[Xmca-l] The Idea of the Idea

[David Kellogg]

Spinoza says that the mnd is the body's idea of itself. But the way he says
it is a little weird: he says that the idea of the mind has the same
relationship to the mind as the mind has to the body. So the idea of the
mind is the idea of the idea of the body of itself.

As told Anthony, I think that Spinoza's "idea of the idea" is pretty
important for Vygotsky. Just to take an example, when Vygotsky argues (in
Chapter Six of T&S and also in his lecture on School Age, which I am
currently translating for Volume Two of the Pedological Works) that the
reason why the child's other functions have become intellectualized but
intellect as such remains unintellectual is that before you can have the
idea of the idea, you need to have the idea.

Scientific concepts, higher aesthetic concepts, ethical thinking, Darwin's
tree, the hierarchy of genus and family and species, the powers of ten in
mathematics--all of these depend on the idea of the idea.. My own PhD
supervisor, David Butt, points out that every clause ever produced can be
given a unique and precise "semantic address" (that is, we can exhaustively
describe it in terms of unique, once-occurent choices at the phoneme, word,
group, phrase, and clause level). Because each higher rank is entirely and
only composed of elements from lower ranks, we can describe the higher rank
as an idea of the idea (a notion of a notion, a concept of a concept).

Yanis Varoufakis argues that sometime in late August, in both the UK and
the USA, capitalism made an important and terrifying transition. Although
BOTH economies are now in Covid-induced recessions, BOTH are experiencing
major stock market expansions. This is because, Varoufakis argues, in both
countries there are enough speculators who believe that there are enough
speculators who believe that stock prices will increase at least in the
short term, despite the dismal prospects for shareholders in the long term.
The idea of the idea has become more powerful than the idea itself.

(As usual, we are at the cutting edge here in Seoul: our  real estate
market has depended entirely on this idea of the idea for years!)

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New article in Mind, Culture, and Activity:
Realizations: non-causal but real relationships in and between Halliday,
Hasan, and Vygotsky

Some free e-prints today available at:
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Y8YHS3SRW42VXPTVY2Z6/full?target=10.1080*10749039.2020.1806329__;Lw!!Mih3wA!SRiw8QGioBGwdR67oxWjWvvziYnUdmMNTwZzxYNpjkvhAxGygLOjYitcV25uLPKGy16y6w$ 

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!SRiw8QGioBGwdR67oxWjWvvziYnUdmMNTwZzxYNpjkvhAxGygLOjYitcV25uLPKISZZUHA$ 
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