[Xmca-l] Re: The Ideal

[Andy Blunden]

To keep up the metaphor, Dude, exporting US democracy is like expecting 
everyone in the world to worship Jesus, and equally likely to succeed. 
No, an ideal, if it exists, exists implicitly in the practices of a 
community and cannot be "exported".
I think Vygotsky was simply talking of the Ideal as something like that, 
which exists within the life of a community, and is acquired by anyone 
raised in that community. I am not talking about a "universal ideal," 
and I don't think that that is what Vygotsky had in mind.
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/


Tvmathdude wrote:
> The USA is the only lace our style of democracy "works". To assume 
> that our style of democracy can be exported is absurd. Our ignorance 
> of other cultures is overwhelming. Yet, the ideal may exist, but be 
> beyond our view.
>
> Did Vygotsky feel that he could only define an ideal within his own 
> cultural limitations?
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> Sent: Tue, Oct 14, 2014 7:58 pm
> Subject: [Xmca-l] The Ideal
>
> Although I am sure that 99.9% (or thereabouts) of people who read what 
> Vygotsky said about the presence of the ideal in the child's 
> environment, interpreted this to mean simply that adult speech provided 
> a model on which children could model their own language-use, 
> nonetheless, this is not ultimately what the presence of the ideal means 
> in the Marxist/Hegelian tradition of which Vygotsky and many of his 
> colleagues were a part.
> It would be true to say for example that the ideal of democracy exists 
> with US political life, even though I doubt there is a single electoral 
> process which is not corrupted by money and degraded by ignorance, 
> prejudice and narrow self-interest. Nonetheless, in all the rhetoric and 
> legislation around the broader political life, and what peoplpe tell 
> their kids and what young people cry out for in their political 
> interventions, that ideal exists, it exists as an immanent tendency 
> present in the very foundation of the Republic. Cynicism aside this is 
> not a fiction.
> So while something like a model is the most obvious and powerful 
> manifestation of the Ideal, it is not the beginning and end of the 
> Ideal. In the absence of such a model, the Ideal is still present in any 
> living community.
> The NSL case is a case where we can learn more deeply what an Ideal can be.
>
> Andy
> -- 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/ <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
>