Moving Beyond the Sophists

Intellectuals in East Central Europe and the Return of Transcendence

Bibliographic Data

ID9307700
AuthorsArpad Szakolczai (0000-0003-4472-5639, University College Cork, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume8
Issue4
Pages417-433
Publication date2005-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEuropean Journal of Social Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1368-4310 • E-ISSN: 1461-7137
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1368431005056421
OpenAlexW2115136339
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited14

This article argues that the dominant role played by intellectuals in East Central Europe was motivated by a deeply felt Enlightenment missionary belief. This establishes affinities between them and the ancient Sophists, and the ambivalence of such a position is illustrated through the case of Georg Lukács. As examples of philosophers in the classical sense of the term, the article provides four short portraits: the Czech Jan Patoc ka, who argued that Europe as a culture is rooted in the care of the soul; the Hungarian one-time friends Károly Kerényi and Béla Hamvas, and the Polish bishop-philosopher Karol Wojtyla, who became Pope John Paul II. The central thrust of the argument is that while Western thought is increasingly trapped in an ever more desperately radicalized critique of metaphysics, in East Central Europe – ironically, to a large extent in the footsteps of Nietzsche – the most important intellectual figures have sparked a return to metaphysics

Ambivalence · Argument (complex analysis · Art history · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Metaphysics · Portrait · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Soul · Central European Literary Studies · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity · History · Philosophy

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