Karel Kosík

Works

• 1963Dialectics of the Concrete

  Everyday life offers a pseudo-concrete world of fixed appearances; dialectical thought understands reality as a concrete totality produced by human praxis.

Position

Kosík’s “Dialectics of the Concrete” is a central text of the Marxist humanism of the 1960s. He read Marx through Hegel, the young Lukács and Heidegger: the everyday world of manipulation, care and routine is “pseudo-concrete”, a world in which human products appear as independent things; dialectical thought destroys this pseudo-concreteness and grasps reality as a concrete totality created by praxis. Praxis, for Kosík, is not only labour but the specific mode of human being, through which people open themselves to the world and to being as a whole. The book was translated into many languages; the Spanish edition (1967) was widely read in Latin America, and Paulo Freire cited it in “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. In 1968 Kosík commented on the crisis of Czech politics in essays such as “Our Present Crisis”; after 1989 he wrote critically about technology, consumerism and the new political order, for example in “The Century of Grete Samsa” (1993). Orthodox Marxist critics in the 1960s accused him of existentialist idealism; other readers found his concept of praxis so broad that it gives little guidance for social analysis. His later essays, less known abroad, have been collected and translated only in part.

Life & context

Karel Kosík was born on 26 June 1926 in Prague. As a student during the German occupation he joined the resistance group Předvoj; he was arrested in 1944 and held at Terezín until the end of the war. After 1945 he studied philosophy and sociology in Prague and in 1947–49 in Moscow and Leningrad. He worked at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, published a study of the Czech radical democrats of the nineteenth century (1958) and in 1963 “Dialectics of the Concrete”, which made him known in Europe and Latin America. During the Prague Spring he became professor at Charles University and, at the clandestine fourteenth party congress in August 1968, a member of the party’s Central Committee. After the Soviet-led invasion he was expelled from the party and in 1970 dismissed from the university. In 1975 the police confiscated about a thousand pages of his manuscripts; Jean-Paul Sartre and others protested publicly. After 1989 he taught again for a short time at Charles University and published essays on politics and modern civilisation. He died in Prague on 21 February 2003.

Further main works

• Czech Radical Democracy (Česká radikální demokracie, 1958)
• Our Present Crisis (Naše nynější krize, 1968)
• The Century of Grete Samsa (Století Markety Samsové, 1993)
• Antediluvian Reflections (Předpotopní úvahy, 1997)