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Kosik’s Dialectics of Concrete Totality



Author(s)

Denko Skalovski

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DOI:10.17265/2159-5313/2015.06.001

Setting out from the categories of totality and histori(ci)sm in Kosik’s Dialectics of the Concrete, we look at the relationship between theory and praxis: empty, abstract totality versus concrete, reified and alienated practice (Lukacs, Habermas, Honneth); a bad totality, in which the real polydimensional subject is replaced by the one-dimensional, mythologized, fetishized, and economistically reduced “subject” of consummation (Marcuse, Baudrillard). The dialectics of concrete totality implies a marxistic critique of the ethical and juristic universalism, in the context of the “positive” side of globalization and political unilateralism, as a concrete, militant, hegemonistic, post-colonial, and neo-imperial practice (Apel, Habermas, Chomsky, Zinoviev); globalization as totali(tari)zation, the “last man,” the “end of history,” and the “end” of dialectics in its neo-liberal, eschatological, empty ideological “realization” (Hegel, Marx, Fukuyama, Arendt); the totality of the (invariable) being as a pseudo-concrete and pseudo-dialectical ontologistic speculation (Heidegger): A “return” to a concrete history and a return of the “positive” dialectics as a critical awareness, mind, and method in the discourse “game” of human’s cognitive, creative, and practical powers. The assumption of Kosik’s humanism is a synchrony of nature and history in the “absolute” totality of human’s concrete existence (Lukacs, Goldmann, Adorno, Sartre, Kosik).

totality, history, nature, dialectics, concrete, globalization, moral, reification