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Date: 8/6/96 6:14 AM
To: Geoffrey Williams
From: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
Hello Arne and everybody--
At 01:47 PM 6/7/96 +0200, Arne Raeithel wrote:
>We need to draw more concrete images of this very important idea. My own
>most helpful example comes also from Ilyenkov 1977, I believe (can't check,
>the photocopy is buried in my archives), who again takes it from Baruch
>Spinoza (1632-1677): The Platonic Ideal Circle does not reside in some
>nowhereland of perennial forms, but is the "limit" in a mathematical
>sense of a certain and very well known possibility of human motion:
>How we may and must draw a circle to get an ever imperfect, but sufficing
>specimen.
I tried to find a quote from Il'enkov (1977) but I couldn't. However, I
found some support in Il'enkov's book published in 1984 in Russian "The
dialectic logic." Here is my translation of relevant fragment (sorry for my
translation)
<< The core difference of the way of actions of thinking body from a
way of movement of any other body [=material non-thinking thing, EM] is that
the thinking body actively builds (constructs) the form (trajectory) of its
own action in the space according to the form (to the configuration and
position) of ANY other body. Descartes clearly knew that but did not quit
understand the consequences. Thus, the specific form of action of a
thinking body is based on its universality. This was the characteristic
that Descartes noticed as the main difference of human action from any
machine that copies human action: the machine is structurally adjusted to a
limited set of action (even better than a man) but exactly because of this
advantage, the machine is not able to do "all the rest."
Hence, human hand can produce a movement according both to the form
of a circle, and to the form of squire, and to the form of any other even
whimsical geometric figure. The human hand constructs and discovers the
movements that it does not aimed by its *structural anatomy* to fit with any
of the "movements" named above and, thus, it can do any action. This
characteristic of human hand can not be found in, for example, a compass
that can draw a circle much better than a human hand but can't draw a
triangle or squire...
Man -- *thinking body* -- builds his own *action according to the
form of any other body [thing, EM]*. He does not wait until a strong
resistance of other bodies [things] forces him to alternate from his way;
the thinking body attempts to detour any obstacle of an even extremely
difficult form. Spinoza believed that the distinguished feature of thinking
body (called "mind" or "cognition") is *the ability to actively construct
his own action according to the form of any other body [thing]*, actively
adjusting the form of his own action in the space and position of all other
bodies.>> (Il'enkov, 1984, pp.38-39)
Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz
------------------------
Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz
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Date: Fri, 07 Jun 1996 11:21:13 -0700
To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu, xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
From: Eugene Matusov <ematusov who-is-at cats.ucsc.edu>
Subject: Re: Bakhurst/Ilyenkov on ideals
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