Panagiotis Kondylis (Greek: Παναγιώτης Κονδύλης; German: Panajotis Kondylis; 17 August 1943 – 11 July 1998) was a Greek philosopher, intellectual historian, translator and publications manager who principally wrote in German, in addition to translating most of his work into Greek. He can be placed in a tradition of thought best exemplified by Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli and Max Weber.
Born in 1943 in the small community of Drouva (Δρούβα) in the municipality of Olympia, Greece, where the Kondylis' family house is still standing today, he moved with his father, who was a military officer, at the age of six to Kifisia, Athens, where he attended school. Kondylis studied classical philology and philosophy at the University of Athens (at which time he was drawn to Marxism), as well as philosophy, medieval and modern history and political science at the Universities of Frankfurt and Heidelberg. During his postgraduate studies at Heidelberg he earned his PhD (under the supervision of Dieter Henrich) with a study of the origins of post-Kantian German idealism, including the early years of Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin entitled Die Entstehung der Dialektik (The Genesis of Dialectics), which supported views considered innovative and provocative at the time, including illuminating the pre-history of Marxism and the world-theoretical presuppositions of the Marxist philosophy of history. Outstanding German historians Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck were important guiding influences during his formative years at Heidelberg.
Kondylis was awarded the Goethe Medal in 1991. As a recipient of the Humboldt Prize he also was in 1994/95 a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. Kondylis, though, was independent – a Privatgelehrter (private scholar) who never aspired to an academic career apart from one attempt in the early 1980s when he entered into discussions with the Philosophy Department of the University of Athens, applying for a placement. His application was confronted with the distrust of the conservative faculty of the philosophical department. Although Kondylis was supported by the then well-known professor Theofilos Veikos, he still had to contend with the opposition of multiple university-based philosophers and subsequently did not succeed in commencing a career as an academic. Thereafter, he never expressed any wish for an academic career (expressing the view that "academic philosophy is dead and buried"), although he was offered a number of honorary placements, including by the University of Ioannina, which he politely refused.
He died in Athens in 1998. His library of some 5000 titles based in his house in Politeia, Athens was donated by his sister, Melpo Kondylis (Μέλπω Κονδύλη), to the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in which a special "Kondylis" section exists in the campus library. In November 2008 a conference was held in Heidelberg honouring the memory of the late Panagiotis Kondylis. A similar event was held in Greece on 22 May 2008.
The great bulk of his corpus was written in German, and most of his writings were translated by Kondylis himself into Greek. He was interested in a number of areas of study including: the Enlightenment and the preceding Renaissance-era critiques of metaphysics; the philosophy of war and Clausewitz, as well as the work of Hegel and Marx; Western bourgeois culture and its decline; Conservatism; post-Modernity, and International Affairs. He also translated into modern Greek classic works by authors such as: Xenophon, Burnham, Machiavelli, Marx, Lichtenberg, Pavese, Montesquieu, Chamfort, Rivarol, Schiller, Cassirer and Carl Schmitt. Moreover, he was publications manager of the Greek-language "Philosophical and Political Library" (editions Γνώση (1983–1998; 60 volumes)) and "Modern European Civilisation" (editions Νεφέλη (1997–2000; 12 volumes)), producing modern Greek translations of renowned texts by authors as diverse as: Hobbes, Lyotard, Foucault, ancient Greek Sophists and Cynics, Moscovici, Sorel, Heidegger, Burckhardt, Michels, Aron, Leo Strauss, Derrida, Locke, Hauser et al., and histories of modern Greek philosophy. Kondylis's best known books are: Die Aufklärung (The Enlightenment) and Macht und Entscheidung (Power and Decision).
Kondylis claimed to be "scientific" in the sense of writing "descriptively" (and explanatorily), in separating Is (facts) from Ought (values), rather than writing "prescriptively" or "normatively". The thread running through all of Kondylis's writings (whether primarily focussed on the history of ideas, social ontology, historical sociology, geopolitics, etc.) is his position that the historical plethora and variety of individual, social and theoretical behaviour or endeavour unfolds against a backdrop of the anthropological law (or constants) of "power" and "decision". Such "power" and "decision" continually traverse a friend–foe spectrum within historically formed (and currently dynamic) societies characterised by varying degrees of multi-faceted social relations of individual and collective subjects (in and through which e.g. biological impulses are rationally justified and embellished so that their voice is heard as the command of ethics; the impulse of self-preservation manifests itself as "meaning of life"; and sexual urges are dressed up as "love"). Orientation, identity formation, hierarchisation, interpretation, the production of normative systems, ideologies, rationality as self-control and the abandonment or postponement of immediate gratification, etc., are all means through which power relations manifest themselves socially and distinguish human civilisations from the basic instinctual behaviour and unrationalised raw violence of the animal kingdom (in short: humans accept "meaning" in seeking power, whereas animals do not). As human societies become more complex (and materially wealthier), power and its self-intensification ceases to often coincide with mere physical superiority (as in the case of primitive conditions), and power is often objectivised through greater use of historically determined and relative ((re-)interpreted and often contested) symbols and values. However, raw physical power is always at least potentially available for use by individual and collective subjects who wish to maintain and expand their power. Even scientific knowledge is not beyond historical determination and polemical manipulation – but only scientific knowledge, if it consistently separates Is from Ought, can explain in terms of corroboration with empirical reality the abundant variety of human existence and "knowing".
His final major work Das Politische und der Mensch (The Political and Man) remained unfinished at the time of his death, but nevertheless managed to present a unified social-scientific theory or "value-free" description of social phenomena, encompassing socio-ontological, sociological and historical aspects of the study of human affairs. Kondylis's conception of social ontology does not offer any fixed causalities or laws nor does it say what people ought to do or not do in any given situation or how their social action should unfold. The task of social ontology is accordingly not to reduce fluid and varied phenomena to basic samples and basic genetic factors; what is sought is to show the spectrum of the forces and factors, which can be constituted and become discernible only from the – irreducible and inexhaustible – diversity of form. Such forces and factors, of course, include certain constants such as striving for self-preservation through the expanding of one's own power, and the friend–foe relation, which exist in all societies and are actualised in concrete historical situations and therefore have concrete dimension and content e.g. when the dominant paradigm might be theocentrism or anthropocentrism or mass democratic post-Modernity. Much of the nearly completed first volume (three volumes had been planned by Kondylis) is an analysis of mass-democratic ideology in the social sciences while also dealing with methodological and theoretical questions such as the distinction between "socio-ontic observation" and "socio-historical observation" and the three key aspects of the social: the social relation, the political and man. Moreover, Kondylis examines the social relation as regards its "internal" mechanism of subjectivity and "external" mechanism of action, the friend–foe polarity and the social relation's continuity, in addition to exploring the concepts of understanding and rationality by way of an extensive examination and/or critique of numerous renowned authors such as Martin Buber, Émile Durkheim, Wilhelm Dilthey, Jürgen Habermas, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Niklas Luhmann, George Herbert Mead, Alfred Schütz, Talcott Parsons, Karl Popper, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber and Leopold von Wiese.