Aurel Kolnai

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Aurel Thomas Kolnai (born December 5, 1900 in Budapest as Aurel Stein , † June 28, 1973 in London ) was an Austro-British philosopher who is best known for his theories of morality and emotions .

Life

Aurél Stein comes from a Jewish family. As a high school student he was active in the left-wing intellectual Galilei circle . In 1918 he took the name Kolnai, which he had taken from a story by Ferenc Molnár ("A Pál utcai fiúk" - The boys from Paulstrasse ).

From 1919 to 1937 Kolnai lived in Vienna, where he initially studied and obtained his doctorate and also took on Austrian citizenship. After being an agnostic well into his student days , he converted to Catholicism in 1926 (on the day of his graduation in Vienna) , influenced by the writings of Gilbert Keith Chestertons . Kolnai worked until 1937 as a journalist for Der Österreichische Volkswirt , Schönere Zukunft , and later also for "Der christliche Ständestaat", a magazine that was published by Dietrich von Hildebrand . Under the pressure of the political situation, Kolnai defended Kurt Schuschnigg's government , which he saw as a lifeline from National Socialism .

After Austria's annexation to the German Reich, Kolnai and his wife Elisabeth went into exile in New York in 1940, but, as he wrote in his memoirs, did not feel at home in the United States. After the Second World War , he first taught at the Université Laval in Québec, Canada. In the 1950s he returned to Europe and worked temporarily at Bedford College in London and in Birmingham. He was a lecturer in Spain several times during the government of Francisco Franco and appreciated the conditions there. Kolnai's last teaching position was at Marquette University in Wisconsin from 1968 until his death .

Philosophical orientation

Kolnai was initially a follower of Sigmund Freud and turned to the phenomenological current in the second half of the 1920s . The philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler's ethics of values were trend-setting for Kolnai, whereby he can be assigned to the realistic direction of phenomenology. Kolnai's phenomenology of emotions became influential, especially the study "The Disgust" , which Ortega y Gasset translated into Spanish in 1929 and which made a great impression on Salvador Dalí . Some thinkers, such as B. Karl Popper , Kolnai were among the most original, but also most challenging philosophers of the 20th century. Kolnai's book The War Against the West , published in 1938 (and written in Vienna in English) is one of the earliest philosophical analyzes of National Socialism and is now considered a masterpiece of ideological criticism . Since teaching at Laval University , which was one of the leading centers of Neuthomism at the time, Kolnai has also been influenced by the scholastic method. During his time at Bedford College he also took up analytical philosophy and was also valued by the leading exponents of "ordinary language philosophy". In this phase his work was particularly concerned with the language-analytical discussion of psychological and moral phenomena, whereby Kolnai never stopped at the analysis and made moral evaluations. As a philosopher Kolnai was committed to realism and as a political thinker to a conservative worldview. He sharply turned against all utopias from left and right. He also criticized democracy, v. a. American utopian egalitarianism, which he called "totalitas sine tyrannide" (totalitarianism without tyranny). In questions of ethics (and especially sexual morality ), Kolnai remained committed to a view based on natural law and shaped by Catholicism. In addition to the phenomenological method, linguistics has shaped him since his time in England. Kolnai is considered to be one of those philosophers who bridged the "gap" between so-called continental philosophy and the Anglo-Saxon philosophy of analytical character. His thinking was not rediscovered until the 1990s in the United States, mostly by conservative and Catholic thinkers.

See also

Works (selection)

  • Psychoanalysis and sociology. International Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Vienna 1920.
  • The meaning of psychoanalysis in the history of ideas. In: International Journal of Psychoanalysis . Vol. 9 (1923), pp. 345-356.
  • Max Scheler's criticism and appreciation of Freud's theory of the libido. In: Imago. Journal of the Application of Psychoanalysis to the Humanities . Vol. 11 (1925), Issue 1/2, pp. 135-146.
  • The ethical value and the reality. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1927.
  • Disgust. In: Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Vol. 10 (1929), pp. 515-569.
    • On disgust. Ed. and with an introd. by Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer. Open Court, Chicago 2004.
  • The power ideas of the classes. On the situation of agriculture in Pomerania. Excursion report from the Institute for Social and Political Sciences at Heidelberg University. In: Archives for Social Science and Social Policy . Vol. 62 (1929), pp. 67-110.
  • Sexual ethics. Schöningh, Paderborn 1930.
  • Counter-revolution. In: Kölner Vierteljahrshefte for sociology. Vol. 10 (1932), pp. 171-199 and 295-319.
  • The War Against the West. With preface by Wickham Steed. Gollancz, London / Viking Press, New York 1938, https://archive.org/details/TheWarAgainstTheWest
  • Conservative and revolutionary ethos. In: Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner (ed.): Reconstruction of conservatism. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1972, pp. 95-136
  • Ethics, Value, and Reality. Selected papers. Athlone, London 1977.
  • The Utopian Mind and Other Papers. A Critical Study in Moral and Political Philosophy. Edited by Francis Dunlop. Athlone, London 1995.
  • Political Memoirs. Lexington, Lanham 1999.
  • Early Ethical Writings of Aurel Kolnai. Translated and introduced by Francis Dunlop. Ashgate, Aldershot 2002, ISBN 0-7546-0648-1 .
  • Sexual Ethics: The Meaning and Foundations of Sexual Morality. Translated and edited by Francis Dunlop. Ashgate, Aldershot 2005, ISBN 0-7546-5312-9 .
  • Disgust, hatred, arrogance. On the phenomenology of hostile feelings. With an afterword by Axel Honneth . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-518-29445-1 (articles).
  • The war against the west. Edited by Wolfgang Bialas, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2015, 763 pages, ISBN 9783525310311

literature

  • Carolyn Korsmeyer and Barry Smith, Visceral Values: Aurel Kolnai on Disgust, introduction to Aurel Kolnai, On Disgust , Chicago and La Salle: Open Court Publishing Company, 2004, 4-25.
  • Lee Congdon: Exile and Social Thought : Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 1919-1933. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
  • Francis Dunlop: The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai. Aldershot: Ashgate 2002 ISBN 0-7546-1662-2 .
  • John P. Hittinger: Aurel Kolnai and the Metaphysics of Political Conservatism (1998; PDF; 204 kB), in: Ders .: Liberty, Wisdom, and Grace. Thomism and Democratic Political Theory, Lanham Md .: Lexington Books, 2002, pp. 163-185.
  • Zoltán Balázs & Francis Dunlop: Exploring the world of human practice. Readings in and about the Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai. Central European University Press (CEU Press) 2004. ISBN 963-9241-97-0 .
  • Wolfgang Grassl:  KOLNAI, Aurél Thomas. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 30, Bautz, Nordhausen 2009, ISBN 978-3-88309-478-6 , Sp. 801-803.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Die Lebensdaten according to Stuart C. Brown, Diané Collinson, Robert Wilkinson (ed.): Biographical dictionary of twentieth-century philosophers, London 1996, p. 410
  2. Andreas Dorschel , 'Exact Imagination', in: Süddeutsche Zeitung No. 106 (May 7, 2008), p. 14
  3. DLF : "Bad feelings" , review of Ekel, Haß, Hochmut , January 17, 2008