[Xmca-l] Re: Thought and language as oscillating and pulsing [or not]

[Larry Purss]

I would like to share a page from the Zinchenko article which puts in play
Vygotsky's and Shpet's understandings of the play of word and thought. It
may be going to the "heart of the matter" The quote is from page 237

According to such logic, inner forms do not disappear,

but rather continue to participate in perception, memory, thinking, and

action.

Action, image, word, feeling, thought, and will – in other words everything

that is united by the concepts “mental processes,” “mental acts,”

or “forces of the soul” – are living forms. And because they are living,

they are, therefore, active, meaningful, unfinalized, and restless *. . . *
Like

a soul! Each one of them is not “pure culture.” One form contains in

itself the others. The ancient principle of “All in one, one in all” is at

work, and this does not interfere with their relatively autonomous
existence.

But even while they maintain their autonomy, they “remember”

their origins and remain heterogeneous forms.

The heterogeneity of images, words, and actions is noted in various

poetic metaphors: “eyes of the soul,” “poetic senses,” “organs of sense as

theoreticians,” “kinetic melody,” “picturesque idea,” “reasonable eye,”

“sighted mind,” “soul in flight” (about ballet), “shame of sighted fingers,”

and so forth. The internal forms of action and image have their

own dynamic forms subordinated to the sense of movement or perceptual

(or perhaps thinking) tasks. We know that we can play out action

before action, and after action (if it is not too late!), we can manipulate

an image, mentally rotate it, and so forth.

The dynamic forms of words, images, and actions enrich each other.

Images and actions, like words, perform operational functions, which, as

in the case of word, may be separated from meaning. Shpet paid attention

to meaning. The instantaneousness of thought may be related to

the simultaneity of image, and perhaps the internal playback of action.

Finally, the interchange of function is possible between word, image, and

action, perhaps, including intellectual functions. Don’t we talk about

visual or musical thinking? Doesn’t the experienced conductor play the

whole symphony in the internal plane in one or two minutes?

I have said enough here to come back to the “wordless impulse,” or

“unembodied intention,” to the situation, paradoxically presented by

Potebnya and Bibikhin when they say: “there is word even where there

is no word.” The word does not die in thought. More likely, thought dies

by drowning in words. After all, truth may be born and regenerated in

discussions, but it may degenerate as well. Perhaps, thought has its own

internal form, and this has to become a subject of serious reflection. It is

no accident that the beginning of this chapter contains the whole gamut

of answers on what stands behind thought. And if, for example, the

internal form of thought contains images, the internal form of images

contains the word."
*The cornerstone of Zinchenko's insight is the notion that these
forms exist and have inner form - "LIVING FORM". -*
*He constructs [and discovers] that if we reduce or abstract this living
form we "have" created [or discovered]specimens which we observe as
spectators. In this move we cut out the living form and are left with a
dead body*
*Larry*
:

On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 6:15 PM, Martin John Packer <mpacker@uniandes.edu.co
> wrote:

> This time, the BBC has come up with quite a good discussion of
> phenomenology, from Husserl to Heidegger and onwards (though not to Spet,
> unfortunately)!
>
> <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04ykk4m>
>
> Martin
>
> On Jan 24, 2015, at 10:19 PM, Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:
>
> > Hi Martin,
> >
> > I would be interested in the "intro to Husserl" by Shpet, as I have long
> been curious how the Husserl got to LSV.
> >
> > Is it possible/doable to get some scans of chapter(s) from Appearance &
> Sense? you know, the ones you believe to be most juicy?
> >
> > You may at any time hermeneutically determine what is "most juicy."
> >
> > Kind regards,
> >
> > Annalisa
> >
> >
>
>
>