Publication Details

Abstract

Revolutionary upheavals bring about not only the requirement that those who committed injustice and misused their power should be called to account, but also a call for the theoretical solution of the problem of responsibility, to which they themselves supply a number of stimuli. The present study really is only a first attempt at theoretical solution of the problem of responsibility whose complexity was pointed out, in particular, by the experience gained in Czechoslovakia in the first months of 1968. By means of his analysis, the author tries to reveal those real components and structures, of human reality which are involved in the concept of responsibility. His analysis continuesfrom the determination of the categories of the feeling of guilt and a real wrongdoing to the categories of the sense of responsibility and to the category of responsibility proper. The feeling of responsibility as well as responsibility itself of man is limited only to personality, to its particular attitude towards reality, and to its freedom. The questions of for what and to whom man is responsible, lead the author to the definition of objective measure of man’s responsibility and, at the same time, to the analysis of individual and collective responsibility. The connection of resposibility with freedom and with personality dimension of the individual man makes the author focuse his attention on personalizing and depersonalizing effects of society in- which man lives, as well as on the effects of society upon forming the sense of responsibility of an individual or upon misleading to irresponsibility to which man also has propensity. 'This, aspect penetrates all the present study; however, most attention is paid to it by the author when the problem of responsibility during the so-called personality cult is being analysed.