Aurel Thomas Kolnai (December 5, 1900 – June 28, 1973) was a 20th-century philosopher and political theorist.
Life
Kolnai was born Aurel Stein in Budapest, Hungary to Jewish parents but moved to Vienna before his twentieth birthday to enter Vienna University, where he studied under Heinrich Gomperz, Moritz Schlick, Felix Kaufmann, Karl Bühler, and Ludwig von Mises. It was also at this time that he became attracted to the thinking of Franz Brentano and the phenomenological thought of Brentano's student Edmund Husserl. Kolnai studied under Husserl briefly in 1928 in Freiburg. During the early 1920s, Kolnai wrote as an independent scholar with little success. He graduated summa cum laude in 1926, publishing his dissertation on Der Ethische Wert und die Wirklichkeit, which was received favorably in Germany. In 1926, he also converted to Catholicism, largely influenced by G. K. Chesterton, whom Kolnai viewed as "a brilliant, if unsystematic phenomenologist of common experience." He then began a career of political journalism, writing for Der Österreichische Volkswirt and Die Schöne Zukunft. Acutely aware of the real threat posed by the Nazi Party in Austria, he began writing for Der christliche Ständestaat, a periodical founded to combat Nazism and edited by Dietrich von Hildebrand. During this time, he also published some of his own philosophical writings including his Sexualethik, Der Ekel, Der Inhalt der Politik, and Der Versuch über den Haß. Kolnai's philosophical writings, though producing little profit for the author, were well received and generated excellent reviews. Salvador Dalí was impressed by Der Ekel; in a 1932 essay for the journal This Quarter, the painter recommended Kolnai's text strongly to other surrealists, praising its analytical power.
During the 1930s, the encroachment of the Nazi Party in Austria remained a major concern. In 1938, Kolnai published his critique of National Socialism titled The War Against the West. The Nazi threat compelled Kolnai to leave Austria in 1937, where he was then a citizen, and depart for France where he married Elisabeth Gemes in 1940, also a Catholic convert. The Vichy threat prevented the newly-wed Kolnai from remaining in France, and after a brief stay in England, Kolnai and his wife moved to Quebec where he accepted a teaching position at the University of Laval. Frustrated by what he saw as the oppressive parochial Catholicism and the rigid neo-Thomism, Kolnai left Quebec in 1955 and returned to England on a Nuffield Foundation Travel Grant. Though he had quite an extensive list of publications in five different languages, Kolnai had little luck finding a permanent professorship in Britain, and fraught with financial worries, his health began to rapidly decline. Due largely to the influence of Harry Acton, Bernard Williams, and David Wiggins, Kolnai was able to secure a part-time "Visiting Lectureship" at Bedford College at London University. In England at this time, Kolnai became very influenced by the English common-sense philosophy of G.E. Moore and other British intuitionists such as H.A. Prichard, E.F. Carritt, and W.D. Ross. In 1961, he received a one-year research fellowship at Birmingham. In 1968, he accepted a visiting professor position at Marquette University in Wisconsin which he maintained until 1973 when he died of a heart attack. Kolnai's wife Elisabeth worked on compiling, translating, and publishing his work until her death in 1982.
Philosophical writings and major themes
Kolnai is an eclectic, well-read thinker in the fields of philosophy, economics, and politics. His major philosophical influences were the phenomenological school of Husserl and British analytic philosophy. A major theme in his writings is the effort to recover the givenness of reality and the sovereignty of the object in order to develop a common-sense approach to philosophy. Kolnai drew on the philosophical realism of Thomas Aquinas and believed that Aquinas could provide a valuable contribution to the recovery of broad dialectical objectivism, but he was opposed to the rigidity of 20th century neo-Thomistic orthodoxy and the dogmatic claims of Thomistic ideology. Kolnai's objectivism rests on four claims:
The importance of ordinary experience to provide access to the real
The importance of secular experience and common sense in the standards of 'tradition' The importance of philosophical teachers and Authorities to 'guide, instruct, and inform' The importance of receptivity to the 'multiplicity of objects and modes of cognition' to overcome subjectivity