Peter,
In reading the paper my interest was directed toward
your emphasis on the ideal and concepts. I could
accept the argument on lets say a philosophical level
that concepts differ from notions in certain regards.
Where I had more difficulty was concepts embedding an
essential or non-essential aspect of the "thing"
separate from cultural experience or practice.
If we take the Aristotian essence of a triangle or
Spinozo's circle they seem to be essences that are as
much cultural-historical as knowledge of the object
perse. In particular when you state,
"Within Materialist epistemology, the process of
cognition is just the reflection in knowledge of what
is above all a practical process in which the social
body of humanity must learn to use the forces of
nature in accordance with the objective properties of
the latter. In the struggle to make these forces serve
our vital ends, a process unfolds in which these
forces ultimately dictate the necessary lines along
which thinking must go to arrive at knowledge adequate
to our aims. Practice ultimately reveals what part of
our ideas belongs to our bodies and what part belongs
to the body external to us. The standpoint of
objective truth - the "God's eye view" as it were -
coincides with the standpoint of purposeful practical
transformation of reality."
My concern here is with "social concepts" and how they
tend to invoke "nature" if its biological or the "body
external to us" to legitimize certain
cultural-historical practices. Here (the quote above)
thinking -higher forms of thinking - (concepts) seems
less cultural-historical and more structured by the
logic of the world. In contrast I would tend to see
the structure on the cultural-historical level which
incorporates or appropriates aspects of the world to
legitimize certain practices.
I would be interested in how your argument would
extend to social concepts that often invoke that the
world is organized in a way that supports a particular
ideology. One example being the chimp post awhile back
where supposedly their social structure is an emerging
form of capitalism.
I enjoyed your dealing with the embodied view of the
the governor very much. Could you touch on the "ideal"
a little more. My understanding is it is a community,
cultural model rather than an individual one.
Ilyenkov's example of the artist seems to assume a
more or less direct relationship as in comparing a
tree to the canvas of a tree, but much art is not so
direct. Vygotsky in *Psychology of Art* had an
interesting discussion of this relationship in which
at times we use cultural processes (genres) to create
"new content" and at other times we use cultural
content to create "new genres". In either case there
appears to be a dialectic in that we never create
something new out of nothing, but on the other hand
the canvas example appears overly simple in that an
important aspect of art is looking at things in a new
way.
In the paper you focused on the ideal and concepts as
dictated, structured by the objective properties of
the world, but I am curious about how both would
relate to social concepts. It seems social concepts
are often given weight or a degree objectivity by
invoking aspects of the world. Ratner, for example,
holds that concepts can be less than desirable and
appropriated by certain practices such as capitalism,
which could be argued as being structured or
legitimized by the properties of the world (e.g.
chimps expressing a social structure of emerging
capitalism).
Nate
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Photos -- now, 100 FREE prints!
http://photos.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Jul 01 2000 - 01:00:27 PDT