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The study deals with the main features of Vladimír Borecký’s general theory of the comic. First, it introduces Borecký’s conception of the structuring features of the comic. It then examines the specificity of the main configurations of the comic that Borecký discusses, i.e. naivety, irony, humour, and absurdity. The study highlights Borecký’s conception of the position of these configurations in the ontogenetic development of the individual and in cultural development. The study also compares Borecký’s thoughts with the conceptions of other theorists of the comic. On the one hand, with James Sully’s genetic and pluralistic conception of laughter and the comic, and on the other hand, with Louis Cazamian’s conception of humour. In conclusion, the study shows that in both Borecký’s and Cazamian’s reflections one can trace a tendency to conceive of absurdity as the ultimate manifestation of the comic.

This study examines Louis Cazamian’s considerations on the nature of humour, which were influenced by Bergson’s theory of the comic as a contrast between life and automatism and Bergson’s idea of humour as a specific type of comic linguistic transposition. In this context, the paper draws attention to the critical function of humour in Cazamian’s understanding based on his embracing of Bergson’s conception of laughter as a critique of the automation of life. However, Cazamian’s speculating diverges from Bergson’s thoughts on humour and leads to the creation of an elaborated theory. Cazamian states that humour has an artistic status and attributes characteristics to it that Bergson attributes to works of art. In contrast to Bergson, who emphasises the distinction between art and the comic, Cazamian deems humour’s critical aspect to accord with its artistic status. While humour is attributed artistic status because it suggests the multifaceted or elusive character of reality, humour’s comic character entails ridiculing the inability or unwillingness to respect that reality has a comic character.

In this essay, the author seeks to demonstrate the remarkable resemblance between the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead and those of Henri Bergson concerning the role of art and aesthetic experience generally in revealing the appearance of immediate experience. The two philosophers agree that this reality is usually concealed from human considerations about practical possibilities of using reality, including considerations about the communicability of the nature of reality. Both men also agree that this revealing has the form of the harmonization of the usual unfocused experience of things and feelings. Nevertheless, in this article the author seeks to demonstrate that harmonization assumes the form of rhythmic arrangement, and art and aesthetic experience therefore generally show immediate reality as rhythm. The fact that immediate experience is rhythm appears, when seen from the standpoint of the conception of Whitehead and Bergson, to be natural, because all reality has the nature of a spectrum of rhythmic movements. By comparing the ideas of the two philosophers, the author aims not only to provide a more precise outline of their thinking on this subject, but also to point out that the similarities of their views enable us to explain them, make them more precise, and to develop them.

The article is a discussion of Alfred North Whitehead’s and Henri Bergson’s considerations of the difference between creativity and stagnation in art. A comparison of the ideas of these two thinkers is then made with the intention of demonstrating the similarity of their approaches to the nature and meaning of fundamental innovations in art. The article also emphasizes that, according to the two thinkers, such innovations are derived from the artist’s relationship with multifaceted reality and are inspired by a true revelation of it. Finally, the article considers Whitehead’s and Bergson’s ideas about the relationship between artistic creativity and the future: the future of universal harmony in Whitehead and the future of artistic production in Bergson.

In his article ‘Art and Time’ (1966) Patočka argues that Hegel rightly recognized a fundamental difference between classical and contemporary art. In developing Hegel’s insight he offers a conception of two eras of art, the ‘artistic’ era and the era of ‘aesthetic culture’. Patočka supposes that artworks of both the artistic era and the aesthetic era always open up a certain ‘meaning’ that gives human existence its fundamental points of reference. The status of this world, however, radically changed from one era to the next. The art of the artistic era offered objective and binding meaning, whereas aesthetic art offers personal or individual meaning. The current article points to an important discrepancy in Patočka’s treatment of the relation between the two eras, and presents Patočka’s later reading of Hegel’s notion of the past character of art. From the perspective of this interpretation, art reveals temporality as such, that is, as the ontological basis of the revelation of meaning. The article emphasizes that such an interpretation demonstrates the ontological relevance of the artwork in greater detail. Yet Patočka continued to use the concepts of the artistic era and the aesthetic era, without sufficiently clarifying the relationship between the two eras. Finally, the author argues that the discrepancy in the concept can be resolved with the help of Patočka’s later reflections on the ‘problematic nature’ of meaning. The article argues that in classical art such a nature is concealed, whereas in modern art it is revealed again. The article includes an English translation of Patočka’s ‘Art and Time’.

The article deals with Jan Patočka’s considerations on the mutual relation of science and art as two important ways towards the comprehension of reality. Patočka believes that science provides the tool to reveal objective and binding truth and that modern and contemporary art is able to reveal subjective and individual truth. Art thus functions as a corrective to the dominance of science and technology. However, art as such emerges only in a time of dominant scientific and technical approaches to reality. Along these lines, the article emphasises that the mutual relations of art and science should be conceived as dialectical.