Yan Yan: An Analysis and Appraisal of Kosík’s Marxist Outlook on Reality
Marx pointed out in his Theses on Feuerbach: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." [1] This assertion does not imply that "interpreting the world" is incorrect, but rather that an interpretation divorced from "changing the world" is one-sided. On the issue of the unity of theory and reality, the key lies not in the exquisiteness of the theory itself, but in how the theory corresponds to reality. This requires answering three questions: What is reality? How do we understand reality? How do we change reality? In recent years, many scholars have conducted detailed inquiries into Marx's concept of reality, yet "in terms of philosophical theory, Marx's concept of reality—that is, Marx's fundamental way of grasping 'reality'—remains largely obscured and unclear." [2] Looking at existing research, scholars primarily clarify the origins of Marx's concept of reality from the perspective of German Classical Philosophy; few have discussed the fundamental insights of foreign Marxist theorists on this issue. In his Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on the Problems of Man and World, the Czech Neo-Marxist theorist Karel Kosík provided a penetrating analysis of Marx's concept of reality. However, for a long time, the academic community has focused more on his discourses on "concreteness" and "totality," failing to place the concept of reality at the center of the book. As the subtitle of the work suggests, the focus here is not on an abstract dialectics of nature, but on a socio-historical dialectic related to the practice of the subject. Its fundamental purpose is to restore the critical and revolutionary nature of Marxism by elucidating the "concreteness" and "totality" of the dialectic, thereby resolving the problem of human alienation. It is precisely here that dialectics establishes a close connection with reality: the world people face is reality, and dialectics is the only tool that allows people to correctly understand and change reality. Since capitalist society is alienated, the sublation of alienated reality must reveal the essence of things through the dialectics of the concrete total, allowing truth to be continuously generated and presented. Elucidating Kosík's view of reality not only helps expand and deepen our understanding of Marx's concept of reality but also assists in correctly viewing and critiquing capitalist society at the level of reality, strengthening our "Four Confidences" in socialism with Chinese characteristics, and promoting the continuous improvement and development of Chinese-path modernization.
I. What is "Reality"?
In Kosík's view, dialectics is not an abstract method; its basic function lies in revealing the essence of things in a roundabout way, thereby changing social reality. Reality not only prescribes the form and function of the dialectic but also determines its goals and values. The subtext here is that if reality becomes problematic (for instance, becoming an alienated reality), then dialectics is highly likely to degenerate into a false ideology; conversely, if one can strive to clarify and restore the revolutionary essence of dialectics within an alienated reality, it can also become a sharp tool for changing reality and leading people out of alienation.
What is reality? Kosík distinguishes between two ways of viewing reality: "one view considers reality as a concrete totality, i.e., a structured, ongoing, and self-forming whole" [3], while the other view regards totality as the sum of all facts. The flaw in the latter view is the assumption that facts will always overflow the boundaries of reality and that human knowledge can never encompass all facts, which inevitably pushes people into the abyss of agnosticism. Kosík never blindly negates facts or affirms reality; instead, he emphasizes that reality is abstract if divorced from facts. Therefore, the correct approach is to realize the interconnection of the two, which requires understanding facts as structural components of the dialectical whole rather than as immutable, irreducible elements. Based on this understanding, dialectics cannot be an all-encompassing "treasure chest" capable of knowing all facts, but can only be a "theory of reality as a concrete totality" [3]. More precisely, dialectics is a theory aimed at critiquing and changing reality. As the Yugoslav "Praxis School" theorist Mihailo Marković stated, "Dialectics is concerned not with how things exist, but with how things can be produced, sublated, and further developed through man. Dialectics is not pure knowledge, i.e., a 'methodology,' but a critique of knowledge and reality." [4] Kosík's understanding of the concrete totality and reality benefited primarily from the intellectual legacy of Lukács, who also advocated for the distinction between facts and reality and proposed that "the concrete totality is the category of true reality" [5]. In Lukács's view, for the knowledge of facts to become the knowledge of reality, facts must be examined as moments of historical development placed within the structure of totality: "Only in this context, where the isolated facts of social life are viewed as moments of historical development and reduced to a totality, can knowledge of the facts become knowledge of reality." [5]
As Hegel pointed out in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right: "Whatever is real is necessary in itself. Necessity consists in the whole being partitioned into the different concepts and in this divided whole possessing a lasting and solid determinacy, which however is not dead but perpetually produces itself in its dissolution." [6] Hegel's concept of reality has two core components: first, necessity, which emphasizes that reality involves essence and laws; second, process, which emphasizes that reality is constantly developing and changing. However, as Lukács correctly pointed out, it is precisely on the view of reality that Marx parted ways with Hegel; the latter failed to overcome the opposition between thinking and being, theory and practice, subject and object, even failing to surpass Kant at critical junctures. [5] Kosík also emphasized that "reality is a structured, evolving, and self-forming whole" [3]. Starting from this, he directed his critical spearhead at Karl Popper’s "piecemeal engineering." Popper opposed all holism, believing that "it is impossible for us to observe or describe the whole world or the whole of nature" [7], because when studying something, people can only select certain aspects of it. Kosík believed Popper's "theory of limited selection" was groundless. Its fundamental problem lies in equating totality with the sum of facts; once this is done, one arrives at the conclusion that "the view of the concrete totality is mysticism." Starting from the premise that "human knowledge can never encompass all facts," Popper attempted to convince people that holism is a form of mysticism, arguing that to avoid agnosticism, one must adopt "piecemeal engineering." Working from the concrete totality, Kosík argued that Popper conflated facts with reality, which not only hinders the understanding of reality but also falls into uncritical fetishism and mysticism. Kosík's critique of Popper represents the intellectual orientation of the entire East European Neo-Marxist movement. Like Western Marxism, East European Neo-Marxism tended toward a humanist Marxism and advocated for a critique of all forms of positivism that one-dimensionally pursue "factuality."
Overall, Kosík leaned toward a dialectical view of the relationship between facts and reality, emphasizing that the two are interdependent and mutually supportive. On the surface, it seems reality is superior to facts, because facts can only be understood within the structural totality of reality. However, Kosík also emphasized: "Making the whole into a substance, and preferring the whole over the parts (facts), is a path leading to a false totality rather than a concrete totality." [3] That is to say, once totality is allowed to override facts, or if totality and facts are viewed in isolation—emphasizing the whole while ignoring the facts—one falls into subjectivism. In fact, an important reason why Popper and others criticized holism and historical determinism was their conviction that the latter would lead to totalitarianism in politics and ideas. Kosík disagreed with Popper's view; on the one hand, he emphasized that totality is closely linked to revolution, while on the other, he was soberly aware that a false totality could lead to totalitarianism. In short, Kosík believed that historical trends must be based on facts; once they are allowed to overstep their bounds and become independent forces, they regress to a reality of a lower grade than empirical facts. Here, Kosík was hinting, on the one hand, that Hegel's philosophy of history possessed totalitarian qualities, and on the other, that capitalist society is a lower-level reality.
Distinguishing facts from reality and viewing reality as a concrete totality does not mean reality can be automatically grasped, as people may still fall into an oppositional mode of thinking between subject and object. The crux of the matter lies in whether reality is understood through human practice, because "as long as man is intuited fundamentally or merely as an object within a total framework, and as long as the importance of man as the subject of objective-historical practice is not recognized, social reality is not treated as a concrete totality." [3] Consequently, the question of "what reality is" transforms into the question of "how reality is formed," and the generation of reality contains "a revolutionary concept concerning society and man." [3] However, Kosík encountered a new historical dilemma: the proletariat did not break through reified consciousness to become the revolutionary subject as Lukács had envisioned. This meant people could neither understand reality nor change it. Kosík identified the root of the problem as the individual being captured by a "bad totality," falling into the "world of the pseudo-concrete" and "utilitarian practice," and he looked to the dialectics of the concrete totality to clear the fog and reshapetrue reality.
In summary, Kosík's view of reality can be summarized in three points: First, the distinction between reality and facts, the belief that dialectics is the method for grasping reality, and the emphasis that facts can only be grasped within the reality of the concrete totality. Second, the emphasis that reality without humans is false; divorced from humans and their cognition, both reality and the knowledge of reality are incomplete. That is, reality can only be human reality; it is humans who create human reality, and only humans can understand and change reality. Third, understanding reality through human practice, believing that utilitarian practice obscures the essence of reality, leaving people immersed in the level of factuality and phenomena. This understanding not only directs the critique of reality toward revolution but also reveals an extremely important truth: the reason reality can be known and changed by dialectics is that reality is constructed by human practical activities. In short, Kosík believed that reality is superior to simple existence (現存); it is not merely environment and conditions, but the unity of events and the subject. It implies both the continuous generation of events and the subject's continuous transcendence of the environment. Only the dialectics of the concrete totality can correctly understand and grasp reality, leading humanity toward emancipation and freedom.
II. Negative Factors Hindering Humanity's Grasp of "Reality"
The reason Kosík emphasized that reality must be grasped in a roundabout way stems not only from a unique understanding of reality but also from an awareness of the alienated reality of capitalist society. In his view, there are various factors and forces in capitalist society that prevent people from recognizing and grasping reality. If their influence is not fundamentally eliminated, reality cannot be understood or changed.
First, the world of pseudoconcreteness as a world of false autonomy. Although Kosík repeatedly claims that the core function of dialectics is to cognize and transform reality, he often discusses this point on a normative level. Facing the alienated reality of capitalist society, Kosík discovers that the subject has been replaced by an autonomous coercive structure, causing that which was originally the object and target of human practice to invert into a subject standing over and above humanity. The world of false autonomy is the world of pseudoconcreteness; it is the familiar world of everyday life. Yet, as Hegel’s maxim "the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively known" [7] suggests, people often know nothing of the essence of this world. Kosík distinguishes between two types of practice: one is fetishized utilitarian practice, which allows humans to survive in the world but conceals the essence of things and causes people to forget the meaning of life. The spiritual atmosphere it creates is characterized by "immediacy," "self-evidence," and "naturalness," the consequence of which is to make people believe they are facing a natural, unchangeable world. The other is active, truly genuine practice that is self-generating within history—"that is, it is a unity of man and world, matter and spirit, subject and object, product and production, in the process of constant renewal and establishment." [9] (p. 170) Dialectics, as a method for grasping reality, is essentially critical and revolutionary, which means it opposes the pseudoconcreteness and false autonomy of the world of everyday life. although Kosík regards the world of everyday life as a world of phenomena and argues that philosophy aims to reveal the essence and laws of things, he opposes discarding phenomena to pursue essence directly; if people view phenomenon and essence as two different grades of things, they fall into a Platonic dualism. In this sense, reality is neither pure phenomenon nor an abstract essence isolated from phenomenon, but rather the unity of the two. What is "false autonomy"? As the name implies, it is not independence or autonomy in the true sense, but a superficial autonomy originating from the subject's misrecognition of alienated reality. That is to say, it is not that reality possesses autonomy, but that human individuals engaged in utilitarian practice misrecognize reality as possessing autonomy. Kosík points out that when people face the phenomena of everyday life, they always believe they have insight into the essence of things and consider the world and its essence to possess a naturalness and autonomy independent of human will. This fundamental misrecognition actually conflates objectivity with autonomy. Dialectics never denies that the existence of the material world and its phenomena is objective, but it emphasizes that this objectivity is confirmed through the mediation of human practice. Therefore, the seemingly independent and autonomous world is precisely derivative, and its claim to autonomy is false. The key is to understand reality starting from practice, thereby shattering the false autonomy of the everyday world. In doing so, "the various reified forms of the objective and conceptual worlds disappear, losing their fixed and natural character as well as their false primordiality, appearing instead as derivative and mediated phenomena, and as the sedimentations and artifacts of human social practice." [9] (pp. 8-9) Unlike fetishized utilitarian practice, genuine practice is revolutionary and critical; it does not pursue absolute truth but allows truth to be constantly generated. Once people turn from utilitarian practice toward genuine practice, the world of pseudoconcreteness will collapse.
Second, determinism and reductionism in epistemology. As mentioned previously, Kosík believes that false autonomy does not originate from the nature of objective things but from the alienated subject’s misrecognition of the reified world. He finds that the alienated subject is always inclined toward elementarism and reductionism in its way of thinking; therefore, eliminating the influence of these two erroneous theoretical tendencies in epistemology becomes the key to cognizing and transforming reality. According to traditional views, materialism and idealism represent two diametrically opposed epistemological lines: materialism insists on the path from object to sensation and thought, while idealism insists on the path from thought and sensation to the object. However, in Kosík’s view, "every epistemology explicitly or implicitly rests on some theory of reality and presupposes a certain concept of reality" [9] (p. 17). That is to say, even if people adhere to a materialist epistemological line, if they follow a form of reductionism, the theory remains abstract and reality remains unknowable. In everyday thinking, reductionism and elementarism are always entangled: reductionism tends to reduce complex things to a certain simple element, and once complex things are viewed as a mere collection of elements, they inevitably move toward reductionism. According to Kosík, "reductionism presupposes a rigid substance and some invariant elements that cannot be further reduced, to which all kinds of phenomena can ultimately be reduced." [9] (p. 17) The fundamental crux of reductionism lies in severing individuality from universality, resulting in abstract universality on one end and abstract individuality on the other. Individuality and universality appear opposed on the surface but are actually unified. As Hegel noted, "the individual through his own deed places himself in the universal element of existing reality, or rather, he makes himself the universal element of existing reality; his deed, even according to the meaning he gives it, should have the value of a universal order." [14] (p. 246) People often think that as long as they maintain dynamism and flux, dialectics can become a revolutionary method. But for Kosík, the problem is not setting the substance in motion, but whether the theory remains, at its core, a "nothing but" reductionist way of thinking. "Dialectics is not a method of reduction, but a method of the spiritual and intellectual reproduction of society, a method for the unfolding and interpretation of social phenomena based on the objective activity of historical man." [9] (pp. 22-23) Kosík’s understanding of dialectics and the concept of reality carries a certain phenomenological flavor. He realizes that "idealism as the spirit of ontology and materialism as the matter of ontology are in principle the same thing; they are products of speculation" [15] (p. 6). Therefore, reality must never be understood as an abstract substance or ontology. Reality can only be truly grasped by people when it exists as an objective [8] presence—on the one hand captured by human consciousness, and on the other hand mediated by human practice. It should be said that Kosík profoundly grasped the "post-metaphysical" implications of Marx’s philosophy and consciously transformed the phenomenology of spirit and consciousness in Western philosophy into social and historical phenomenology.
Third, the world of acquisition and manipulation. The world of pseudoconcreteness not only makes people abandon the pursuit of the meaning of life, but also causes human practice to degenerate into acquisitive activity, which then forms a system of manipulation over the subject. Essentially, acquisition is the product of abstract labor and reflects a fetishized practice. On the surface, the subject seems able to cognize and change reality through acquisitive activities, but in fact, the subject is instead captured by the "apparatus" (system of equipment) in this process; the object, to the subject, is merely a ready-made, incomprehensible, and irrational thing. "Acquisition is the practical behavior of man in a ready-made, given world; it is equivalent to maintaining and manipulating tools in a certain world, but it is by no means a process of forming the human world." [9] (p. 49) Through acquisitive activity, people cannot truly grasp reality because reality appears as a ready-made, incomprehensible world of abstract utility where everything is meaningless, or rather, things only have meaning when they become objects to be manipulated. As for the human individual, they also turn into an object of manipulation at this point, only able to prove their own meaning and value through abstract labor. Therefore, acquisition means that manipulation and abstract universality occupy the dominant position. If Heidegger believed that the subject inevitably falls into "submergedness" [9] and lifelong "anxiety" [10], Kosík regards anxiety as the entanglement of the individual in social relations and believes that as long as existing social relations are changed, one can escape the alienated mode of existence. It is easy to see that Heidegger’s existentialist philosophy tends to solidify the existing state of affairs and is thus conservative; Kosík’s critical theory emphasizes the realization of human freedom and liberation through concrete dialectics and is thus radical and revolutionary.
Fourth, the familiar world of everyday life. For Kosík, the world of pseudoconcreteness is the world of everyday life. The "everyday" is every single day; it usually manifests as a familiar world where all human activities are subconscious, instinctive, and unreflective. Kosík never believes that people can easily escape the everyday, but the problem is that the everyday possesses inertia and interchangeability: not only can each everyday day be replaced by another, but even the subject of everyday life can be replaced by another subject. Consequently, the everyday world is left with nothing but numbers and symbols. Kosík believes that the most conservative aspect of the everyday lies in its concealment of the essence of things, which distances people from history and causes life to lose its meaning. To put it popularly, everyday life always tends toward alienation. Like Agnes Heller, Kosík saw the connection between the everyday and history, believing that without history the everyday would become hollow, and without the everyday history would become absurd. Regarding the understanding and grasping of reality, although the everyday—as the phenomenal layer of reality—conceals the essence, the essence of reality can only be revealed through the description of the phenomenal world by the everyday. Kosík reminds us that the everyday world does not automatically manifest the essence; therefore, one must destroy pseudoconcreteness through revolutionary change, reveal its connection with fetishism, and fully expose the cruelty of alienated reality. Unlike Heller, who advocated escaping the alienation of everyday life through existential choice, Kosík believed that existential choice only changes the individual's attitude toward the world without truly changing the world, and thus is not the most appropriate way to sublate [11] alienation. In his essay Socialism and the Crisis of Modern Man, Kosík offers another way out: "In Czechoslovakia today, there exists a humanistic socialism for which people struggle tirelessly to create; it is a revolutionary, humanistic, and emancipatory alternative to a system of universal manipulation." [16] (p. 67) How then is humanistic socialism to be realized? Kosík’s view on this issue is quite comprehensive: on the one hand, he emphasizes the importance of proletarian revolution and the reform of the social system; on the other hand, he believes that philosophy, especially dialectics, plays an important role, emphasizing that "dialectics, revolutionary character, critique, and humanism become precisely the constituent parts of socialism." [16] (p. 72)
(5) The Economic System and the "Economic Man" Hypothesis. Kosík discovers that in modern society, the positions of subject and object have been inverted: "the subject is abstracted from his subjectivity and becomes an object and an element of the system. Man becomes a unit in a law-like system determined by his function." [9] (p. 63) It is precisely this point that directly leads to the failure of the project to cognize and change reality. Why does the subject transform into an object? Is it a proactive choice or a passive acceptance for the subject? How can the alienated subject regain their status as a subject? Like Lukács, Kosík believes the inversion of subject and object is a phenomenon of alienation deeply rooted in the capitalist system, "reflecting the true deformation of man caused by capitalism" [9] (p. 63). Kosík believes that the deformed man under the capitalist system is the so-called "economic man" (homo economicus), which is an important invention of bourgeois economics. The economic system and "economic man" exist in an inseparable relationship: "economic man" is an indispensable element for maintaining the operation of the system, while the system creates a specific economic atmosphere that causes the subject to degenerate into "economic man." Unlike idealists, Kosík did not attribute the root of alienation to ideas or categories, but practiced emphasizing that alienation comes from the reality of capitalist society—the economic system. "Once entering the realm of economy, man is transformed. As soon as he enters economic relations, he is dragged into environments and law-like relations independent of his will and consciousness" [9] (p. 66). It can be seen that the inversion of subject and object is not something the subject does willingly, but is the result of objective material forces in operation. Yet the paradox lies in the fact that, during this transformation process, the subject offers no resistance whatsoever because they believe that the objective world and its social relations are natural and unchangeable. In other words, in capitalist society, the concealment of essence by phenomena is deep-seated and not easily perceived: "this concealment is possible because in capitalist society, the human environment—especially economic categories—presents itself directly and necessarily before him in an objective form; the objective form conceals the fact that they are categories of relations between man and man." [11] (p. 63)
Furthermore, Kosík reveals to us the secret of the "economic man" (homo economicus) hypothesis in classical economics. In its essence, the "economic man" serves the capitalist economic system; it is the system itself that produces the "economic man." "Economy is a vital atmosphere with a tendency to change man into an economic man, to drag man into an objective mechanism of conquering and transforming man."14 Although classical economics exposed the manipulation of human beings by the economic system at an objective level, it used the "economic man" to conceal this systemic manipulation. It failed to correctly reveal the real roots of alienation and subsequently fell into the ideology of the world of objectness [12]. Like Marx, Kosík believes that the Romantics also failed to truly penetrate the secret of classical economics. While they opposed the "economic man" and the system, attempting to restore human wholeness, this wholeness was false, patriarchal, and insufficiently developed. In Marx's words, it was a primitive richness where human capacities were confined within a narrow locality [13]. It is evident that while Kosík opposes the manipulation of humans by the economic system, he simultaneously acknowledges that this manipulation is a great advantage of modernity. Therefore, the correct approach should be to change reality and overthrow the system, rather than simply declaring the system illegitimate and advocating for a retreat into pre-modern society. "Romanticism despises the system and despises abstraction, forgetting that the problem of man, of his freedom and his concreteness, is always a relationship to the system."14 In essence, as a part of reality, man must both exist within the system and transcend it.
(6) The fallacy of economic determinism. Factor theory, reductionism, and the economic system intertwine to facilitate the emergence of economic determinism. Lukács once understood the core of Marxism as the totalizing method rather than the principle of economic primacy; while this move ensured the revolutionary nature of Marxism to a certain extent, it came at the cost of a retreat toward idealism. For a long time, people have been caught in a contradictory position on this issue. Kosík’s brilliance lies in combining the totalizing method with the principle of economic primacy. His fundamental view is that Marxism is not economic determinism, but rather economic structural determinism. The latter is not only consistent with the totalizing method but takes it as its fundamental prerequisite. In Kosík’s view, it is precisely capitalist society that creates economic determinism. The fundamental problem with this theory lies in ahistorically regarding a certain factor as a decisive independent variable, which is an entirely metaphysical approach. Marxism is undoubtedly a form of determinism, and it emphasizes the role of the economy, but it must be noted that Marxism is by no means linear determinism or narrow economic determinism. On the one hand, it views society as a whole determined by economic structures; on the other hand, it maintains that humans can influence and change these economic structures through practical activity (practice). Fundamentally, historical materialism does not only focus on "social beings" but goes behind "things" to explore the roots of social reality. This involves the subject and its consciousness. "The reason why the economy has primacy is not because certain human creations are more real than others, but because practice and labor hold a central position in the process of constructing reality."14 Because practice and labor in capitalist society are alienated, reality degenerates into a world of objects that people cannot control. In this process, the subject is inverted into an object and left at the mercy of the economic system. Thus, in capitalist society, reality becomes the economy, the economy becomes economic factors, and man becomes "economic man." Kosík believes that "materialist philosophy poses a revolutionary question: How is social reality formed?"14 The correct answer to this question is that social reality must never be reduced to a fixed, unchanging object; social reality can only be the result of human practical activity. Therefore, man is the core of social reality.
III. Limitations of Kosík’s Dialectics and Concept of Reality
Kosík’s understanding of dialectics and the concept of reality reflects the "problematic" of the entire Eastern European Neo-Marxist movement. Its core view is that philosophy (dialectics) must be able to recognize and change reality, which aligns with Marx’s understanding of dialectics. However, this theory still contains three defects.
First, Kosík’s understanding of dialectics and the concept of reality does not exceed the horizons of Western Marxists like Lukács. Its core remains a form of "thought determinism" and "revolutionary consciousness." The merit of this view is the inclusion of the subject and practice into the understanding of dialectics, thereby restoring its critical and revolutionary nature. Yet the defect is equally obvious: the analysis of capitalist contradictions unconsciously takes on a strong tinge of subjectivism because "over-exaggerating the concept of practice can lead to its opposite: falling back into idealistic intuitionism."16 This defect is fully exposed when Kosík maintains that the dialectics of the concrete total can break through the world of pseudo-concreteness.
Second, Kosík and other Eastern European Neo-Marxists have a serious bias in their understanding of socialist society. They tend to examine the differences between the two systems from a binary opposition perspective, failing to see the continuity and commonality between them. Specifically, Eastern European Neo-Marxists tend to view capitalist society and Soviet socialist society as opposites, believing that neither managed to eliminate alienation; they opposed both capitalism and Soviet socialism. However, in the author's view, the "humanistic socialism" yearned for by Kosík and others is merely a simple negation of capitalism and Soviet socialism. Before the logic of capital has completely exited the stage, and while the capitalist mode of production can still accommodate new productive forces, such a vision cannot be realized in reality. The greatest drawback of this understanding is that it ignores the diversity of socialist development paths and fails to understand the true meaning of Marx's statement that "alienation and the supersession of alienation follow the same path." The great practice of socialism with Chinese characteristics demonstrates that Chinese-path modernization can effectively regulate and guide capital, fully utilize market elements, and thereby avoid "the manipulation of man by the system." Kosík only saw that socialism should move toward humanization and democratization, but ignored that this transition is not an external transcendence of capitalist modernity. Rather, it should inherit all the achievements of civilization from capitalist society and achieve true transcendence from within. In this regard, Kosík's views carry a utopian color.
Finally, Kosík’s critique of capitalist society does not strike the vital point. Although he directs his critique at the economic system, he fails to further reveal that the logic of capital is the mastermind manipulating the system behind the scenes. "The logic of capital is a logic of being-for-itself, self-multiplication, and self-centeredness. Individuals and even the whole of society appear as means and tools for the appreciation of capital value, while the self-valorization of capital appears as the highest goal of individual and social life."22 In fact, the "false autonomy," "inversion of subject and object," "economic determinism and reductionism," and the "manipulation of man by the system" that Kosík critiques are all results of the logic of capital proliferating in modern society. It is precisely because he failed to grasp this key link that Kosík’s understanding of reality remains insufficiently precise. This not only directly leads to his theoretical entanglement in subjectivism but also forces him toward pessimism, entrusting human liberation to a radical break with current society—that is, "depending on an entirely different foundation, and requiring an absolutely different conceptualization of man, nature, truth, and history."21 Kosík’s pessimism is particularly prominent in his commentary on Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk. Hašek attempted to use Švejk’s grotesque behavior to prove the absurdity of the system, but Kosík intends to show that although Švejk’s resistance to the system is admirable, he did not truly defeat the system; he only gave a glimmer of hope to people in despair.
In summary, Kosík’s Marxist view of reality accurately distinguishes between facts and reality, phenomenon and essence. His critique of capitalist society is sharp and hits the mark. His understanding of dialectics differs from Soviet dogmatic Marxism, providing a new way of thinking for reflecting on the issues of the subject and practice. However, it should also be noted that Eastern European Neo-Marxism, like Western Marxism, has tendencies toward subjectivism, utopianism, and pessimism in its understanding of core issues. This stems both from a narrow understanding of capitalist society and from inherent prejudices against socialist society. The theoretical gains and losses of this movement still merit reflection today.