Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to compare the approaches of Ernst Cassirer and Aurel Kolnai on the idea of the nation state in its most radical form, which consists of identifying national sovereignty with an unrestricted right of the nation to political, external, and internal self-determination. What the comparison attempted here focuses on, is the criticism on the conditions for the possibility of specific German nationalism, presented by Cassirer in his Myth of the State and by Kolnai in his War Against the West. According to the main thesis of this paper, insofar as both Cassirer and Kolnai recognized the role played in politics by emotions and considered political phenomena as being constituted by not only rational or at least calculable mechanisms, but also affective factors, like beliefs, religion, and myth, they tended to consider nationalism in terms of the politics of “regression,” understood, psychoanalytically, as a reversion of mental life, in some respects, to a former, or less developed, psychological state, characteristic of not only individual mental disorders, but also social psychosis. It will be argued, that Cassirer and Kolnai, not unlike the representatives of the Frankfurt School, considered the contemporary preponderance of mythical thought in political philosophy to be an expression of the dialectic, which consisted in “relapsing” of the Enlightenment into mythology. As a main motive for the comparison of their political philosophies, an assumption will be presented in the paper, that, while taking into account the contemporary tendency to oppose national sovereignty to the sovereignty of international law, the approach to the idea of nation state, as presented by Cassirer and Kolnai, seems to be by no means out of date.
Keywords:
political philosophy, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, theory of symbolic forms, neokantianism, conservatism, nation state, myth, communism, Nazism
How to cite:
Gniazdowski, Andrzej. “The Politics of Regression: The Idea of the Nation State in the Thought of Ernst Cassirer and Aurel Kolnai.” Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 2, no. 3(5) (2018): 27–41. https://doi.org/10.26319/5813.
Author:
Andrzej Gniazdowski
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences
72 Nowy Świat Street, 00-330 Warsaw, Poland
agniazdo@ifispan.waw.pl
References:
Arendt, Hannah. Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1951.
Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944.
Cassirer, Ernst. The Myth of the State. New Haven: Publisher, 1946.
Dunlop, Francis. “Kolnai’s Dissertation Der ethische Wert und die Wirklichkeit: A ‘Completion’ of Scheler’s Value-Ethics.” Exploring the World of Human Practice: Readings in and about the Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai, edited by Zoltán Baláczs and Francis Dunlop. New York: Central European University Press, 2004.
Honneth, Axel. “Phänomenologie des Bösen. Das vergessene Werk von Aurel Kolnai.” Vivisektionen eines Zeitalters. Porträts zur Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014.
Honneth, Axel. “Afterward.” In Aurel Kolnai. Ekel, Hochmut, Haß. Zur Phänomenologie feindlicher Gefühle. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2007.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Joachim, Carl, Friedrich Brzezinski, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956.
Kolnai, Aurel. Der ethische Wert und die Wirklichkeit. Freiburg: Herder and Company, 1927.
Kolnai, Aurel. Ethics, Value & Reality. London and New York: Transaction Publishers, 2008.
Kolnai, Aurel. “Der Inhalt der Politik.” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, 94, no. 1 (1933): 1–38.
Kolnai, Aurel. “Die geistesgeschichtliche Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse.” Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 9, no. 3 (1923): 345–356.
Kolnai, Aurel. “Max Scheler’s Kritik und Würdigung der Freudschen Libidolehre.” Imago. Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse an Geisteswissenschaften 11, no.1 (1925):135–146.
Kolnai, Aurel. On Disgust. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2004.
Kolnai, Aurel. Privilege and Liberty and other Essays in Political Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999.
Kolnai, Aurel. Psychoanalysis and Sociology. Translated by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul. New York: Harcourt, 1922.
Kolnai, Aurel. Psychoanalyse und Soziologie. Zur Psychologie von Masseund Gesellschaft. Leipzig/Wien/Zürich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1920.
Kolnai, Aurel. Sexualethik. Sinn und Grundlagen der Geschlechtsmoral. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1930.
Kolnai, Aurel. “The Meaning of the Common Man.” Thomist (1949), 273.
Kolnai, Aurel. “The Standard Modes of Aversion: Fear, Disgust and Hatred.” Mind 107, no. 427 (July 1998): 581–95.
Kolnai, Aurel. The War Against the West. New York: The Viking Press, 1938.
Mészáros, Judit. Ferenczi and Beyond: Exile of the Budapest School and Solidarity in the Psychoanalytic Movement during the Nazi Years. London: Routledge, 2014.
Plessner, Helmuth. Verspätete Nation. Über die politische Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1959.
Plessner, Helmuth. Schicksal deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner bürgerlichen Epoche. Zürich: Niehans, 1935.
Radford, Robert. “Aurel Kolnai’s ‘Disgust’: a Source in the Art and Writing of Salvador Dali.” Exploring the World of Human Practice: Readings in And About the Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai, edited by Zoltán Baláczs and Francis Dunlop. New York: Central European University Press, 2005.
Rosenberg, Alfred. The Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts. (München: Auflage, 1934).
Scheler, Max. The Nature of Sympathy. Translated by Peter Heath. New York: Transaction Publishers, 2008.
Open Access Statement:
This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author, as long as the author and original source are properly cited. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Submitting a text to Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture means that the author agrees with the general conditions of this license. The author does and will maintain copyrights and publishing rights for his/her article without any restrictions.