Home 9 Passage 9 Concreteness

Back to the Thing Itself—What Is the Concrete? For phenomenological research, it is especially imperative to understand what the concrete can mean and signify. Some equate the concrete with the empirical and the factual. The concrete is referred to as the thing-in-itself. It can also be understood as the essence or originary ground of a thing. Or the concrete may be understood as the particularity of things. But in The Phenomenology of Mind (1977), Hegel argues that what is referred to as the particular and the concrete is actually the most abstract and the most general and therefore poor in its specificity. What we consider as the concrete is linguistically determined with language and may give the illusion of concrete reality but that is actually ultimately fictional. Perhaps the concrete is phenomenologically best understood as the phenomenality of the experiential meaning of a phenomenon. In this way we can keep apart the idea of the thing-in-itself that is the starting point for phenomenological inquiry and ideas generated through abstract theorizing but that have no meaningful anchor in experiential existence.