Background
Kolnai, Aurel Thomas was born on December 5, 1900 in Budapest.
Phenomenologist philosopher of common sense
Kolnai, Aurel Thomas was born on December 5, 1900 in Budapest.
Mainly the University of Vienna, but also Universities of Budapest and Freiburg, tnffs: Literary influencesChesterton, Scheler, Husserl and the English intuitionists. Personal: Oszkar Jaszi and Karl Polanyi.
1945-1954, Lectureship at Laval University, Quebec. 1959 72, Visiting Lecturer at Bedford College, University of London.
Like many young Hungarian Jewish intellectuals, Kolnai was attracted to Oszkar Jdszi’s liberalism. But the revolutionary upheavals of postwar Hungary, his reading of G. K. Chesterton and the early phenomenologists, and his gradual conversion to Catholicism brought out his moderate conservatism. As his journalistic campaigns show, Austrian semi-fascism after 1929 temporarily revived his social democratic allegiances, and his mature conservative thought only emerged fully in papers he wrote as an exile in the USA. and then Canada. Kolnai's early academic publications embrace Psychoanalytic and sociological, as well as ethical, topics. His great powers of description and analysis are well apparent in his Sexualethik (1930), as in his best phenomenological paper, Her Ekef [Disgust], But the foundations of his •nature thought are already laid in his doctoral thesis Der etltische Wert (1927), which is a synthesis of the phenomenological ethics of value and the traditional Catholic and Aristotelian ethics of end. Work on The War against the West 0938), his ‘exposé’ of the deep philosophical currents underlying Nazism, followed by two ntore unpublished topical books of political thought, quite apart from his nomadic life as a refugee, impeded the development of his main e,hical ideas. After writing a series of anti-communist works ln Canada, he went to England to work on ‘the utopian mind’, the fundamental attitude corrupting Western civilization. Utopian thinking, he argued, subverts our experience of value-reality: We turn from the real but partially improvable 'v°rld, already charged with value-cum-disvalue, towards a ‘reality’ which cannot be thought, to Perfection values’ which cannot even be imagined. Kolnai held that the philosopher must always he loyal to ordinary experience, though not uncritically so. He argued that conscience and the intuition of moral principles must be supplemented by ‘the moral consensus of mankind'. His anti-utopianism shows itself again in the claim that morality, though not coextensive with Practice, is nevertheless importantly related to it. its heart are the great ‘moral taboos', where the moral theme' is at its most salient. This then shades off gradually, with decreasing emphasis, into the area of supererogation and the morally indifferent.