Ian Jasper - Following the path between Ilyenkov’s philosophy to Luria’s ‘Romantic Science’
Evald Ilyenkov’s The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital was first published in Russian in 1960. A central issue of Ilyenkov’s work was to develop what Marx meant by the ‘abstract’ and the ‘concrete’ and their relationship to each other. Ilyenkov demonstrates how Marx’s understanding of the ‘abstract’ and the ‘concrete’ is far more sophisticated than a crude opposition of the physically material to that which is not. Ilyenkov explored the full implications of Marx’s statement in the Grundrisse that:
“The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking therefore as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation and conception.” (p. 101)
In this context we should understand that taken separately each of the ‘many determinations’ concentrated in ‘the concrete’ is an abstraction. Later in the 1960s, after the publication of Ilyenkov’s work (op. cit.), A.R. Luria, the friend and collaborator of Vygotsky began writing a number of ‘biographical’ pieces which were later developed and published in English for the first time in 1979 as The Making of Mind. One chapter of this book is titled Romantic Science where Luria talks about two case studies he undertook with patients, one of whom had an apparently limitless memory, the other a man recovering from a head wound which left him brain damaged. These two ‘unimagined portraits’ move between distinct levels of analysis and exposition from the neurological to the psychological and the biographical. It will be argued that what Luria is doing with romantic science is in fact an attempt to concentrate some of the important determinants of the psychology of the two case studies to present as concrete a picture as possible. Luria’s romantic science strives to “ascend to the concrete”.
I do not know the extent of contact or awareness of each other’s work between Ilyenkov and Luria but there are striking parallels. The inner logic of Ilyenkov’s work in philosophy, and Luria’s in psychology, led them both in their respective fields to develop a materialist dialectical understanding of the relationship of the abstract to the concrete. An understanding rooted deeply in the tradition of Marx.
Sources referred to
Ilyenkov, E. V. (1982) The dialectics of the abstract and the concrete in Marx’s Capital. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Luria, A.R. (1979) The making of mind. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Marx, K. (1993) Grundrisse. London: Penguin.
Dr Ian Jasper is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Canterbury Christ Church University. He works mostly in Teacher Education, he has a long experience working in adult literacy projects and he is especially interested in ‘life stories’.