ABSTRACT universal Manual de usuario descargar pdf (Pagina 19)

(so Platonism is false).

Therefore, starting from any one of the categories

of the Concept (universality, particularity, individuality), this category can

only be made intelligible in the light of the other two: individuality is

constituted by the particularized substance universal (as an individual, I am

a man with a determinate set of properties that distinguish me from other

men); the substance universal exists only in individuals, through its

particularization (the universal ‘man’ exists in rebus, as instantiated in

diﬀerent men); and particularity is the diﬀerentiation of a substance

universal, whereby it con stitutes an individual (it is qua man that I have

the properties that distinguish me from other men). It is the dialectical

interconnection between the three categories which Hegel characterizes as

‘development’, and which he thinks we can obtain only when we conceive of

the universal as ‘concrete’ rather than as merely ‘abstract’, as only then will

we be able to distinguish between substance and property universals in the

way that is required.

Now, if the account I have presented here adequately captures the force of

Hegel’s view of the concrete universal, it should be clear why I earlier denied

that this doctrine commits Hegel to any sort of holistic conception, of the

kind favoured by the British Idealists. While the Concept, as the

interrelation of universality, particularity and individuality, has a holistic

structure, in the sense that (as we have seen) each ‘moment’ is claimed to be

In his early work Ethical Studies, Bradley seems to have made just this the basis of his

conception of the concrete universal, before he came to the more problematic position discussed

in section I: see Ethical Studies,2

edn, revised (Oxford, 1927) 162, where he speaks of the ‘the

will which is above ourselves’ as a universal which

is not abstract, since it belongs to its essence that it should be realized, and it has no

real existence except in and through its particulars. The good will (for morality) is

meaningless, if, whatever else it be, it be not the will of living ﬁnite beings. It is a

concrete universal, because it not only is above but is within and throughout its

details, and is so far only as they are.

Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, translated by H. B. Nisbet, edited by

Allen W. Wood (Cambridge, 1991), x260, p. 282:

[In the state] the universal does not attain validity or fulﬁlment without the interest,

knowledge, and volition of the particular, and . . . individuals do not live as private

persons merely for these particular interests without at the same time directing their

will to a universal end and acting in conscious awareness of this end.

(. . . so daß weder das Allgemeine ohne das besondere Interesse, Wissen und Wollen

gelte und vollbracht werde, noch daß die Individuen bloß fu

r das letztere als

Privatpersonen leben und nicht zugleich in und fu

r das Allgemeine wollen und eine

dieses Zwecks bewußte Wirksamkeit haben.)

(Werke, Vol. VII, p. 407)

Even here, however, Bradley’s position begins to take a holistic turn, by way of an organicist

analogy, where Bradley continues:

It is the life which can live only in and by them, as they are dead unless within it; it is

the whole soul which lives so far as the body lives, which makes the body a living

body, and which without the body is as unreal an abstraction as the body without it. It

is an organism and a moral organism; and it is conscious self-realization, because only

by the will of its self-conscious members can the moral organism give itself reality.

HEGEL AND THE CONCRETE UNIVERSAL 133

1 2 ... 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 ... 38 39

Comentarios a estos manuales

Sin comentarios

ABSTRACT universal Manual de usuario Pagina 19

Comentarios a estos manuales