The evolution of Marxist theory in the course of the 20th century was characterized, among other things, by the opening up of Marxism to other currents of thought. One such confluence occurred between Marxism and existentialism. Thanks to their humanistic interpretations of Marxism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Karel Kosík are usually seen as leading representatives of this interface. Both emphasize the social situation of man in their theoretical approaches, but at the same time also give consideration to the uniqueness of his experience and practical relation to the world. This study will try to show that, though Sartre and Kosík share a number of motifs in their work, they cannot be said to belong to the same line of thought. They might converge, that is to say, but they started from opposite directions. Kosík opens Marxism up to ideas from existentialism while solving them on the soil of practical materialism; Sartre, though accepting Marxist social theory, still holds to existentialist assumptions in which the individual is situated against the world and their social environment. and Vývoj marxistické teorie se v průběhu 20. století vyznačoval mimo jiné otevíráním marxismu vlivu dalších myšlenkových proudů. K jednomu z takových setkání došlo mezi marxismem a existencialismem. Jean-Paul Sartre a Karel Kosík jsou díky jejich humanistickému výkladu marxismu obvykle vnímáni jako přední představitelé této interakce. Oba vycházejí z důrazu na sociální situovanost člověka, současně ale ve svých teoriích dávají prostor také jedinečnosti jeho zkušenosti a praktického vztahování ke světu. Tato studie se pokusí dokázat, že navzdory řadě shodných motivů v jejich díle nemůžeme Jeana-Paula Sartra a Karla Kosíka zařazovat do téže myšlenkové linie. Oba autoři totiž vycházejí k onomu sblížení z opačných pólů. Zatímco Kosík otevírá marxismus podnětům z existencialismu, ale současně je stále řeší na půdě praktického materialismu, Sartre navzdory přijetí marxistické sociální teorie stále drží existencialistické předpoklady, v nichž je jedinec postaven proti světu a svému sociálnímu prostředí.
Author focuses on conception of world as simultaneously constituted and lived by humans in the thought of Karel Kosík and Erazim Kohák. He seeks first an overall interpretation of the thought of Karel Kosík which would bridge the apparent gap between his early Marxist thought and his later essayistic critique of modern age. He comes to the conclusion that both phases of Kosík’s thought share substantive traits and even that Kosík’s later criticism of global capitalism is possible only on the foundations laid in his early works. Susequently the author presents phenomenologically oriented thought of Erazim Kohák which in spite of differences in overall philosophical framework manifests numerous parallels with Kosík’s thought. In Kohák’s work the author traces the problem of values and of valuing in general. On that basis he then analyses Kohák’s idea of home and offers it as a possible answer to the question of anchoring and orientating of lived experience in the dynamics of a world constituted by human being and living.
In Dialectics of the Concrete (1963), Karel Kosík entered into a virtual dialogue with Herbert Marcuse on philosophy and social theory. Central to this discussion is the necessity and freedom dialectic. Kosík referred to several of Marcuse’s works, arguing that Marcuse aimed to abolish philosophy and replace it with social theory. I review two other of Marcuse’s significant works, which were written within this period and are relevant to Kosík’s argument. I conclude that there is great value in re-examining and going further into Marcuse’s extensive investigations of the necessity and freedom dialectic. Kosík’s assessments, based on Marx’s concept of labor in Theories of Surplus Value, and in Capital, vol. 3, on the potential of freedom in the realm of necessity, were ultimately truer than were Marcuse’s conclusions with respect to the development of the necessity and freedom dialectic from Hegel to Marx. But, unlike Marcuse’s approach, Kosík’s assessment of the philosophic dimension involved a conception of Schelling’s instead of Hegel’s ideas as the primary link to Marx’s concept of the dialectic of the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom – the transition from a capitalist to a post-capitalist society. Kosík’s approach obscured Hegel’s detailed examination and illumination of this issue, the brilliance of which involved a historical version of philosophy’s integration of social theory. The latter enabled Marx’s eventual consummation of his theory of the transition from a capitalist to a post-capitalist society, which remains, even to this day, the crucial issue underlying the on-going philosophy-social theory dialectic.
Present study is conceived as a contribution to the development of Czech humanistic Marxism and is devoted to the philosophers Karel Kosík, Robert Kalivoda and Ivan Sviták during the Czechoslovak spring of 1968. The author considers their philosophical positions, their social critique and their vision of a future democratic socialism as well as their distinctive political commitment inseparable from their philosophical development. For all three, those were long term concerns culminating in the political thaw of 1968. The study deals with their successive texts, written intentionally as contributions to a society-wide discussion or even as programmatic proclamations, showing the moments with which they contended at the time and what goals they followed. At the same time it points to quite evident difference between the thought of I. Sviták on the one hand and K. Kosík and R. Kalivoda on the other, while also attempting a more detailed sketch of differences in their views as well as of the agreements not evident at first glance.