This 6/26 post by Victor seems like a good
stopping place for the moment - I need to put our
discussion about ideality aside for just a little
while to tend to other projects, but I am
certainly interested. I will follow up. Victor
is perfectly correct, I must show what I claim.
BTW, for anyone trying to follow this discussion,
two different essays by Ilyenkov are quoted in
Victor's post, both available on the internet at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/index.htm
The main essay Victor and I have been debating interpretations of is:
The Concept of the Ideal
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm
This essay appeared in the book Problems of
Dialectical Materialism; Progress Publishers,
1977 and was scanned by Andy Blunden. The
numbering both Victor and I have been using
refers to the sequence of 142 paragraphs in that
essay. In Victor's 6/26 post, he quotes from paragraphs 49, 50 and 51.
I have an important side point to bring up about
this essay. In my scrutiny of this on-line
version, the only version I have, I believe there
are some scanning errors and possibly some
original translation errors to contend
with. There is also some reason to wonder if the
original Russian that the translation was based
on may also contain editorial errors. In other
words, this version must be read with caution,
and if something does not make sense, it may not
be Ilyenkov's original writing. I bring this up
because there are a handful of places in the
essay where publishing errors like these seem to
contribute to confusion over what Ilyenkov was really saying.
In his 6/26 post Victor also quotes Ilyenkov
using paragraph numbers 57, 58, 59,
60. However, these are from a different essay -
chapter 8 in DIALECTICAL LOGIC (1974), Part Two
Problems of the Marxist-Leninist Theory of Dialectics
8: The Materialist Conception of Thought as the Subject Matter of Logic
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay8.htm
The scanned book is Dialectical Logic, Essays on
its History and Theory; Progress Publishers,
1977; English translation 1977 by H. Campbell
Creighton; Transcribed: Andy Blunden; HTML Markup: Andy Blunden.
BTW, these paragraphs (found on pages 285-288)
are from the same essay Victor mentioned on 5/26
and I quoted from on 5/30, and which were
discussed a little on this list. The question of
the ideal is a major topic of this essay and I
agree with Victor that it should be discussed in
conjunction with the Concept of the Ideal essay
when we take this topic up again.
The philosophical work we are doing here is to
try to untangle the ideal and the material,
closely studying Ilyenkov's work on this complex
question in doing so. In the process, it seems
we should also seek to keep untangled which
citation by our philosopher-teacher we are talking about.
:-))
Best,
~ Steve
<end of my post>
_______________________________________________________________
At 07:32 PM 6/26/2005 +0200, Oudeyis (Victor) wrote:
----- 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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