[Xmca-l] Re: Fwd: The protectors of the Amazon

Wed Sep 18 14:03:24 PDT 2019

Andy--

Engels not only accepted the existence of atoms (Dialectics of Nature) he
offers us a proof of their existence that pre-dates Einstein's (which
actually only proves the existence of molecules). Engels used the fact that
the properties of moles of elements could be deduced from their atomic
weight to demonstrate Hegel's "passage of quantity into quality"; there
isn't any way to do this without the understanding that atoms exist.

Henry--

The term "cyborg" didn't exist until 1960. But I think it's a little like
the way that Vygotsky and Buhler use "Lamarckianism" or "a synthesis of
Larmarck and Darwin" to refer to what we would now call epigenesis: the
term is new, but the concept is definitely there in Vygotsky: in the form
of the "Jennings Principle", or rather Vygotsky's criticism of the Jennings
principle.

Herbert Spencer Jennings (despite the unfortunate name his parents
christened him with) was a progressive eugenicist (which at the end of the
nineteenth century must have been like being an airplane pilot with a fear
of heights). He was mostly interested in paramecia (because he wanted to
work out the real mathematics behind Mendel's discoveries--you know that
the numbers Mendel came up with for dominance and recessiveness are really
WAY too convenient). But he used his knowledge of genetics to argue against
the 1924 anti-Chinese immigration act, a piece of racist legislation which
is still the basis of American immigration law (immigration quotas are
designed to preserve the ethnic composition of the USA).

In the course of  his work on paramecia, Jennings says that the sphere of
activity of any organism is a function (in the mathematical sense) of its
organs. Vygotsky is skeptical, and not simply because the activity of an
organism is greater than the sum of the actions of its organs. Vygotsky
says that humans have the peculiar ability to create their own organs:
artificial limbs, eye-glasses, ear-trumpets, and of course the numerous
prosthetic devices that our brains use, chief of which is language. This
means that humans do not obey the Jennings principle.

The ability of humans to flout Malthus--our ability to make the means of
subsistence increase "geometrically" and not just "arithmetically"--is not
simply a matter of altering the environment to suit ourselves and our own
reproductive proclivities. It is also a matter of altering ourselves to
suit our better natures. I think that the only real hope for the Amazon
lies in that latter possibility, although I think I would resist
physicalizing it as "cyborg nature" the way that Donna Haraway does. I also
think that "cyborg nature" essentializes matters: the ability to flout the
Jennings principle is anything but essential to humans. It's a fluke of
exaptation: taking an organ that evolved for one thing and using it for
something quite different (e.g. taking organs that evolved for breathing
and eating and using them for talking about philosophy).

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article:
Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
understanding narratives by
Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663

Some e-prints available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 12:32 AM HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote:

> David,
> Does biology include the cyborg nature of humanity? I mean the way in
> which technology has changed human consciousness, what it is like to be
> human.
> Henry
>
>
>
> On Sep 17, 2019, at 11:56 PM, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:
>
> David, I seem to recall that Engels also took atoms to be an unprovable
> hypothesis. The point for Hegel though is that the question of atoms or not
> is not a philosophical question, but one which can only be resolved by
> experiment, and like Engels, he simply failed to imagine that such a thing
> was possible. Einstein observed atoms c. 1905 via a mathematical analysis
> of Brownian motion. Another great philosopher, maybe you remember who,
> claimed that although we could see the Sun, we could not, in principle,
> ever know what it is made of. Optical spectrometry of course put an end to
> that,
>
> In general, Hegel underestimated the potential for expansion of the domain
> of natural scientific and technical discovery. But he updated his
> philosophy as new insights became available, as we all do.
>
> Andy
> ------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> Hegel for Social Movements <https://brill.com/view/title/54574>
> Home Page <https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm>
> On 18/09/2019 2:50 pm, David Kellogg wrote:
>
> While I was (gratefully) checking out this material (and also the
> previously sent material from Mike on the APA deep poverty challenge) I was
> turning over in my head the last discussion we had on Hegel and social
> movements. Andy's book prompted me to dig out my dog-eared copy of Hegel's
> Logic and give it another go, and this time I did find it went a lot more
> easily (for which to Andy many thanks).
>
> But I had to cough a bit over Hegel's rejection of atoms. On the one hand,
> he says, there isn't and can never be any empirical evidence for them. On
> the other, he says, physics is just miring us in matter, distracting us
> from our real task, which is a new kind of metaphysics that can overleap
> mathematics, matter, and elemental sciences stuck in Being merely and
> establish a true science of the whole (his encyclopedia of philosophy, of
> which the logic is a part). As usual, when I come up against stuff like
> this in Hegel, I try hard to imagine what the world really looks like to
> nineteenth century German philosopher, where atoms are an unproveable
> hypothesis and God is simply "pure" reality. It still seems to me that what
> Hegel has to say about atoms is embarrassing, dogmatic, and downright
> foolish--but as soon as we transfer what he says to sociology and
> psychology, he starts making sense.
>
> At the same time I've been rereading Darwin. One of the things that struck
> me was how much Darwin was influenced by political economy, and especially
> by Malthus. What Darwin is really up to is taking Malthus OUT of sociology,
> where it really is not very good at explaining things like learning and
> development, collaboration, and culture generally, and put him where he
> really belongs, biology, where he really does help us to understand
> precisely why learning doesn't seem to play much of a role in evolution and
> speciation. It was Darwin's misfortune that many of his most ardent
> epigones (e.g. Spencer) were essentially Lamarckians who were trying to
> reverse what he did, putting his biology back into political economy. It
> was all of our misfortunes that this resulted in a highly atomistic way of
> looking at culture, history, sociology and psychology, in which the sole
> supra-individual unit was a pseudo-biological category of race.
>
> Darwin only makes sense when you ratchet him down from social theory to
> biology. Human  culture really doesn't obey strict Darwinism anymore:
> agriculture and husbandry mean we burn forests instead of hunting and
> gathering like other species, and knowledge of how to do this is
> essentially Lamarckian in the way it is handed down through language.
> Similarly, Hegel only makes sense when you ratchet him up from physics into
> social theory. Atoms exist, and carbon dioxide is made of 'em, but that
> doesn't tell us much about how to stop global warming. Our, physics
> doesn't really have to listen to Hegel--there is just too much empirical
> evidence for atoms--and the proper name of the new kind of metaphysics that
> Hegel had in mind is not metaphysics at all, but historico-cultural
> psychology.
>
> (I have always wondered why my Geneva friends insist on
> "historico-cultural" instead of cultural-historical, but I think I know
> now...culture, e.g. guarding the amazon, is the emerging concept of history
> and not the other way around....).
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article:
> Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
> pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
> understanding narratives by
> Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
> To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>
> Some e-prints available at:
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 8:02 AM Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
>
>>
>>
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>> The Amazon Has True Champions
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>> A season filled with intense, human-caused wildfires in the Amazon
>> rainforest has burned thousands of square miles, turned the skies black and
>> raised red flags on an international level. The number of fires is 85%
>> higher than the previous year.
>>
>> The Amazon is both the lungs and the heart of our planet.  It takes in
>> enormous quantities of CO2 and is thought to produce 12-20% of the
>> world’s oxygen. It also acts as a biotic pump bringing rain into South
>> America and all over the world.  Without rainfall, there will be cultural
>> and agricultural ruin.
>>
>> Let’s credit those who have been and continue to act as its guardians.
>> Over the course of thousands of years, the indigenous people of the Amazon
>> have worked to preserve this diverse biome that has contributed immensely
>> to the habitability of the planet.
>>
>> They are the ones who can show us the way, we must support and follow
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>> *We Mapped All The Fires That Burned In The Amazon In August - *In 2019
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