Modern Spiritual Reality and Marxism

The book consists of three thematically interrelated essays whose philosophical link is the materialist conception of spiritual reality. Kalivoda opens up Marxism to various traditions of thought, structuralism, psychoanalysis and libertarianism, and his approach is dialogical or, more precisely, dialectical. From a Marxist point of view, he criticizes the limits of these conceptions, but at the same time he enriches Marxism with their impulses. What emerges is an extremely original conception of Marxism as an open, non-dogmatic thinking that can not only analyse the contradictions of the present but also revive the now somewhat fading idea of human emancipation. The work was first published in 1968 and can be counted among the important publications by H. Marcuse, T. W. Adorno, K. Kosík, J. Mukařovský or V. Effenberger. The edition is supplemented by a follow-up study "Emancipation and Utopia" from 1981, which deepens some aspects of Kalivoda's previous interpretation.