Re: [xmca] Subject: Verb, Object

Eric, as I see it this is one of several dichotomies that were introduced
by Kant in the process of overcoming the scepticism into which philosophy
had fallen as a result of the mutual critique by Descartes/Spinoza and
Hobbes/Locke. I.e., Hume. The German philosophers who followed Kant
(Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) were all dedicated to resolving Kant's dualism,
each taking a different approach.

Hegel's approach is clearly (to me) set out in his early "System of Ethical
Life" which begins as follows:

               "Knowledge of the Idea of the absolute ethical order depends
                entirely on the establishment of perfect adequacy between
intuition
                and concept, because the Idea itself is nothing other than
the identity
                of the two. But if this identity is to be actually known,
it must be
                thought as a made adequacy."
                http://marx.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/se/introduction.htm

That is Hegel says that concepts are artefacts and our idea of them as
norms or ways of acting in the world using them, while "intuition" is the
immediate sensual impression of artefacts, their feeling of colour, weight,
shape, etc. He says that there is always a discrepancy between how we see a
thing at one and the same time in these two ways. But as we work in the
world, making new artefacts and therefore changing the norms we work to
etc., etc., we are striving to overcome this contradiction in our thinking,
a contradiction that exists in our thinking only because we have built a
world which is contradictory. So we get to sort out the contradictions in
our heads and in our perception by making a world which, ultimately, there
is no contradiction between how it is an how it ought to be. Psychological
problems are just the internal side of cultural-historical problems.

Andy

At 04:00 PM 28/12/2007 -0600, you wrote:
> The reintroduction
>of Hegel's phenomenology of spirit is indeed brilliant. However, I must
>insist if you are to look forward in methodology you must include the
>ideographic/nomothetical array for addressing the quagmire associated with
>the 'subject' of activity. Psychology is not only culture, society, labor,
>economics and politics; it is development, emotions, habilitation,
>rehabilitation, habituation, memory, functional and academic skills,
>interpersonal and intrapersonal relations, etc. There are other avenues
>for studying the ideographic/nomothetical array besides Valsiner (Alfred
>Adler comes to mind), please reconsider the importance.
>
>eric
>

  Andy Blunden : http://home.mira.net/~andy/ tel (H) +61 3 9380 9435,
mobile 0409 358 651

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Received on Fri Dec 28 15:28 PST 2007