----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and
thethinkers he inspired" <marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu>
Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2005 12:40
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst
I am responding to a 6/22/2005 post from Victor, which I quote from.
The quote below is a good example of where I think Victor gets Ilyenkov
wrong 180 degrees. In the general section of Ilyenkov's 1977 essay "The
Concept of the Ideal" that Victor quotes from, I believe Ilyenkov is
making just the opposite point that Victor attributes to him.
Victor quotes Ilyenkov:
"Paragraph 53: It is this fact, incidentally, that explains the
persistent survival of such "semantic substitutions"; indeed, when we are
talking about nature, we are obliged to make use of the available language
of natural science, the "language of science" with its established and
generally understood "meanings". It is this, specifically, which forms the
basis of the arguments of logical positivism, which quite consciously
identifies "nature" with the "language" in which people talk and write
about nature.
Paragraph 54: It will be appreciated that the main difficulty and,
therefore, the main problem of philosophy is not to distinguish and
counterpose everything that is "in the consciousness of the individual" to
everything that is outside this individual consciousness (this is hardly
ever difficult to do), but to delimit the world of collectively
acknowledged notions, that is, the whole socially organised world of
intellectual culture with all its stable and materially established
universal patterns, and the real world as it exists outside and apart from
its expression in these socially legitimised forms of "experience".
(Ilyenkov The Concept of the Ideal 1977)
Victor comments:
The delimitation of what Ilyenkov calls the "whole socially organised
world of intellectual culture" and the "real world as it exists outside
and apart from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of
"experience." can only be based on the distinction between the socially
learned and confirmed concepts or ideas of the tribe and the concepts
formulated by reflecting on practical material activity, i.e. labour
activity: the operations carried out, the physical and material response
of the instruments and material of production to these activities and
finally the effectivity of the operations relative to their purposes.
Victor says the delimitation that Ilyenkov makes (I am adding ...'s to
make Victor's complex sentence a little more readable) "can only be based
on the distinction" .... "between the socially learned and confirmed
concepts or ideas of the tribe" ... and ... "the concepts formulated by
reflecting on practical material activity, i.e. labour activity: the
operations carried out, the physical and material response of the
instruments and material of production to these activities and finally the
effectivity of the operations relative to their purposes."
But this is decidedly *not* the distinction Ilyenkov makes.
The essential discussion we are having here is over this question: where,
precisely, is the boundary between ideality and materiality?
Victor draws the boundary between socially learned concepts, on one hand,
and conceptualizing practical activity/carrying out practical activity/the
consequences of practical activity - on the other.
Ilyenkov draws a very different distinction. Ilyenkov is investigating
the distinction - and he refers to this as the "main problem of
philosophy" - between the "whole socially organised world of intellectual
culture" and "the real world as it exists outside and apart from" this.
I believe I can draw on Ilyenkov, and: a) show where Ilyenkov makes his
distinction between the ideal and the real and b) demonstrate that Victor
is committing the very idealist error that Ilyenkov criticizes Hegel and
Bogdanov for making. In the essay "The Concept of the Ideal," my
annotations offer the subtitles "Hegel's Concept of the Ideal" to
paragraphs 45-49, "The Secret Twist of Idealism" to paragraphs 50-53, and
"The Distinction Between the Ideal and the Real" to paragraphs 54-57.
Interestingly, my reading of Victor's writings on the question of the
ideal, such as in the quote above, is that his concept of the ideal is
much closer to Hegel's than Ilyenkov's or Marx's, he is actually
performing the same kind of "secret twist of idealism" that Ilyenkov
attributes to Hegel and others, and Victor's distinction or boundary
between the ideal and the real is not consistent with Ilyenkov's.
It's not enough simply to say that Victor is making the same error as Hegel
and Bogdanov. You have to show it to be so.
What does Ilyenkov actually say about Hegel and Bogdanov?
49. In other words, Hegel includes in the concept of the "ideal"
everything that another representative of idealism in philosophy (admittedly
he never acknowledged himself to be an "idealist")A. A. Bogdanov - a century
later designated as "socially organised experience" with its stable,
historically crystallised patterns, standards, stereotypes, and "algorithms".
The feature which both Hegel and Bogdanov have in common (as "idealists") is
the notion that this world of "socially organised experience" is for the
individual the sole ,,object" which he "assimilates" and "cognises", the
sole object with which he has any dealings. Ilyenkov 1977 Concept of the
Ideal.
So how does Ilyenkov describe the real in contrast to the ideal? In truth
he does not describe the real as such in The Concept of the Ideal, but in
another work, Dialectical Logic (1974):
57 While Hegel's recording of these facts led him to idealism, Marx
and Engels, having considered the real (objective) prototype of logical
definitions and laws in the concrete, universal forms and laws of social man's
objective activity, cut off any possibility of subjectivist interpretation
of the activity itself. Man does not act on nature from outside, but
'confronts nature as one of her own forces' and his objective activity is
therefore linked at every stage with, and mediated by, objective natural
laws. Man 'makes use of the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of
things as means of exerting power over other things, and in order to make
these other things subservient to his aims .... Thus nature becomes an
instrument of his activities, an instrument with which he supplements his
own bodily organs, adding a cubit and more to his stature, scripture
notwithstanding'. It is just in that that the secret of the universality of
human activity lies, which idealism passes off as the consequence of reason
operating in man: 'The universality of man appears in practice precisely in
the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body - both inasmuch a
nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object,
and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man's inorganic body -
nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself the human body.'
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The ideal refers to the collective intellectual activity of men; social
thought, its formation, its operation and its transmission.
Reality on the other hand is not a function of ideality, consciousness or of
will. It precedes all these as it does humanity itself. In labour
activity when man "confronts nature as one of her own forces' and his
objective activity is therefore linked at every stage with, and mediated by,
objective natural laws." The distinction between ideality and reality
emerges in labour activity, in the absolute participation of man, with all
his faculties (not only his thoughts but his physical and material body and
the physical and material artifactual extensions of his body) in the
production and reproduction of the means for his existence. Objective,
natural laws are indifferent to the history and character of the
intellectual activities and constructions of human kind for they represent
conditions (even of mankind) that precede all human ideation. They are
universal to all human activity in nature and to the extent that men must
cope with the same natural conditions to realize the same goals, they must
conform to the same laws and principles relevant to the interaction.
THAT IS THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE IDEAL AND THE REAL!
58. The laws of human activity are therefore also, above all, laws of
the natural material from which 'man's inorganic body', the objective
(material) body of civilisation, is built, i.e. laws of the movement and
change of the objects of nature, transformed into the organs of man, into
moments of the process of production of society's material life.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Now then, the laws of human activity are functions of mans total or absolute
participation in productive process and are the laws and principles of "the
natural material from which'man's inorganic body', the objective (material)
body of civilisation, is built." These laws can and are conceptualised by
men, but they are also assimilated by human faculties that are remote from
his intellectual activities.
59 In labour (production) man makes one object of nature act on another
object of the same nature in accordance with their own properties and laws
of existence . Marx and Engels showed that the logical forms of man's action
were the consequences (reflection) of real laws of human actions on objects,
i.e. of practice in all its scope and development, laws that are independent
of any thinking. Practice understood materialistically, appeared as a
process in whose movement each object involved in it functioned (behaved) in
accordance with its own laws, bringing its own form and measure to light in
the changes taking place in it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The logical forms of reason are most explicitly described by way of
conceptualization, but their roots lie at the very foundation of life
activity. Any natural form that acts consciously, unconsciously or a
consciously to realize some object exhibits rational activity. Rationality
then has far deeper origins in nature than thought. The stages of
rationality (understood materially of course), mapped and described by
Hegel's categories of thought, model the ascent of the abstract rationality
of life as a universal to the very concrete rationality of men.
60 Thus mankind's practice is a fully concrete (particular) process, and at
the same time a universal one. It includes all other forms and types of the
movement of matter as its abstract moments, and takes place in conformity
with their laws. The general laws governing man's changing of nature
therefore transpire to be also general laws of the change of nature itself,
revealed by man's activity, and not by orders foreign to it, dictated from
outside. The universal laws of man's changing of nature are also universal
laws of nature only in accordance with which can man successfully alter it.
Once realised they also appear as laws of reason, as logical laws. Their
'specificity' consists precisely in their in their universality, i.e. in the
fact that they are not only laws of subjectivity (as laws of the physiology
of higher nervous activity or of language), and not only of objective
reality (as laws of physics or chemistry), but also laws governing. the
movement both of objective reality and of subjective human life activity.
(That does not mean at all, of course, that thought does not in general
possess any 'specific features' worthy of study. As a special process
possessing features specifically distinguishing it from the movement of
objective reality, i.e. as a psycho-physiological faculty of the human
individual, thought has, of course, to be subjected to very detailed study
in psychology and the physiology of the higher nervous system, but not in
logic). In subjective consciousness these laws appear as 'plenipotentiaries'
of the rights of the object, as its universal, ideal image: 'The laws of
logic are the reflections of the objective in the subjective consciousness
of man.'
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Practice, human practice at least, is the unity of ideation and reality, of
particularity and universality. Like ideality it can only be understood as
a concept joining contradictions. On the one it is a fully concrete process
of absolute involvement of the labourer in productive activity, on the other
hand it is informed by concepts that impart to it the social aims and means,
at varying degrees of abstraction, that give it direction and some measure
of effectiveness. The material outcomes of practical activity are neither
ideal nor real, but both containing the imprint of ideality but in material
forms whose forms and substance are completely independent of the idealities
that guided their production.
And now for the "Idealist twist" Here are the two paragraphs referred to by
Steve.
50 But the world existing before, outside and independently
of the consciousness and will in general (i.e., not only of the
consciousness and will of the individual but also of the social
consciousness and the socially organised "will"), the world as such, is
taken into account by this conception only insofar as it finds expression in
universal forms of consciousness and will, insofar as it is already
"idealised", already assimilated in "experience", already presented in the
patterns and forms of this "experience", already included therein.
51 By this twist of thought, which characterises idealism
in general (whether it is Platonic, Berkeleian, Hegelian or that of Popper),
the real material world, existing before, outside and quite independently of
"experience" and before being expressed in the forms of this "experience"
(including language), is totally removed from the field of vision, and what
begins to figure under the designation of the "real world" is an already
"idealised" world, a world already assimilated by people, a world already
shaped by their activity, the world as people know it, as it is presented in
the existing forms of their culture. A world already expressed (presented)
in the forms of the existing human experience. And this world is declared to
be the only world about which anything at all can be said.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve's interpretation of the offending paragraph (included below for
comparison) does contain an error, but it's not the error of "the Idealist
twist."
What I do here is describe two kinds of ideation. Ethical Ideal and
Practical Scientific, the former, representing the idealisms and fetishisms
of unreflective social conformism, the latter, the practical thinking of
creative labour. If anything, I argue that the idealist conception is
mystical illusionism while the real world is only conceptualised in
reflection on practical activity, just the reverse of the "Idealist twist
(it has more in common with Korsch's somewhat misplaced critique of Lenin)."
In truth, I don't much like this dichotomy. For one thing it suggests two
kinds of ideals which is not justified by distinctions in the origins,
development and form of ideality whatever its contents. Second it tends to
obfuscate the dialectics of practice, i.e. some ideality unites with the
real in practice while other idealities do not. Third, it tends to treat
the ideal and the real as material equivalents, something they surely are
not. The ideal is an emergent property from out of the real, and not a
metaphysical variant of Ahura Mazda opposing Angra Mainyu or vice versa as
you so wish.
Despite the necessity of avoiding the dichotomy described above (whether
with an idealist or materialist twist), it's important from the research
point of view to realize that idealism and fetishism exerts a powerful
presence in human activity, not as a philosophy, but as a way of regarding
the world. Considering that most of the people most of the time and some of
the people all of the time generally concieve of their activity in ethical
or cultural terms, the integration of idealism and fetishism into theory as
common and even prevalent intellectual practice is important to a scientific
understanding of the laws of human history.
None of my opinions or claims, of course, negate Victor's good advice and
inspiration to me to study and make copious notes about the other books
Ilyenkov has in English, as well as study relevant writings by Marx,
Lenin, and Hegel. Nor do my philosophically sharp criticisms of what I
perceive as erroneous interpretations by Victor of Ilyenkov's theory of
the ideal take away from the respect and admiration I have for Victor's
many intellectual accomplishments, which I have been privileged to learn
much from in various internet venues. In all worthwhile discussions,
there are points where it is best to step back and just agree to disagree.
This discussion is certainly one that can be continued at later dates.
None of Ilyenkov's writings, nor the ideal, nor any of our concepts of it
are likely to go away any time soon.
In solidarity,
- Steve
Right on and thanks,
Oudeyis
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