Kostas Axelos tried to reconcile the ancient thinking of Heraclitus with the modern thinking of Marx,
Nietzsche,
Freud, Heidegger, and others in order to gain a new perspective on some of the problems of Marxism during his time. Axelos used Heraclitus' philosophy as the primary basis for assessing the work 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. Axelos' starting point was the argument in Marx's thesis that "the world's becoming philosophical is at the same time philosophy's becoming worldly, that its realization is at the same time its loss" 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's 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, in terms of the "externalization" of human beings in an "alien reality." Axelos tried to relate these descriptions of alienation and loss of "play" to Heidegger's concept of technological "
enframing as standing-reserve
[bestand]. For Axelos, this expanded understanding of technology became a way of interrogating both modern society and Marxism Following the example of his teacher Heidegger, who employed a
poetic style of philosophy, Axelos often used a continuous flow of aphoristic statements to relate phenomena together, attempting to
listen to "the game of the world". Using this method to approach the "horizons of the world," Axelos unpacks 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 continuous wandering through the splintered "wholeness" that surrounds contemporary human beings. 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 present-at-hand 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).
Open Marxism Axelos' approach to thinking and philosophizing can be called '
Open Marxism,' a term Axelos himself used. However, Axelos identified aspects of modern technological thinking that needed to be criticized within Marx's texts, leading him to read Marx as the culminating figure of Western metaphysics (paralleling Heidegger's assessment of Nietzsche). Open Marxism is therefore an attempt to transcend the political-ideological role of Marxism and to instead "pose fruitful questions and demystify 'existing realizations.'" Axelos stressed that all kinds of action (political or otherwise) cannot be defined
a priori. Axelos' thought attempts to question all forms of closure and is a form of
open systems theory (as opposed to
closed systems theory). Elsewhere, he called this "planetary thinking" (1964).
The concept of "play" Axelos uses the concept of "play" (
le jeu) both as an ontological category (the "system of systems") and as an ethical ideal for an unalienated society. Axelos argues, following Marx, that the opposition between work (necessity) and play (freedom) needs to be abolished, but recognizes that this would be both a concrete
and ontological "world-play" (
le jeu du monde) or
errance. He also argues, following Heidegger, that play is the meaning of Being which has been forgotten in the modern world (the oblivion of Being). Critiquing overly determinist accounts of globalization, for example, Axelos argues that it is a process of world-forming (
mondialisation) which is more open to transformation than classical Marxists theorists often admit. The relational aspect of play is what links human activity with the activity of the world, and the various systems of human life (magic, myth, religion, poetry, politics, philosophy, science) together and to the world. Thus, play is not at all a childish vocation for Axelos. ==Bibliography==