P. 302 of "The Ideal in Activity," by Ilyenkov:"Here, then, is the question: take your thought, your consciousness of the world, and the world itself, the complex and intricate world which only appears to be simple, the world which you see around you, in which you live, act and carry out your work - whether you write treatises on philosophy or physics, sculpt statues out of stone, or produce steel in a blast furnace - what is the relationship between them?
"Here there is a parting of the ways, and the difference lies in whether you choose the right path or the left, for there is no middle here; the middle path contains within itself the very same divergences, only they branch out within it in ever more minute and discrete proportions. In philosophy the 'party of the golden mean' is the 'party of the brainless', who try to unite materialism with idealism in an eclectic way, by means of smoothing out the basic contradictions, and by means of muddling the most general (abstract, 'cellule') and clear concepts.
"These concepts are matter and consciousness (psyche, the ideal, spirit, soul, will, etc. etc.). 'Consciousness' – let us take this term as Lenin did - is the most general concept which can only be defined by clearly contrasting it with the most general concept of 'matter', moreover as something secondary, produced and derived. Dialectics consists in not being able to define matter as such; it can only be defined through its opposite, and only if one of the opposites is fixed as primary, and the other arises from it."
Andy Blunden wrote:
Oh I don't doubt that the various strands of abstract empiricism and so on are full of non-material representational systems and non-material all-sorts-of-things. I think you are just making a point about your not subscribing to Platonism or some dualist philosophical system.But in the meaning *you* give to "material" aren't you making a tautology by saying that representational systems found in history are material? Or are there representational system which *you* say are not material?Andy Martin Packer wrote:Andy,Well, the (putative) representational systems studied by cognitive science, which are taken to be mental functions, properties of thought, which are not doubted to have a material substrate (the brain) but which are assumed not to be material themselves but ideal, in Plato's rather than Ilyenkov's sense. Chomsky's generative grammar is a good example. Piaget's theory of the mental actions and operations going on 'inside the head' of child is another.Martin On Sep 24, 2009, at 9:09 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:Martin, tell me a representational system which is *not* material. a Martin Packer wrote:humans have evolved to use an ordered series of "representational systems." The sequence is as follows: the episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretic. I won't go into the details, but crucially important, I think, is that these systems are material._______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andy Blunden http://www.erythrospress.com/Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov, Ilyenkov $20 ea
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