Re: Abstract to concrete

=?iso-8859-1?Q?Yrj=F6?= =?iso-8859-1?Q?_?= (engestro who-is-at helsinki.fi)
Mon, 23 Sep 1996 11:55:49 +0200

Russ Hunt wrote on the impossibility of making abstractions concrete:

At 9:00 9/20/96, Russ Hunt wrote:
>Yrjo, I took it as a part of the definition of the terms that an
>abstraction is a result of a mental operation across a class of
>things and thus couldn't actually _be_, or be made, a concrete
>object.
>
>I may be missing something obvious here, but it seems to me implicit
>in how I use those two words.

>Because I do have a tendency to think about these issues very, um,
>simplemindedly, maybe somebody (Yrjo?) can help me by giving an
>instance where an abstraction _is_ actually "made concrete"?

Here is my brief response:
Since the discussion on the abstract and the concrete arose in the context
of discussing reification and commodification (or commoditization), I found
it curious that dialectical logic, arguably the core of Marxist thought,
was not taken into account when Russ made his comment on the impossibility
of making abstractions concrete. The method of ascending from the abstract
to the concrete is - at least for me - the key to dialectical logic. It is
thoroughly elaborated in the writings of Evald Ilyenkov, and translated
into a methdology of teaching and learning by V. V. Davydov (in his seminal
'Types of Generalization in Instruction'). Recently Falmagne has discussed
this tradition in her piece in L. M. W. Martin, K. Nelson & E. Tobach
(Eds.) (1995): Sociocultural psychology: Theory and practice of doing and
knowing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Well, in any case, in dialectical logic the concepts of concrete and
abstract have a very different meaning from that of formal logic or
everyday language. The historico-genetic construction of 'germ cell'
abstractions (compare Vygotsky's units vs. elements), and the ascending to
the concrete, many-sided systemic, and internally contradictory totality by
means of following the real evolution of the germ cell, is a logic of
concept formation, thinking, and learning which is hard to grasp if formal
logic is privileged as the self-evidently valid viewpoint. As Ilyenkov and
many others have shown, Marx's 'Capital' is a pretty good example of using
the method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete.

Yrjo Engestrom