Economics and philosophy

pp. 36-92

in: Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the concrete, Berlin, Springer, 1976

Abstract

One wonders how appropriate is an investigation that reaches directly for the essence and leaves all the inessential behind as just excess baggage. Such investigation pretends to be something it is not. It claims to be scientific, yet it takes the most essential thing — the distinction between what is essential and what is peripheral — for granted and beyond investigating. It does not strive for the essential through a complex process of regressing and progressing which would at once cleave reality into the essential and the peripheral and substantiate such cleaving. Instead, it leaps over phenomenal appearances without ever investigating them and in so doing seeks to know both the essence and how to reach it. The directness of "essential" thought skips the essential. Its chase after the essential ends in hunting down a thing without its essence, a mere abstraction or triviality.