Understanding Abstractions in Science and Philosophy

There are abstractions in the history of science and philosophy. These abstractions are thinking possibilities developed to analyse phenomena more easily at the mental level. One of the first examples of this that comes to my mind is Karl Marx’s much-discussed abstraction of infrastructure-superstructure. In the Preface to his famous work, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1979: 23-26), Marx writes that essentially economic production determines the political and ideological superstructure, that there must be some kind of harmony in the relationship between the mode of production and the productive forces, but that the breakdown of this harmony is also a necessity of the laws of history. When the harmony or balance between these relations is disturbed, the era of social revolution begins until these forces are harmonized with each other again. This harmony is, of course, achieved by producing institutions, structures and ideological discourses that are compatible with the relations operating at the political, legal and ideological levels or, in the first instance, at the economic level.

By choosing this passage as an example to justify my argument, I am actually saying that by considering a theory in the context of social relations, we can apply it to everyday forms, free it from abstraction and make it comprehensibly visible in the world of material reality. For example, if I concretize the metaphor I mentioned above in a relational unity and say that the AEG refrigerator, which we all had in our homes in the past and which worked for thirty years without any maintenance, was a part of the dominant mode of production before post-fordism, I am also saying that this relationship is a product of the Fordist and Keynesian social welfare state based on mass production and mass consumption, and that this is essentially a political-legal superstructure required by that style, which is a particular world between different manifestations of bourgeois parliamentarism organized on the basis of the nation-state and Soviet patriotism organized on the basis of a single party. If I go even further, I would also be saying that that refrigerator can no longer be reproduced today because we live in a dominant production system based on the maximisation of consumption in the short term. In other words, social relations that are separated and analyzed at the level of abstraction are essentially one and intertwined, just like the photo frames that make up the negatives of a cinema film… We can examine them better by stopping and zooming in on them at a certain moment in history, but we also know that all levels of social reality actually appear in everyday life under hybrid forms.

Another abstraction that comes to mind is that of the French philosopher Louis Althusser. Althusser also abstracts Marx. To put it nicely, the one who abstracts will be abstracted. In his short and influential text Lenin and Philosophy (2008; 59-65), Althusser sharply distinguishes Karl Marx’s thought between the 1844 Manuscripts and other texts, in which he dealt mainly with the political and legal forms of social reality and alienation as a manifestation of these forms, and the later period in which the thinker concentrated on political economy and produced works such as Grundrisse and Capital. According to Althusser, Marx has now moved from philosophy to science; in a sense, he has started to do science in a pure sense, which the thinker calls “epistemological rupture“. Of course, these processes cannot be separated from each other as precisely as Althusser abstracted them in order to analyse them. Marx probably wrote a large number of texts that we are unable to trace, such as the “German Ideology“, which was found much later in a “safe box” in the Soviet archives. The concrete manifestations of the social reality he analyzed must have led him to an extended reproduction of economic relations and, as part of this, of social reality. As a matter of fact, Capital is not independent of all these levels; it is also a text that contains concrete and effective passages on the life of workers.

My own intellectual journey has been at least as complex. I started by focusing on the salient, firsthand dimensions of social reality. I moved from the field of communication, ideology, discourse, and culture to the field of political and economic relations, from anthropology to religion and schools of thought. Art, culture, different levels of thought and the expressions of intellectual movements in literature, science and technology formed the “compartments” of this broad interest, if I may use Althusserian terminology. I have tried to read the social relations and ways of thinking of each age in relation to the works of art and literature of that age, to mystical and material ways of thinking, and to establish the historical and actual context correctly through these parallel readings. Of course, time will tell how successful I have been. But this intellectual journey of mine has taught me a very important truth that will never be forgotten. The truth is that all knowledge can be reinterpreted, rethought and functionalized from different perspectives. I call this type of knowledge “human knowledge”, and I think that there are others besides me who share this usage.

The period of time we are in is an era in which human knowledge, from philosophy of history to anthropology, from culture to art, and from psychology to technology, is being reconsidered and reinterpreted. In this process, for the common future of humanity, we need not only educated but also very well-trained minds, free from dogmas and absolute assumptions, who do not prioritise their own interests.

I think the most important thing is to never forget that truth can be analyzed by dividing it into different parts at the level of abstraction, but this is not an absolute necessity, because truth or the given social reality is actually and ultimately a whole! All great thinkers are people who have overcome and stretched the given distinctions and educated themselves according to the type of knowledge required by the new age. This has led them to be recognized as great figures who transcend the limits of the historical period in which they lived and shed light on the future. If we fail to see that reality itself is one and that the distinctions we make are merely methodological adjustments to better comprehend it, we impose ourselves on reality.

It is a hopeless endeavor to impose oneself on total reality.
I think we do not have such a luxury in the age we are on the threshold of.