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Re: [xmca] "Rising to the concrete"



Thanks, Huw. The oppositeness of the Hegelian meaning of a bunch of words involved here, conceptions which are continued by Marxists even those like Vygotsky who never read Hegel, is a source of a lot of confusion. To make sense of what these people say about abstract or concrete or whatever, you really have to take everything they write in the context of the totality of their work, and in turn within the tradition in which they wrote. Otherwise they read like nonsense.

Indeed, Lenin's aphorism is quite clear and self-contained:
In order to understand it is necessary empirically to begin understanding, study, to rise, from empiricism to the universal. In order to learn to swim it is necessary to get into the water.
By "universal" Lenin means a principle or concept, i.e., something very concise, which encompasses or describes a vast process such as "modern capitalism" or "the Russian working class." The thing itself is both abstract and concrete, but any immediate expe4rience, or as you say, measurement of it, i.e., something abstracted from it, is abstract but not universal. This particular worker is well-paid, but that is not a universal; another worker may be poorly paid. When the thinker has reproduced the object (e.g. Russian capitalism) in thought (in terms of a huge book on the topic, such as Lenin's 1895 "The Development of Capitalism in Russia," he (accoridng to Marx) begins with a few abstractions, universals, such as "capitalism," "modern industry," etc., and then brings these universals into relation with each other, and the various abstract measurements (wage levels, concentration of capital, foreign ownership data, etc) and recovers an image of the object which is *relatively* concrete. The point of Lenin's aphorism, is that before you even begin to think about writing that book, you have to study life, visit the workers' districts, study the accounts, talk to capitalists, etc., etc., i.e., "empiricism", then you will probably spend a few years (23 in Marx's case) before you are ready to write your Magnum opus.

Does that make sense?

Andy
Huw Lloyd wrote:


On 15 August 2012 05:05, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
Greg,
Lenin's rising from the empirical to the universal is actually the /opposite /of rising from the abstract to the concrete.

I don't agree with this, although I haven't read Lenin.  The quote seems fairly self contained though.
 
This does not mean that Lenin was wrong or anything, because you will see in the excerpt from the Grundrisse that I sent that Marx is pointing to a/ 2-phase/ movement: from the concrete of immediate perception to the abstract universal, and then, by reconstructing the process in thought, rising back from the abstract universal to the real concrete. Marx explains this in more readable terms than you find in either Lenin's gloss of Hegel's Logic or in the Logic itself.

I think your "abstract universal" is misplaced here, it is simply abstract which is the same thing as an empirical observation, i.e. a measurement which is an abstraction of the thing being measured.

Huw
 

Also, when you read that excerpt of the Grundrisse, don't stop at the explanation of the two processes, read to the  end of the section, because there is a fine rendering by Marx of his critique of Hegel there and a foundation for activity theory.

Andy


Greg Thompson wrote:
Still in between boxes but came across this quote from Lenin today:
‘In order to understand it is necessary empirically to begin understanding,
study, to rise, from empiricism to the universal. In order to learn to swim
it is necessary to get into the
water<http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/ch03.htm#LCW38_205>
’.
(found at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling3.htm)

and it reminded me of one of mike's favorite statements "rising to the
concrete." Yet Mike's phrase appears quite different. So Mike, if you're
out there, does your "rising to the concrete" bear any significant relation
to Lenin's rising to the universal? They seem like very different concepts,
no?

-greg

 

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.brill.nl/concepts

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--

*Andy Blunden*
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.brill.nl/concepts
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