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"Karel Kosík (1926–2003) was one of the most remarkable Marxist philosophers of his generation in Czechoslovakia. Together with the phenomenologist Jan Patočka, he is probably the best-known Czech philosopher in the modern age.
Kosík’s reputation as a creative thinker and an insightful critic of both market-capitalist and Soviet-type societies is owed largely to his magnum opus, Dialectics of the Concrete. This book, first published in 1963, marked the culmination of a process of intellectual development that first took off in the mid-1950s, when Kosík, along with many of his generation, began to question the dogmas of Stalinist orthodoxy. Almost immediately after the book’s appearance it became a philosophical ‘blockbuster’, quickly attracting the attention not only of philosophers, writers and artists, but also of the broader reading public. After its later translation into numerous languages, Dialectics of the Concrete would go on to enjoy international acclaim." (p.1)
"The Italian philosopher Guido Davide Neri, a member of the ‘Milan School’ devoted to integrating Marxism with phenomenology, spent a year in Prague in the early 1960s, researching intersections between phenomenology and Marxism. There he met Kosík and became acquainted with the core ideas of Dialectics of the Concrete. After the book’s publication, he initiated its Italian publication and helped with the translation. The book was enthusiastically received among Italian Marxists, especially those working on the frontiers of phenomenology and Marxism such as Enzo Paci and Pier Aldo Rovatti (both members of the Milan School). But it was Neri on whom the book made its deepest impact. In Neri’s book Praxis and Knowledge (which was the outcome of Neri’s research sabbatical in Prague, parts of it having been written during his time there), Neri included a chapter on Kosík’s philosophy of praxis, in which he examined the epistemological implications of the ontology of labour." (p.2)
"The Mexican philosopher Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez (who consulted the German translation made that same year) published his Spanish translation in 1967." (p.2)
"Kosík also influenced several philosophers and theologians of liberation, including Enrique Dussel. Kosík’s reception in Lusophone countries dates primarily to1969, when the Portuguese translation of Dialectics of the Concrete appeared in Brazil. Kosík exerted some influence on Paolo Freire, who used some of Kosík’s ideas in his theory of pedagogy.
A German translation of Dialectics of the Concrete was published in 1967 by Suhrkamp Verlag, and was later re-issued in several editions. It stimulated debates among Sovietologists such as Nikolaus Lobkowicz, literary critics from the Konstanz school of reception theory (namely Hans Robert Jauss), and philosophers around the Frankfurt School, including Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth." (p.3)
"Although the complete [french] translation of Dialectics of the Concrete appeared relatively late [1970], some of its main ideas concerning concrete totality circulated and exerted some influence in the Francophone world via a paper entitled ‘Dialectique du concret’, which Kosík presented at a philosophical colloquium in Royaumont in 1960 and published in the Italian journal aut aut two years later. Since Kosík was strongly influenced by György Lukács’s French disciple Lucien Goldmann, who newly reinterpreted the concept of ‘concrete totality’ and used it to analyse world-view structures (visions du monde), it is no surprise that Kosík’s ideas resonated with Goldmann (with whom Kosík met in person several times) and later on with some of Goldmann’s students, including Michael Löwy and Marc Perelman. Jean-Paul Sartre was also attracted by Kosík’s humanistic attitude and his brave attempt to break through the corset of official Marxism-Leninist doctrine." (p.5)
"Kosík’s humanist variant of Marxism found fertile soil among members of the ‘Budapest School’ (especially György Márkus and Agnes Heller) and the ‘Praxis School’ (especially Gajo Petrović and Predrag Vranicki) [in Yugoslavia]" (p.5)
"The most important figure who introduced Kosík to Anglophone intellectual circles was the Italian-American philosopher Paul Piccone, publisher and editor of the journal Telos, which was founded during the rise of New Left in the late 1960s. From the start, Piccone devoted space in his journal to philosophical currents from East-Central Europe, and he published several extracts from Dialectics of the Concrete there in 1968 and 1969. The book’s complete translation, made directly from the Czech, appeared several years later, in 1976." (p.5)
"In China there has been growing interest in Kosík since the second half of the 1980s, as Chinese scholars have made efforts to enrich official Marxist-Leninist discourse, derived largely from Soviet diamat and histmat, with inspiration from less orthodox sources." (p.6)
"Kosík’s colleague and fellow advocate of Marxist humanism Josef Zumr positively assessed several aspects of Kosík’s work related to those addressed by Patočka and Hejdánek: its courage in addressing bourgeois philosophy (existentialism, phenomenology), as well as its confrontation with Marxist scientism and economic reductionism." (p.7)
"Within the context of 1960s Czechoslovakia, Dialectics of the Concrete was also perceived as providing sophisticated philosophical support for the reform communist current, as many within the Communist Party embarked on the path of de-Stalinisation and aimed at establishing what they saw as a more democratic form of socialism. Since the party itself during this period vacillated between support for and resistance to reform, the official ideologues of the Communist Party varied in their reactions to Kosík’s work, as a result of which Dialectics of the Concrete sometimes enjoyed official approval and at other times became an object of censure. After the suppression of the Prague Spring, however, the book’s reputation was sealed as a symbol of so-called counter-revolution. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kosík was banned from all academic work, and if his work was mentioned at all it was only as an example of a ‘dangerous revisionist deviation’. This situation changed somewhat after 1989. Kosík became publicly active again and gained some popularity as an essayist and commentator on current events. Nevertheless, in the atmosphere of triumphant capitalism his magnum opus remained almost forgotten, appearing to many as an ominous shadow of the dark communist past. Only in recent years, as Marxism has once again become recognised as a relevant part of the intellectual environment in the region, has Dialectics of the Concrete begun to attract significant attention among Czech scholars." (p.
"Kosík adopts core insights from existentialism and phenomenology, borrowing other ideas from structuralism, logical positivism and critical theory. Yet he was also critical of these approaches. In the case of positivism, he appreciated its sober anti-metaphysical approach, while he criticised its reductionist and naturalist mania to explain social phenomena solely on the basis of natural phenomena. In Tomáš Hříbek’s view, Kosík’s critique of positivism fails, since he did not distinguish between different strands of positivism and did not take into account, for example, Otto Neurath’s attempt to merge positivism with methodological holism, which resulted in a ‘holistic empiricism’ freed of its naturalist inclinations to conceive the social realm in terms of physical features. Kosík’s defence of holism is also central to a polemic he aimed at structuralism and systems theory. Kosík criticised both currents for overemphasising the role of autonomous structures and for replacing human subjects or collectivities with quasi super-subjects. Nevertheless, he was quite sympathetic to a functionalist approach to ‘structures’ and ‘systems’ that sees concrete parts as realisations of abstract statuses or functions.Vít Bartoš argues, however, that Kosík’s appropriation and critique of both currents is parochial, due to his adherence to a practical materialism that favours human subjects and social reality over animal beings and natural reality. Kosík’s conception of structural ‘totality’ thus appears, from this perspective, to be only partial.
Hence, Kosík’s text can be viewed as a striking example of Marxist ontology reaching a deadlock, since it blocks a dialogue with structuralism or general systems theory that theorise natural systems –and not only human beings or social systems– as self-creating subjects. By the same token, Kosík’s holism can be viewed as the antithesis of Louis Althusser’s anti-humanist structuralism, since practical materialism implies the centrality of the human being. Petr Kužel undertakes a thorough comparison of Kosík’s humanism and Althusser’s anti-humanism, concentrating on their understanding of both ideology and the subject. Whereas for Althusser the subject is an ideological product and in this respect is trapped in a web of ideological beliefs (despite the fact that it can be involved in subversive actions), for Kosík the subject is theorised as revolutionary from the outset, with a capacity to destroy the ‘world of the pseudoconcrete’. From here, Kužel concludes that Kosík’s ontology of the subject offers an alternative to post-Marxist theories, whose main concern is to understand the subject emerging out of a revolutionary event. Kosík proceeds the other way around, conceiving revolution as it arises out of the subject." (pp.13-14)
-Joseph Grim Feinberg, Ivan Landa, Jan Mervart Introduction à Joseph Grim Feinberg, Ivan Landa, Jan Mervart (eds.), Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, Leiden / Boston, Brill, 2022, 378 pages.
"Compared to other countries of the Eastern Bloc, the influence of the Twentieth party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was rather controlled than spontaneous in Czechoslovakia. The only voices openly calling for immediate de-Stalinisation came from the circles of the party intelligentsia (including Kosík) and from students in larger cities such as Prague or Bratislava, as well as from some communist writers at the second congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union in April 1956. The party leadership and apparatchiks were very keen to suppress any efforts that would have striven for the assembly of an extraordinary party congress, or for further discussion of Khrushchev’s speech. Soon after the Budapest events in the fall of 1956, Czechoslovakia was one of the most enthusiastic participants in an antirevisionist campaign, aimed at preventing any future ‘counterrevolutionary tendencies’. Nevertheless, the more Czechoslovak cultural and intellectual life was fettered in the second half of the 1950s, the more relaxed was the atmosphere of the subsequent decade upon the delayed arrival of a process of political de-Stalinisation (in December 1962, the Twelfth Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia declared a fight against the ‘cult of personality’), and when many previously politically delicate issues could be more or less articulated. The role of the Czech and Slovak communist intelligentsia (mostly scholars, writers, film makers or journalists) in shaping the heady atmosphere of 1960s Czechoslovakia is broadly examined in an extensive body of respective literature concerned with the Prague Spring of 1968 and its preconditions." (p.19)
"The majority of the public intellectuals of the 1960s were former Stalinists, and were still party members in the 1960s; from this point of view, the term ‘party intelligentsia’ is more than suitable. They had mostly been born in the third decade of the twentieth century (Kosík personally in 1926) and started to be politically active during or immediately after the Second World War. In the second half of the1950s, they underwent a complicated and usually painful personal de-Stalinisation process. At the same time, but no later than in the first half of the 1960s, they gained serious public authority as advocates of a delayed campaign against the ‘cult of personality’. Kosík’s generation, until recently a pillar of Stalinism, started a quest for a new legitimisation of communism’s revolutionary attempts through reform of the system. Simultaneously, the same generation contributed to the de-legitimisation of the Soviet form of Marxist-Leninist ideological dominance and opened up a space for specific reinterpretations of classical Marxist-Leninist dogmas in culture, philosophy, history or law. Despite the relaxed nature of the Czechoslovak post-Stalinist regime, this process was not of a linear character in the sense of continually increasing autonomy of the intellectual sphere. The reformist Party intelligentsia found itself in a constant struggle with party officials and up to the end of 1967, when Novotný was replaced by Dubček, its members could find themselves the target of an ideological campaign at any time. Party intellectuals were still an immanent part of the system in the 1960s, and the era of dissent did not start until the beginning of the subsequent decade, when it was more than clear that reform communism was politically defeated for the time being. The subversion of Marxism-Leninism never crossed the boundaries of state socialism, and the party intelligentsia stayed and wanted to stay within it." (p.20)
"Czech and Slovak intellectuals belonged to the most influential groups in socialist society [...] Because the intelligentsia tended to formulate public claims, their members were publicly recognised as respected authorities, and their influence (symbolic capital) was much more significant than any of their Western counterparts. In an interview with the Czech cultural journalist Antonín Jaroslav Liehm, Kosík mentioned an illustrative conversation on that topic with Jürgen Habermas, who reportedly stated that compared to the censorship and ideological critique of philosophers in Czechoslovakia the situation in Western Germany was even worse, because intellectuals were ignored by the government as well as by the public, and therefore did not play a relevant role in the society." (pp.21-22)
"In the nineteenth century, writers, university teachers, lawyers and other intellectuals belonged to the backbone of modern Czech society, and after Czechoslovakia was established in 1918 the state was referred to as the ‘republic of professors’ because its political elites, including the first two presidents (T.G. Masaryk and Edvard Beneš), were respected professors." (p.22)
"The case of Karel Kosík was not an exceptional but a typical one. As a highschool student, the author of the Dialectics of the Concrete joined the anti-Nazi resistance group Předvoj, he was editor in chief of its journal Boj mladých and he spent the last days of the war in Terezín Prison while many of his comrades were executed. Together with the economic crisis of the 1930s and the formation of the Popular Front, these were precisely the very historical moments which caused a large section of this generation to embrace communism already during the war. In such an understanding, communist engagement was not associated in the slightest extent with the implementation of bureaucratic directives and adherence to a strict party hierarchy. Despite the strictly pyramidal shape of the resistance’s organisation, under the conditions of concealment the interpretation of party ideology was relatively unrestricted. Moreover, Stalinism was perceived as good and was primarily seen as the only opposition to Nazism (evil).
Předvoj was a group of communist youth, but due to the complicated circumstances of the war, the Czechoslovak communist leadership based in Moscow never recognised it as a part of the illegal Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (ksč). This explains the fact that Kosík and many others were able to join the party only after the liberation. At the same time, the universities were reopened and Kosík started to study philosophy at Charles University in Prague. He collaborated with the newly established communist journal Lidová kultura [People’s culture]. In 1947–49 Kosík studied in Leningrad and Moscow, and he returned to Czechoslovakia as a devoted builder of the new Stalinist civilisation, writing on Marxism-Leninism, the successes of the ussr, Stalin’s works and so on. With the establishment of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, he started to work in the Cabinet for Philosophy. In 1954 he took part in a campaign against ‘Masarykism’ and so-called pseudo-humanism. Kosík did not hesitate to label T.G. Masaryk as an idealist and bourgeois thinker whose moralism and intellectual background did not provide an answer to the questions of the present day. At first glance, nothing indicated any other fate for Kosík than a career of an official Marxist-Leninist philosopher following the party line." (pp.22-23)
"At the end of 1956, together with Ivan Sviták, he initiated the first public anti-Stalinist debate in Literární noviny [Literary News] on the relationship between science and ideology. If ideology had recently been interpreted in a positive way in the official Stalinist discourse, as an inseparable part of political praxis, now Kosík understood it in a Marxian way as ‘false consciousness’ and demanded an end to the ‘ideology dominion’, which should be overcome by ‘critical thought’. This statement by Kosík prefigured the post-Stalinist era which began in Czechoslovakia in the second half of the 1950s." (p.24)
"Similarly to Poland, the humanist approach of Czech scholars such as Robert Kalivoda, Karel Kosík, Milan Machovec or Ivan Sviták was formed within the framework of the history of philosophy. Crucial for the formation of Marxist humanism was the experience of working with original sources of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 ; the Grundrisse ; The Peasant War in Germany), as well as of the broader Marxist tradition (Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, Karl Korsch) or general philosophical tradition (Holbach, Hegel, Montaigne) [...] An irreplaceable role was played by personal contacts and intellectual influences with representatives of the Polish school of the history of ideas, the Budapest school of Lukács’s students and later (at the beginning of the 1960s) also the Yugoslav Praxis school and Western scholars such as Ernst Fischer, Erich Fromm or Roger Garaudy.
Karel Kosík finished his work on the Czech radical democrats in 1957. In this he defined the Marxist method in the sense of revealing the ‘totality of relationships’. A year later, at a conference about the Czech philosophical tradition, he warned against the economic determinism of the Stalinist era, as well as against excessive empiricism. In contrast with this, he pleaded for an application of philosophy (real Marxist method) to the history of philosophy." (p.25)
"Reality should be exposed as a complex of social relationships and as a dialectically conditioned unity of essence and phenomenon. In contrast with a dialectical understanding of reality as a concrete totality, Kosík introduces the category of the pseudoconcrete, which was understood as the world of the everyday, its environment and routine atmosphere. The ‘pseudo-concrete’ part of reality is important for our further examination because it includes Man’s fetishised praxis of procuring and manipulation, its ideology and fixed objects that are considered products of natural conditions. However, the world of the ‘pseudoconcrete’ is not a given substance, on the contrary, it has been created. It has to be demystified and recognised as a product of Man’s activity, and destroyed in a process of overcoming through revolutionary praxis." (p.26)
"The emphasis on the subversive role of philosophy (dialectical-critical thinking) and true art as well as on potential social changes, where the human individual plays a crucial role, was easy to understand in Kosík’s era of flourishing intellectual and cultural activities. These aspects brought Kosík popularity with a broader Czechoslovak intellectual audience, but what made him enormously popular among the creative party intelligentsia were his arguments relating to contemporary art. Kosík observed art to be of a revolutionary quality: ‘One of the main principles of modern art, poetry and drama, of painting and film-making, we feel, is the “forcing” of the everyday, the destruction of the pseudoconcrete’. Art as creative activity played an important role in the destruction of the pseudoconcrete, because it made it possible to usher man ‘into reality itself and its “truth” ’ and thus reveal the complexity of the world. Kosík’s statements were extremely influential. In the post-Stalinist era of constant controversies between party ideologues on the one hand and artists together with critical party intellectuals on the other, his arguments about art were understood as support for free expression. It was no coincidence that Kosík’s book was nominated for a special award by the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union. Despite the fact that the awarding was supported by such authors as Milan Kundera and Jan Skácel, who saw in Dialectics of the Concrete a philosophical work of extreme importance for the realm of art, the nomination was rejected by party officials." (p.27)
"The positive reception to Dialectics of the concrete does not mean that there was no critique of it within Czechoslovak Marxist humanism whatsoever. For Ivan Sviták for example, it represented rather an ‘abstract metaphysical’ philosophy than an analysis of the real world. Kosík’s style of argumentation would inevitably have failed in confrontation with contemporary positivism and scientism. In a similar but more developed way, Robert Kalivoda considered Dialectics of the Concrete to be negatively influenced by Hegelian essentialism, which according to Kalivoda had culminated in a ‘Lukácsian-phenomenological’ trend which Kosík in his view represented. In deliberate opposition to Kosík, Kalivoda spoke about ‘concrete dialectics’ based on an analysis of concrete historical forms instead of on presumptions of a metaphysical quality." (p.29)
"During the 1960s, he published several essays in cultural political journals such as Literární noviny and Plamen (the first magazine was issued in a circulation of at least 150,000 copies every week). His texts predominantly focused on perspectives of culture, art and nation in the modern world. Using for example the literary works of Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, or Jaroslav Hašek, he depicted reality as a ‘dehumanised’ and manipulated reality. In many of his texts, he followed on from arguments (especially about art and its role) used already in Dialectics of the Concrete. And as was the case of his main work, the essayistic approach towards the manipulated praxis of modern world was understood as a critique of state socialist reality. Beginning in 1963, Kosík was also a member of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, an organisation of the party intelligentsia which had previously been Stalinist and in the 1960s became a centre for reform communism." (p.30)
"In the Spring of 1968 Kosík was more concrete in his answers: the political crisis as well as the devalued sense of politics should be overcome through a radical displacement of the police bureaucratic dictatorship by a program of socialist democracy based on the federalisation of the Czechoslovak state, acceptance of a loyal socialist opposition to the ksč, democracy of socialist citizens, legal dismissal of censorship and self-management of socialist producers. Such a radical reformist agenda was according to Kosík not merely of a national but rather of an existential character, because its fulfilment would enable an evolution of Man’s potentiality." (pp.31-32)
"Kosík was critical of the post-Stalinist regime of Antonín Novotný, which he considered a ‘police-bureaucratic dictatorship’, but he did not want to reduce the crisis of socialism to a correction of the previous state, as was demonstrated by the official reform communist rhetoric." (p.32)
"During the Prague Spring he also participated in several public meetings and did not hesitate to become involved in actual political affairs. It was Kosík and a few other radical reformist intellectuals who became members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. They were elected at the extraordinary party congress held in the Vysočany čkd factory immediately after the military invasion on 22 August. Due to the pressure of the Moscow party leadership, this congress was soon declared invalid, nevertheless a political compromise enabled some of the elected reformist members to be co-opted to the previously existing Central Committee. At the session of the Central Committee in November 1968 he gave a radical reformist speech, where he warned of the self-isolation of the reform party leadership. He stated that while negotiations of the party leadership resembled the intrigues of a closed sect, there were thousands of demands from workers, cooperative farmers, intellectuals and students for a continuation of the reform policy. Instead of a Marxist analysis of the previous political development, a schematic interpretation of the 1968 events prevails which is not far from that of Moscow. According to Kosík, the meaning of the Prague Spring rested upon a metamorphosis of the working class from a passive object of manipulation into a ‘real political subject’ (an active political force) which ‘wants to direct and manage the whole society in a new way’. A mutual dialogue between the working class, cooperative farmers, intelligentsia and youth creates a new feature of politics, a ‘revolutionary wisdom’, which together with the ‘wisdom of revolution’ should become a ‘guarantee against hysteria and demagogy, against the ambitions and the vanity of individuals, against cowardice, excessive caution, naivete, and illusions’. If this is a new contribution of the working people to politics, the political leadership should regain their respect through the realisation of principled reformist politics. Whereas under the circumstances of the beginnings of the reintroduction of censorship, Kosík’s November speech could still attract relatively broad public attention, his subsequent and last speech on the same platform remained unpublished – public presentation of the pivotal session of the cc kpc was already strictly controlled in order to present a positive, conflict-free picture of Dubček’s removal.
On 17 April 1969, Kosík was one of the few speakers to raise an open voice of protest against the election of Gustáv Husák to the leadership of the Communist Party. He asked a crucial question as to in whose interest it was to reestablish censorship and the old methods of political management: ‘of these people who want to govern without the people, who do not want to respect people’s living interests, who want to impose upon the people and nations of our country a nondemocratic solution to the contemporary crisis’, which would not eliminate the reasons for the crisis." (pp.33-34)
"The political leadership should defend and realise people’s life interests and simultaneously it should periodically examine its mandate as given to it by the people. Political strategies and tactics must be subordinated to the people’s interests and not vice versa. The political leadership must be vigorous and consistent, but always in a coalition with the people, under the people’s control and in a relationship of mutual trust. Socialism means the liberation of Man, which brings more freedom in everyday life and not a new despotism. At the end of his speech, Kosík impressively stated that the realisation of such a programme represented the last chance for the current political leadership, otherwise it would be fully responsible for its own failure. From the long-term perspective, Kosík was right. Nevertheless, in1969 it was his turn to go. At the subsequent session of the Central Committee in May, he was, together with some others, expelled from ranks of the Central Committee.
It was Gustáv Husák who started the process of so-called normalisation, which was accompanied by political purges in the party as well as throughout the whole society. At the beginning of Husák’s departure from the reform communist policy, the circle of radical reformists belonged to the last actively rebellious ‘islands’ of party members. However, they were ‘pacified’ no later than by the spring of 1970, with the suppression of the Prague Spring and also Kosík’s public intellectual activities. Similarly to thousands of others, in 1970 he was prohibited from holding any academic posts and, of course, he was expelled from the Communist party of Czechoslovakia. His works were banned and broadly criticised as a deviation from Marxist-Leninism. The author himself retired into a kind of internal exile, remaining in touch with the emerging socialist opposition but reserved in his activities." (p.35)
"Despite his sympathies for an alliance with workers and students, he never elaborated a deeper analysis of such a coalition, nor was he concerned with questions of practical political tactics for how to achieve it etc. Moreover, such matters as the state ownership of the means of production were not challenged in Kosík’s conception. A critique of this type would have crossed the boundaries of communist reformism and even of its radical form, whose representative Kosík was. The type of an analysis that would have interpreted the economic basis of the existing system as ‘state capitalist’ for example was very rare in Czechoslovakia in that time. One of the few exceptions within this generation was represented by a text written by Kosík’s personal friend Karel Bartošek or an analysis by Egon Bondy, who unfortunately remained on the outskirts of the academic intellectual sphere." (p.36)
"At the time when Husák was elected, the radical reformists had no chance to resist other than to attempt to create a coalition with workers and students. Despite all their written proclamations in 1968, Kosík as well as others hesitated to embark upon such a step in 1969, because such spontaneous activity would ruin all hopes for a future dialogue with the party establishment. The reform communist part of their political identity limited them to remaining within the constraints given by the party ; even after the party purges in 1970-71 most of them counted on an invitation for an early return to the party ranks. At the same time, the public intellectual as well as political activities of radical reformists mostly did not cross over from the sphere of the written word to the sphere of real (revolutionary) politics. Radical reformism was predominantly defined intellectually, using the written word and culture as a tool of politics, and practical political activity in the pragmatic sense, seen as the ‘dirty part’ (‘sphere of manipulation’), was almost alien to it." (p.37)
"Reform communist generation with its ideas of democratic socialism was not very popular within the optimistic atmosphere of the capitalist restoration of the 1990s, when the neoliberal doctrine was presented as the most progressive one. Kosík’s conceptualisation of attributes of the post-1989 society such as ‘supracapital’ or ‘lumpen-bourgeoisie’simply did not attract broader attention. Nevertheless, and most importantly, the media of public communication had changed. Whereas in the 1960s Czechoslovakia the printed word in the form of books, magazines, the daily press or leaflets still belonged among the main communication channels, subsequent decades have been characterised by different forms. As Regis Debray defines it, the era of the ‘graphosphere’ was replaced by the era of the ‘videosphere’. This was already happening during the state socialism of the 1970s and especially of the 1980s, and the capitalist restoration only accelerated and confirmed this process. Under the conditions of the new socio-economic order, Kosík could only experience what Jürgen Habermas had experienced earlier, or what Milan Kundera observed in exile, writing in his essay ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’: ‘If all the reviews in France or England disappeared, no one would notice it, not even their editors’. In the 1990s, once it was possible for Kosík’s old as well as new essays to be published, almost nobody noticed it." (p.38)
-Jan Mervart, "Karel Kosík as a Public Intellectual of the Reform Years", chapitre 1 in Joseph Grim Feinberg, Ivan Landa, Jan Mervart (eds.), Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, Leiden / Boston, Brill, 2022, 378 pages.
"Karel Kosík (1926–2003) was one of the most remarkable Marxist philosophers of his generation in Czechoslovakia. Together with the phenomenologist Jan Patočka, he is probably the best-known Czech philosopher in the modern age.
Kosík’s reputation as a creative thinker and an insightful critic of both market-capitalist and Soviet-type societies is owed largely to his magnum opus, Dialectics of the Concrete. This book, first published in 1963, marked the culmination of a process of intellectual development that first took off in the mid-1950s, when Kosík, along with many of his generation, began to question the dogmas of Stalinist orthodoxy. Almost immediately after the book’s appearance it became a philosophical ‘blockbuster’, quickly attracting the attention not only of philosophers, writers and artists, but also of the broader reading public. After its later translation into numerous languages, Dialectics of the Concrete would go on to enjoy international acclaim." (p.1)
"The Italian philosopher Guido Davide Neri, a member of the ‘Milan School’ devoted to integrating Marxism with phenomenology, spent a year in Prague in the early 1960s, researching intersections between phenomenology and Marxism. There he met Kosík and became acquainted with the core ideas of Dialectics of the Concrete. After the book’s publication, he initiated its Italian publication and helped with the translation. The book was enthusiastically received among Italian Marxists, especially those working on the frontiers of phenomenology and Marxism such as Enzo Paci and Pier Aldo Rovatti (both members of the Milan School). But it was Neri on whom the book made its deepest impact. In Neri’s book Praxis and Knowledge (which was the outcome of Neri’s research sabbatical in Prague, parts of it having been written during his time there), Neri included a chapter on Kosík’s philosophy of praxis, in which he examined the epistemological implications of the ontology of labour." (p.2)
"The Mexican philosopher Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez (who consulted the German translation made that same year) published his Spanish translation in 1967." (p.2)
"Kosík also influenced several philosophers and theologians of liberation, including Enrique Dussel. Kosík’s reception in Lusophone countries dates primarily to1969, when the Portuguese translation of Dialectics of the Concrete appeared in Brazil. Kosík exerted some influence on Paolo Freire, who used some of Kosík’s ideas in his theory of pedagogy.
A German translation of Dialectics of the Concrete was published in 1967 by Suhrkamp Verlag, and was later re-issued in several editions. It stimulated debates among Sovietologists such as Nikolaus Lobkowicz, literary critics from the Konstanz school of reception theory (namely Hans Robert Jauss), and philosophers around the Frankfurt School, including Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth." (p.3)
"Although the complete [french] translation of Dialectics of the Concrete appeared relatively late [1970], some of its main ideas concerning concrete totality circulated and exerted some influence in the Francophone world via a paper entitled ‘Dialectique du concret’, which Kosík presented at a philosophical colloquium in Royaumont in 1960 and published in the Italian journal aut aut two years later. Since Kosík was strongly influenced by György Lukács’s French disciple Lucien Goldmann, who newly reinterpreted the concept of ‘concrete totality’ and used it to analyse world-view structures (visions du monde), it is no surprise that Kosík’s ideas resonated with Goldmann (with whom Kosík met in person several times) and later on with some of Goldmann’s students, including Michael Löwy and Marc Perelman. Jean-Paul Sartre was also attracted by Kosík’s humanistic attitude and his brave attempt to break through the corset of official Marxism-Leninist doctrine." (p.5)
"Kosík’s humanist variant of Marxism found fertile soil among members of the ‘Budapest School’ (especially György Márkus and Agnes Heller) and the ‘Praxis School’ (especially Gajo Petrović and Predrag Vranicki) [in Yugoslavia]" (p.5)
"The most important figure who introduced Kosík to Anglophone intellectual circles was the Italian-American philosopher Paul Piccone, publisher and editor of the journal Telos, which was founded during the rise of New Left in the late 1960s. From the start, Piccone devoted space in his journal to philosophical currents from East-Central Europe, and he published several extracts from Dialectics of the Concrete there in 1968 and 1969. The book’s complete translation, made directly from the Czech, appeared several years later, in 1976." (p.5)
"In China there has been growing interest in Kosík since the second half of the 1980s, as Chinese scholars have made efforts to enrich official Marxist-Leninist discourse, derived largely from Soviet diamat and histmat, with inspiration from less orthodox sources." (p.6)
"Kosík’s colleague and fellow advocate of Marxist humanism Josef Zumr positively assessed several aspects of Kosík’s work related to those addressed by Patočka and Hejdánek: its courage in addressing bourgeois philosophy (existentialism, phenomenology), as well as its confrontation with Marxist scientism and economic reductionism." (p.7)
"Within the context of 1960s Czechoslovakia, Dialectics of the Concrete was also perceived as providing sophisticated philosophical support for the reform communist current, as many within the Communist Party embarked on the path of de-Stalinisation and aimed at establishing what they saw as a more democratic form of socialism. Since the party itself during this period vacillated between support for and resistance to reform, the official ideologues of the Communist Party varied in their reactions to Kosík’s work, as a result of which Dialectics of the Concrete sometimes enjoyed official approval and at other times became an object of censure. After the suppression of the Prague Spring, however, the book’s reputation was sealed as a symbol of so-called counter-revolution. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kosík was banned from all academic work, and if his work was mentioned at all it was only as an example of a ‘dangerous revisionist deviation’. This situation changed somewhat after 1989. Kosík became publicly active again and gained some popularity as an essayist and commentator on current events. Nevertheless, in the atmosphere of triumphant capitalism his magnum opus remained almost forgotten, appearing to many as an ominous shadow of the dark communist past. Only in recent years, as Marxism has once again become recognised as a relevant part of the intellectual environment in the region, has Dialectics of the Concrete begun to attract significant attention among Czech scholars." (p.
"Kosík adopts core insights from existentialism and phenomenology, borrowing other ideas from structuralism, logical positivism and critical theory. Yet he was also critical of these approaches. In the case of positivism, he appreciated its sober anti-metaphysical approach, while he criticised its reductionist and naturalist mania to explain social phenomena solely on the basis of natural phenomena. In Tomáš Hříbek’s view, Kosík’s critique of positivism fails, since he did not distinguish between different strands of positivism and did not take into account, for example, Otto Neurath’s attempt to merge positivism with methodological holism, which resulted in a ‘holistic empiricism’ freed of its naturalist inclinations to conceive the social realm in terms of physical features. Kosík’s defence of holism is also central to a polemic he aimed at structuralism and systems theory. Kosík criticised both currents for overemphasising the role of autonomous structures and for replacing human subjects or collectivities with quasi super-subjects. Nevertheless, he was quite sympathetic to a functionalist approach to ‘structures’ and ‘systems’ that sees concrete parts as realisations of abstract statuses or functions.Vít Bartoš argues, however, that Kosík’s appropriation and critique of both currents is parochial, due to his adherence to a practical materialism that favours human subjects and social reality over animal beings and natural reality. Kosík’s conception of structural ‘totality’ thus appears, from this perspective, to be only partial.
Hence, Kosík’s text can be viewed as a striking example of Marxist ontology reaching a deadlock, since it blocks a dialogue with structuralism or general systems theory that theorise natural systems –and not only human beings or social systems– as self-creating subjects. By the same token, Kosík’s holism can be viewed as the antithesis of Louis Althusser’s anti-humanist structuralism, since practical materialism implies the centrality of the human being. Petr Kužel undertakes a thorough comparison of Kosík’s humanism and Althusser’s anti-humanism, concentrating on their understanding of both ideology and the subject. Whereas for Althusser the subject is an ideological product and in this respect is trapped in a web of ideological beliefs (despite the fact that it can be involved in subversive actions), for Kosík the subject is theorised as revolutionary from the outset, with a capacity to destroy the ‘world of the pseudoconcrete’. From here, Kužel concludes that Kosík’s ontology of the subject offers an alternative to post-Marxist theories, whose main concern is to understand the subject emerging out of a revolutionary event. Kosík proceeds the other way around, conceiving revolution as it arises out of the subject." (pp.13-14)
-Joseph Grim Feinberg, Ivan Landa, Jan Mervart Introduction à Joseph Grim Feinberg, Ivan Landa, Jan Mervart (eds.), Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, Leiden / Boston, Brill, 2022, 378 pages.
"Compared to other countries of the Eastern Bloc, the influence of the Twentieth party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was rather controlled than spontaneous in Czechoslovakia. The only voices openly calling for immediate de-Stalinisation came from the circles of the party intelligentsia (including Kosík) and from students in larger cities such as Prague or Bratislava, as well as from some communist writers at the second congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union in April 1956. The party leadership and apparatchiks were very keen to suppress any efforts that would have striven for the assembly of an extraordinary party congress, or for further discussion of Khrushchev’s speech. Soon after the Budapest events in the fall of 1956, Czechoslovakia was one of the most enthusiastic participants in an antirevisionist campaign, aimed at preventing any future ‘counterrevolutionary tendencies’. Nevertheless, the more Czechoslovak cultural and intellectual life was fettered in the second half of the 1950s, the more relaxed was the atmosphere of the subsequent decade upon the delayed arrival of a process of political de-Stalinisation (in December 1962, the Twelfth Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia declared a fight against the ‘cult of personality’), and when many previously politically delicate issues could be more or less articulated. The role of the Czech and Slovak communist intelligentsia (mostly scholars, writers, film makers or journalists) in shaping the heady atmosphere of 1960s Czechoslovakia is broadly examined in an extensive body of respective literature concerned with the Prague Spring of 1968 and its preconditions." (p.19)
"The majority of the public intellectuals of the 1960s were former Stalinists, and were still party members in the 1960s; from this point of view, the term ‘party intelligentsia’ is more than suitable. They had mostly been born in the third decade of the twentieth century (Kosík personally in 1926) and started to be politically active during or immediately after the Second World War. In the second half of the1950s, they underwent a complicated and usually painful personal de-Stalinisation process. At the same time, but no later than in the first half of the 1960s, they gained serious public authority as advocates of a delayed campaign against the ‘cult of personality’. Kosík’s generation, until recently a pillar of Stalinism, started a quest for a new legitimisation of communism’s revolutionary attempts through reform of the system. Simultaneously, the same generation contributed to the de-legitimisation of the Soviet form of Marxist-Leninist ideological dominance and opened up a space for specific reinterpretations of classical Marxist-Leninist dogmas in culture, philosophy, history or law. Despite the relaxed nature of the Czechoslovak post-Stalinist regime, this process was not of a linear character in the sense of continually increasing autonomy of the intellectual sphere. The reformist Party intelligentsia found itself in a constant struggle with party officials and up to the end of 1967, when Novotný was replaced by Dubček, its members could find themselves the target of an ideological campaign at any time. Party intellectuals were still an immanent part of the system in the 1960s, and the era of dissent did not start until the beginning of the subsequent decade, when it was more than clear that reform communism was politically defeated for the time being. The subversion of Marxism-Leninism never crossed the boundaries of state socialism, and the party intelligentsia stayed and wanted to stay within it." (p.20)
"Czech and Slovak intellectuals belonged to the most influential groups in socialist society [...] Because the intelligentsia tended to formulate public claims, their members were publicly recognised as respected authorities, and their influence (symbolic capital) was much more significant than any of their Western counterparts. In an interview with the Czech cultural journalist Antonín Jaroslav Liehm, Kosík mentioned an illustrative conversation on that topic with Jürgen Habermas, who reportedly stated that compared to the censorship and ideological critique of philosophers in Czechoslovakia the situation in Western Germany was even worse, because intellectuals were ignored by the government as well as by the public, and therefore did not play a relevant role in the society." (pp.21-22)
"In the nineteenth century, writers, university teachers, lawyers and other intellectuals belonged to the backbone of modern Czech society, and after Czechoslovakia was established in 1918 the state was referred to as the ‘republic of professors’ because its political elites, including the first two presidents (T.G. Masaryk and Edvard Beneš), were respected professors." (p.22)
"The case of Karel Kosík was not an exceptional but a typical one. As a highschool student, the author of the Dialectics of the Concrete joined the anti-Nazi resistance group Předvoj, he was editor in chief of its journal Boj mladých and he spent the last days of the war in Terezín Prison while many of his comrades were executed. Together with the economic crisis of the 1930s and the formation of the Popular Front, these were precisely the very historical moments which caused a large section of this generation to embrace communism already during the war. In such an understanding, communist engagement was not associated in the slightest extent with the implementation of bureaucratic directives and adherence to a strict party hierarchy. Despite the strictly pyramidal shape of the resistance’s organisation, under the conditions of concealment the interpretation of party ideology was relatively unrestricted. Moreover, Stalinism was perceived as good and was primarily seen as the only opposition to Nazism (evil).
Předvoj was a group of communist youth, but due to the complicated circumstances of the war, the Czechoslovak communist leadership based in Moscow never recognised it as a part of the illegal Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (ksč). This explains the fact that Kosík and many others were able to join the party only after the liberation. At the same time, the universities were reopened and Kosík started to study philosophy at Charles University in Prague. He collaborated with the newly established communist journal Lidová kultura [People’s culture]. In 1947–49 Kosík studied in Leningrad and Moscow, and he returned to Czechoslovakia as a devoted builder of the new Stalinist civilisation, writing on Marxism-Leninism, the successes of the ussr, Stalin’s works and so on. With the establishment of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, he started to work in the Cabinet for Philosophy. In 1954 he took part in a campaign against ‘Masarykism’ and so-called pseudo-humanism. Kosík did not hesitate to label T.G. Masaryk as an idealist and bourgeois thinker whose moralism and intellectual background did not provide an answer to the questions of the present day. At first glance, nothing indicated any other fate for Kosík than a career of an official Marxist-Leninist philosopher following the party line." (pp.22-23)
"At the end of 1956, together with Ivan Sviták, he initiated the first public anti-Stalinist debate in Literární noviny [Literary News] on the relationship between science and ideology. If ideology had recently been interpreted in a positive way in the official Stalinist discourse, as an inseparable part of political praxis, now Kosík understood it in a Marxian way as ‘false consciousness’ and demanded an end to the ‘ideology dominion’, which should be overcome by ‘critical thought’. This statement by Kosík prefigured the post-Stalinist era which began in Czechoslovakia in the second half of the 1950s." (p.24)
"Similarly to Poland, the humanist approach of Czech scholars such as Robert Kalivoda, Karel Kosík, Milan Machovec or Ivan Sviták was formed within the framework of the history of philosophy. Crucial for the formation of Marxist humanism was the experience of working with original sources of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 ; the Grundrisse ; The Peasant War in Germany), as well as of the broader Marxist tradition (Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, Karl Korsch) or general philosophical tradition (Holbach, Hegel, Montaigne) [...] An irreplaceable role was played by personal contacts and intellectual influences with representatives of the Polish school of the history of ideas, the Budapest school of Lukács’s students and later (at the beginning of the 1960s) also the Yugoslav Praxis school and Western scholars such as Ernst Fischer, Erich Fromm or Roger Garaudy.
Karel Kosík finished his work on the Czech radical democrats in 1957. In this he defined the Marxist method in the sense of revealing the ‘totality of relationships’. A year later, at a conference about the Czech philosophical tradition, he warned against the economic determinism of the Stalinist era, as well as against excessive empiricism. In contrast with this, he pleaded for an application of philosophy (real Marxist method) to the history of philosophy." (p.25)
"Reality should be exposed as a complex of social relationships and as a dialectically conditioned unity of essence and phenomenon. In contrast with a dialectical understanding of reality as a concrete totality, Kosík introduces the category of the pseudoconcrete, which was understood as the world of the everyday, its environment and routine atmosphere. The ‘pseudo-concrete’ part of reality is important for our further examination because it includes Man’s fetishised praxis of procuring and manipulation, its ideology and fixed objects that are considered products of natural conditions. However, the world of the ‘pseudoconcrete’ is not a given substance, on the contrary, it has been created. It has to be demystified and recognised as a product of Man’s activity, and destroyed in a process of overcoming through revolutionary praxis." (p.26)
"The emphasis on the subversive role of philosophy (dialectical-critical thinking) and true art as well as on potential social changes, where the human individual plays a crucial role, was easy to understand in Kosík’s era of flourishing intellectual and cultural activities. These aspects brought Kosík popularity with a broader Czechoslovak intellectual audience, but what made him enormously popular among the creative party intelligentsia were his arguments relating to contemporary art. Kosík observed art to be of a revolutionary quality: ‘One of the main principles of modern art, poetry and drama, of painting and film-making, we feel, is the “forcing” of the everyday, the destruction of the pseudoconcrete’. Art as creative activity played an important role in the destruction of the pseudoconcrete, because it made it possible to usher man ‘into reality itself and its “truth” ’ and thus reveal the complexity of the world. Kosík’s statements were extremely influential. In the post-Stalinist era of constant controversies between party ideologues on the one hand and artists together with critical party intellectuals on the other, his arguments about art were understood as support for free expression. It was no coincidence that Kosík’s book was nominated for a special award by the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union. Despite the fact that the awarding was supported by such authors as Milan Kundera and Jan Skácel, who saw in Dialectics of the Concrete a philosophical work of extreme importance for the realm of art, the nomination was rejected by party officials." (p.27)
"The positive reception to Dialectics of the concrete does not mean that there was no critique of it within Czechoslovak Marxist humanism whatsoever. For Ivan Sviták for example, it represented rather an ‘abstract metaphysical’ philosophy than an analysis of the real world. Kosík’s style of argumentation would inevitably have failed in confrontation with contemporary positivism and scientism. In a similar but more developed way, Robert Kalivoda considered Dialectics of the Concrete to be negatively influenced by Hegelian essentialism, which according to Kalivoda had culminated in a ‘Lukácsian-phenomenological’ trend which Kosík in his view represented. In deliberate opposition to Kosík, Kalivoda spoke about ‘concrete dialectics’ based on an analysis of concrete historical forms instead of on presumptions of a metaphysical quality." (p.29)
"During the 1960s, he published several essays in cultural political journals such as Literární noviny and Plamen (the first magazine was issued in a circulation of at least 150,000 copies every week). His texts predominantly focused on perspectives of culture, art and nation in the modern world. Using for example the literary works of Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, or Jaroslav Hašek, he depicted reality as a ‘dehumanised’ and manipulated reality. In many of his texts, he followed on from arguments (especially about art and its role) used already in Dialectics of the Concrete. And as was the case of his main work, the essayistic approach towards the manipulated praxis of modern world was understood as a critique of state socialist reality. Beginning in 1963, Kosík was also a member of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, an organisation of the party intelligentsia which had previously been Stalinist and in the 1960s became a centre for reform communism." (p.30)
"In the Spring of 1968 Kosík was more concrete in his answers: the political crisis as well as the devalued sense of politics should be overcome through a radical displacement of the police bureaucratic dictatorship by a program of socialist democracy based on the federalisation of the Czechoslovak state, acceptance of a loyal socialist opposition to the ksč, democracy of socialist citizens, legal dismissal of censorship and self-management of socialist producers. Such a radical reformist agenda was according to Kosík not merely of a national but rather of an existential character, because its fulfilment would enable an evolution of Man’s potentiality." (pp.31-32)
"Kosík was critical of the post-Stalinist regime of Antonín Novotný, which he considered a ‘police-bureaucratic dictatorship’, but he did not want to reduce the crisis of socialism to a correction of the previous state, as was demonstrated by the official reform communist rhetoric." (p.32)
"During the Prague Spring he also participated in several public meetings and did not hesitate to become involved in actual political affairs. It was Kosík and a few other radical reformist intellectuals who became members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. They were elected at the extraordinary party congress held in the Vysočany čkd factory immediately after the military invasion on 22 August. Due to the pressure of the Moscow party leadership, this congress was soon declared invalid, nevertheless a political compromise enabled some of the elected reformist members to be co-opted to the previously existing Central Committee. At the session of the Central Committee in November 1968 he gave a radical reformist speech, where he warned of the self-isolation of the reform party leadership. He stated that while negotiations of the party leadership resembled the intrigues of a closed sect, there were thousands of demands from workers, cooperative farmers, intellectuals and students for a continuation of the reform policy. Instead of a Marxist analysis of the previous political development, a schematic interpretation of the 1968 events prevails which is not far from that of Moscow. According to Kosík, the meaning of the Prague Spring rested upon a metamorphosis of the working class from a passive object of manipulation into a ‘real political subject’ (an active political force) which ‘wants to direct and manage the whole society in a new way’. A mutual dialogue between the working class, cooperative farmers, intelligentsia and youth creates a new feature of politics, a ‘revolutionary wisdom’, which together with the ‘wisdom of revolution’ should become a ‘guarantee against hysteria and demagogy, against the ambitions and the vanity of individuals, against cowardice, excessive caution, naivete, and illusions’. If this is a new contribution of the working people to politics, the political leadership should regain their respect through the realisation of principled reformist politics. Whereas under the circumstances of the beginnings of the reintroduction of censorship, Kosík’s November speech could still attract relatively broad public attention, his subsequent and last speech on the same platform remained unpublished – public presentation of the pivotal session of the cc kpc was already strictly controlled in order to present a positive, conflict-free picture of Dubček’s removal.
On 17 April 1969, Kosík was one of the few speakers to raise an open voice of protest against the election of Gustáv Husák to the leadership of the Communist Party. He asked a crucial question as to in whose interest it was to reestablish censorship and the old methods of political management: ‘of these people who want to govern without the people, who do not want to respect people’s living interests, who want to impose upon the people and nations of our country a nondemocratic solution to the contemporary crisis’, which would not eliminate the reasons for the crisis." (pp.33-34)
"The political leadership should defend and realise people’s life interests and simultaneously it should periodically examine its mandate as given to it by the people. Political strategies and tactics must be subordinated to the people’s interests and not vice versa. The political leadership must be vigorous and consistent, but always in a coalition with the people, under the people’s control and in a relationship of mutual trust. Socialism means the liberation of Man, which brings more freedom in everyday life and not a new despotism. At the end of his speech, Kosík impressively stated that the realisation of such a programme represented the last chance for the current political leadership, otherwise it would be fully responsible for its own failure. From the long-term perspective, Kosík was right. Nevertheless, in1969 it was his turn to go. At the subsequent session of the Central Committee in May, he was, together with some others, expelled from ranks of the Central Committee.
It was Gustáv Husák who started the process of so-called normalisation, which was accompanied by political purges in the party as well as throughout the whole society. At the beginning of Husák’s departure from the reform communist policy, the circle of radical reformists belonged to the last actively rebellious ‘islands’ of party members. However, they were ‘pacified’ no later than by the spring of 1970, with the suppression of the Prague Spring and also Kosík’s public intellectual activities. Similarly to thousands of others, in 1970 he was prohibited from holding any academic posts and, of course, he was expelled from the Communist party of Czechoslovakia. His works were banned and broadly criticised as a deviation from Marxist-Leninism. The author himself retired into a kind of internal exile, remaining in touch with the emerging socialist opposition but reserved in his activities." (p.35)
"Despite his sympathies for an alliance with workers and students, he never elaborated a deeper analysis of such a coalition, nor was he concerned with questions of practical political tactics for how to achieve it etc. Moreover, such matters as the state ownership of the means of production were not challenged in Kosík’s conception. A critique of this type would have crossed the boundaries of communist reformism and even of its radical form, whose representative Kosík was. The type of an analysis that would have interpreted the economic basis of the existing system as ‘state capitalist’ for example was very rare in Czechoslovakia in that time. One of the few exceptions within this generation was represented by a text written by Kosík’s personal friend Karel Bartošek or an analysis by Egon Bondy, who unfortunately remained on the outskirts of the academic intellectual sphere." (p.36)
"At the time when Husák was elected, the radical reformists had no chance to resist other than to attempt to create a coalition with workers and students. Despite all their written proclamations in 1968, Kosík as well as others hesitated to embark upon such a step in 1969, because such spontaneous activity would ruin all hopes for a future dialogue with the party establishment. The reform communist part of their political identity limited them to remaining within the constraints given by the party ; even after the party purges in 1970-71 most of them counted on an invitation for an early return to the party ranks. At the same time, the public intellectual as well as political activities of radical reformists mostly did not cross over from the sphere of the written word to the sphere of real (revolutionary) politics. Radical reformism was predominantly defined intellectually, using the written word and culture as a tool of politics, and practical political activity in the pragmatic sense, seen as the ‘dirty part’ (‘sphere of manipulation’), was almost alien to it." (p.37)
"Reform communist generation with its ideas of democratic socialism was not very popular within the optimistic atmosphere of the capitalist restoration of the 1990s, when the neoliberal doctrine was presented as the most progressive one. Kosík’s conceptualisation of attributes of the post-1989 society such as ‘supracapital’ or ‘lumpen-bourgeoisie’simply did not attract broader attention. Nevertheless, and most importantly, the media of public communication had changed. Whereas in the 1960s Czechoslovakia the printed word in the form of books, magazines, the daily press or leaflets still belonged among the main communication channels, subsequent decades have been characterised by different forms. As Regis Debray defines it, the era of the ‘graphosphere’ was replaced by the era of the ‘videosphere’. This was already happening during the state socialism of the 1970s and especially of the 1980s, and the capitalist restoration only accelerated and confirmed this process. Under the conditions of the new socio-economic order, Kosík could only experience what Jürgen Habermas had experienced earlier, or what Milan Kundera observed in exile, writing in his essay ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’: ‘If all the reviews in France or England disappeared, no one would notice it, not even their editors’. In the 1990s, once it was possible for Kosík’s old as well as new essays to be published, almost nobody noticed it." (p.38)
-Jan Mervart, "Karel Kosík as a Public Intellectual of the Reform Years", chapitre 1 in Joseph Grim Feinberg, Ivan Landa, Jan Mervart (eds.), Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, Leiden / Boston, Brill, 2022, 378 pages.
