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Marxism and existentialism in state socialist Czechoslovakia

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Abstract

Existentialism became one of the most fashionable philosophical currents in postwar Czechoslovakia. Whereas the orthodox Marxism of the 1950s, following Lukács’s Marxism or existentialism?, hastily condemned existentialism as an offshoot of bourgeois idealism, Marxists of the 1960s viewed existentialism as a philosophical current that deserved, at the least, serious examination. During the subsequent era of Czechoslovak “real” socialism of the 1970s and 1980s, existentialism was, as a result, interpreted as one of the sources of the 1968 “counterrevolution.” This article maps and analyzes the official Marxist reception of existentialism in the course of the Stalinist, post-Stalinist and so-called real socialist periods of Czechoslovak history. However, its main focus is on the post-Stalinist period, when Czechoslovak philosophy benefited from a lively debate between Marxism and existentialism. Some participants in this debate considered existentialism to be an important rival to Marxism, one that posed the very same questions yet offered slightly different answers. At the center of the polemics lay the existentialist categories of being, existence, and freedom.

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Notes

  1. Translated into Slovak in 1950 (Bratislava: Tatran) and Czech in 1951 (Prague: Život práce).

  2. This was a review of F. H. Heinemann’s Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New York: A. & C. Black, 1953), in which the author soberly reported the author’s inquiry as a search for an adequate bulwark against the offensive of Marxism.

  3. Patočka’s text was in fact devoted to existentialism in general.

  4. For an analysis of the different currents of thought within Czechoslovak post-Stalinist Marxism, see Mervart and Růžička 2020.

  5. In his interpretation of Sartre, Ján Bodnár, a Slovak philosopher, adds that reflection itself becomes a complete mystery in this conception, because it is difficult to explain how something material (the objective, external world) can reflect and thus establish a real connection with something that is of a completely different nature (the subjective nature of consciousness) (Bodnár 1967b, p. 187).

  6. It should be noted that Czechoslovak Marxists based their evaluation of Sartre’s work primarily on his famous Being and Nothingness, more or less leaving aside his other great philosophical work, Critique of Dialectical Reason. This “omission” is, of course, deliberate and stems from their conviction that Sartre has not changed his view of human existence (compared to Being and Nothingness) much and has remained essentially enclosed within a phenomenological-interpretive horizon. To what extent this interpretation is justified remains a question that we cannot, for lack of space, address in depth here.

  7. The Czech philosopher Josef Zumr recalls that in the late 1950s and early 1960s he and Karel Kosík participated in a private seminar of Patočka’s, where they read Heidegger’s Being and Time (Zumr et al. 2018, pp. 347–348).

  8. For this topic, see also Mervart and Růžička (2020, pp. 102–103).

  9. Here, we especially have in mind the first and third theses as well as Marx’s famous reflections on human being as a “species being” from the fragment on “estranged labour” in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (Marx 1975a, pp. 275–277; 1975b, pp. 3–5). As a side note, we are not evaluating the justifiability of this connection. It is of course problematic mainly because even for the early Marx, consciousness is a product of sensory activity, not its driving force.

  10. It has to be noted that such a direct fusion of Marxism and Heidegger was without precedent at this time and it foreshadowed a slow Heideggerization of many representatives of Czech and Slovak Marxist humanism.

  11. This was a lecture given at the World Congress of Philosophy held in Mexico City in 1963, where Kosík presented some of the theses from Dialectics of the Concrete.

  12. Whereas this fact did not lead Hermach and Dubská to stop considering themselves to be Marxists, Michňák openly declared himself to have abandoned Marxism in 1968 (Kroupa 2017, pp. 233–234).

  13. Vyjádření k tematickému číslu věnovanému M. Heideggerovi. Archiv akademie věd, f. Filosofický ústav ČSAV, inv. č. 163, sign. 721, Filosofický časopis 1955–1970).

  14. The figure of Schwarz (13 January 1915, Zurich – 26 September 1968, Bratislava) is deserving of further research.

  15. Hrzal and Netopilík 1971, pp. 347–352.

  16. A comprehensive and basically authoritative interpretation of all these negative features of existentialism, which, however, is mainly focused on the works of Karel Kosík, is given in the chapter “Existential-anthropological revision of Marxism-Leninism” (see Hrzal and Netopilík 1975, pp. 149–207). For variations on the erroneous approach to science in Kierkegaard and Heidegger, see Pecen 1973.

  17. See, for example, a review on Tordai’s book devoted to Sartre (Egrzisztencia és valóság), which refers to it as an informed and not simplistic critique (Pražák 1971); see also the study devoted, among others, to existentialism in the USA (Jana Dubská-Novozámská 1970); or a critical but informative text by a Russian author, Tavrizjan 1977.

  18. See in particular the extensive monographs by Czech and several Russian authors, Zdeněk Javůrek: 1976.

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  1. Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, Jilská 1, 110 00, Prague, Czechia

    Jiří Růžička & Jan Mervart

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Růžička, J., Mervart, J. Marxism and existentialism in state socialist Czechoslovakia. Stud East Eur Thought 75, 399–416 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-022-09493-y

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