Hegel, Part 9
Pablo Picasso, 1908: “Three Women”
Ascent from the
Abstract to the Concrete
There is no a priori humanity,
or presupposition of humanity. There may be a God, or not; but what is human is
not given, but is made, by humans. We are made as humans by the knowledge that
we continue to get, through labour, and to share, socially.
The knowledge that humanity has accumulated, altogether, is
science. Objective things-in-themselves that are parts of the universe become
known through labour and are thereby brought into that sphere which is
humanity. So, the Object becomes part
of the Subject.
Similarly, thoughts and decisions become facts of a social
and political kind and become objects of science, including Scientific
Socialism. In this way, Subject
becomes Object.
These reversals, inversions (or “reciprocal actions” as
Clausewitz might have called them), are critical transformations and are
noticed and incorporated into the philosophy of Hegel and of Karl Marx.
We cannot say that everything is thought, and we equally
cannot say that everything is matter; and to say that reality is an unqualified
mixture of thought and matter is only to enter a hall of mirrors.
Hegel creates an escape from this maze into a better, and
dynamic, form of understanding.
Hegel’s solution is to demonstrate how the movement takes
place, not once and for all, but constantly. In the previous part of this
course, Andy Blunden’s lecture explained it like this:
“The categories of Being which come into
being and pass away, continue
to come and go indefinitely. The succession of oppositions which overtake one
another in Essence continue to generate polar opposite pairs of determinations.
As these unfold, a new form of social practice develops self-consciousness,
with a succession of new qualities, new entities, new relations, both
incidental and necessary, registered in thoughts and purposive activity and
representations, and judged, and people may draw from these experiences a more
concrete understanding of the new social practice as it develops. So in terms
of time, all these relations are happening at the same time, although there is
a logical dependence of the later categories on the former.”
This movement is an ascent
from the abstract to the concrete.
What is “concrete”? It is the unity and interaction of the
parts of a system. It is a dialectical unity-and-struggle-of-opposites. In
philosophy, “concrete” has nothing to do with being fixed, hard or permanent.
In philosophy this word has a special meaning.
Our main document in this part is “Hegel’s Conception
of the Concrete” from
Chapter 2 of Evald Ilyenkov’s “Dialectics
of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital”. Ilyenkov
(1924-1979) was a first-class Soviet philosopher. The full Ilyenkov Archive on MIA is here. Here
are a couple of quotes from Ilyenkov:
“As we know, Hegel was the first to
understand the development of knowledge as a historical process subject to laws
that do not depend on men’s will and consciousness. He discovered the law of
ascent from the abstract to the concrete as the law governing the entire course
of development of knowledge.”
“In reality, the immediate basis of the
development of thought is not nature as such but precisely the transformation
of nature by social man, that is, practice.”
Picture:
Pablo Picasso’s “Three Women”. “Cubism” in visual art was a conscious attempt
to represent the relationship of the abstract and the concrete on a
two-dimensional surface.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Hegel’s Conception of the Concrete, Evald Ilyenkov, 1960.
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