[Xmca-l] Re: human etc

[David Kellogg]

Mike Cole has criticized Vygotsky on exactly this point: in "The Socialist
Alteration of Man" (and in other texts), he seems to think that
phylogenesis doesn't exactly stop but it is carried on by artificial means,
as if development were kind of shunted from a slow track to a much faster
one, e.g. by socialist eugenics. It's certainly true that the Soviets
believed in a phylogenesis by intelligent design, although they attributed
that design to the socialist future and not to the Creationist past. It is
also true that their distinction between phylogenetic development and
sociogenetic development is a little too sharp for anything but rhetorical
accuracy (it is partly developed in opposition to Social Darwinism). But I
think that the main theatre for intelligent design was supposed to be
political economy, and not biology. In that field, the Soviets were
over-optimistic, or perhaps they simply didn't or couldn't understand the
part of Capital where Marx reminds us of the difference between a sloppy
architect and a really talented honeybee: the former, but not the latter,
has mastered language and can raise his structure in imagination and in
words before blundering on into steel and concrete.

One of the things you learn drawing the human figure in art school is that
the medievals didn't know how to draw children: Giotto's pictures of Christ
show him as a shrunken adult. It really isn't until the Renaissance that
painters figure out that an adult is about seven heads tall and a child is
only about four heads tall. We sometimes think of the Renaissance as being
a "return to the Greeks", but in fact it was Giotto and his colleagues who
were slavishly following Aristotle. The Greeks had apparently written that
the ideal height of a person was seven times the distance from the bottom
of the chin to the top of skull and fashioned their gods accordingly. But
if you dig up skeletons from that time, particularly those of the slave
class, you find that they are only five or six heads tall. So the gods that
people had in mind back then were actually idealized versions of the
slave-owning class--putting flesh on the skeleton of your boss. Or, if you
prefer, they were doing their own version of science fiction, because today
we are on the average the stature of a Greek god (which is why we think
that their fantastic versions of human height are actually 'realistic').

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
Outlines, Spring 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!TuLHcPCurn3Tt7a-dwWNUjD96PkWT_X-aGLLq2cVMX068SIKfKA88_DDQLgPFR4glb6neA$ 
New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological
Works* *Volume
One: Foundations of Pedology*"
 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!TuLHcPCurn3Tt7a-dwWNUjD96PkWT_X-aGLLq2cVMX068SIKfKA88_DDQLgPFR43nyNT3w$ 


On Mon, Aug 10, 2020 at 3:04 AM Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Does human phylogenesis end?  Like, is there a dividing line or stop-point
> between human development and whatever version or branch comes next?
>
> I was going to look this up but figured I'm better off just posing the
> question here. (A favor to anyone who answers: try to talk to me like I'm
> ignorant here -- because that would be correct!)
>
> Related: here's a fun and very interesting show that plays around with
> future (and not-so-future) possibilities of human development:
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Million__;!!Mih3wA!TuLHcPCurn3Tt7a-dwWNUjD96PkWT_X-aGLLq2cVMX068SIKfKA88_DDQLgPFR47dRt8TQ$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Million__;!!Mih3wA!S6RpUe7tKXHgEfQnhGveZQV1LbA1OhhVvxCcLctUKHrBssGuvvKrFmGHo0VrzlmuKZy1Ug$>
>
>
> Thank you,
>
> Anthony
>
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