Revisiting The Thought Of

Panagiotis Kondylis

Παναγιώτης Κονδύλης

Panagiotis Kondylis (Παναγιώτης Κονδύλης) (1943-1998) was a Greek philosopher, intellectual historian, and translator who produced a deep and original multidimensional body of work. Kondylis earned his doctorate in 1977 at the University of Heidelberg under the supervision of Dieter Henrich producing a thesis on the origins of German idealism. Eschewing traditional academic appointments he worked as a private scholar and wrote articles and monographs covering the Enlightenment, conservatism, liberalism, early modern metaphysics, the philosophy of war as seen in Clausewitz, Karl Marx's relation to Greek philosophy, international relations, and social ontology. 

The primary theme running throughout Kondylis’ work is that human affairs are governed by anthropological constants, especially those of power and decision. Here power should be understood as an infinitely variable attribute and is the subject's ability to impose his will on the world. Power is not mere physical superiority but also rests in culture, symbols, ideas, and permeates all of human relationships. Decision is the act of which a world image results which guarantees the subject an ordered world for the purpose of self-preservation. 

The result is a decisionistic theory in favor of descriptivism, in contrast to militant decisionism such as that of thinkers like Carl Schmitt. In other words, it is a form of historicism, applied to the analysis of the social sphere. According to Kondylis, descriptive decisionism, as a morphology of thought that works with its structures rather than with its content, comes close to nihilism, given that we understand the latter as the idea of an objective lack of value and meaning in the world. Furthermore, descriptive decisionism does not have claims to power, thus being unable to give us any practical recommendations of how to constitute our lives.