Steve,
I really do not have enough time to devote to answering this message as it
deserves. So please excuse the briefness of my responses.
----- 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: Monday, July 04, 2005 19:36
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst
Here is a follow-up on a passage Victor offered
in an interpretation of an Ilyenkov quote. I
made some claims and promised to try to show
their basis. First, I deconstruct both of these
passages from my viewpoint and criticize Victor's
formulation. Second, I touch on why Victor's
formulation reminds me more of Hegel than
Ilyenkov. But I do this in a (hopefully) more
relaxed way than the manner in which I initiated
this thought on 6/26, which on retrospect may
have been unnecessarily sharp and
argumentative. I hope this post does not come off in that way.
At 11:18 AM 6/22/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
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's interpretation:]
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.
Allow me to break these complex passages into
smaller pieces and comment on them:
Paragraph 54 (Ilyenkov The Concept of the Ideal 1977):
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".
Steve comments:
This is a huge statement by EVI: he is defining
"the main problem of philosophy." He is
suggesting that the main historical division of
philosophy between idealism and materialism,
emphasized so much by Marx and Engels, revolves
around a different kind of boundary than is
usually assumed. The usual boundary is between
that which is "inside" and "outside" individual
consciousness. EVI polemicizes again and again
against using this division in this
essay. Instead, EVI proposes a different
boundary. It is where EVI places this
alternative boundary that is the source of debate.
I believe, although his formulations are less
than transparent, that EVI is delimiting the
fundamental difference as that between the ideal
- "the world of collectively acknowledged
notions" - and the "real world as it exists outside and apart" from the
ideal.
[Victor 6/22:]
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.
Steve comments:
Victor suggests the boundary EVI is speaking of
is revealed in the following distinction: between
the ideas/concepts of the tribe - and reflections
on practical/labor activity. Simplifying even
more what I believe Victor is suggesting, he
appears to place the essential boundary between
the ideal, on one hand, and reflections on activity, on the other.
My opinion - and of course, Victor's
interpretation of his own words takes precedence
over any opinions I may express - is that
Victor's distinction does not capture the point
EVI was making. In fact, as I see it, Victor's
formulation quite dramatically loses the very
distinction between the ideal and the "real world
as it exists outside and apart from" the ideal
that I believe EVI is trying to make.
This is only the case if you maintain the Kantian view that reality and
ideality do not share the same ground, something Ilyenkov explicitly
rejects.
I see the realm of, as Victor puts it, "concepts
formulated by reflecting on practical material
activity, i.e. labour activity," as a *part* of
the ideal, as *examples* of ideality. I would
categorize such reflections as part of what
Ilyenkov calls the "whole socially organised
world of intellectual culture," not as that which
"exists outside and apart" from it.
The reflections of labour activity include thinking about such normally
unconscious human activities such as muscle activity, sense perception, as
well as the manifestation of the natural laws and related principles
relevant to the forms and substances of the decidedly non-human participants
such as tools and materials of production in the productive process. By
arguing that all reflective thought is ideal you are committing the
"idealist twist". To argue that the manifestation of natural laws and
principles in labour activity are no less ideas than, say the belief in gods
or of the buying power of money is exactly the practice of objective
idealists who assert that all human knowledge is ideal :
"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."EVI 1977 paragraph
51)
In fact they are not regarded as ideal by EVI but universals that represent
conditions that are arrived at by reflection on practical activity, i.e.
information that is generated by human interaction with nature-see Chapter 8
of Dialectical Logic. Ideals on the other hand are concepts whose origins
are strictly limited to learning from others and represent social truths
essentially relevant to social life only. For this reread Ilyenkov's
critique of objective idealism - Chapter 7 of Dialectical Logic. Natural
science can of course become ideal when its truths are accepted without
regular testing by practical activity.]
If Victor's distinction does indeed not match
EVI's, and only refers to two aspects of EVI's
first half, then Victor's formulation leaves
nothing that actually does qualify for EVI's
second half - that which exists "outside and apart" from ideality.
So what do you call reality? Ilyenkov is quite clear as to what he calls
reality (see below):
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.'
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.
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.
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.' EVI 1974 Dialectical Logic Part 2 Chapter
8)
What is especially interesting about this, is
that this is precisely what Ilyenkov seems to
criticize Hegel and Bogdanov and the objective
idealists for doing. As I see it, EVI criticizes
them for dropping off "virgin" materiality -
materiality that has not been humanized, has not been idealized - from view.
What is virgin materiality? If by virgin materiality you mean that part of
nature men have yet to have contacted, then you are recapitulating the crude
metaphysical materialist assertion that we can discuss nature apart from
man's interaction with it. It is in fact a regression to the distinction
between what's in the head and what's outside the head shared by both
metaphysical idealism and materialism.
At the bottom of this post are five paragraphs
from EVI that discuss this. Victor quoted
several of them the other week. Here are some
sentences that emphasize the point I am getting at:
par 48:
"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."
and, par 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."
This is what Victor's formulation seems to do -
it seems to remove the world that is "outside and
apart" from ideality from the field of vision -
or perhaps better put, the field of interest.
Strange! First you argue that by distinguishing between the ideal and the
real on the basis of the former being the strictly social conceptualizations
of reality while the latter is a function of the confrontation between
socially engendered activity and the natural world represents an
illegitimate differentiation between parts of what you regard as an integral
ideality. Then having convinced yourself that I somehow agree that this
distinction between kinds of human activity (conscious activity if you will)
is incorrect, I now regard the real world as totally a function of ideality
and discount the world apart from ideality as irrelevant.
Sorry, but I'm afraid your argument that thought as a function of practice
and thought as recieved social wisdom are both ideal are not acceptable to
me or to Ilyenkov. Your views that all reflective thought is ideal is much
more consistent with the views of Lukac, Adorno, Marcuse and Horkheimer and
more recently of Habermas than with Ilyenkov (who an original thinker but is
after all still well within the Marxist Leninist orbit of scientific
Marxism).
I find it interesting that since you've determined that all human
consciousness is ideal, you are compelled to search for reality outside
human experience (and of course knowledge) and to revive the metaphysical
materialism of the 18th century French materialists and of Feuerbach.
Bringing up another recurring theme we have
discussed on this list: this perspective on
Victor's formulation may also help explain
Victor's views on the dialectics of nature.
on 5/26 Oudeyis stated:
"Is nature dialectical? I don't really know or
care. Science is dialectical, as dialectical as dialectics can be!"
As I see it, this view of nature and whether it
is dialectical is consistent with the tendency to
remove from the "field of vision" the world that
exists "outside and apart" from ideality - to
instead put all energy into analyzing the "world
already assimilated by people," such as the world
of scientific work. My general impression, which
could certainly be in need of correction, is that
this approach seems to characterize an important
tenet of Victor's philosophical system.
Wow! I wrote the previous paragraph before reading this one, and here you
are confirming my description of your argument as more consistent with
Critical Theory then with EVI's Marxist-Leninism. The identification of
scientific theory as an integral part of the ideal is an invention of Lukacs
that was expanded by his Critical Theorist epigones. It was an anathema to
Marxist Leninist theory and even Korsch expresses some doubts as to Lukac's
counterposing the dialectic to scientific knowledge.
There is another inevitable consequence of this displacement of the accent
from the dialectic to materialism. It prevents materialist philosophy from
contributing to the further development of the empirical sciences of nature
and society. In the dialectic method and content are inseparably linked. in
a famous passage Marx says that 'form has no value when it is not the form
of its content'. It is therefore completely against the spirit of the
dialectic, and especially of the materialist dialectic, to counterpose the
dialectical materialist 'method' to the substantive results achieved by
applying it to philosophy and the sciences. This procedure has become very
fashionable in Western Marxism. Nevertheless, behind this exaggeration there
lies a correct insight - namely, that dialectical materialism influenced the
progress of the empirical study of nature and society in the second half of
the nineteenth century above all because of its method. (K Korsch 1930 The
Problem of 'Marxism and Philosophy" An Anticritique pg.119)
Of course Korsch in his enthusiasm to delegitimize Leninism whitewashes the
absurdity produced by Lukacs's counterposition of the dialectic to science
and even tries a bit feebly to be sure to extract some value from it.
However, by arguing that science is counterposed to the dialectic just as
are the social idealizations of political economy, Lukacs transforms
dialectics into an empty intellectual exercise with no real relevance to
anything but the ideology of the dialectician.
Certainly Ilyenkov does not commit that piece of academic silliness. At no
point does Ilyenkov describe scientific work as ideal. On the contrary he
distinguishes the findings of science from ideality as the theoretical
representation of the universal relations of men and nature in labour
activity (see above).
In time, Critical Theory, so-called Western Marxism, dispensed with
materialism altogether and in the hands of theorists such as Marcuse, Adorno
and Habermas became a Marxoid moral philosophy with virtually no relevance
outside academia.
Highest regards,
- Steve Gabosch
What say you comrade?
Oudeyis
__________________________________________________________
from http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm
from Ilyenkov, The Concept of the Ideal, 1977, paragraphs 48-52.
48
"Hegel proceeds from the quite obvious fact that
for the consciousness of the individual the
"real" and even the "crudely material"
certainly not the "ideal" is at first the whole
grandiose materially established spiritual
culture of the human race, within which and by
the assimilation of which this individual awakens
to "self-consciousness". It is this that
confronts the individual as the thought of
preceding generations realised ("reified",
"objectified", "alienated") in sensuously
perceptible "matter" in language and visually
perceptible images, in books and statues, in wood
and bronze, in the form of places of worship and
instruments of labour, in the designs of machines
and state buildings, in the patterns of
scientific and moral systems, and so on. All
these objects are in their existence, in their
"present being" substantial, "material", but in
their essence, in their origin they are "ideal",
because they "embody" the collective thinking of
people, the "universal spirit" of mankind.
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.
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.
52
"This secret of idealism shows up transparently
in Hegel's discussion of the "ideality" of
natural phenomena, in his presentation of nature
as an "ideal" being in itself. Underlying what he
has to say about certain natural phenomena is
their description in the concepts and terms of
the physics of his day: "...because masses push
and crush each other and there is no vacuum
between them, it is only in this contact that the
ideality of matter in general begins, and it is
interesting to see how this intrinsic character
of matter emerges, for in general it is always
interesting to see the realisation of a concept."
Here Hegel is really speaking not at all about
nature as it is, but about nature as it is
presented (described) in the system of a definite
physical theory, in the system of its definitions
established by its historically formed "language".
<end>
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