Man in the World or Man against the World? : Jean-Paul Sartre, Karel Kosik and Practical Materialism
Abstract
The evolution of Marxist theory in the course of the 20th century was characterized, among other things, by the opening up of Marxism to other currents of thought. One such confluence occurred between Marxism and existentialism.
Thanks to their humanistic interpretations of Marxism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Karel Kosík are usually seen as leading representatives of this interface. Both emphasize the social situation of man in their theoretical approaches, but at the same time also give consideration to the uniqueness of his experience and practical relation to the world.
This study will try to show that, though Sartre and Kosík share a number of motifs in their work, they cannot be said to belong to the same line of thought. They might converge, that is to say, but they started from opposite directions.
Kosík opens Marxism up to ideas from existentialism while solving them on the soil of practical materialism; Sartre, though accepting Marxist social theory, still holds to existentialist assumptions in which the individual is situated against the world and their social environment.