Part 03: ‘Karl Seldon on Karl Marx Series’ -- ‘THE FORCE OF ABSTRACTION’.
Dear Reader,
It
is my pleasure,
and my honor, as an officer of the Foundation Encyclopedia
Dialectica [F.E.D.]
Office of Public Liaison, and
as a voting member of F.E.D.,
to share, with
you, from
time to time, as
they
are approved
for public release by
the F.E.D.
General Council, key
excerpts
from the internal writings, and from the internal sayings, of our co-founder,
Karl Seldon.
This third release
in this new series is posted below [Some E.D. standard edits have been applied, in the version presented below, by the editors of
the F.E.D. Special Council for the Encyclopedia, to the
direct transcript of our co-founder’s discourse].
In this 3rd installment in this
new series, Seldon describes the role of abstraction in Marx’s dialectical Method of Discovery of the beginning [category] for the human comprehension of a given Domain/sub-totality, and in his dialectical Method of Presentation of that comprehension of that given Domain/sub-totality, all via the example of Marx’s work in the Domain of his
“critique of capitalist
political economy”.
Seldon --
“Marx addresses
what he calls “the force of abstraction” in his Preface to the first German
edition of Capital, vol. I, so [Capital
I., NW, pp. 7-8]:
“Every beginning is
difficult, holds for all sciences*. To understand the first chapter, especially
the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will, therefore, present
the greatest difficulty. That which
concerns more especially the analysis of the substance of value and the
magnitude of value, I have, as much as possible, popularized. The value-form, whose fully developed shape
is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more
than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it, whilst on the other
hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms,
there has been at least an approximation.
Why? Because the body, as an
organic whole, is more easy of study than the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover,
neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must
replace both. [emphasis added by K.S.].”
“But
Marx’s advocacy of abstraction in the passage above must be considered in the
context of other passages by Marx in which “abstraction” and
“abstractness” are objects of his withering criticism.”
“That
is, Marx is also, of course, a major critic of abstraction in its faulty and
misleading forms, in political-economic science and/as in other
fields, and with regard not only to abstraction-based theories, e.g., with regard to abstraction from natural-historicity
in the natural sciences, and with regard to abstraction from “historical
specificity” in the account of human-social formations, but
also with regard to ‘‘‘abstraction in practice’’’ as well, e.g., in the
very nature of the capital praxis and its “law of value”. ...”
“...Abstraction is always omissive. Abstraction is always ‘homeomorphically
defectious’, and a major source of the ‘homeomorphic defect’, in
models, and in theories-in-general,
both ineluctable and ‘eluctable’.”
“A
key to ‘‘‘fruitful abstraction’’’ is to omit, from a model/theory, only what
you can get away with omitting for the application at hand.”
“E.g.,
it is to omit details which would only “clutter up” the clarity
of the thought-process and of the presentation needed to solve
the problem(s) at hand, but also to retain at least some shadow
of the details that belong to the core of that(those)
solution(s).”
*[The
character of this first line, as a fragment of a fuller sentence, may be a nod,
by Marx, to the opening line of Hegel’s [dialectical] «Logik»,
Chapter I, BEING, A. BEING [p. 82 in the A V. Miller translation], which is not a grammatically complete sentence, but
rather, a kind of lengthy, descriptive name, or noun -- per Hegel, because of
the nature of the content that it addresses: “Being, pure being,
without any further determination.”].
NOTE: [by the
E.D. Editors] The
‘dialectogram’ posted below provides a partially-pictorial
summary of Marx’s dialectical Method of Discovery, and of his dialectical
Method of Presentation, in the context, and in the [tables-of-]contents, of the first 3 volumes of Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy.
For more
information regarding these
Seldonian and Marxian insights,
please see --
For partially pictographical, ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian and Marxian insights -- specimens of ‘dialectical art’ -- see:
¡ENJOY!
Regards,
Miguel
Detonacciones,
Voting Member, Foundation Encyclopedia
Dialectica [F.E.D.],
Participant, F.E.D.
Special Council for Public Liaison,
Officer, F.E.D.
Office of Public Liaison.
