Re: [xmca] Response to DK about Volition

Tony:
   
  Right you are! Unlike me, Volosinov is very careful: he says that the snow "probably" means two months more of winter. This refers to immediate experience (winter) but not to normative experience. So I think in his formulation the lateness of winter really is secondness and not thirdness. I don't know if Volosinov read Peirce. I think they BOTH just read Hegel carefully. Which is more than I've done (but less than Andy's done!).
   
  (I was thinking this morning how much easier Mike's project of establishing the CHAT family tree would be if only ANL and LSV and Marx and Hegel and Aristotle had used e-mail and only changed the subject headings every few hundred years, but I can imagine there would always be someone like me who changes the name of the thread every morning....)

  Andy, I feel a little like the little boy who is asked by the schoolmaster whether he would rather decline roast beef or the Latin noun for it, and ends up forgoing dinner as a result. I understand that I have in some way said something that somehow implies that the dialectic belongs to a pre-existing Popperian "World Three", just out there waiting to be discovered. But I can't see how.
   
  I didn't inject the word "nature" into the debate ("volition" was my contribution if you check the subject line), and I certainly don't understand what god is now doing nosing around it. (Allah, by the way, is quite different from either "nature" or the Christian notion of god; just as we would expect of what was historically the most modern of the great religions, knowledge of Allah is mediated by beauty--literary beauty, in fact--rather than by scientific concepts or brute faith).
   
  What I understood by natural dialectics was simply dialectics for grizzly bears, that is, stuff that happens whether people are there to notice or not. Tony's right; grizzlies probably don't keep good enough records to think normatively about winter (humans didn't think normatively about climate until VERY recently). But bears notice when spring is late.
   
  Presumably, the social world IS dialectic in its laws of motion, and it didn't suddenly start being dialectic in 1848. It's just that a small portion of it became consciously so. Why is THIS observation not a form of nominalism (particularly if we are rejecting "nature" as a construct that leads us directly to god)?
   
  David Kellogg
  Seoul National University of Education

       
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Received on Mon Sep 10 17:42 PDT 2007