Lajos Prohászka (1897–1963) was one of the most influential figures in Hungarian philosophical, pedagogical and political thought in the years between the two world wars. He was one of the Hungarian scholars who were marginalized and, ultimately, ideologically and politically excluded from Hungarian cultural and scientific life after the communist takeover.[1] Prohászka’s name has little presence in today’s Hungarian culture: even after the regime change, there has been no significant interest in the life’s work of this important thinker, despite the fact that the earlier obstacles have fortunately been removed. In the time since then, apart from László Tőkéczki’s short study, which mainly summarized Prohászka’s pedagogical work,[2] only Miklós Lackó and László Perecz have dealt with Prohászka’s oeuvre in more detail in a few Hungarian philosophical studies. Despite this, the oeuvre has not yet entered the Hungarian cultural bloodstream, and it appears that the author’s name is now known only to specialists and researchers of 20th-century Hungarian history of ideas.
Prohászka’s writings reveal the image of a scholar blessed with multifaceted talents: his wide-ranging work extended from the history of pedagogy and the philosophy of culture to the philosophy of religion—in this regard, his study of the German philosopher of religion Leopold Ziegler, the first in Hungary to evaluate him, is particularly significant.[3] In agreement with the above, Ervin Csizmadia, in his comprehensive study of the political science of the Horthy regime, classifies Prohászka, together with Tibor Joó and János Makkai, as belonging to the so-called ‘intellectual-historical-social-psychological movement’.[4] In his interpretation, this reflects the same tendency led by thinkers such as Gustave Le Bon and Ortega y Gasset, among others.[5] Indeed, we see influences in Prohászka’s work from Le Bon and Ortega (especially in relation to social and political philosophy), but even more from Leopold Ziegler and Keyserling. The most important thinkers for him are Eduard Spranger and Ákos Pauler; however, his orientation is universal. And yet, he also creates something entirely different from his influences.
Although he did not use the adjective ‘conservative’ in the sense of a self-definition, if ‘conservatism’ is not only a socio-political ideology but, above all, a form of philosophical thought aimed at the preservation and conservation of culture (in relation to Hungary: Hungarian and European culture), Prohászka is clearly an arch-conservative thinker.
As Márton Molnár puts it, ‘Prohászka’s work covers three major—closely related—themes: educational science and the history of education…the theoretical issues of the philosophy of culture; and the problems of the modern cultural crisis’.[6]
‘For Prohászka, the fundamental questions are precisely those that positivism declares to be “metaphysical”’
In this paper, we focus on this last area: the modern cultural crisis. In the 1930s, Prohászka dealt with modernity in a number of essays written between 1932 and 1938 (‘The Modern Man’, ‘Modern Culture’, ‘The Spirit of the Present Age’), but the problem of modernity remains a prominent theme throughout his entire oeuvre. There are very few Prohászka texts where it does not appear at least in the background. It’s obvious: before he could respond to the problems of pedagogy and/or cultural philosophy (and within that issue: art, way of life and politics), he had to determine where he himself stood in the drift of his own age.
The Spirit of Our Times
‘The only way to access the spirit of our own age is to construct it on the basis of philosophical principles…For the spirit of the age is not a finished, not a completed, closed series of developments, but is still in the process of change,’[7] Lajos Prohászka wrote in his article entitled ‘The Modern Man’. The search for the spirit of an age presupposes that reality, above all, is a spiritual category. Every age is an interpretation. It is the spirit, not nature or the economy, that judges each age. Age is not primarily a product of the external world, understood and conceived as a set of material relations, but of the human spirit, which projects a culture around itself from the moment it becomes self-conscious.
‘…Man not only creates his culture but lives in culture and lives with culture; culture is not only man’s environment but also man himself. His soul unfolds, so to speak, in a perpetual tension between these two poles. Let us start, therefore, from the statement that culture is a new and repeated outpouring of spiritual products from the soul, and at the same time, a reverent reception, preservation, and further derivation of the forms once created.’[8]
Prohászka’s examination of the spirit of our age, the Zeitgeist, leads back to the fundamental questions of philosophy. These can be interpreted in several ways. Marxist philosophy, in general, spoke of ‘the fundamental question of philosophy’ (singular), which referred to ‘the primacy of matter or spirit’ or ‘the correspondence or difference between consciousness and being’. Logical positivism (and, in its wake, some of the philosophers who call themselves postmodern) denies the conjecturability or meaningfulness of the fundamental questions. For Prohászka, the fundamental questions are precisely those that positivism declares to be ‘metaphysical’ (ie meaningless), such as the purpose and meaning of existence, God, the nature of the spirit, or the immortality of the soul. Nor is it possible to understand his cultural and pedagogical philosophy without examining these fundamental questions: sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, they are reflected in his other texts, which also deal with seemingly unrelated themes. Prohászka’s philosophical worldview, following Ákos Pauler and Eduard Spranger, can be seen as a peculiar, objective idealism that rejects both subjective idealism and materialism in answering the fundamental questions. It was in this spirit that he sought answers to the problem of modernity.
For Prohászka, modernity was definitely a problem. He did not view it as a kind of endowment, as an object independent of human consciousness, as a character, or as a simple change (deterioration or even improvement) in the conditions of being in the world or in the physical conditions of existence. He did not seek to define it as a simple transformation of economic processes, of the political worldview, or of the relations of material production. He did not view modernity primarily as a political concept, even though it carries significant political implications, as he has noted in several studies. Prohászka did not conceive of modernity as an event, an occurrence, a kind of general contemporary fact, but as an all-encompassing flow of relations that reaches down to the depths of our existence and is itself inseparable from the radical turn of subjective reflection on culture (as the ‘objectified spirit’ of man). This reversal, from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment to the philosophical present, continues into the 20th century. This radical turn gives rise to modern culture and its subject: the modern man.
‘Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, he never became either a materialist or an atheist’
The fundamental questions of philosophy, which were of paramount interest to the philosopher, although theoretically identical across all ages, are always presented through the filter, or rather the refraction, of the worldview of the current or actual age. The modern age has presented us with a completely new situation: it has given us radically different answers to the fundamental questions from any previous age, to the extent that in the typically modern philosophical worldviews of positivism, naturalism and materialism, it has become possible to deny the fundamental questions of philosophy, or more precisely, their answerability.
Lajos Prohászka, as a thinker with a Christian Catholic background, felt the full weight of this denial. His life’s work is permeated by the ‘struggle for the soul’ which inevitably confronted him with the soul-denying ideologies of modernity, in a sense turning him against his own time. When, after 1945, politics in Hungary became the servant and victim of an openly atheistic and materialistic ideology, Soviet-style communism, his career was also shattered: he lost his university career, was forced to retire, and was essentially deprived of the possibility of publication.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, he never became either a materialist or an atheist, although, as a universally educated philosopher, he was well acquainted with the principles, the anti-metaphysics and anti-transcendental arguments that made the rise of atheism and materialism in the modern age possible. Their material interests would have dictated exactly the same turn towards atheism. But his conscious resistance to the ideologies that denied the soul and the absolute, rather than submitting to the spirit of the age, led him to approach his own age with critical analysis. Not only in the somewhat more favourable circumstances of the Horthy era (for philosophy and intellectual life in general) but also in the enormous opposition to communist power, he never gave up his traditional, ie non-materialist and non-atheistic, understanding of the meaning of existence, an understanding which he still found compatible with his Christian faith.
‘The failure to ask a question does not eliminate the possibility of asking questions’
In Prohászka’s interpretation, the denial of metaphysical values (and the value of metaphysics[9])—that is, the self-declared turning away of modern, post-secular philosophy from the fundamental dichotomy of phenomenon and essence—does not mean that the question of essence has been settled in human thought. Prohászka recognized early on that the questioning of the spiritual basis of existence in materialism or the denial of essence and substance in positivism—both are ‘triumphant’ worldviews of the 19th century—leads, in fact, to constant aporias and absurd conclusions for consistent thinking. The failure to ask a question does not eliminate the possibility of asking questions. The absence of a certain experience, or the inability to have it, does not, in fact, eliminate the many forms and modes of experience (Michael Oakeshott), even though the ab ovo anti-transcendence epistemologies and positions reduce experience to the idea of naturalistic empiricism, thinking is itself a form of experience, being a precondition for the subject’s perception. Unlike modern worldviews that deny metaphysical essences and truths, the young Prohászka’s soul had already awakened to a profound Socratic doubt.[10] Reflecting on the time of the triumphant positivism and the culmination of the cult of progress, he wrote in his essay ‘The Spirit of the Present Age’:[11]
‘The anxious forebodings of poets and philosophers were not much taken into account by man, or at most, those were enjoyed as expressions of perfection, who believed that the perfection that had gained such great momentum in the technical field also involved becoming more spiritually sensitive and receptive to subtleties.’
Along with his most significant contemporaries, Tibor Joó, Béla Hamvas, Nándor Várkonyi, and Gyula Kornis, Prohászka was also looking for some kind of conceptualization to be able to describe that vast process, whose effects are still incomprehensible today, which we can call the state of ‘turnover’ from the world state preceding the spread of the modern scientific worldview. That ‘turnover’ emerged in the wake of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and can be seen as a form of ‘secularization’: the rejection of the idea of a sacred world order. He—like the contemporaries mentioned above—found this concept in the philosophy of crisis, although his interpretation in this case is also specific and individual.
[1] ‘The last decade and a half, from 1947–1948, the period of totalistic communist dictatorship, was a tragic calvary for Prohászka. The 52-year-old scientist was forced to retire, then removed from the ranks of those worthy of any scientific degree; the regime plunged him into existential insecurity and soon into ever more serious illness.’ (Miklós Lackó, ‘Egy nemes konzervatív, A kultúrfilozófus Prohászka Lajos’, Történelmi Szemle XL, 1998, no 3–4, pp. 277–297, p. 292.)
[2] László Tőkéczki, Prohászka Lajos, Országos Pedagógiai Könyvtár és Múzeum, Budapest, 1992.
[3] Leopold Ziegler’s work, The Transformation of the Gods (Gestaltwandel der Götter), which had a great impact in Hungary, was first analysed in Hungary by Lajos Prohászka in his study titled: Religion and Culture.
[4] Ervin Csizmadia, ‘A magyar politikatudomány tradíciói a két világháború között, Munkabeszámoló’, OTKA, http://real.mtak.hu/2695/1/69072_ZJ1.pdf, acessed: 19 March 2025.
[5] Ibid.
[6]Márton Molnár, ‘Prohászka Lajos vallásbölcseleti gondolatai tanulmányai és esszéi tükrében, Szövegelemzés’, in Jani Anna and Veres Ildikó (eds), Két világháború közötti magyar vallásbölcseletek, MCA Collegium Professorum Hungarorum, Piliscsaba, 2024, pp. 99–119, p. 102.
[7] Lajos Prohászka, ‘A modern ember’ (‘The Modern Man’), in Prohászka Lajos, Történet és kultúra, (Ed Orosz Gábor), Hamvas Béla Kultúrakutató Intézet, Budapest, 2015, pp. 96–140, p. 96. In the philosopher’s system, ‘the essence of the subjective spirit’ is the attraction of value, and the essence of the ‘objective spirit’ is the expression of value. Ibid, p. 100.
[8] According to Prohászka’s definition of spirit: ‘The soul…always reveals some meaning, some significance, and this significance is not derived from itself, ie from the nature of the activity, but from some value, from the reference to value. And this value reference of the soul‘s activity is called spirit. The essence of spirit, then, is activity, insofar as it is related to value.’ Ibid, pp. 99–100.
[9] By metaphysics, we do not mean here simply the philosophical investigation of the basic structure of being, or ‘abstraction’ in opposition to (naturalistic) empiricism, but essentially the supernatural as the non-physical basis of all physical (natural) existence. Metaphysics, understood in this sense, is the philosophically conceived basis of all religious worldviews.
[10] As he writes in his study entitled The Spirit and the Absolute, Metaphysical Principles for a Philosophy of Culture: ‘The soul is the essence of all cosmos, and it is by the soul that cosmos becomes form, for the soul is also form and all cosmos is the objectification of the soul.’ Prohászka, 2015, pp. 7–20.
[11] Ibid, p. 155.
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