Kostas Axelos - Intellectual Biography

Intellectual Biography

Kostas Axelos tried to reconcile the ancient philosophers with the thinking of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and others in order to gain a new perspective on some of the problems in Marxism during his time. He avoids the charm of the fragmentary aphorisms used by Heraclitus, but uses Heraclitus' philosophy as the primary measuring stick for assessing the "positive" contribution of Marx and Engels. Axelos contributed to the growing interest of contemporary researchers in the Pre-Socratics and generally for ancient Greek philosophy, through his reading of the role of concepts in interpreting the world, which recalls Engels' Anti-Duhring.

In his dissertation Marx, the Man Who Thinks Through Technique and in his work Alienation, Techne, and Praxis in the Thought of Karl Marx, Axelos draws heavily on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, reading them with the help of Heidegger and Nietzsche's concepts. He explored the consequences of "alienation" in history, such as the effects of the division of labor, private property and capital, and "externalization" of man in an "alien reality." Axelos tried to relate these descriptions of alienation to Heidegger's concept of "enframing." The latter can be lifted only with the building of communist society as a "positive appeal against private property." Then will be born the "whole man", who overcomes dualisms such as freedom and necessity, "individual and society," and the physical and historical sciences, which are seen as false abstractions of ideology.

Following the example of his teacher Heidegger, who employed a poetic style of philosophy, Axelos often using a continuous flow of aphoristic statements to describe lists of phenomena - thus, listening to "the game of the world". Using this method to approach the "horizons of the world," Axelos decrypts the "mythological elements" of Marxism and especially criticizes tendencies toward meta-narrative that he considers nihilistic and anthropocentric. Axelos' two doctoral theses and his book "Towards Planetary Thinking" (1964) were arranged as a trilogy - The Unfolding of Errance.

Axelos continued to engage with contemporary thinking and the emerging global world by seeking to discover the "unseen horizon encircling all things" (1964), further refining his method as a continues wandering through the splintered "wholeness" that surrounds the man. To describe this state of "being-in-becoming," Axelos uses the term "the game." This is the basis of Axelos' second trilogy entitled The Unfolding of the Game («Le deploiement de jeu»), which includes the books: The Game of the World (1969), Towards an Ethics of Problematics (1972), and Contribution to Logic (1977).

Finally, Axelos' third trilogy is entitled The Unfolding of an Investigation, and consists of the books: Arguments of an Investigation (1969), Horizons of the World (1974), and Issues at Stake (1979). In employing both Marx and Freud, Axelos did not carelessly reject their arguments despite trying to "liberate the vital forces" within them (1964), as his autobiography notes: "it remains to ask again, to extrapolate the Marxian and Freudian intuitions" (1997). The focus of the searches is still the "set-game of sets," especially in the context of the "end of history" debates. This is restated as follows: "Since everything has been said and contradicted in a specific language, mainly the metaphysical language of philosophy and the language of anti-philosophy that subverts the metaphysical, is there is still something of meaning to say, and in what language?" (1974).

After completion of the third trilogy, Axelos published Open Systems (1984) as an extension of the concepts that he had hitherto employed on "exposures in the world 'with a means of capturing and writing also' the different and enormous 'wanderings' of the open world," i.e., what is not there but what is "overwhelming more people and more historical societies."

Axelos' texts were almost all written as meta-philosophical epilogues with the intention not to "passively endure our time: the inquiries that we have launched require us to look and see both near and far" (1997). The ultimate goal was to write "in a speech poetic and thoughtful, a fervent life" (1997).