I am not at all up to speed on the German Marxist Sohn-Rethel (please
help), but a thought immediately comes to mind on Popper's "Three Worlds"
cosmology.
If one ignores the positivist framework of these three worlds invented by
Popper and attempts to make them as dynamic and "dialectical" as possible,
one might have some success drawing some rough correspondence between a)
Popper's world 1, the world of physical objects and organisms, and
Ilyenkov's material world; b) Popper's world 2, of mental activity, and
Ilyenkov's will and consciousness; and c) Popper's world 3, the products of
the human mind, and Ilyenkov's realm of ideality.
But there is still a fundamental difference that makes the two world views
completely different. If we are to make Popper's three worlds dynamic and
historical, and assign any meaning to his numbering system, then world 1,
objects and organisms, must generate an emerging world 2, mental
activities, which in turn (in conjunction with each other) generate world
3, the world of products of the human mind.
Ilyenkov, however, makes it crystal clear that he sees just the opposite
genetic-historic relationship between world "2" and world "3". He argues
that it is ideality that generates will and consciousness, not the other
way around. See paragraph 76. Also note Ilyenkov's brief mention of
Popper in paragraph 77.
To expand on Ilyenkov's discussion of the "secret twist of idealism,"
(discussed earlier in the essay "the Concept of the Ideal), it is this
"inversion" of ideality, on one hand, and will and consciousness, on the
other, that creates a major stumbling block in philosophy and
science. When plain materialists and empiricists do this, they are
committing an essential idealist error. It is one of the most common
errors in bourgeois social science.
- Steve
At 01:02 PM 6/16/2005 -0400, Ralph wrote:
This is the key. How would you compare Ilyenkov's view to that of
Sohn-Rethel, or to Popper's 3-worlds theory?
At 07:16 PM 6/15/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:
......................
As I see it, the key concept in this regard that Ilyenkov offers is that
just as Marx discovered how social relations can be "embodied" into
things in the form of commodities - through the incorporation of abstract
labor into the value-form - so too, Marxists can explain that social
relations are embodied in all cultural objects - through the
incorporation of meaningful cultural activity into the ideal form.
Ilyenkov explains that plain materialists and idealists alike make the
error of viewing the boundary between the material and the ideal as being
the world of the inside versus that of the outside of each individual
human head. In contrast, he argues that according to dialectical
materialism, ideality and materiality must be distinguished in terms of
the composition of each object - both the composition of the physical
attributes, which of course are the sources of its materiality, and the
composition of its social origins and social context, which are the
sources of its ideality - just as Marx analyzed the composition of the
commodity. According to Ilyenkov's theory, objects within the human
cultural realm objectively possess both materiality and ideality, just as
commodities in a market economy possess both concrete and abstract labor,
possess both use-value and exchange-value.
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