Aurel Kolnai (1900-1973) was a Hungarian philosopher. He started out as part of Freud’s circle and became a notable proponent of phenomenology. He converted to Catholicism in 1923. However, he was forced to flee Europe with the rise of National Socialism. This was because he was a Jew by birth and had critiqued Nazism in his best-selling book, The War Against the West. In addition to his contributions to phenomenology, he is best known for his essays on ethics and political philosophy, especially for his analysis of privilege, hierarchy, and utopianism.
In this interview, Graham McAleer discusses Kolnai’s thought.
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Who was Aurel Kolnai? He was born into a completely secular Jewish family. His name was actually Aurel Stein, but he changed it when he was about twenty. The origin of this name is opaque. Francis Dunlop, who wrote a very good biography of Kolnai and who has perhaps done the most to get his work into print, investigated it. It is not a Hungarian name and seems to have been fabricated.
When he converted to Catholicism in his twenties, his full name became Aurel Thomas— after Thomas Aquinas—Kolnai. This is interesting because he was not much of a Thomist.
His biography is very interesting story but also very sad. He was a refugee for the rest of his life. Although he had converted to Catholicism, he was Jewish and had to flee Europe. He never obtained a formal academic position in the American system. He was an adjunct, always on the periphery of university life, even though he was superbly gifted and wrote philosophy in English, German, Hungarian, French, and Spanish.
He was not a thinker of pastiche. Although it is not always easy to understand who he was reading or what his sources were, he was an extraordinarily original thinker who deserved a place in the academy but never found one. This meant that he was quite poor, often living directly off the money given by Catholic charities or friends. To earn some money, his wife did translations.
He lived in Quebec for a while but did not care for it for several reasons. Ultimately, he ended up in England, which he loved. He had always been an Anglophile and came into the Catholic Church through the influence of G.K. Chesterton. Although Austro-Hungarian, this precocious teenager supported the Allies during World War One. So, he was absolutely thrilled when he landed in England and, oddly, tended to think of himself as an honorary Scotsman. He liked the idea of understatement and thought the Scottish were very understated.
What are the main areas of philosophy on which Kolnai writes? He is quite capacious and always blends ethical thinking with political thinking.
He started off in the Vienna Circle of Freud and his first book was called Psychoanalysis and Sociology, published when he was turning twenty.However, he had a formal intellectual break with Freud and abandoned the sort of psychoanalysis for the phenomenology of Max Scheler. The thread throughout the rest of his work is the value phenomenology or the value ethics of Max Schuyler. Thate puts him in the same school or tradition as John Paul the Great. The blending of ethical and political thought is a signature of Kolnai’s thinking.
He was not much of a metaphysician. Like Max Scheler, he believes that the ethical alerts you to the fundamental metaphysical assumptions or insights He is very different in this regard from Erich Przywara or von Balthasar, who start with metaphysics and move into culture. Scheler and Kolnai start with the ethical and the political.
That is odd. One of the criticisms moved against the phenomenological movement is that it has a notable lack of political philosophy, unless there is an oblique political philosophy, as some would allege to be the case with Heidegger. The first three great phenomenologists are Husserl, Heidegger, and, in my view, Max Scheler. Scheler introduces an ethical focus. Within the Schelerian tradition in Catholic thought, John Paul II fuses Scheler with Thomism, whereas Kolnai takes phenomenological ethics and shows the intricacies of the connective tissue that it has with political questions. For those working within the phenomenological method who wanted to look at politics, Kolnai is an avenue to take.
Why is Kolnai worth reading? On account of the phenomenological sensitivity. There is still a divide in philosophy between the continental tradition that comes from phenomenology and the Anglo-American analytical tradition.
In the 1950s, when Kolnai ended up in England, linguistic analytical philosophy dominated. When I went to university in England, nobody read Nietzsche. We were all still reading A.J. Ayer and Quine. However, when Kolnai arrived with his Schelerian background, he was struck by the usefulness of analytical philosophy for ethical questions and so he blends phenomenology with analytical philosophy in some interesting ways.
He was gifted linguistically and he knew Greek and Latin. However, whereas Heidegger believes the ancient languages are very important for doing philosophy, Kolnai looks at modern languages. Often he begins an essays from the perspective of analytical philosophy. For example, if the topic were obligation, he would look at the word as you might find it in Portuguese, German, or Russian. Unlike Heidegger, he does not believe that there is anything mystical about what language might tell you. However, he does believe that it is an important starting point for understanding moral concepts.
Phenomenology is the method by which we examine very closely the way in which the world registers in our minds or consciousness. By looking at language, we can add to that a common-sense approach. What are the deliverances made to our ethical lives and our political lives by ordinary human interactions down through the centuries. These deliverances accumulate in ordinary language and in phenomenology. Kolmai would respond to sceptics by claiming that he is staying close to common-sense experience. That takes him into the Scottish Enlightenment.
Are Kolnai’s writing only of interest to the philosopher or do they also touch upon questions of Christian doctrine? He is a more accessible writer than, say, von Balthasar or Przywara, but nonetheless quite a technical thinker. Though an academic writer, he engages in a phenomenology of our ethical lives and an analysis of ordinary language. Hence, his writing does not tend to be jargon driven or use technical philosophical terms.
Nevertheless, he is extremely Germanic in a sense. He constantly makes distinctions and unearths connections. In that sense, he is an academic writer.
Ecclesiology is the main Christian doctrine on which his writings have a bearing. His interest in the problem of privilege, hierarchy, and the common man bear quite interestingly on those of the papacy, authority, and the relationship the enthusiasm of spiritual ecclesial movements and the canonical Church. Kolnai might have much to say, for example, for those wondering about the intellectual justification of the papacy.
On the other hand, Kolnai has all sorts of ideas related to moral theology.
How did the works of G.K. Chesterton contribute to Kolnai’s conversion to Catholicism? In his biography, Francis Dunlop is quite clear that we do not know about the actual intricacies of his conversion. Nor do we know why Kolnai—who prior to World War II was both a journalist and a centre-left socialist—emerged from the war as quite an interesting conservative thinker.
He was already an Anglophile, at the age of 14, and was very good at languages. As a young boy, he was already able to read English. Chesterton would be a wonderful place for a non-native speaker to enter into the English language.
Francis Dunlop had been a student of Kolnai’s but found it hard to trace Kolnai’s sources, influences, letters, or people who had known him. The reader might wonder where Kolnai’s original ideas come from and whom he was reading, because no one works in a vacuum. We know that he read Francisco de Vitoria, Edmund Burke, and the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Thomas Reid, and Scheler. Beyond what he formally tells us, it is difficult to trace the lineage of his ideas.
Is the report that G.K. Chesterton contributed to his conversion apocryphal or is there some truth to it? It doesn't explain exactly how. In Political Memoirs, he simply says that Chesteron was very important.
This short autobiography is incomplete. Kolnai had trouble completing projects. When he was a refugee in England, he received a number of academic grants for various books that he promised to write. Very few of them came to fruition. He was given a grant to write The Utopian Mind but he never got terribly far with it, even though he had been thinking about the subject for a long time.
Of course, he was a sickly and poor. He had no position in English society. He was always on the fringes. He taught at Bedford College, one of the colleges of the University of London, but he was on the fringes there too. It is not easy to write consistently under difficult material circumstances.
How did you discover Kolnai and what made you a fan? The book I first read was the Daniel Mahoney’sPrivilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy. I recommend that people start with it because it is very much about political philosophy and is a set of stunningly original essays.
Anyone who wants to know why Marxism and fascism remain resilient should read Kolnai. He focussed on the fate of liberal democracies that are squeezed between fascism and Marxism, because that was the reality he lived in. However, he also believed that this would be an enduring problem. Indeed, nearly sixty years after Kolnai’s death, we are back in the circuit of these three fundamental ideologies.
Kolnai is one of several important political philosophers formed and active in Germany or Austria between the two world wars who, with the rise of Nazism, were not only forced to emigrate to English-speaking countries but who also defended classical political thought against its modern counterparts. Unlike Leo Strauss or Eric Vogelin, Kolnai was Catholic. What are the main differences between his political thought and theirs? Great question. I would call into question the initial assumption. Although he knew Greek and Latin just as well as Vogelin and Strauss did, he was not terribly interested in either the classical or the medieval world. He believed that the emergence of liberal democracy in eighteenth-century England was a watershed moment and that there was not a lot of reason to think outside of the categories of liberal democracy, communism, and fascism. We had entered into a mass civilization, with high populations, commerce, industry, and mass communications. He thought that we have to do political philosophy within this phenomenology. In the West, we are fundamentally liberal democratic. There are two further possibilities which the West has experimented.
Vogelin presents tremendous sweeps of history. He looks not only looking at the deep history of the West, but also at that of China.
Leo Strauss tries to reclaim the Greek understanding of nature, whereas Kolnai is not a natural law theorist. Having abandoned Freud, he was no longer interested in dynamic or desire. Instead, he was a cognitive thinker, concerned with how it is that categories of meaning appear to the mind. One’s encounter with the natural world is not the starting point for his thought. However, he is a moral realist and committed to moral objectivity. Like Strauss, he wants there to be some control on the historical development of politics. In his view, that control comes from the hierarchies of value into which Scheler have given us insight.
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That brings us into the first book, Der Ekel, Kolnai’s phenomenological analysis of disgust. What is disgust and how does it manifest objective moral values?
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