Ascent from the abstract to the concrete

What problem was this method meant to solve?

Where should one start in order to understand a complex society? Common sense says: with the whole in front of you. To understand an economy, look first at a country's population, industries and trade. Marx held that this common sense is right only in appearance. His unfinished Introduction, written between late August and mid-September 1857, tackles the question head-on. It was meant to open the economic manuscripts known as the Grundrisse, but Marx never published it; it was found among his papers in 1902 and first printed in Die Neue Zeit in 1903.

The method matters because it is the key to reading Capital. Why does Capital not begin with the plight of workers or with crises, but with a strange, abstract analysis of the "commodity"? The reason for the first chapter, where new readers most often get stuck, lies in this method. At the same time it is a philosophical claim about how scientific theories are built in general, and in the twentieth century it became a major subject of debate in Soviet philosophy and pedagogy.

What did Marx write?

Marx first examines the commonsense starting point: "It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population." But the population is an abstraction if one leaves out the classes of which it consists; the classes are an empty phrase without wage labour and capital; and capital is nothing without value, money and price. So "if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole".

Es scheint das Richtige zu sein, mit dem Realen und Konkreten, der wirklichen Voraussetzung zu beginnen, also z.B. in der Ökonomie mit der Bevölkerung

Finge ich also mit der Bevölkerung an, so wäre das eine chaotische Vorstellung des Ganzen

Marx distinguishes two paths. The first starts from the chaotic whole and, by repeated analysis, arrives at ever thinner abstractions, the simplest determinations such as division of labour, money and value; this was the path of the seventeenth-century economists. The second starts from these simple determinations and travels back up until it reaches the population again, this time not as a chaotic conception but as "a rich totality of many determinations and relations". "The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method."

Das letztre ist offenbar die wissenschaftlich richtige Methode.

He then defines the concrete: "The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse." In thought, therefore, the concrete appears as the result of a process of concentration, not as the point of departure.

Das Konkrete ist konkret, weil es die Zusammenfassung vieler Bestimmungen ist, also Einheit des Mannigfaltigen.

Here Marx draws a line against Hegel, who fell into the illusion that thought moving by itself produces the real, "whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being." Real society stands independently outside the head; theory only reassembles it in thought.

während die Methode, vom Abstrakten zum Konkreten aufzusteigen, nur die Art für das Denken ist, sich das Konkrete anzueignen, es als ein geistig Konkretes zu reproduzieren.

Keineswegs aber der Entstehungsprozeß des Konkreten selbst.

How is it used in Capital?

Volume I of Capital begins with the commodity, the simplest relation of capitalist society, repeated billions of times a day: products of labour exchanged on the market. Within this simple relation Marx finds the contradictions of use value and value, concrete and abstract labour, and unfolds step by step how the contradiction gives rise to money, money to capital, and capital to the production and accumulation of surplus value. By Volume III the categories visible in everyday economic life, profit, interest and rent, are explained as arising from that simple starting point.

In the Philosophical Encyclopedia entry "The Logic of Capital", Ilyenkov noted that in this system the commodity is "the simplest immediate being" underlying all the other elements. He likened the starting point to the "cell" of a living thing: as understanding the cell lets one grasp the complex structure of an organism as its development, so understanding the commodity "cell" lets one grasp capitalism as a whole as the unfolding of its contradiction.

В данном же случае товар составляет то «простейшее непосредственное бытие», которое лежит в основании всех остальных элементов системы.

How did Ilyenkov interpret the method?

Ilyenkov wrote the manuscript "The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Scientific-Theoretical Thought" in 1956. During preparation for publication the leadership of the Institute of Philosophy insisted on a series of changes, and the text was cut by more than a third; it appeared in 1960 from the Academy of Sciences publishing house as The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital. The following year an uncut version came out in Italian, and many other translations followed.

His first emphasis was to separate "the concrete" from its everyday sense. We usually take the concrete to be what we can see and touch and the abstract to be a concept in the head. Ilyenkov wrote that for Marx "the 'concrete' is by no means a synonym for the sensuously evident, the directly contemplated". The concrete is "above all a synonym for the real connection of phenomena, the interlocking and interaction of all the sides and moments of an object".

Маркса «конкретное» ни в коем случае не есть синоним чувственно-наглядного, непосредственно-созерцаемого.

конкретное, конкретность — это прежде всего синоним реальной связи явлений, сцепления и взаимодействия всех сторон, моментов предмета, данного человеку в созерцании и представлении.

His second emphasis was a critique of empiricism. Induction, collecting many cases and extracting what they have in common, cannot reach a scientific concept: pile up what all humans share and you get little more than "walks on two legs, has no feathers". Ilyenkov used the example of defining man as "a being that makes tools". This determination is not a common surface feature of all people but a starting point from which the whole range of historical forms of human existence unfolds, and in that sense it is a "concrete universal".

Third, he held that the ascent from the abstract to the concrete cannot be separated from the opposite movement, analysis from the concrete to the abstract: "Without its opposite, without the ascent from the concrete to the abstract, the ascent from the abstract to the concrete would turn into a purely scholastic linking of ready-made general abstractions borrowed uncritically from somewhere." While building a system, the theorist must keep re-examining existing concepts against the facts.

Восхождение от абстрактного к конкретному без своей противоположности, без восхождения от конкретного к абстрактному, превратилось бы в чисто схоластическое связывание готовых, некритически заимствованных откуда-либо общих абстракций.

What were the debates?

Ilyenkov's work had a political context. As David Bakhurst points out, the book's critique of empiricism was aimed at the positivism and scientism Ilyenkov thought prevalent in Soviet political and intellectual culture: the habit of piling up facts and statistics without grasping their inner connection in theory, and of reducing philosophy to a general worldview that tidies up the results of the natural sciences. This concern ties in with the 1954 affair in which he defined philosophy as "the science of scientific thought" and lost his right to teach (see dialectical logic).

Another issue was the relation of "the logical and the historical". In his 1859 review of Marx's Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Engels explained that the logical order of the theory follows the historical order stripped of accidents. Marx himself, however, wrote in the Introduction that the order of the categories is fixed not by the sequence in which they appeared in history but by their relations within modern bourgeois society. Ilyenkov opposed readings that mechanically equate the two and held that logical development expresses a "concrete historicism". The question was long argued in Soviet, East German and Western interpretations of Capital.

How was it carried on in and beyond the USSR?

From the 1960s the book deeply influenced how Marx's economic manuscripts were read in the Soviet Union, East Germany and the West; its influence is visible in the international work, from the mid-1970s, on the second section of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), the economic manuscripts. The philosopher Vladislav Lektorsky judged that Ilyenkov's treatment of the "core" of a theory touches on Imre Lakatos's later methodology of scientific research programmes.

In education, the psychologist Vasily Davydov carried the method into primary schooling. The developmental education system of Daniil Elkonin and Davydov has children first explore the simplest relation from which a concept arises and then move to concrete cases, instead of memorizing many separate examples. Davydov himself called the principle "from the abstract to the concrete".

What does it mean to read it today?

In an age of information overload, collecting facts is easy, but understanding the inner connections that bind them has become harder. The ascent from the abstract to the concrete says that the way to understand a complex reality lies not in more data but in the right starting point and its development. Marx's method sought to show how the simple relation of commodity and value unfolds into crises, inequality and technological change, instead of explaining each separately. That is also why the first chapter of Capital rewards a patient reading.