“The Dialectic of the Concrete” by Karel Kosik
Here we present fairly extensive extracts from the work of the Czech philosopher and critical thinker Karel Kosik (1926-2003). It is not known for what deleterious reasons this very important work disappeared from the shelves of bookshops and became almost impossible to find. The lack of recognition of its author outside his country of origin, and the inability to face up to the demands of the text, are probably enough to explain its disappearance in an era that has become very averse to reflective effort. What is the point of thinking beyond our immediate concerns in a time of debacle and widespread renunciation! On the other hand, those who believe that we still need this reflective effort, perhaps now more than ever, will find here material to nurture and reinforce it.
“Karel Kosik is not only one of the most important philosophers of the second half of the 20th century, but also one of those who best embodied the spirit of resistance of critical thinking. He is also one of the few who fought, in their succession, the three great forces of oppression of modern history: fascism, during the 1940s, the Stalinist bureaucratic regime, from 1956, and the dictatorship of the market, since 1989. At a time when so many thinkers have abdicated their autonomy to serve the powerful of this world, or have turned away from historical reality to engage in academic language games, Kosik appears as a man who stands tall, who refuses to bow down, and who does not hesitate to think, against the current, about the great problems of the time.” (Michael Löwy)
In opposition to the world of the pseudo-concrete, the world of reality concretizes the truth, which is neither given nor predetermined as a finished and invariable copy, which would be found in human consciousness. On the contrary, it is a world where truth becomes.
Dialectics focuses on the thing itself. But this does not manifest itself directly to man. To grasp it, he must make an effort and even take a detour. This is why dialectical thought distinguishes between representation and concept of the thing, and sees in it not only two forms or degrees of knowledge, but also and above all two qualities of human praxis.
There is a fundamental difference between those who consider reality as a concrete totality, that is to say as a structured whole in evolution and creation, and those who affirm that human knowledge can, or cannot, reach the totality of aspects and facts, that is to say the whole of the properties, things, relationships and processes of reality. In the latter case, reality is conceived as the sum of all facts. Since human knowledge can never in principle embrace all facts, if only because new facts and aspects can always be added to them, the thesis of concreteness or totality is described as mystical. In fact, totality does not in any way mean the sum of all facts. It means reality as a structured and dialectical whole in which – or from which – facts of any kind (group or set of facts) can be rationally understood. Gathering all the facts does not yet mean knowing reality, and all the (gathered) facts do not yet constitute the totality.
Facts enable an understanding of reality if they are conceived as facts of a dialectical totality, as parts structuring the totality, and not as immutable, indivisible and irreducible atoms.
The methodological principle of the dialectical analysis of social reality is the perspective of concrete totality. This means above all that each phenomenon can be understood as an element of a whole. A social phenomenon is a historical fact insofar as it is examined as an element of a specific whole, such that it fulfills a dual task, thanks to which alone it truly becomes a historical fact: on the one hand, defining itself; on the other hand, defining the whole, being at once producer and product, both determining and determined, both revealing and deciphering itself, bringing its own meaning at the same time as that of something else.
This reciprocal connection and this mediation of the part and the whole signify at the same time: isolated facts are abstractions artificially dissociated from the whole; they acquire truth and concreteness only by being inserted into their true whole. Similarly, the whole whose component elements are not differentiated or determined would be nothing but a hollow abstraction.
As it progresses, the dialectical knowledge of reality makes concepts evolve, because it is not a systematization of concepts that proceeds by summation and rests on an immutable and once and for all discovered basis. (…). The dialectical understanding of reality implies not only that the parts and the whole are in a relationship of interaction and internal connection, but also that reality cannot be petrified into an abstraction hovering above the parts, for it is only through the interaction of the parts that the whole is elaborated.
In the history of philosophical thought, there are three fundamental conceptions of the whole or totality, based on a specific vision of reality and postulating a specific epistemological principle:
- The atomistic and rationalist conception, from Descartes to Wittgenstein, which considers the totality as the sum of the simplest elements and facts.
- The organicist and organico-dynamic conception, which formalizes the totality and emphasizes the priority of the totality over the parts (Schelling, Spann).
- The dialectical conception (Heraclitus, Hegel, Marx) which considers reality as a structured totality in development and creation.
Social reality is not considered to be a concrete totality if, within this totality, man is perceived solely or essentially as an object, and if, as a result, the fundamental importance of man as a subject is not recognized in the objective historical praxis of humanity.
The concreteness or totality of reality does not first pose the question of whether the facts are whole or imperfect, but more fundamentally: What is reality? With regard to social reality, this question can be answered by another: How is social reality created? To ask these questions about what something is and how reality is created is to start from a revolutionary conception of society and of man.
The mystification and false consciousness of people in relation to events of the present or the past are an integral part of history. It is to alter history to consider false consciousness as a secondary or contingent phenomenon, or even to eliminate it as a lie or error unrelated to history.
If the everyday is the phenomenal veneer of reality, it cannot be transcended by leaping from the everyday to the authentic, but by abolishing in practice the fetishization of the everyday and of history, that is to say by effectively destroying reified reality in both its appearance and its real essence.
We have shown that, if we radically separate the everyday from change and from history, we end up, on the one hand, mystifying history, limiting it to the history of the great and good, and, on the other hand, emptying the everyday of all content, trivializing and sanctifying everyday life. Everyday life, separated from history, is emptied of its content and reduced to an absurd immutability, while history, detached from everyday life, is transformed into an absurdly impotent colossus, which bursts into everyday life like a catastrophe without, however, succeeding in changing it, eliminating its banality and giving it content.
Man is not reduced to an abstraction by theory, but by reality itself. The economy is a system and a determinism of relationships that constantly transform the individual into an economic man. As soon as man enters the economic realm, he is transformed. As soon as he enters into economic relationships, he is involved – independently of his will and his conscience – in a set of connections and determined laws, where he fulfills his functions as homo oeconomicus. The economy is therefore a sphere that tends to turn man into an economic being, because it draws him into an objective mechanism that subjugates and assimilates him.
Homo oeconomicus is a fiction only if it is conceived as a reality existing independently of the capitalist order. As an element of the system, homo oeconomicus is a reality. Man is not defined in himself, but in relation to the system.
Since the reification of the world of things and human relations is reality, and since science is concerned with it in order to discover its internal laws, science itself falls into illusion and reification because, in this objectal world, it sees not only a specific aspect and a historically transitory stage of human reality but natural human reality.
It formulates the immanent laws of this reified world as being those of the authentically human world, because it knows of no other human world apart from this alienated human universe.
Man always lives within a system: as an integral part of it, he is reduced to certain of its aspects (functions) or appearances (one-sided or reified). But, at the same time, man is always above the system and – as a man – he cannot be reduced to the system. The existence of the concrete man extends to the sphere that lies between the irreducibility to the system, or his possibility of overcoming it, and his de facto insertion, or his practical function, in the system (historical conditions and relationships).
For Descartes, reason is that of the isolated and emancipated individual, who finds certainty in the world and in himself only in his consciousness. Not only is the science of modern times, of rationalist reason, rooted in this reason, but reason also permeates the whole reality of modern times with its rationalization and irrationalism. The consequences and the realization of autonomous reason demonstrate that it is not independent, but subject to its own products, which, as a whole, are unreasonable and irrational. This produces a reversal that causes autonomous reason to lose its independence as well as its rationality, so that it manifests itself as something dependent and irrational, while its products present themselves as the center of reason and autonomy. Reason then no longer has its seat in the individual human being, but outside the individual and individual reason.
Irrationality has become the rationale of modern capitalist society.
The separation of the sciences of nature from those of society, the autonomy of methods based on explanation or understanding, as well as the periodic tendency to give a naturalistic or physicalistic character to human and social phenomena or to spiritualize natural phenomena, clearly show the split in reality: the domination of rationalist reason leads to a petrification of this split. Human reality is divided, practically and theoretically, into the sphere of reason, that is to say into a world of rationalization, means, technology and efficiency, and into a domain of human values and meanings, which, paradoxically, become the field of the irrational. It is in this division that the unity of the capitalist world is specifically realized.
Dialectical reason is a universal and necessary process of knowledge and elaboration of reality; it leaves nothing outside its sphere, since it is the reason of science and thought as well as that of human freedom and reality. The unreasonableness of reason, this historical limitation of thought, stems from the fact that rationalism does not admit that negativity is its own product. The rationality of reason therefore requires it to recognize negativity as the product of reason itself, the latter knowing itself to be negativity in continuous historical development and its activity being to consciously pose and resolve contradictions.
In human memory, the past becomes present, the temporal being overcome. Indeed, the past is not something useless for man that he leaves behind, but something that enters into his present in a constitutive way, as human nature that creates and elaborates itself.
The historical stages of the development of humanity are not empty forms devoid of life because humanity has reached higher forms of development, but they are continually integrated into the present thanks to the creative activity (praxis) of humanity. This process of integration is also critical and a new appreciation of the past.
From the outset, Capital caused serious confusion among those interpreting it, with only one thing being clear: it is not an economic work in the usual sense of the term, with economics being conceived from a particular point of view and in close connection with sociology, history and philosophy. Judging by the history of its interpretations, the issue of the relationship between science (economics) and philosophy (dialectics) is paramount in Capital. The relationship between economics and philosophy is not simply a theme that characterizes certain aspects of Marx’s work, since it provides access to the essence and specificity of Capital.
If any concept, whatever it may be, always contains the element of relativity, it is because it is both a historical stage of human knowledge and a moment of its improvement.
STRUCTURE OF CAPITAL
From the elementary form of capitalist wealth and the analysis of its elements, the analysis moves on to the real movement of the commodity and describes capitalism as a system created by the movement of an automatic subject (value). The system thus appears as a whole that constantly reproduces itself on an enlarged scale, the exploitation of the labor of others, that is to say as a mechanism of domination of dead labor over living labor, of the thing over man, of the product over the producer, of the mystified subject over the real subject, of the object over the subject. Capitalism is a system of reification or total alienation, a dynamic system that swells cyclically and reproduces itself in the midst of catastrophes, with men appearing under the characteristic mask of functionaries or agents of this machine, that is to say as its constituent parts or elements.
The commodity, which first manifests itself as an external and banal thing, performs in the capitalist economy the function of a mystified and mystifying subject, whose real movement creates the capitalist system. Whether the real subject of this social movement is value or merchandise, the fact remains that the three theoretical volumes of Capital retrace the odyssey of this subject, i.e. they describe the structure of the capitalist world and the way in which it is created by its real movement.
Only now do we have the necessary premises for a scientific comparison and critical analysis of Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Both start, in the construction of their work, from the same symbolic motif of thought, very widespread in the cultural atmosphere of their time. This motif – a metaphor for literary, philosophical and scientific creation – is the odyssey: the subject (individual, individual consciousness, spirit or community) must make a pilgrimage through the world in order to know the world and itself.
Knowledge of the subject is only possible on the basis of the subject’s own activity in the world. The subject only knows the world to the extent that he actively intervenes in it; he only knows himself by transforming the world through his activity. To know the subject is to know his activity in the world. The subject who returns to himself after having traveled the world is different from the one who is about to set out.
In the capitalist economy, we are witnessing a double permutation of individuals and things: a personalization of objects, and a reification of people. Objects are endowed with will and consciousness, in other words: their movement is carried out with consciousness and will, and men are the bearers or executors of this movement of things.
(…) If we examine and formulate the internal law of social movement – of which man (homo œconomicus) is the simple support and characteristic mask – we see that this reality is only a real appearance. If the individual (man) appears at first glance in the economic production relationship as the simple personification of the social movement of objects and if consciousness manifests itself as the executor (agent) of this same movement, the analysis subsequently dispels this real appearance and demonstrates that the social movement of things is only a historical form of the relationship between men, just as reified consciousness is only a historical form of human consciousness.
(The social being) is not a rigid or dynamic substance, or even a transcendent entity that exists independently of objective praxis; it is the process of production and reproduction of social reality, that is to say the historical praxis of humanity and the forms of its objectification.
In the sociology of work, the psychology of work, the theology of work, the physiology of work or in the economic analyses of work, specific aspects of work are examined and defined, with the corresponding concepts of sociology, psychology, economics, etc., while the central question: what is work? is taken for granted, as a premise that is accepted without any prior criticism or analysis (and therefore as an unscientific prejudice on which all so-called scientific investigation is based).
Work, in its essence and generality, cannot be reduced to this or that productive activity or human occupation which, in turn, influences the human being’s psychology, habitus and thought, i.e. specific spheres of the human being. Work is a process that permeates the whole of the human being, of which it constitutes the specificity. It must first of all be admitted that, in work, something essential happens for man and for his being and that a necessary internal connection is established between the question what is work? and what is man?
(…) If work is a process in which something happens for man, his being and the world of man, it is legitimate that philosophical interest should focus on explaining the nature of this process or this doing and endeavor to discover the secret of this something.
Work is a process that brings about a dialectical metamorphosis or mediation. In this dialectical mediation, there is a balancing of contradictions, which are no longer antinomic, the unity of contradictions forming a process or metamorphosing into it. Dialectical mediation is a metamorphosis whose result is a novelty; it is the genesis of a new qualitative element. In the very act of mediation, where the human is born of animality and the human desire of animal instinct, the three-dimensionality of human time is also elaborated: only a creature who overcomes through work the nihilism of animal instinct can, in the very act of repression, discover the future as a dimension of his being. Through work and by means of it, man dominates time (whereas the animal is dominated by it), because a creature capable of resisting the immediate satisfaction of its needs and actively rejecting them makes the present a function of the future and learns from the past, that is to say discovers in its action the three-dimensionality of time as a dimension of its being.
Human endeavor is not divided into two autonomous spheres, which would be both independent and indifferent to each other, the first being the embodiment of freedom and the other the field of action of necessity. The philosophy of work, as an objective human endeavor, where the real presuppositions of freedom are created in a necessary process, is therefore also a philosophy of non-work.
As long as we seek the relationship between work and the structuring of social and human reality, we discover nothing economic in work.
(…) Work in general is the presupposition of work in the economic sense, but it is not identical with it. The wealth-producing work of capitalism is not work in general but a quite specific kind of work, abstract-concrete work or work of a dual character: this form alone belongs to the economy.
The desacralization of nature and its representation as a set of mechanical forces, subject to the domination and exploitation of man, goes hand in hand with the desacralization of man, who discovers that he is a creature that can be formed and molded or – translated into a corresponding language – manipulated. Only in this context can we grasp the historical significance of Machiavelli and the scope of Machiavellianism. In the naïve anecdotal (journalistic) view, Machiavelli’s doctrine represents the quintessence of Renaissance power techniques and the set of guidelines for a policy of cunning and treachery, poison and dagger. However, Machiavelli was not an empirical observer, nor a subtle commentator of historical texts elaborating and generalizing on paper the current praxis of Renaissance sovereigns and the traditional processes of the Roman world. He entered the history of thought above all as an inflexible analyst of human reality. His fundamental discovery – corresponding to Bacon’s operative science and the modern conception of science – is the concept of man as a being who is available and manipulable.
(…) Praxis manifests itself in the historical form of manipulation and preoccupation or – as Marx would later say – in the form of the sordid trafficker.
The concept of praxis shows that social and human reality is opposed to what is given; that is to say, it is the specific elaboration and form of the human being. Praxis is a sphere of the human being.
Praxis is the active unity of man and the world, of matter and spirit, of subject and object, of product and producer, this active unity reproducing itself historically, that is to say constantly renewing and reconstituting itself in practice. Human and social reality being created by praxis, history appears as a practical process during which man is distinguished from the non-human; the human and the non-human are never predetermined, but differentiate themselves in history thanks to practice.
It is only the dialectic of the proper movement of things that transforms the future, devalues the immediate future as a lie and as one-sidedness, and reveals the mediated future as truth. (…) But from where does man derive the knowledge of his immediate future for which he begins the struggle for recognition? The three-dimensionality of time, as a form of his own existence, manifests itself to man and is realized in the process of objectification, that is to say in work.
Praxis therefore embraces – in addition to work – an existential moment: it manifests itself in the objective activity of man who transforms nature and imprints human meanings on natural matter, as well as in the formation of human subjectivity in which essential moments such as anguish, nausea, fear, joy, laughter, hope, etc., do not represent passive experiences, but are an integral part of the struggle for recognition, that is to say, of the process of realization of human freedom. Without the existential moment, work would cease to be an integral part of praxis.
Freedom cannot arise from a simple objective relationship with nature. What, at certain historical periods, manifests itself as the impersonality and objectivity of praxis and is posited by false consciousness as the most practical thing in praxis is, on the contrary, only the praxis of manipulation and preoccupation, that is to say, fetishized praxis. Without an existential moment, that is to say without a struggle for recognition, praxis degenerates into technique and manipulation.
Reason is created in history only because history is not rationally predetermined, but becomes rational. In history, reason is not providential reason of pre-established harmony, nor triumph of metaphysically predetermined good, but conflicting reason of historical dialectic, rationality being conquered with great difficulty and each historical phase of reason being realized in conflict with historical unreason. In history, reason becomes to the very extent that it is realized. It is not in the history of reason ready-made in advance, supra-historical, which would reveal itself in historical events. Historical reason achieves its own rationality by realizing itself.
Reality is not an (authentic) reality without man, any more than it is (only) the reality of man. It is the reality of nature as an absolute totality, independent not only of human consciousness, but also of human existence, at the same time as it is the reality of man who creates, within nature and as a fraction of it, a social and human reality, superior to nature and defining his place in the universe throughout history. Man does not live in two spheres. He does not live for one part of his being in history and for the other in nature. Man is always both in nature and in history.
As a historical, that is to say social, being, he humanizes nature, but he knows it – and also recognizes it – as an absolute totality, as a causa sui that is sufficient unto itself, as a condition and presupposition of humanity.