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Re: [xmca] Humans are signs/ideal



A Virtual Interview with Evald Ilyenkov on Consciousness and Will

I was re-reading Concept of the Ideal tonight, spurred by Martin and by Andy, and started to compile some quotes to back up my assertion to Andy that Ilyenkov says social consciousness determines individual consciousness (especially 4. thru 7.). That is the main point of the quotes below. Also, the other week, some issues regarding llyenkov and consciousness and will came up, and that fit in a little.

Before I knew it (I have the article in a word .doc, so it was easy) I had a bunch of quotes, and then I played around with some of them and wound up creating a little dialogue with passages from Ilyenkov's essay. To have a little fun, I interviewed him in the voice of an imaginary xmca-er who is somewhat new to the Russian philosopher ...


A Virtual Interview with Evald Ilyenkov on Consciousness and Will
From The Concept of the Ideal by EV Ilyenkov
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm
<So, Mr. Ilyenkov, just about everyone on xmca says “culture is in the middle” and that culture mediates human life. What do you think?>

1. "Psychology must necessarily proceed from the fact that between the individual consciousness and objective reality there exists the “mediating link” of the historically formed culture, which acts as the prerequisite and condition of individual mental activity. This comprises the economic and legal forms of human relationships, the forms of everyday life and forms of language, and so on."


<OK! Cool! So, I have some questions for you about how your theories relate to individual consciousness, to consciousness and will. What life activity causes consciousness and will to arise in the human individual? Is it, for example, their encounters with nature per se, or labor somehow, or what?>

2. “The consciousness and will that arise in the mind of the human individual are the direct consequence of the fact that what he is confronted by as the object of his life activity is not nature as such, but nature that has been transformed by the labour of previous generations, shaped by human labour, nature in the forms of human life activity.”


<Nature shaped by labor. Awesome. Now, what causes consciousness and will to arise? Does this happen naturally? Or is it caused by something else?>

3. “Consciousness and will become necessary forms of mental activity only where the individual is compelled to control his own organic body in answer not to the organic (natural) demands of this body but to demands presented from outside, by the “rules” accepted in the society in which he was born. It is only in these conditions that the individual is compelled to distinguish *himself from his own organic body*. These rules are not passed on to him by birth, through his “genes”, but are imposed upon him from outside, dictated by culture, and not by nature.”


<Interesting. Let me ask you about how ideality fits in. Is ideality connected with consciousness and will?>

4. ““Ideality” is, indeed, necessarily connected with consciousness and will, but not at all in the way that the old, pre-Marxist materialism describes this connection. It is not ideality that is an “aspect”, or “form of manifestation” of the conscious-will sphere but, on the contrary, the conscious-will character of the human mentality is a form of manifestation, an “aspect” or mental manifestation of the *ideal* (i.e., socio-historically generated) *plane of relationships between* man *and nature*.”


<Alright, I hear you saying that one is a manifestation of the other. How about if there aren’t any people possessing consciousness and will around at all – could we still talk about there being ideality?>

5. “… there can be no talk of “ideality” where there are no people socially producing and reproducing their material life, that is to say, individuals working collectively and, therefore, necessarily possessing consciousness and will. But this does not mean that the “ideality of things” is a product of their *conscious will*, that it is “immanent in the consciousness” and exists only in the consciousness. Quite the reverse, the individual’s consciousness and will are functions of the ideality of things, their comprehended, *conscious ideality*.”


<Hmmm. Let me ask this from another angle: what does the world of artifacts created by humans have to do with consciousness and will?>

6. “The existence of this specifically human object — the world of things created by man for man, and, therefore, things whose forms *are reified forms of human activity* (labour) … — is the condition for the existence *of consciousness and will* And certainly not the reverse, it is not consciousness and will that are the condition and prerequisite for the existence of this unique object, let alone its “cause”.”


<I’m still trying to get this straight. Which are you saying is the cause and which is the effect?>

7. “Consciousness and will are not the “cause” of the manifestation of this new plane of relationships [that is, the ideal plane of life activity -sg] between the individual and the external world, but only the *mental forms of its expression*, in other words, its *effect*.”


<Thanks. Look, I’m trying, but I sometimes get this ideality thing mixed up and confuse it with consciousness and will. Why is that?>

8. “… since in its developed stages human life activity always has a purposeful, i.e., consciously willed character, “ideality” presents itself as a *form of consciousness and will*, as the law guiding man’s consciousness and will, as the objectively compulsory pattern of consciously willed activity. This is why it turns out to be so easy to portray the “ideal” exclusively as a form of consciousness and self- consciousness, exclusively as the “transcendental” pattern of the psyche and the will that realises this pattern.”


< I … see. I think. Okay, one last question. Since the ideal and individual consciousness are both socially constructed forms of human consciousness, that would make them both, among other things, intersubjective and interdependent, wouldn’t it?>

9. “The ideal ... exists outside people’s heads and consciousness, as something completely objective, a reality of a special kind that is independent of their consciousness and will …”


<Oh. Well, um, thanks. Really, I totally appreciate your time, Mr. Ilyenkov. Speaking of heads, you wouldn’t happen to have an aspirin, would you?>

Cheers,
- Steve

PS Nice notes, Martin.



On Sep 26, 2009, at 2:31 PM, Martin Packer wrote:

Tony,

OK, then let's wade in! I'm posting below my notes on Ilyenkov's The Concept of The Ideal (there are some italics so I've made it rich text; let me know if this causes problems), and starting a new thread topic. The first section of these notes makes some general points, then I get serious and try to summarize the argument. I've left my bracketed expressions of confusion, questions, etc. in the notes. I don't think it's an easy read, but it's easier than the original!

If I remember correctly, in our previous discussion of this text Andy and Steve argued that Ilyenkov considers only obviously symbolic objects, such as statues and coats of arms, to ideal. I argued that Ilyenkov says that every material aspect of social life is ideal. I still stand by this reading (though as I said before, this text is somewhat unclear on this point). After all, Ilyenkov's central example of a material object that is at the same time ideal is the commodity. While a commodity may be a symbol (I can buy an American flag at the grocery store, for example), there are obviously many commodities that are not symbols of this kind (a pork chop). Something is ideal when its existence represents the form of something else.

One part of this text that we didn't get to discuss before is where Ilyenkov makes the case that a child has to become ideal (as Ilyenkov defines this) to be a member of society. My notes on this are towards the end, after skipping over some sections, chiefly for lack of time. This is where he seems to be moving in the direction that Pierce was going in when he suggested that a human is a sign.

You'll see the principal argument is that the child needs to impose forms on their ow activity, and regard themselves as another person would regard them, as representing or standing for the 'general another.' In doing so, the child must distinguish himself from his own body. The child's existence comes to represent the general form of human being (in their particular culture, I presume). That's to say, the child becomes ideal. It's a very interesting analysis.

Martin

On Sep 26, 2009, at 1:45 PM, Tony Whitson wrote:

On Sat, 26 Sep 2009, Martin Packer wrote:

To forge a link to Tony's post from Pierce, I think also proposes that humans are ideal, or to be more precise become ideal in ontogenesis. Rather like saying a human is a sign. But that's a big topic.

It is a big topic, but it happens to be what I am working on right now, and it is intimately involved with understanding consciousness.

============
The Concept of the Ideal.

EI argues that the ideal is to be found in the material things of a human culture (form of life). Things have a form that “represents” something else - no, I think it’s that things have an existence that represents the form of something else. So the coat represents (embodies, expresses) the value-form of the cloth from which it was made. But it is actually the form of human activity, epecially labor, that gives existence to these (social) things. So, EI writes, Plato and Hegel were partially right to think that a world of ideal forms exists independently of the individual mind. For this plane of ideality is the product of *collective* human activity. As such it confronts the individual as something external and objective, which must be assimilated, adapted too. More than this, it is in adapting to this plane of cultural objects that human consciousness and will are formed. They are effects of this realm of ideality, not its origin. (This is where Kant went wrong, along with common sense.) Ideality, the ideal, exists only in the continual movement between the form of activity and the form of a thing. This is why a *dialectical* explanation is necessary. Take a thing out of a form of activiy, and it no longer exists, it is merely a dead material object. A word, taken out of “the organism of human intercourse” is no more than a mere acoustic phenomenon. Why does consciousness come from assimilating this cultural plane? I proposes that this human form of life requires looking at oneself as though as at another. Looking at oneself as another might look. Considering oneself as a “representative” of the human species (or at least the society). The individual needs to become “a special object” to participate in this ideal objectivity, to make its rules and patterns the “rules and patterns of the life activity of his own body.”
There  are passages that sound very like Foucault:
“The individual is compelled to control his own organic body in answer not to the organic (natural) demands of this body but to demands presented from outside, by the ‘rules’ accepted in the society in which he was born. It is only in these conditions that the individual is compelled to distinguish himself from his own organic body.” And WILL is, first of all, “the ability to forcibly subordinate one’s own inclinations and urges to a certain law, a certain demand dictated not by the individual organics of one’s own body, but by the organisation of the ‘collective body’, the collective, that has formed around a certain common task.” We generally are unable to see the distinction between the natural properties of things and the properties they have as embodied social labor. We see, for example, the stars first as a “natural clock, calendar, and compass.” That’s to say, our human activities are taken to be objective proprties of the natural world. [MP: I think EI runs into a problem here. How can we humans ever draw a distinction between the natural and social properties? Science will always assimilate objects to its social and instrumental concerns. At times EI seems to see and accept this, at other times he seems to want to be able to draw the line, and at one point defines this as the task of philosophy.] There’s an account of reflection in all this. He seems to equate reflection with “the relationship to oneself as ‘another’” [MP: though he may be attributing this definition only to Fichte and to Hegel]. He explicitly brings up the mirror, quoting Marx. But the point of the quote is that man doesn’t have a mirror in which to see himself, so his reflection must take the form of recognition in (and so as) another. (As, because the other sees me as an other to them.) This is reflection in the sense of thinking about, becoming aware of, - but there’s the implication that this requires an ‘other’ to be accomplished. One becmes aware of self this way. Does one become aware of anything the same way? Marx writes that the ideal is the material world reflected by the human mind. (By, not in). Ideas and images are ideal only when they have become separated from individual mental activity. 8. An “image” is “objectified” in words, but also (“and even more directly”) in “in sculptural, graphic and plastic forms and in the form of the routine-ritual ways of dealing with things and people, so that it is expressed not only in words, in speech and language, but also in drawings, models and such symbolic objects as coats of arms, banners, dress, utensils, or as money, including gold coins and paper money, IOUs, bonds or credit notes.”

==
EI begins by distinguishing the concept from the terms. That is, the “range of phenomena” must be defined before turning to the essence of the phenomena. That makes sense - until you’ve decided what phenomena the term is to be applied to, one cannot start to analyse the phenomena. EI notes that this task isn’t so easy, because there’s a circularity: the terms are used based on an understanding of the essence. He notes that this is a common problem, and debate dissolves into ‘the meaning of the term.’ The term ‘ideal’ is used today mainly as ‘conceivable,’ ‘immanent in Cs.’ This implies that what is outside Cs is material. This seems ‘at first sight’ reasonable - but it’s not! Certainly we can’t talk about anything ideal when there are no people involved. The ideal is ‘inseparably linked’ to notions of culture, purposeful activity, the brain. Marx seems to have recognized this when he wrote that the ideal is ‘the material world reflected by the human mind…’ But it doesn’t follow that ‘ideal’ = ‘in Cs.’ For example, Marx in Capital defines the value form as ’purely ideal’ even though it isn’t ‘in Cs.’ The value form (price, money) is ideal because it is distinct from the material form of the commodity in which it is found. Here something ‘ideal’ is outside and separate from human Cs. This will seem puzzling. The suggestion that the ideal can exist outside Cs may make it seem imaginary, or that Marx is flirting with Plato’s and Hegel’s ‘objective idealism’ of ‘incorporeal entities.’ But it’s not that simple. Marx’s use of the term is closer to Hegel’s, and far more meaningful than the popular use. Dialectical idealism is “far nearer the truth” [sic] than vulgar materialism. Hegel grasped the fact of the ‘dialectical transformaton’ of the ideal into the material and vice versa. Marx recognized this, though he also saw that Hegel had inverted the relation of mind to nature, of ideal to material.
Let’s consider the history of the term ideal from Kant to Hegel.
Kant adopted the ‘popular’ interpretation of the concepts of the ideal and real, and so fell into a pit. He doesn’t define ideality, but simply uses it as a synonym for Cs as such. Materiality is acheved in cognition via the senses. Kant made “a perfectly popular distinction.” The ideal is everything we know about the world except its existence. The latter is non-ideal, and so innaccesible to Cs and knowledge. Kant’s example of the talers is important. Imaginary coins, he argues, doesn’t exist. The fact that we can imagine god doesn’t mean that God exists. Want Kant doesn’t notice is that even real coins will not be real in another country with a different currency. As Marx pointed out, Kant’s example actually shows how diferent things are ‘real’ in different forms of life - in “the general or rather common imagination of man.” Kant’s definition of ideal and real cannot draw distinctions that are important for us to make. In fact, belief in the ‘reality’ of coins is no different from simple belief in the reality of gods. Both are examples of festishism: attributing immediately perceptible properties to an object which it does not in fact have, and which “have nothing in common with its sensuous percetible external appearence.” This is taking a symbol literally. When people come to recgnize that an idol is only a symbol of god, and a coin a symbol of value, “then man’s consciousness takes a step forward on the path to understanding the essence of things.” Hegel agreed with Kant that Protestantism was a higher stage of Cs than festishistic Catholicism. Hegelians criticiced Kant for lapsing into idolatry with his talers example. They were “only symbols,” “only representatives,” in their essence entirely ideal, although material in their existence. And of course they were outside individual Cs. This was to define ideal and real in a very different way. It was associated with alienation, reification. What people take to be real has a real existence. If I believe I have money in the bank I will take on debts. This point of view recognizes that there is a “Social Cs” that isn’t just multiplied individual Cs, but “a historically formed and historically developing system of ‘objective notions.’” It contains “structural forms of patterns of social Cs” [MP: lots of examples given here] that make demands and impose restrictions that, from childhood, the individual must reckon with, more so than mere external’things’ or even the organic desires of his body. These patterns must be “assimilated” by the individual through experience and education. And so Hegel sees value in Platos’s notion that the individual must come to terms with a “world of ideas” that is distinct from the “world of things.” Plato, he reasoned, had in effect recognized the role of “the state” - that’s to say, culture. Plato began a line of thought in which “the world of ideas” has been viewed as “stable and internally organized,” an “objective reality” that is distinct from and even opposed to the individual, and dictates how the individual should act. Of course this was still a “semi-mystical” way of thinking. But it recognized that the activity of an individual depends on a prior system of culture, in which the individual life “begins and runs its course.” For Plato, the relation of the ideal to the material was formulated in terms of the relation of stable forms of culture to the world of ‘individual things,’ which included the physical body. This meant Plato had to clearly distinguish between ideality and psyche, which previously had been equated (by Democritus, for example). Ideality came for the first time to define a certain class of phenomena, a reflection of objective reality in mental (human & social) activity, rather than Cs in general. Rubinstein [this is a bit confusing]: ideality is when an idea or image is objectified in words, or in “sculptural, graphic and plastic forms and in the form of the ritual-routine ways of dealing with things are people” [8]. That’s to say, “‘Ideality’ in general… [is] a characteristic of the materially established (objectivised, materialised, reified) images of human social culture.” That’s to say, a “special object” that is often (mistakenly?) identified with material reality. It is “comparable” with material reality, but it is a “special ‘supernatural’ objective reality.” [MP: Is this EI’s view, or his summary of another position?] Individual mental states, in contrast, are determined by numerous diverse factors, and on the plane of culture are “purely accidental.” This is why Kant doesn’t consider Cs of weight, for example, to be ideal. For Kant, the ideal is universal, impersonal and complusive. He doesn’t stick consistently to this terminology (as the talers example shows), but even here we start to see the objective character of the forms. But Kant was unable to get past the view of the social as simply the multipled individual. Hegel stated the problem differently. Culture is not an abstraction that expresses universality among individuals, but the crystalized result of individual wills which is not contained in any of them separately. Culture is not built from parts which are identical. The patterns that Kant viewed as innate and universal to all individuals, Hegel viewed as cultural patterns which the individual must assimilate from without to become social. A culture opposes the individual (the individual physical body) as “in itself and for itself,” something ideal within which things have meaning and role that are different from what they have “as themselves” outside culture. For Hegel, the ‘ideal’ definition of a thing coincides with its role and meaning in culture, not in the indiviual Cs. This view is broader and more profound than Kant’s, or the popular notion. The ideal and material are not ‘opposites,’ in ‘different worlds,’ but merely ‘different.’ Hegel starts with the obvious fact that for the individual Cs, material culture is what is at first real, even material. It is the thought of prior generations ‘reified’ or ‘objectified’ in matter. These are material in their ‘present being,’ but in their oigin they are ‘ideal’ because they embody the collective thinking of a people. Like Plato and Popper and Berkeley, Hegel here treats culture as the only object that an individual must deal with. The world outside culture is removed from view. The ‘real world’ is an “already ‘idealized’ world.” This “secret of idealism” shows up in Hegel’s treatment of nature, which he describes using the language of physics of his time. Like the logical positivists, he identifies ‘nature’ with the language people use to talk about nature. [But] The main problem of philosophy is to distinguish the world of culture from “the real world as it exists outside and apart from its expression in these socially legitimated forms of ‘experience.’” 12 Here is where the distinction between ideal and real (material) has a scientific meaning. Objective reality is what is revealed by scientific research. … Words are material. It is temping to think that their subjective image is what is ‘ideal.’ But Hegel shows us that a name, like a gold coin, is a general representation. The representation has nothing in common with what it represents. Like a diplomat representing his country, the verbal symbol or sign (or syntactical combination of these ) represents not itself but ‘another.’ Representation is a relationship in which one thing performs the function of [being] representative of another - of, in fact, the universal nature of that other thing. This relationship is what is called ideality in the Hegelian tradition. Marx uses the term in this way, although in his writing the range of phenomena is “dialectically opposed” to the Hegelian usage. The meaning of the term is the same, but the concept is different. Marx’s understanding of the essence of the phenomenon was different. When he analyzed money, what Marx described as ideal was the value- form of labor in general. Certainly this didn’t mean that value exists only in Cs. The form of value is ideal because the palpable form of the thing (a coat) is “only a form of expression” of another thing (linen). The form of the coat represents (embodies, expresses) the value of the linen. The form of the coat is the ideal form, the represented form, of the value of the linen. The linen (as value) “now has the appearance of a coat.” As value, the two are equal. “The body of commodity B acts as a mirror to the value of commodity A” (Capital, p. 59). Value is the ‘substance’ that is embodied here and there. [MP: But the linen is turned into the coat. What is preserved in this transformation is the value?] The form of value is ideal. The form of the thing represented is different, and is not ideal. This “difference” is not Cs or will. What is represented as a thing is the the form of people’s activity. [MP: This moved very quickly! I need to reread Capital] Here is the answer to the riddle of ideality. “Ideality, according to Marx is nothing else but the form of social human activity represented in the thing. Or, conversely, the form of human activity represented as a thing, as an object” 15 Ideality is like a stamp on the substance of nature. All things acquire a new ‘form of existence’ that is not included in their physical nature - their ideal form. Ideality has a social character and origin. It is the form of a thing, but outside the thing. Or the form of an activity, but outside that activity. It is the form of an activity. It is the form of a thing. It cannot be fixed as one or the other, [MP: I really dislike this. It presumes the physical nature is knowable, without explaining how. It seems to detach social meaning from material properties. The stamp metaphor makes things seem like passive recipients of an imposed form.] Ideality exists only when people are working collectively. Individual Cs and will depend on the ideality of things, comprehended and so conscious. Both Marx and Hegel offered a theory of ideality which took into account the emergence of human self-Cs. Hegel recognized that self-examination requires self-opposition - of Geist in the form of objects. First “embodied” in the word, then in the “inorganic body of man,” that’s to say culture, civilization. For Hegel, ideality exists only as objects which are reified activity. Ideality, for him [MP: but not for EI and Marx?] “took in the whole range of phenomena within which the ideal,’ understood as the corporeally embodied form of the activity of social man, really exists” 17 This is why the comodity can do what it can do. It is ideal through and through. Things “whose category quite unambiguously includes words, the units of language, and many other ‘things’” 17. [MP: But if the ideal includes “many other things” then it doesn’t include “all” things!] …this “category of ‘things’” [here again it is not all things but just one category] Here EI returns to Marx and the commodity, to emphasize that there is nothing in common substantially between the ideal and what it represents. And to emphasize that the relationship of ideality is established outside the head, behind the back, in the practices. This means that trying to reflect on the relationship doesn’t get one very far. The objectivity of the ideal is a fact, and ‘idealism’ is not a schoolboy’s mistake but a sober statement of this objectivity without, however, explaining it. Idealists appeal to an incorporial form that controls things, and determines whether they will be a form or not, but that cannot be located. Materialism explains the objectivity of the ideal. Marx’s analysis of value is “a typical and characteristic case of ideality in general.” Where classical philsophy [Hegel] appealed to “pure activity” [Geist?], political economists recognized the centrality of labor, and saw value as embodied labor. But they couldn’t see the form of value. Marx “gained the theoretical key” from Hegel, and saw the form of value as the reified form of labor - “a form of human life activity.” [MP: But what does it mean to speak of the form of activity? If I make a coat from linen, does the coat actually have the form of my activity? What did Marx say about this?] Since human activity is purposeful, it is easy to misunderstand this form as the product of (individual) Cs and self-Cs. (And then criticize Hegel for projecting subjective mental activity into the ‘external’ world.) But Marx recognized that logical thinking stems from the universal forms of existence of objective reality. [MP: Culture, or nature? This is confused.]
[some sections skipped over here]
[MP: The following paragraph is directly copied] “Ideality exists only when people are working collectively. Individual Cs and will depend on the ideality of things, comprehended and so conscious. Both Marx and Hegel offered a theory of ideality which took into account the emergence of human self-Cs. Hegel recognized that self- examination requires self-opposition - of Geist in the form of objects. First ‘embodied’ in the word, then in the ‘inorganic body of man,’ that’s to say culture, civilization.” Marx “by no means accidently uses the comparison of the mirror.” Man is born without a mirror, and first sees and recognizes himself in other men. Peter compares himself with Paul, as the type of human being. Human activity involves “reflection,” which for classical German philosphy meant “self-consciousness,” but for Marx meant “the relationship to oneself as to ‘another.’” Marx didn’t believe that humans differ from animals in having Cs and will and so have culture. Rather, he believed that because humans (collectvely) have culture, they come individually to have Cs and will. Man, unlike the animals, has to master purely social forms of life activity. Where an animal is born with inborn forms of activity, the human child is born confronted by the complex system of culture which includes modes of activity which he has to assimilate, even though they may be very different from the biological reactions of his body. Even the satisfaction of biological needs requires that the child adopt conventional modes of activity. Eating with a spoon, sitting at a table. These are external, social forms which the child has to “convert into the forms of his individual life activity.” This external objectivity is not nature, but culture, nature transformed, given new form, by the labor of previous generations. These social forms are the objectivity to which the child is compelled to adapt all the functions of his organic body. To do this, the child must distinguish himself from his own body. He has to develop a new relationship to himself, “as to a single representative of ‘another.’” The child has to become “a special object” in order to impose the rules and patterns (the forms) of culture on the life activity of his body. In mastering these forms, the child becomes a “representative” of the human race. The individual’s organic body “changes into a representative of the race.” It is this specific relationship that brings about the specific human forms of mental activity of consciousness and will. Consciousness arises because the individual must view himself as if with the eyes not only of another person, but with the eyes of all other people. The child must “correlate” his actions with those of others, and this calls for will: the ability to subordinate one’s organic inclinations and urges to the social demands of a common task. In the process of labour man transforms material things, including his own body, his own nervous system and brain. These become means for his purposeful activity. Will and Cs are products, effects. [MP: Notice that EI is saying here that the child becomes ideal, on his own definition of ideality. The child becomes a representation of something else - the human race. He does this by imposing form on his own activity. ]



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