Abstraction, enlightenment’s tool, liquidates its objects as fate once did.

Evidence

But in Marx it is no longer a question of understanding how one tree might be juxtaposed with another very different one in order that the “name” and the “concept” tree thereby somehow emerge; it is rather a question of understanding how altogether distinct objects (the salt, the hammers, the linen, the coat) could be somehow considered equivalences. The most exciting Marxian epistemological work then follows Marx’s anti-Cartesian and dialectical methodological lesson; namely, that we do not build up complex ideas out of simple ones, but rather, the other way around, that it is the intuition of the complex form that gives us the key to grasping the simpler one. From the law of value, or the mystery of the equivalence of radically different things, we can then return in a new way to the simpler problem of universals and particulars; or if you prefer, abstraction itself and conceptual thought (DeMan’s “linguistic conceptualization”) must first be positioned in the larger field of the operation of the law of value before its more specialized philosophical and linguistic effects can be understood. Or finally, to be even more “vulgar” (that is to say, more ontological) about it, philosophical and linguistic abstraction is itself an effect and a by-product of exchange. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 517 (#expands, via linked claim)

In the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel argues that ‘Thought … is the most trenchant epitomist (der mächigste Epitomator).’ Events that traverse ‘long periods of time’end up ‘foreshortened in abstractions (mit Abstraktionen abkürzen)’: in other words, as pure thought-determinations. At the level of generality, everything essential to thought is an abbreviation: For what a host of particulars of outer existence and actions is embraced by a conception - battle, war, nation, ocean, or animal, for example. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1022 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Philosophical abstraction is itself a by-product of commodity exchange. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 517; Thought itself operates as an epitomist that foreshortens events into abstractions. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1022

Broader Connections

• Philosophical abstraction is itself a by-product of commodity exchange. #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 517
• Thought itself operates as an epitomist that foreshortens events into abstractions. #expands (0.80) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1022