Kosík´s Concept of Concreteness, the Everyday, and the Intercultural Dialogue

e-mail: lubomir.dunaj@gmail.com

Globalization is an omnipresent phenomenon today and establishes itself primarily as a process, which essence consists of preceding the economic interests above everything else, whereas the final aim is the maximum of utility. Only an elitist minority profits from globalization and it does not feel responsibility to the majority – other parts of society are left to ‘their fate’.
Their claims for deregulation and for a retreat of the state from public affairs have a destabilising tendency to the social order (even in a worldwide dimension) – for example because of a depletion of natural resources. Hence, it is important by intercultural dialogue to consider a policy framework, which is able to establish in modern societies a regulation of the negative effects of globalization. Such a framework can bring into effect a functioning transnational civil-law, which has to find inspirations for its constitution, but it also has to be accepted by the different societies participating in the legislative process. The acceptance of international policies depends on the capacity to tie the legislative process up to the cultural heritage and historical experiences of all mankind. Kosík explains in Dialectics of the Concrete that the methodological principle for dialectically investigating of objective reality is the standpoint of concrete totality, and this inter alia implies that every phenomenon can be conceived as a moment of a whole. He adds that isolated facts are abstractions, artificially uprooted moments of a whole which become concrete and true only when set in the respective whole. In my paper I will analyse relevance of this Kosík´s explanation of concreteness and also by means of using his concept of everyday I will try think about preconditions of intercultural dialogue. Kosík emphasises the distinction between systematic-additive cognition and dialectical cognition, which is essentially the distinction between two different conceptions of reality. I think that the handling of this point of view could be very useful for adequate reflections on the world under the conditions of globalization and thereby also for finding some approaches to reduction the negative effects of globalization.