7 june 2000
from peter jones, sheffield hallam university
greetings to all! thanks to those who have responded to the embodied mind paper
so far and here are a few of my thoughts in return.
1) Thanks to Andy Blunden for the greetings (hello andy, yes its me!) and for
the comments. I apologize for the glibness of my term Materialism with a
capital M. I hoped it would be taken as a crude (and ad hoc, one-off) but
convenient abbreviated label for the philosophical tradition identified in
paragraph 1. The focus of this paper is not the social division of labour as
such, involving the conflict between mental and manual labour/ theory and
practice which you refer to. My target here is a philosophical orientation
which denies in principle the possibility of objective knowledge of anything.
It sees in social practice human beings interacting with the world and one
another not the source of our knowledge of the way the natural (and social)
world works but a kind of barrier between us and the thing in itself which
remains fundamentally unknowable. Social practice is understood on this view in
a naturalistic and individualistic way (as criticised by Marx in his Theses on
Feuerbach) where knowledge becomes a form of expression of bodily processes
and experiences and the relationship between what we think and how we think to
the properties of the world outside and around us is thereby mystified. To
complete the critique in my paper would involve showing the social roots and
ideological implications of this view and in my opinion these roots are
precisely in that socially and historically developed separation of thinking
and doing which you mention. (These issues are nicely dealt with in Ilyenkovs
Dialectical Logic). But it seems to me that a discussion of the obvious fact
of the separation of theory and practice in bourgeois societyis not and cannot
be our starting point for epistemological and scientific reflection on human
cognition, or for the critique of theoretical psychological frameworks such as
are the topic of the paper. The general question is not how to unite these two
apparently disconnected spheres of being (knowing/thinking and doing) but how,
in principle, these dialectically united/differentiated aspects of human social
practice come to be antagonistically and metaphysically separated from one
another in the first place as a result of socio-historical development,
separated both in practice and in theory/philosophy. Isnt it just the
uncritical acceptance of the obvious fact of the separation of theory and
practice in bourgeois societywhich is in fact the starting point for such
sceptical philosophical trends as embodied realismand the rest? In other
words, the separation of theory and practice is indeed obvious and leads to all
kind of fantastic illusions about the mind, symbolisation etc (including those
of the biological reductionists like Chomsky, I would argue) what is not
obvious is their unity. So my aims are very limited indeed here (possibly with
seriously bad consequences for the argument maybe you are right) although I
wouldnt share your pessimistic conclusion!
2) On Nates queries. These are difficult ones. Im not sure I understand the
distinction between social concepts and all other concepts. So that when you
say that the characterisation of thinking seems less cultural-historical and
more structured by the logic of the world I dont see a dichotomy here, so
maybe Ive got you wrong. I would say that concepts are by their nature social
products, social phenomena, cultural-historical entities since they are a form
and product of socio-historical practice. But it is just because concepts are a
form in which the logic of human practice in the world is abstracted and
represented
that the logic of concepts and the logic of the world (including human
practice) can (and must) come to correspond (to some degree). Concepts have
objective content (and logic) because of this involvement in and abstraction
from real objective practice with things.In the governor example, the
theoretical knowledge expressed in concepts ( in the concept of the governor
itself but also in the underlying physics, mechanics, mathematics, etc) is all
cultural-historical stuff but expresses the properties of the materials, of
the spatio-
temporal interactions and causal powers imminent in and intrinsic to those
materials themselves (independent of human knowledge and purpose). That
knowledge of course is the result in theoretical form of historically developed
and developing practices where the objects and materials concerned are dragged
into the service of human aims and needs. But in order for those aims and needs
to be met through those materials we must understand their logic, the
objective logic of their interaction within the material system of forces being
constructed by the engineer.So we put these things to use, but for them to
behave as
we intend we must have and develop knowledge which corresponds to their
behaviour. From this standpoint that a distinction between essential and
nonessential properties, for instance, would mean picking out the relevant
aspects of natural law-governed interaction between aspects of the material
system. If we look at all products and processes of thinking as related (more
or less directly) to social practice, then we can look at social concepts (by
which I understand concepts to do with social life itself, including ideologies
etc) themselves as abstracting, recording and fixing social activities. So for
example, for Marx ideologies were not fantastic ideas coming from nowhere but
illusions which in fact gave a theoretical
expression to certain existing social relations and processes. Their
ideological nature was a result of the narrow, historically limited and
limiting practices which these ideas reflected. Such ideologies can and do, of
course (as you suggest) co-opt or commission all kinds of knowledge from the
natural and social sciences which confirm or support them. I think the
philosophy of the embodied mind as discussed here has such ideological
implications, along with evolutionary psychology and lots more we could all
mention, including the idea (where did this come from?) of emergent capitalism
in chimp society (Marx and Engels attacked many such crazy ideas in their own
day)!! On the issue of the ideal as a community/cultural versus individual
model: again, this is a dichotomy which I would suggest we be wary
of. When we think on our own are we not thinking as social, community, cultural
beings? With the governor example, when Watt works the thing out in his head
and on paper, is he not acting (and thinking) as part of the culture, part of
the society? Is his activity not social? For me the answer to all these
questions is yes. The individual is the social being. What do you reckon? On
the art thing. I absolutely take the point about different kinds of artistic
activity. But I think Ilyenkovs point is somewhere else. What he is getting
at is that, whatever the kind of artistic expression we are bothered about, the
artistic representation (whether figurative or not!) is an object that we
make which stands outside of us, alongside whatever it is that it relates to.
It is that thing that we make (picture, musical composition or whatever) which
represents, which is meaningful (shades of our previous discussion of Pauls
paper here!!!), which we enjoy, which has generic properties, which says
something new and which allows us to see things (ie things other than the
artistic object itself!) in a different way perhaps. This new image does not
come, as you rightly say, out of nowhere but itself is part of a tradition of
activity of making (and appreciating) such
things and consequently needs real work on our part to understand it. Sorry
about the tedious and lengthy
ramblings.
3) On Dianes question - what indeed?
Very best wishes to all
P
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