Hegel, Part 9
Pablo
Picasso, 1908: “Three Women”
Ascent from Abstract to
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.
