[Xmca-l] Re: Science and Passion

[David Kellogg]

Well, I didn't say I liked the paper, Andy. I think that just as
perezhivanie cannot really be treated without some serious discussion of
the temporality of development, the issue of "flagrant partisanship" in
science cannot be treated without mentioning emotion, and I am ready to
acknowledge that you were attempting just that..

I do agree with the comment you made at CHAR on treating Dewey's remark
about partisanship developmentally, i.e. partisanship can be an asset to
science at one moment and a liability to science at another. But I
certainly don't accept that the direction of development is always away
from partisanship and/or emotional commitment. When I consider my own
trajectory through a number of different fields (e.g. linguistics) I find
the situation to be quite the other way around, and I don't think I've
devolved as a linguist.

I think this is why Vygotsky is quite unwilling to commit to sweeping
generalizations about the direction of development of the relationship
between emotion and reason (or, for that matter, thinking and speech, which
do not always tend to merge, contrary to what many people have written and
various schemata available on Google images indicate).

So although I strongly disagree with Anna on a number of issues (e.g.the
significance of Lenin, whether phylogenesis stops with sociogenesis or not,
whether "traditional models of science" uphold the capitalist order,
whether immigration is really in "turmoil"), I guess I am really on her
side in this: science is and inevitably has to be flagrantly partisan, and
flagrant partisanship is directly proportional to the extent a science
looks to the future for empirical confirmation and theoretical affirmation.
To believe otherwise is ahistorical in more ways than one. .

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New article in WORD, journal of the International Linguistic
Association (Volume
66, 2020 - Issue 3)
The problem of articulate animals in Korean child conversation: A
Hallidayan analysis, a Vygotskyan interpretation, and a Hasanian critique
David Kellogg & Seon-mi Song
Pages 149-165 | Published online: 18 Sep 2020

Some free e-prints available at:

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HAHXXJCARIGMTDBWYS9S/full?target=10.1080*00437956.2020.1793498__;Lw!!Mih3wA!RCBfj5odZ1CJnuL09UWYZ7l1CKcb-tsTundUZ4d9h7abZO5i1r4RAHCYfegqSCsO5Wyhbw$ 



On Thu, Oct 1, 2020 at 10:36 AM Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:

> Thanks for the interest, David, but my paper said absolutely nothing about
> emotion, which is of course nothing to do with the strange idea of
> "excluding" emotion.
> The motivation of scientific activity self-evidently entails emotion so
> long as we are human.
>
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/science-partisan.pdf__;!!Mih3wA!RCBfj5odZ1CJnuL09UWYZ7l1CKcb-tsTundUZ4d9h7abZO5i1r4RAHCYfegqSCsewLej1Q$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/science-partisan.pdf__;!!Mih3wA!S4ID5uDZu3ThzTshuAinndnUEx4h6tTRIVLkDBjV0h0l4WT2Agt_yC_A7qlq_xpnXJo0dA$>
>
> andy
> ------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> Hegel for Social Movements
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://brill.com/view/title/54574__;!!Mih3wA!S4ID5uDZu3ThzTshuAinndnUEx4h6tTRIVLkDBjV0h0l4WT2Agt_yC_A7qlq_xoHSgf7Rw$>
> Home Page
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm__;!!Mih3wA!S4ID5uDZu3ThzTshuAinndnUEx4h6tTRIVLkDBjV0h0l4WT2Agt_yC_A7qlq_xogGUjEaQ$>
> On 1/10/2020 9:45 am, David Kellogg wrote:
>
> Andy has written a very interesting response paper to Anna Stetsenko's
> recent article "Hope, political imagination, and agency in Marxism and
> beyond" in which he argues that Marx differentiated the  "flagrantly
> partisan" stance of his youth into a dispassionate science and a committed
> technology. Anna is arguing for more or less the opposite: as academics we
> need to abandon the idea that that emotion is separable from science, along
> with the notion that theory is separable from applicability.
>
> Here in Korea it is the annual harvest festival, and our little group (now
> not so little) is using the stay-at-home-this-holiday order to try to turn
> Vygotsky's "Teaching About the Emotions" into a kind of comic book. The
> idea is to use Dutch paintings from the Golden Age with thought balloons
> and speech bubbles to illustrate Vygotsky's text, to situate it into a
> popular genre here in Korea (the "Why?" science comic books) and above all
> to try to complement the argument Vygotsky is making about the role of
> emotion in the formation of interests, and hence concepts, with some of
> the passion and quietude of Rembrandt and Vermeer.
>
> So Lange argues that the whole of enculturation, if not education, nothing
> but toilet training: "The rod trains a child not to cry from disappointment
> as a result of emotional vasomotor spasm in the same way it trains him not
> to wet himself as a result of involuntary reflex functions."  (Vol 6, 1999:
> 152, though the translation is somewhat off). Lange then argues that
> "history" has condemned "wild peoples" to extinction because of their
> inability to emotionally toilet-train themselves. Vygotsky manages to
> suppress his own rage; he deadpans that the racist implications of this
> view are shared not by Lange's physiologist co-thinkers but rather by their
> arch-enemy Kant and the cognitivist accounts of emotion. It's not just that
> philosophy makes for strange bedfellows, it's also the case that its
> repudiation breaks up once stable marriage vows. Without emotions, humans
> never would bother with science. But without the rod of science, the
> passions lead us straight back into racist bedwetting.
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New article in WORD, journal of the International Linguistic Association (Volume
> 66, 2020 - Issue 3)
> The problem of articulate animals in Korean child conversation: A
> Hallidayan analysis, a Vygotskyan interpretation, and a Hasanian critique
> David Kellogg & Seon-mi Song
> Pages 149-165 | Published online: 18 Sep 2020
>
> Some free e-prints available at:
>
>
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HAHXXJCARIGMTDBWYS9S/full?target=10.1080*00437956.2020.1793498__;Lw!!Mih3wA!RCBfj5odZ1CJnuL09UWYZ7l1CKcb-tsTundUZ4d9h7abZO5i1r4RAHCYfegqSCsO5Wyhbw$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HAHXXJCARIGMTDBWYS9S/full?target=10.1080*00437956.2020.1793498__;Lw!!Mih3wA!SMt-quuzIId0EBtbemt5aLiOWQJLEaFjT7gstOKC79XNAignbGG4ljFbbYHg24X9z0TfCA$>
>
>
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