If the general information can be misleading (see Plato and the language), they are however necessary for thinking..
Because to bring back everything to the detail, it is to have a short-sighted vision of the things: one is then unable to seize the deep thing behind the superficial thing, the permanent thing behind the passenger thing and the universal thing behind the individual thing.
In the myth of the cave, Plato (428-348 before J.-C.) immortalise this distinction: it separates the world from the cave, where the men are connected to a particular vision, of the world of the ideas where the men see the models and the structures which build reality.
Since, philosophy supported the direction of the concept, namely the idea making it possible to conceive reality by seizing the General behind the private individual.
However, as this concept is not static, this one took two forms. Initially, to have the direction of the concept returns to the fact of knowing to classify and order reality.

Aristote (384-322 front. J.-C.) said the scientific requirement by proclaiming "there is only science from the General", reality being ordered according to these great structures which are the categories of time, place, number, quality, modality, genre...

Thus, for Aristote, to conceive reality, it is to be able to arrange it while answering the questions: when? where? how?

We show a direction of the concept each time we order reality in accordance with the structures which are them its.

Concept and imagination

In the second place, to have the direction of the concept returns to the fact of imagining.
Because if the world of Aristote is an ordered world, the modern science reveals that there are some worlds hidden in the world. So then the necessity as restored by Kant (1724-1804), to find a direction for the classification of the world: the one which does not consist anymore in arranging the world in accordance with its structures (natural laws), but with the categories of the understanding * (quality, quantity, relation, method).

This passage from the reality to the subject (i.e. to the man considered in logical terms in opposition to the object), in order to order the world is capital, because it uses imagination.
To arrange the private individual under the General, it is necessary from now on to invent with an aim of finding the way of applying the General to the private individual and vice versa.

However, according to Hegel (1770-1831), the concept is not simply subjective.
Reality is invention, and it is when one invents like it, that being seemingly most subjective, one is in fact objective.

For proof, our emotion in front of any concept. Aren't we delighted when somebody can find the right word "to hit the bull" and to qualify a situation?

With the obviousness, far from capturing reality, the concept is on the contrary the means of delivering it by having a meeting "seizing" with him. This is why Hegel made the pillar of its philosophy of it while advancing that all that is real is rational and that all that is rational is real.
It meant by this, that in a world where what arrives is carrying senses, an idea is not only one subjective opinion, since it is for it that the man and the world have to meet.

Today, all the persons who seek "to seize" the world are in search of concepts.