Between Heaven and Dirt
On Political Animals, Apolitical Gods, and Karel Kosík
On March 2, 2024 I took part in an event at the Casa della Cultura in Milan commemorating the legacy Karel Kosík, a Czech Marxist humanist philosopher who had passed away just over twenty years before. I reflected on a lesser-known aspect of Kosík’s work, an implicit political theology he elaborated in occasional references to the relationship between the human being and God. The following text is adapted from the talk I gave there.
In 1963 the Czech philosopher-critic Karel Kosík published a short book called Dialectics of the Concrete. This dense and abstract investigation of Marxist political economy became an instant bestseller in Czechoslovakia, where readers saw in it philosophical grounding for the political reforms that had begun to sweep over the country. More slowly, after translations into Italian (1965), Spanish (1967), German (1967), Japanese (1969), and at least ten other languages (English late among them, in 1976), it came as close as critical social philosophy comes (short of Marcuse or Žižek) to an international sensation. What Kosík himself claimed to be doing was both more and less modest than the philosophy of democratic socialism that his readers were looking for: while he left the immediate political implications of the book for the most part implicit, he promised an investigation into the very nature of “the human being and its place in the universe or, in other words: […] the totality of the world uncovered in history by the human being, and the human existing in the totality of the world.”[1]
In investigating the nature of the human, Kosík put forth the then-orthodox Marxist position that what “distinguishes the human being from the beast” is “work,” but he immediately clarified that this applies only if work is “conceived in the broad sense of creating.”[2] Though beasts may “work” in a more limited sense, humans also create.
But this raises a second problem, to which Kosík points in an apparent non sequitur: “God does not work, though he creates.”[3] He has just been speaking of “beasts,” and now suddenly he turns to God. As if an appeal to God were necessary for an understanding of the human. That the human being does more than God is offered by Kosík as evidence that the human being is more than an ordinary animal. If the human is set apart from animals by the power of creation, the human is set apart from God by the power of work. Beasts only work, while God only creates, but “the human both creates and works.”[4]
In anchoring his humanism in a kind of negative theology, Kosík stepped into a longstanding intellectual tradition. It is one of the ironic regularities of modern European philosophy that humanism and materialism repeatedly lead back to conceptualizations of spirit and gods. It seems that in order to carve out a place in the world for humans, we are compelled to confront the non-human entities that vie for our attention on the social stage. No materialist theory of society is complete if it isn’t also a theory of the immaterial things that live with us in every human society. The search for a human subject takes us negatively through the possibility of divine and bestial subjects. A theory of the human is also a theory of the animal and a theory of divinity.
Kosík, in slipping so suddenly from beasts to God, may have been referencing a passage in Aristotle’s Politics. Just after the famous assertion the human being is “a political animal,” which is to say an animal that lives in a political community, or a polis, Aristotle observed that “he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.”[5] In other words, Aristotle’s argument for human specificity applies equally when looking up or down. A person without a polis is either below humanity or above it, and for Aristotle’s political theory it doesn’t much matter which. Politics is not the business of the immortals or the all-too-mortals, who live a kind of barely human life. The political animal, Aristotle seems to suggest, must renounce the eternal life of gods in order to step out from the crowd of mere animals and live the time-bound life of politics.
For Aristotle, politics had no more business looking to the heavens than it had looking into the dirt; it was as unconcerned with those who were too good for the polis as it was for those excluded from it, such as animals, women, foreigners, and slaves. Political theory was to be neither theology, nor biology, nor economics (oikonomia, the science of household management). Yet since the time of Aristotle, the greatest political struggles have been attempts to bring into politics the basic material questions and the grand spiritual questions that Aristotle tried to exclude. In a certain sense, the field of political theory, which Aristotle founded, has been a continual struggle between the defense of political purity on the one hand (the attempt to theorize politics as a sphere of its own, whose autonomous laws must be preserved from external threats), and a range of challenges, from biopolitics and political theology to socialist humanism that sought a politics of the integral, creative human being in the totality of life.
Kosík makes a move similar to Aristotle’s, but with a twist that opens political philosophy rather than enclosing it in the walls of the polis. The human being, for Kosík, is not distinguished merely by being in a polis, but by working in a polis. Still more specifically, the human being is not distinguished merely by working, as a certain tradition of Marxism might have it, but by working and creating. As Kosík explains, he understands “work” not only as labor exploited in capitalist society, where the work process has been severed from the creative process, but as a more general category that includes all processes by which the human practically creates the social world. The dialectics of labor consists in the contradiction between exploitable work and unexploited creation. Both exist as potentialities of human work. Exploited labor is a contemporary reality; unexploited creation may be liberated by socialism. Insofar as people engage only in exploited labor, they are little more than animals; insofar as they create, they are something more. But because they do not create in a detached realm of absolute freedom, they are not gods.
Because the creation of the social world occurs within a social structure—and Kosík calls this structure of creation “economics”[6]—we might say that human creativity is made into “work” by the fact that the human creator, unlike animals or gods, belongs to a polis. Animals may make things, and gods may be said to create, but only humans make things within social structures that are continually debated and refashioned by politics. By the same token, it follows that “human” is whatever acts within political structures, because these structures determine what is socially considered to have achieved humanity.
But because, in Kosík’s understanding, human work creates the entire social world, his humanism is not an attempt to limit politics to what the polis considers politically appropriate; it is an attempt to extend politics into all things humanly made. By the same move, Kosík’s Marxist analysis of economics becomes an analysis of culture. Economics, for him, is “the sum of social relations that people enter into in production,” which means that society as such is “formed by economic structure.”[7] This is not a reduction of everything social to the economic, but an expansion of the economic into everything social. The economy is not merely one aspect of society alongside other aspects like “politics” or “culture”; it is the structure of the production of human reality. Culture and politics are created by the same process that creates material goods.
Because there is a single process with a single subject who creates both culture and economy, “the human being” becomes the hero of a single story about the creation of reality. Kosík calls this story “historical materialism.” But because historical materialism is a story about how the human being changes, the hero adopts many names. It isn’t enough to declare that abstractly labeled “the human being” makes all social things. The organization of society determines who can be creative, that is, what work is creative work, and what work merely follows directives issue by those in power, in a process that produces things that have no connection to the imaginative powers of their producers.
Since economic structure is also a structure of how reality-making is organized, which determines who has the power to determine how reality is made, the search for a subject of this process is a question of political theory. But since the process of reality-making is temporal, the theory of this process is also a narrative theory.
From this follow two interrelated questions that increasingly occupied Kosík in his later work.
First, he would ask: Who is the human being that, facing challenges to its creativity, lays claim to control over its production, acting in its capacity as a political animal? In Dialectics of the Concrete, Kosík tells us that when capitalist society splits the human being in two, separating economic activity from creative activity, this wounded hero takes the name of “proletariat.”[8] In Kosík’s later works, which turn increasingly from problems of economics to problems of politics, the hero of the materialist historical process increasingly takes the name of “the people.”
Second, Kosík asks: What is the nature of the human’s changing work of creation? In a 1992 essay called “The Century of Grete Samsa,” Kosík refers again to Aristotle, this time explicitly: “Prior to theoretical treatises on tragedy [i.e. the Aristotle’s Poetics] there existed tragedy as poetic work […], but prior to poetic work was the work of the citizens of Athens and the collective work named the polis.”[9] He also reminds us that, according to Plato, poets are engaged in mere mimesis, the mere imitation or representation of reality, while citizens of the polis enact true poiesis, or creation. In other words, he interprets Plato’s notorious banishing of poets from his ideal polity as a preference for authentic political creativity over the merely derivative and representational creativity of epic composition. Citizens in the polis do the real work; poets only reflect imperfectly and inaccurately on what the citizens have accomplished before them.
The exaggerated intolerance of this political metaphysics is rather obvious. One senses that even Plato himself (a great creator of fictitious dialogues that drew inspiration from epic poetry) could not have fully accepted the radical view he put in the mouth of his mimetic representation of Socrates. But Kosík draws attention here, as in several other essays, to something else: not only does poetry encroach on politics and politics on poetry (for better or for worse), but politics is fundamentally poietic, because it is a matter of creating.
Political theory, then, must also be aesthetic theory. Politics unfolds with a logic of poetics. It places characters in narratives, or in what Kosík calls “play.” Political history, Kosík writes in a 1966 essay called “The Individual in History,” can be understood as a “play” that is “open to everyone and to all; […] a play in which the masses and individuals, classes and nations, great personalities and average beings, all partake.”[10] But elsewhere he writes that history can also be a “bizarre political spectacle”[11] that people are called upon only to watch. Politics can be a “a historical drama” whose “lead actor” is “the people-as-citizenry,”[12] or it can be a series of “‘political theaters’ in which professionals put on plays for the people, who have been degraded to a spectating audience and an anonymous public.”[13]
In the last of the articles I’ve just quoted, a reflection on the Prague Spring, Kosík makes a clear dichotomy between two kinds of “actors”: aktéři and herci in Czech, the former referring to people who play an active role in events, and the latter to professional actors who perform on stage and expect people to watch them as an audience.[14] Yet the same text already complicates this schema when Kosík describes the last mass demonstration that took place on Prague’s Wenceslas Square after the suppression of the democratization process of the late 1960s. In March 1969, the people-as-citizenry enacted a “concluding public performance,” which “sounded out as loud mockery of the occupiers and domestic normalizers” (that is, against those who would “normalize” the suppression of socialist democracy).[15] It is as if the performers had suddenly become spectators again, while the audience refused to be passive spectators. Their time spent on stage had prepared them to become critics when they were pushed off stage. They were ready to ridicule the bad acting of the powerful who took over the theater after them.
In these essays Kosík decries overly professionalized theater. He lauds classical theater but still considers it posterior and implicitly inferior to the political theater that preceded it. He acknowledges that God—a fictitious character, as far as historical materialism is concerned—creates, but he shows his preference for humanity, which not only creates, but also works. What should we make, then, of Kosík’s perennial interest in literature, his penchant for invoking fictitious characters in his philosophical work, through whose pages repeatedly walk such figures as the Good Soldier Švejk and Kafka’s Josef K. and Grete Samsa?
This question returns me to the problem of God as creator. In the standard story of historical materialism, it is true that God does not work. But in the Biblical narrative it is quite the contrary. In the world of the book, God works hard for 6 long days, and only then does He rest.
Gods may be fictions, creations of the human mind. And we know well the anti-fetishist critique, drawn from the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim critique of false gods, repurposed by Marxism: things that are only created by people should not be treated as autonomous forces that can control us. Certain agitators came among the ancient Israelites to tell them that idols, made by human hands, were plainly not gods, and they rejoiced in the superior logic of their invisible God, whose divinity could not be easily disproven. It does not seem to have occurred to them—or at least they left no trace of such a doubt in their ancient texts—that their god too could have been made, not by human hands, but by human minds.
But there is something that gods can do precisely because they are fictions, which is to say, because they exist in stories, regardless of whether they exist in heaven or in the obscurity of temple mist. As the anthropological study of totemism reminds us, the same is true of animals. People are prone to creating animal symbols of their social structures because, as Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, “animals are good to think with.”[16] (And anyone who thinks this phenomenon is limited to “primitive” or pre-Christian societies should note the passionate identification of college football fans with their badgers, wolverines, gophers, and Nittany lions.)
The praxis of fictitious characters provides a model for human praxis, a model or a counter-model. Their work authorizes our work, and their rest authorizes rest. Their brutality, banality, and grotesqueness also provokes our resistance to the brutal, the banal, and the grotesque. Their heroism inspires us and their villainy enrages us. Their stories give us a script, which we can then act out and can change in the acting. Their narrative structures give meaning to our history, which is to say, they make history possible at all, by making strings of facts, events, and memories into story.
In Kosík’s essay on “The Century of Grete Samsa,” he takes the troubled sister of Gregor in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” as a symbol of the grotesque quality of the modern age. Even this kind, loving sister, who begins by defending the humanity of her brother-turned-insect, can learn to ignore what has been dehumanized. She overcomes the annoyance of care in order to get on with her still-human life. When humans stick with humans, they blithely look past all inhumanity.
At this point Kosík draws out another ancient Greek concept of community, koinonia, which is not limited to the purely human polis, but evokes “a community of people and gods.”[17] Maybe it’s time to abandon the original attempt to create a purely political community that excludes all beasts and gods. Maybe we should instead be prepared to confront the claims that the inhuman and dehumanized make on our political sphere—as long as we don’t let them take the upper hand and dehumanize us. We might not need gods as gods, but maybe we can take them as characters of our stories, who keep alive the ongoing play between the inevitability of death and the irrepressible desire for immortality, which is also the play of creation with separation from creation, which is at the heart of modern history. Mortals create, but we die. Gods do not die, but they need us to create them as fictions that can survive our deaths.
[1] Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete, trans. Karel Kovanda and James Schmimdt (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976), p. 152–53. Here and elsewhere I have slightly altered the published translation.
[2] Kosík, Dialectics, p. 68.
[3] Kosík, Dialectics, p. 68.
[4] Kosík, Dialectics, p. 68.
[5] Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon, 1885), pp. 4–5, 1253a.
[6] Kosík, Dialectics, p. 64, and elsewhere.
[7] Kosík, Dialectics, p. 64.
[8] Kosík, Dialectics, p. 68.
[9] Karel Kosík, “Století Markéty Samsové,” in Století Markéty Samsové (Prague: Český spisovatel, 1993), pp. 19–20 (full article pp. 11–21).
[10] Karel Kosík, “The Individual and History,” in The Crisis of Modernity, ed. James H. Satterwhite (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), p. 127 (full article pp. pp. 123–134). See also Francesco Tava, “Praxis in Progress: On the Transformations of Kosík’s Thought,” in Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, ed. Joseph Grim Feinberg, Ivan Landa, and Jan Mervart (Leiden: Brill, 2022), pp. 57–74.
[11] Karel Kosík, “Čecháčkové a světáci,” in Poslední eseje, ed. Irena Šnebergová and Josef Zumr (Prague: Filosofia, 2004), pp. 83–4 (full article pp. 83–88).
[12] Karel Kosík, “Událost (Pražské jaro 1968),” in Poslední eseje, ed. Irena Šnebergová and Josef Zumr (Prague: Filosofia, 2004), p. 70 (full article pp. 67–82).
[13] Kosík, “Událost,” p. 70.
[14] Kosík, “Událost,” p. 71.
[15] Kosík, “Událost,” p. 71.
[16] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (London: Merlin, 1964), p. 89.
[17] Kosík, “Století Markéty Samsové,” pp. 20–1.
i love the concept that divine creatures need humans. it's something i often think about, it's a fascinating thought, especially as someone who was raised with the mentality of there being a supreme, unquestionable deity above me, and as an artist.
i love this reflection of yours, thank you for sharing it!