CONCRETE. - In opposition to abstract (v.), which is the mental universal, concrete is the real singular, above all the individual of material substances and what belongs to it properly: it is the primary substance, indivisible (Aristotle, Cat., 5, 3 b 12). Concreteness is therefore given by the principle of individuation, which distinguishes the individual from the species and separates it from the individuals of the same species.
What, at bottom, corresponds at a distance to the classical Latin use of concrete as an attribute of matter insofar as it presents itself as condensed and thick ("concreta copia materiae": Lucretius, I, 1018; "aër concretus" in contrast with "aër fusus": Cicero, De Nat. deor., II, 39). For Hegel, on the other hand, the concrete is the "concept" in its subjectivity, insofar as, by way of dialectical mediation, it holds united within itself, in the moment of synthesis (becoming), the two preceding moments of thesis (being) and antithesis (non-being). Concrete is therefore the concept because it is a totality embracing in unity the moments of universality, particularity and individuality (Enzykl. d. ph. Wiss., §§ 163-64). A position that seemed to Gentile still too bound to classical logic, insofar as it supposed that the concept had outside itself both Nature, as its presupposition, and Spirit as the return that the idea, or itself, makes. The true and authentic concrete can only be the pure Act of thinking, the identity of thinking and thought, of consciousness and object of consciousness, and therefore autoctisis (v.), freedom and absolute historicity. For the critics of idealism, the alleged new concept of the concrete denies the very meaning of thought because it does not recognize the effective reality of the object and of the subject in their "singularity."
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Cornelio Fabro