Real Abstraction & The Myths of the Given:
On Post-Sellarsian Marxism

Instructor: J.-P. Caron Date & Time: January 15, 22, 29, February 5. 14:00-16:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: There’s been recently an interest in the possible connections between Wilfred Sellars and his heirs from the Pittsburgh school and Marx and the Marxist tradition. This Seminar contributes to this discussion by tackling the issue of real abstractions in the Marxian framework and the Sellarsian problem of the critique of the Given. It is usually accepted that there are two forms of the Given to be criticized in Sellars’ oeuvre: the epistemic and the categorial givens. The epistemic Given corresponds to information that is both epistemically independent and epistemically efficacious- meaning it is something that is not the result of previous cognitive states while transmitting “positive epistemic status to other cognitive states of ours” (DeVries, 2005, p. 99). The second, as Sellars himself puts it, is the categorial structure of the world imposing itself on the mind as a seal imposes an image on melted wax. (Sellars, 1981a: I, §45)”. Rejecting both forms of the Given yields in the Sellarsian picture a distinctive division of labor between sensible contents and conceptual workings.

On the other hand, the idea of real abstraction as proposed within the Marxist tradition eschews traditional divisions between the mental and the real, the abstract and the concrete, the sensible and the conceptual. It commits to a causally efficacious figure of abstraction that “is the form of the thought previous and external to the thought” (Zizek, 1989, 19). This amounts to a “veritable expropriation of abstract thought” (Toscano, 2013, 280). For the prospect of a Post-Sellarsian form of Marxism the question then becomes: does the hypothesis of a real abstraction fall unto a form of the Given? What is the proper account of the relationship between thought (in the strict sense) and material practice that correctly attributes the roles of condition and conditioned? Under what conditions the thought of real abstraction is compatible with the Sellarsian framework? This Seminar will proceed by stages in the development of an extended argument for compatibility between Sellars and the advocates of real abstraction, but not without some caveats that will be revealed en route.

Session 1: The myths of the Given: General intro to the Seminar and a presentation of the myths of the Given in the Sellarsian picture.

Session 2: Enter Real abstraction: General introduction to the Sohn-Rethelian treatment of real abstraction in Intellectual and Manual Labour.

Session 3: Real abstraction in the philosophy of language: Some attempts to recast the problem of real abstraction with the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy of language.

Session 4: The transformation problem of abstraction: Can Sohn-Rethel’s hard thesis of the passage from real abstraction to thinking abstractions be fleshed out in its causal-rational circuits of transmission?

IMAGE: Henni Alften, Broken Mirror, 2021.

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