Kolnai Aurél és Hannah Arendt szemléleti párhuzamai
Parallels of Aurél Kolnai’s and Hannah Arendt’s Way of Thinking

Summary/Abstract: This paper is about two extraordinarily original but still symbolic thinkers of the last century. Both of them experienced personally the phenomena of the totalitarian systems of the 20th century, which experience determined their way of political thinking basically and eternally. They escaped from these systems and that is why they could find their place in the society on its periphery. This place makes them possible to form a sovereign thinking, which makes it impossible to enlist them into the major political ideologies. Beyond the parallelism of both thinkers’ fate we can find remarkable similarities in the political philosophy of Arendt and Kolnai, which refers to Aristotle and phenomenology. The fundamental conceptions of Arendt (action) and Kolnai (normality) are rooted in the conception of of Aristotle and show the different sides of the concept, but the different concepts are connectable with each other without any difficulties. Arendt and Kolnai were pupils of Edmund Husserl in Freiburg for a short time and his phenomenological philosophy impressed them, but later they created their own philosophical way. The most important experience for their political thinking was the totalitarianism, which is leadable back to the mass society and the rule of the common man. The mass society means for them the most important precondition for the totalitarian systems that is connected with the effects of the utopian and ideological thinking. On the ground of this conception they express their distrust towards the liberal democracy because it was unable to brave the nazism and communism.

• Details
• Contents