Background
Kosik, Karel was born in 1926 in Prague.
Kosik, Karel was born in 1926 in Prague.
University of Leningrad and Charles University, Prague.
1950-1963, Researcher, Institute °f Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. 1963-1969, Professor of Philosophy, Charles University, Prague. ^aln publications: (1958) Ceska radikalni demokcracie [Radical Czech Democracy], Prague: Stoleti. 11964) Dialektika konkretniho,, Prague: SAV. (1969) La nostracrisi attuale, Rome: Riuniti.
Kosik is one of the major figures of postwar Czechoslovak philosophy. Prominent in the revisionist movment that generated the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968, he was for years thereafter banned from teaching and print. Influenced by neo-Hegelian dialectics in his Radical Czech Democracy (1958), and later by Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology as well, Kosik sought humanistic dimensions within Marxist theory itself. This led him to develop a critical position which challenged the limits of orthodox Marxist theory with radical questions concerning the significance of the subject and the role of the idea in history. In his Dialectics of the Concrete (1964) Kosik returned to praxis as the fundamental category in the interpretation of history, and correlated praxis with ‘totality’ by defining praxis as the unity of man and the world, spirit and matter, subject and object, producer and product. He thereby asserted that praxis discloses the essence of man as a self-creative being who produces human and social reality and, consequently, is able to understand and transform reality in all its aspects, human and non-human. Thus, although he still held that praxis presupposes material conditions, that it is one moment of the ‘concrete totality’ of existence, by stressing the primacy of human freedom and self-constitution Kosik effectively transformed the materialist metaphysics of Marxism into a humanist ontology more akin to Hegelianism and existentialism. Kosik also used these ideas in La nostracrisi attuale (1969), a series of essays on political philosophy and history of literature. Kosik’s heterodox Marxism notably influenced the Petofi Circle in Hungary, East German thinkers such as R. Havemann. and the editors of the American periodical Telos. His great achievement was to have broken the hegemony of the conception of Marxism as an uncritical objectivist ideology of coercion.