-----Original Message----- From: James Creegan <[email protected]> To: pen-l <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, Oct 2, 2015 4:56 pm Subject: query re Marx
Thanks to both Charlie & James for their responses. Now my only "problem" is to determine what "determinations" means! It is a promising term. Carrol ****************** A non-German-philosophical synonym for "determination" might be "specification". If I say that Creegan is person, further determiniations would be that he is a male, old, a Marxist, etc. In the passage on method CC refers to, Marx is discussing how the concrete reality of anything is reproduced in thought. He says that reality is never abstract, but always concrete. We can only conceptualize it, however, via various abstractions that we cull from the actual concrete. Hence, we move from the concrete to the abstract in thought. But then we must reverse directions and move back from the abstract to the concrete (in thought). We can only do this by combining abstractions (or specifications): sex, age, intellectual outlook, etc. By combining these abstractions, we arrive once again at the concrete object(s),--in this case a specific person-- from which abstractions were made in the first place. Make sense? JC
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