[Xmca-l] Necessities and Necessariness

[David Kellogg]

Andy has an amazing on-line discussion, going back almost exactly two
decades, on "Freedom as the Recognition of Necessity", which was Engels's
exaptation of a Heglian formulation (which in turn comes from Spinoza.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/txt/davie07.htm

As I understand it, Andy is arguing that freedom as the recognition of
necessity in Hegel and Spinoza is a kind of philosophical resignation to
one's fate, but in Marx and Vygotsky it is a kind of active realization of
one's own labor and hence one's own selfhood in the transformation of the
environment.

The Soviet model of Marxism is a negation of both of these.  On the one
hand, externalization is active in nature, because it really involves
turning the tables on the environment and forcing it to adapt to human
necessities. And on the other hand it has very little room for "one's own
labor" and still less for "one's own selfhood": "One" is not a
statistically significant, hence not a necessary, number.

I think one way to reconcile this view with Andy's view is to make a
distinction between externalization as the recognition of the necessariness
of necessities, and externalization as the recognition of both one's own
necessariness and that of others. These seem to me to be two distinct
processes, belonging to two different stages of development (and to the
deveopment of tools on the one hand and signs on the other). But perhaps
"seem" is the word I should be stressing.

(In the article linked below, which I did with my wife, there is this four
year old girl who is trying to learn the times tables. She keeps getting
stuck: Why can't you just put three and five together and get thirty five?
Her grandmother is old school: your solution counts for nothing: Your
presumed necessariness is not as important as instrumental necessity. And
of course at one stage of development that is true; but "sustainable
development" is everywhere and always a contradiction in terms: no
development can ever sustain itself against itself.)

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New in *Early Years*, co-authored with Fang Li:

When three fives are thirty-five: Vygotsky in a Hallidayan idiom … and
maths in the grandmother tongue

Some free e-prints available at:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7I8zYW3qkEqNBA66XAwS/full
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20180609/9ac37e86/attachment.html