The below is from Kondylis’ final work (1999, 618–19). The translated excerpt ends mid-paragraph.

It is interesting to appreciate the consequences for ethical thought when one insists on history, not just “closed systems” in anthropological literature (a different time-sense).

Universal Rationality and Universal Reason: in What Sense?

To answer the question, one of the oldest prejudices in the philosophical tradition must be dispelled, namely the thesis that the relativity of values, the breakdown of ethical rationality, epistemological skepticism, and the rejection of the possibility of hard rational knowledge are necessarily logically concomitant. In antiquity and in its influential moderns forms, skepticism of any thesis was linked to this rejection and inclined toward epistemological empiricism or even sensualism precisely because of the belief that a clear parallel can be established between the uncertainty and variability of sensual knowledge and the aforementioned qualities applied to ethical values. Platonists and idealists generally accept this same parallelism, inverting the signs: the certainty and permanence of rational knowledge transcends the murkiness of the sensual, concomitant with the certainty and immutability of the good. Platonism and idealism thus were always skepticism turned on its head and skepticism an inverted Platonism or idealism. But the parallel between the cognitive and the ethical levels, both deriving from polemical factors, is in no way logically necessary. In particular, relativity of values in no way follows from the impossibility of knowledge of human affairs or understanding other humans. Quite to the contrary, in fact. The statement “I cannot know human affairs” is only grounds to conclude “I cannot know if there are objective values,” it does not amount to “there are no objective values.” To know that values are in fact relative, or, to be precise, why and in what sense this must be the case, one must possess a sufficient knowledge of human affairs. The question is only to what depth this knowledge must reach. Socio-ontological consideration can admit precisely those insights into human things: understanding on the basis of a universal rationality grounded in the spectrum and mechanisms of social relationships and simultaneously permit the determination of the relativity of (the contents of) values. The fundamental possibility of understanding foreign persons and cultures indicates that the difference concerns not socio-ontologically/anthropologically defined rationality but rather the (contents of its) values or worldviews, and also that there is no direct and logically or historically-socially necessary connection between rationality thus defined and such values or worldviews. Only when rationality is purified from the admixture of ethical matters and worldviews can it provide the foundations of a universal understanding—no matter what special, for example scientific, forms of rationality achieve for the understanding of foreign ethical matters or worldviews and no matter how far it can go in this direction. Ethical relativity or relativity of worldviews in no way necessarily impedes understanding when these are put where they belong; such relativism proves to be exactly the precondition and vehicle of socio-ontologically grounded understanding. It makes use of a rationality and simultaneously registers the effect of a rationality that is active under the layer to determine the historically and sociologically explainable effects of ethical contents and contents of worldviews.

Socio-ontological consideration therefore does not aim to play the universal against the relative or inversely; it does not recognize the opposition between the two and concerns itself with specifying its particular sense in terms of contents and logical positions. Partisans for universalism or relativism, however, being connected to the value question, serve polemical ends rather than socio-ontological. We previously hinted at what the preachers of universal rationality or reason hope for by possessing a monopoly on its interpretation. Relativists, for their part, seek to relativize the other’s claims of universal validity and thereby shift the balance of power in the political or intellectual arena in their own favor. In situations in the history of ideas, when the place of universalism is already occupied, only the path of relativism remains to aspirants, and conversely. And universalism, if it is to be practically relevant, must in fact be relativized and particularized by interpretation adapted to the concrete situation…