelio: Athens, 2004), pp. 59-60

15. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1949)

16. Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957)

17. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (1922; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)

18. Reinhart Koselleck, “The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts”, in: Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 155-191

19. Panagiotis Kondylis, “The Old and the New Deity”, in Panagiotis Kondylis et al, The Old and New Deity (Athens: Erasmos, 2003), p. 41

20. Ibid, pp. 42-43

21. Ibid, p. 45

22. Ibid, p. 48

23. Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford University Press: New York, 2011), p. 3

24. He writes: ‘The social-ontologically oriented anthropologist, in other words, should not, as strange as it may seem, start with “the human being” but rather with the immense variety of historical and social phenomena. He should arrive at his conception of man at the endpoint of his investigation, after having answered the question: In which way must humans, as beings of a certain species, be constituted that their existence harmoniously aligns with this diversity, seemingly without constraint? Premises of any rational or instinctual anthropology fail before such a question’. Panajotis Kondylis, Das Politische und der Mensch (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), p. 216

25. Panagiotis Kondylis, “The Old and the New Deity”, in Panagiotis Kondylis et al, The Old and New Deity (Athens: Erasmos, 2003), p. 51

26. Gerasimos Lykiardopoulos, “The Old and the New Deity: Notes on the Occasion”, in Panagiotis Kondylis et al, The Old and New Deity (Athens: Erasmos, 2003), p. 57

27. Ibid, p. 59

28. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (1966; New York: Seabury Press, 1973), pp. 4-6

29. Ibid, p. 60.

30. Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 42

31. Ibid, p. 63

32. Ibid

33. Panagiotis Kondylis, “The Bright and Shadowy Sides of Visions”, in Panagiotis Kondylis et al, The Old and New Deity (Athens: Erasmos, 2003), p. 65

34. Ibid, p. 67

35. Ibid, p. 68

36. Panagiotis Kondylis, “The Bright and Shadowy Sides of Visions” in Panagiotis Kondylis et al, The Old and New Deity (Athens: Erasmos, 2003), p. 68. The idea that the formation of concepts comes about in this way reminds us of Nietsche’s famous essay: “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-moral Sense”, where he writes: ‘Every word immediately becomes a concept, in as much as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases -which means, strictly speaking, never equal - in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal’. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, ed., and trans. Walter Kauffman (Viking Press: New York, 1976), p. 46.

37. See also Kondylis’s statement in his Ευρωπαϊκός Διαφωτισμός [The European Enlightenment], vol. I (Themelio: Athens, 1987), p. 35. ‘Plasmatic constructions and abstractions are necessary for science, and a revolt against them essentially means that we are not satisfied with the texture of man’s cognitive powers’.

38. Letter to Spyros Tsaknias dated 13.04.1992 in: Private Archive of Aimilios Kaliakatsos

39. Max Weber, “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy”, in: The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. & trans. E. A. Shils and H. A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949), p. 90, 93. For a brief and comprehensive discussion of Weberian ideal types see Julien Freund, The Sociology of Max Weber, trans. Mary Ilford (London: Penguin Press, 1968), pp. 59-70. He writes: ‘Weber rejects the old view of science as capable of penetrating to the essence of things in order to unify them in a complete system which would be a faithful reflection of reality. In his opinion, no system is capable of reproducing all reality, because reality is infinite, nor can any concept wholly reproduce the utter diversity of particular phenomena. In short, there is no knowledge which is not hypothetical.’ Kondylis in his introduction to Montesquieu similarly asserts: ‘the great truth of Max Weber, i.e. that the more fluid reality is, the clearer and more fixed owe our concepts to be’. Panagiotis Kondylis, “Introduction” in: Montesquieu, Το Πνεύμα των Νόμων [The Spirit of Laws], trans. Panagiotis Kondylis & Kostis Papagiorgis (Athens: Gnosi, 2006), p. 13

40. Panagiotis Kondylis, Ισχύς και Απόφαση [Power and Decision] (Athens: Stigmi, 1989), p. 220

41. Letter to Lavrantonis dated 23.05.1974 cited in Raymond Petridis, Kondylis and the Problem of Nihilism, (ProQuest, 2013), p. 245

42. Panagiotis Kondylis, “The Bright and Shadowy Sides of Visions” in Panagiotis Kondylis et al, Η Παλιά και η Νέα Θεότητα [The Old and New Deity] (Erasmos: Athens, 2003), p. 69.

43. Cited in Theodore Plantinga, Historical Understanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1980), p. 24

44. Ibid, p. 68

45. Kondylis’s approach is marked by a notable tension between an idealistic and a materialistic aspect in his writings. Peter Furth has captured insightfully this tension: ‘He sees himself as superior to the main schism in philosophy, the opposition between materialism and idealism. Clearly leaning towards materialism, he seems to believe he can navigate through idealistic counterarguments without much trouble because his materialism includes an endogenous idealism […] On the one hand, he takes the integrative effect of idealism without its metaphysical foundation, and on the other hand, he takes the metaphysical foundational role of materialism without its reductionism, combining both into a new third entity. However, the question of whether the elements extracted from opposing worldviews can fulfill their role in construction without their original ideal context is not addressed. In any case, the third entity does not emerge as a synthesis from the mutual negation of antithetical worldviews but rather as the result of an externally imposed construction interest aimed at resolving the opposition between worldviews’. Peter Furth, “Über die Sozialontologie von Panajotis Kondylis”, in: Falk Horst (ed.), Panajotis Kondylis: Aufklärer ohne Mission (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), p. 179

46. Gerasimos Lykiardopoulos, “Neither God nor Hegel”, in Panagiotis Kondylis et al, Η Παλιά και η Νέα Θεότητα [The Old and New Deity] (Erasmos: Athens, 2003), p. 84

47. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (1951;Verso: London, 1974), p. 247

48. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (1966; Seabury Press: New York, 1973), p. 17

49. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Prometheus Books: New York, 1998), pp. 68-69

50. Letter to Antonis Lavrantonis, dated 23.05.1974, cited in Raymond Petridis, Kondylis and the Problem of Nihilism (ProQuest, 2013), p.107