Abstract

In this volume, Karel Kosik criticizes reductive Marxism, from the perspective of existential phenomenology and phemenology from the perspective of Hegelian Marxism. His Hegelian Marxism brings his thought closer, in certain respects, to Heidegger than to Husserl. In the end, however, Kosik's amalgam achieves a deepened reading of Marxism and a devastating critique of Heidegger.

The rallying cry of Husserlian phenomenology was “back to the things themselves.” Kosik begins and ends Dialectics of the Concrete with the question: “what is the thing itself?” It is not the inaccessible Kantian Ding-an-sich, but the Husserlian thing itself (die Sache selbst) intentionally constituted and knowable through the fulfillment of its essence.