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Panajotis Kondylis
A great social philosopher of our times

Panagiotis Kondylis (Παναγιώτης Κονδύλης, Panajotis Kondylis, Panagiotes Kondyles) (17 August 1943 – 11 July 1998), was a Greek writer, translator and publications manager who principally wrote in German, in addition to translating most of his work into Greek.

He can be placed in the tradition of thought best exemplified by Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli and Max Weber. Other thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Hobbes, Spinoza, Montesquieu, La Mettrie, Kant, de Sade, Clausewitz, Marx, Nietzsche, Schmitt and Aron were amongst the important points of reference in his thinking, notwithstanding the significant differences he had with some of these writers.

Kondylis claimed to be "scientific" in the sense of writing "descriptively" and "explanatorily" rather than "prescriptively" or "normatively". He called his theoretical outlook "descriptive decisionism" and produced a body of work that referred directly to primary sources in no less than 6 languages (Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian and English).

He had no time for what he considered intellectual fashions and bombastic language used to camouflage logical inconsistencies and lack of first-hand knowledge of primary sources.

His work 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. (Source, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panagiotis_Kondylis )

Panajotis Kondylis

Some of his quotes
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panagiotis_Kondylis

• "The life of humans is given meaning only by their deeds."
• "Whatever benefits the self-interested is propagandised by the naive."
• "There is no final solution and there is no happiness that is not in danger."
• "Post-modern mash is easily digested but it does not constitute nutritious food."
• "Only intellectuals contend that intellectuals understand the world better than others."
• "The only thing that a world state could guarantee is the conversion of all wars into civil wars."
• "Pluralism is the ideology of satiated felicity – the hungry do not respect the values of the satiated."
• "Everyone has equal rights in delusions, since not everyone has equal ability or courage in attaining knowledge."
• "Whoever contends that History has ended might as well be certain that History awaits them around the next corner."
• "Most people consider it roughly unnatural for other opposing viewpoints to prevail. I, on the contrary, am surprised when someone agrees with me."
• "The key is to think historically – the answers to historical problems are not to be found in a constructed theory, but on the contrary, the answers to theoretical problems are to be found in history."
• "...the garrulous and lachrymose pseudo-humanism that characterises public discourse in the West does not mean any tangible disposition for drastic world-wide redistribution of material prosperity."
• "The proclamation of human rights today is connected with - and in the future it will be connected even more closely - with the once explicit desire that one's dear fellow man should sit in his own country and enjoy his human dignity over there."
• "...ideas, particularly those which have a normative loading, do not constitute a reflection [of reality (as in the case of vulgar Marxism),] but weapons, and their content is defined negatively by the conjectured belief of the enemy on each occasion."
• “[the philosophers'] position is in part tragic and in part comical because they themselves cannot transubstantiate… power into their own social domination and, correspondingly, they dream that masters will one day philosophise rather than philosophers prevail.”
• "Speaking in jest, I confess to friends that, since reading pleases me so much, I should have never made writing my profession, and Ι recollect with envy Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray, who said that he likes reading so much that it does not give him any motive to write books himself."
• "Humans will be called "humans", precisely like lions are called lions and mice - mice, without any other ethnic, national or ideological differentiation. It might appear to be a paradox, but it is true that a human separated himself from all the other animal species precisely because he was not only a human without any other predicate."
• "If the same Western Powers, which in 1919 rejected Japan's demand and denied safeguarding the equality of races in the Treaty of Versailles, in the year 1998 officially bend over backwards for the sake of the understanding of foreign cultures, that does not definitely constitute the progress of understanding. However, it does constitute a sign of a dramatic about-face in the global correlation of forces."
• "The de-ideologisation and the merging of politics with the economy, in the final analysis, mean that in the hereafter conflicts will be conducted for tangible material goods, without notable ideological mediations. Thus, to be precise, we should characterise the end of ideologies as a partial return to the animal kingdom. If it is attractive and desirable for the farewelling of Utopia to reach up to there, remains a matter of taste."
• "Just as the philosopher [Kant] believed, it is exactly the "mixing" and "merging" of peoples which puts peace in danger. But even if the democratic peoples remained separate like good neighbours, as Kant preferred, again they would not be lacking in war-mongering arguments in the event they are needed. Nobody will deny the principle that "democracies do not wage war against each other" - only that he will add that the opponent is not a "genuine democrat.""
• "In order to avoid hysteria in the face of complete and irrevocable death, eschatological hysteria was legitimised world-theoretically. Whoever learns to live without spoken or unspoken eschatologies and without ethicisms as their substitutes, has to learn to die, completely and irrevocably, with psychic tranquility and drollness. This highest of lessons is learnt in classical ancient times, which ignored the straight line with the propitious end in order to fasten itself to the eternal cycle."
• "...a substantial contribution to knowledge of human affairs requires a total existential commitment, an unwinking observation of specific situations and living people, and a ceaseless refining of observations with implacable contemplation, which does not retreat before any prejudice and does not fear clashing with whomever and whatever. This stance can be called an ethic by someone (it is certainly a form of internal asceticism), but it has no relation with ethics as rules of social behaviour; on the contrary, it can militate head on against such ethics."
• "Of course, the garrulous and lachrymose pseudo-humanism that characterises public discourse in the West does not mean any tangible disposition for drastic world-wide redistribution of material prosperity. On the other hand, the extremely dangerous paradox of the planetary situation means that even “just” solutions such as self-denial without historical precedent would not offer a long-term way out. If the wealth e.g. of 800 million is divided amongst six billion, everyone will simply become a brother in poverty – conversely: if a Chinese, Indian and African were to consume per capita as much raw material and as much energy as a North American, that could entail ecological collapse."
• "The production of a historical theory and theory ignorant of history is deep down an easy matter, and that is why so many, famous and unknown, indulge in it, wanting to believe that the substitution of an arbitrary concept with another arbitrary concept or with a new combination of concepts is a significant contribution to thought. All of that comprises symptoms of a permanent intellectual adolescence. The intellect reaches a maturity when it is in a position to give a specific analysis of a specific situation. Only the clueless will call that narrow-mindedness and empiricism. It is exactly the specific analysis of specific situations which shows the true texture and usefulness of conceptual and methodological tools."