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Re: [xmca] Re: Kant and the Strange Situation



Why sad?

Martin Packer wrote:
I know, but it would be sad to discover that Vygotsky was drawing so heavily
from Lenin.


On 1/4/09 9:42 PM, "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

I might say as an aside, that "reflection" whatever it is in
Russian, has a strong place in Russian Marxism. This is
because Lenin made such a powerful attack on his
philosophical enemies in "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism"
written in 1908. Ilyenkov still defends this books in the
mid-1970s, though almost all non-Russian Marxists would say
that it is a terrible book and was written before Lenin had
studied Hegel, etc. In M&EC Lenin makes reflection a central
category, a universal property of matter, etc., and bitterly
attacks the use of semiotics of any kind.

I have an ambiguous attitude to M&EC myself. Apart from
"sins of omission" perhaps, Lenin is right, but did he
really have to shout it that loud? Well, in the historical
context of the wake of the defeat of the 1905 Revolution,
probably he did. Did all Russian Marxists for the next 100
years have to follow his lead? Probably not.

I note that in Dot Robbins' book on Vygotsky and Leontyev's
Semiotics etc., Dot defends the notion of reflection. The
situation, as I see it, is that "reflection" has a strong
advantage and an equally strong disadvantage in conveying a
materialist conception of sensuous perception.

On one side it emphasises the objectivity of the
image-making - there is nothing in the mirror, or if there
is, it is an imperfectionit which distorts the image. On the
other side, mirror-imaging is an entirely passive process, a
property of even non-living matter.

Personally, I think "reflection" belongs to Feuerbachian
materialism, not Marxism, but in historical context, the
position of many Russians who use the concept, is
understandable.

That's how I see it anyway,

Andy

Ed Wall wrote:
Martin

       It appears the root is more or less

                        отрaжáть (отрaзить)


and, at least according to my dictionary, has the sense of  reflecting
or having an effect. However, my qualifications are dated.

Ed

On Jan 4, 2009, at 7:01 PM, Martin Packer wrote:

At the end of last year several of us were trying to figure out whether
'reflection' is a good term to translate the way Vygotsky and leontiev
wrote
about 'mental' activity. Michael Roth pointed out that the German word
that
Marx used was Widerspiegeln rather than Reflektion (see below). I don't
think anyone identified the Russian word that was used. I still haven't
found time to trace the word in Vygotsky's texts, English and Russian.
But
an article by Charles Tolman suggests that the Russian term was
'otrazhenie.'  Online translators don't like this word: can any Russian
speakers suggest how it might be translated?

Reflection (German: Widerspiegelung; Russian: otrazhenie)

Tolman, C.W. (1988). The basic vocabulary of Activity Theory. Activity
Theory, 1, 14-20.

Martin

On 10/25/08 12:40 PM, "Wolff-Michael Roth" <mroth@uvic.ca> wrote:

Hi Martin,

Marx does indeed use the term "widerspiegeln" in the sentence you cite.

Das Gehirn der
Privatproduzenten spiegelt diesen doppelten gesellschaftlichen
Charakter ihrer Privatarbeiten nur wider in den Formen, welche im
praktischen Verkehr, im Produktenaustausch erscheinen - den
gesellschaftlich
nützlichen Charakter ihrer Privatarbeiten also in
der Form, daß das Arbeitsprodukt nützlich sein muß, und zwar für
andre - den gesellschaftlichen Charakter der Gleichheit der
verschiedenartigen
Arbeiten in der Form des gemeinsamen Wertcharakters
dieser materiell verschiednen Dinge, der Arbeitsprodukte.


But the Duden, the reference work of German language says that there
are 2 different senses. One is reflection as in a mirror, the other
one that something brings to expression. In this context, I do not
see Marx draw on the mirror idea.

For those who have trouble, perhaps the analogy with mathematical
functions. In German, what a mathematical function does is
"abbilden," which is, provide a projection of, or reflection, or
whatever. You have the word Bild, image, picture in the verb. But
when you look at functions, only y = f(x) = x, or -x gives you what
you would get in the mirror analogy. You get very different things
when you use different functions, log functions, etc. Then the
relationship between the points on a line no longer is the same in
the "image", that is, the target domain.

We sometimes see the word "refraction" in the works of Russian
psychologists, which may be better than reflection. It allows you to
think of looking at the world through a kaleidoscope, and you get all
sorts of things, none of which look like "the real thing."

Michael





On 25-Oct-08, at 9:01 AM, Martin Packer wrote:

Michael,

Here's one example from Marx, and several from Leontiev, if we can
get into
the Russian too.

"The twofold social character of the labour of the individual appears to
him, when *reflected* in his brain, only under those forms which are
impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the exchange of
products." Marx, Capital, Chapter 1, section 4.

" Activity is a non-additive unit of the corporeal, material life of the
material subject. In the narrower sense, i.e., on the psychological
plane,
it is a unit of life, mediated by mental *reflection*, by an *image,*
whose
real function is to orientate the subject in the objective world."
Leontiev,
Activity & Consciousness.

" The circular nature of the processes effecting the interaction of the
organism with the environment has been generally acknowledged. But
the main
thing is not this circular structure as such, but the fact that the
mental
*reflection* of the objective world is not directly generated by the
external influences themselves, but by the processes through which the
subject comes into practical contact with the objective world, and which
therefore necessarily obey its independent properties, connections, and
relations." ibid

" Thus, individual consciousness as a specifically human form of the
subjective *reflection* of objective reality may be understood only
as the
product of those relations and mediacies that arise in the course of the
establishment and development of society." ibid

Martin
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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ +61 3 9380 9435 Skype andy.blunden
Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
http://www.marxists.org/admin/books/index.htm

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