Skalovski, Denko

Kosik’s Dialectics of Concrete Totality

e-mail: deskalovski@yahoo.com

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 practice: empty, abstract totality versus conrete, 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 “negative” 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: a synchrony of nature and history in the “absolute” totality of human’s concrete existence (Lukacs, Goldmann, Adorno, Anders, Sartre, Kosik).