[Xmca-l] Re: Neoformation and developmental change: Issue 4 article for discussion
David Kellogg
dkellogg60@gmail.com
Thu Dec 14 18:48:23 PST 2017
Take a look at this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Socrates#/media/File:David_-_The_Death_of_Socrates.jpg
"The Death of Socrates" is a painting that practically invented
neo-classicism, and you can see why. It's got everything that Plato's
"Phaedo" has and most of "Crito" besides, put in a visual form that anybody
can take in at a glance (like the "arrow" formed by the line of sun on the
wall and the line of Socrates's leg with the line of heads hoving over the
floor, seemingly pointing to the Exit...). It's concrete (like the drawing
on paper that Wolff-Michael is talking about)--it's real paint and canvas
and if you are in New York you can go and see it at the Met. But it's also
highly abstract--Crito is fondling Socrates's leg for a good reason: he is
making the distinction between a necessary cause, i.e. Socrates's leg
muscles, whose activation is what brought Socrates to prison and whose
non-activation is what will keep him there until he dies of the hemlock)
and a sufficient one (both Socrates's supporters and his detractors wish
him to be an example to others, and that is why Socrates himself chooses to
die, in order to show that when you live in a city you must abide by its
judgements, even when they are unjust and wrong).
The problem with neo-classsicism is that it is very bad at explaining
emotion. You can see that the executioner is the one who is most
overwrought, and Plato, who sits, anachronistically, at the foot of the
(ahistorical) bed with his (ahistorical) gray head bowed is the least. What
Socrates is SUPPOSED to be conveying here is really not the distinction
between necessary cause and sufficient cause, but the foolishness of
fearing death, because according to him death is the beginning of a whole
new form of development, much realer and much less abstract than earthly
life because a more direct form of communion with the Platonic ideal.
Death is the moment when a participant in our historico-cultural community
ceases inner speech and oral speech and must continue participating in
written speech only, but since, as Wolff-Michael correctly says, thought is
not simply an attribute of people but more properly of speech communities,
this is part is true enough. But when I made a remark along these lines to
Mike (I think it was when Ruqaiya Hasan died) he said, quite rightly, that
this ignores the emotion of those suddenly abandoned. That's why, when Vera
dies, the testimony of people like Annalisa and Henry, who knew her well,
is so important and worth reading (yea, even at great length). It's the
part that neo-classicism ignores; the part that this painting cannot convey.
There is another part of the story that Socrates himself is ignoring,
though. After death, there is a qualitative change in
development--development is not for myself or for Ruqaiya or for Vera or
for Socrates. It is like the moment when children beget other children, and
"development" must, for perfectly good biological as well as
sociohistorical and ontogenetic reasons, cease. Phillip Larkin puts it like
this:
Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,
The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)
High and preposterous and separate—
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,
One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
David Kellogg
Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'
Free e-print available (for a short time only) at
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full
On Fri, Dec 15, 2017 at 10:43 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
> I remember being shocked, Michael, when I first read the
> critique of the concept of "trajectory" in a North-Holland
> book on the mathematical foundations of quantum physics back
> in the 1960s, but on reflection, it is correct and
> anticipated by Hegel. Hegel is of course talking about the
> *real* movement not subjective thought forms, just as much
> as Marx is, but this is a whole other question.
>
> On reflection, I think I was wrong referring to "movement"
> as an "abstraction," though. It would be more true to say it
> is a derivative or higher order concept while
> "contradiction" is the more fundamental concept, from which
> "movement" derives. I only raised it because you said "The
> smallest unit of movement still is movement," which is just
> as nonsensical as the broken English translation of
> Leontyev: "Activity is the unit of activity," which has
> caused so much confusion for English speakers.
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 15/12/2017 12:03 PM, Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:
> > ... and, quantum physics is right for describing events
> > that we attribute to quantum particles, protons, photons,
> > electrons, etc. For human size stuff, we use classical
> > physics because it does pretty well; and when we go to
> > stellar scale, we don't use quantum physics but general
> > relativity because these approaches are better suited for
> > describing and theorizing what we observe :-)
> >
> > Michael
> >
> >
> > Wolff-Michael Roth, Lansdowne Professor
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> --------------------
> > Applied Cognitive Science
> > MacLaurin Building A567
> > University of Victoria
> > Victoria, BC, V8P 5C2
> > http://web.uvic.ca/~mroth
> > <http://education2.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/>
> >
> > New book: */The Mathematics of Mathematics
> > <https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/new-
> directions-in-mathematics-and-science-education/the-
> mathematics-of-mathematics/>/*
> >
> > On Thu, Dec 14, 2017 at 4:57 PM, Wolff-Michael Roth
> > <wolffmichael.roth@gmail.com
> > <mailto:wolffmichael.roth@gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Andy,
> > I am looking at the real movement of the thinking-body
> > (Il'enkov), using a pen and making a circle, for
> > example. No abstraction. This is precisely what Maxine
> > Sheets-Johnston develops, and the point that she
> > critiques with embodiers and and enactivists---they
> > abstract in positing schemas, that are somewhere
> > lodged in the mind, whereas life is in movement, real
> > movement, not abstracted. Without movement, life does
> > not exist.
> >
> > Also, an important point. I am talking about
> > /trans/action not /inter/action---in the senses of
> > Dewey and Bateson. Transaction is the coming and going
> > in the same action that Mikhailov is writing about,
> > and the afferent and efferent aspects of an action in
> > the work of Timo Järvilehto. Because of this, any form
> > of cognition cannot be located merely in the brain
> > (see also Il'enkov on the beginning of any thought at
> > the outside of the thinker, and the endpoint of the
> > thought again on the outside of the thinker).
> >
> > I don't know where this stuff from quantum physics
> > comes in. I am a physicist by training, having done my
> > MSc in atomic physics, and so I don't see the link to
> > the argument here.
> >
> > Michael
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Wolff-Michael Roth, Lansdowne Professor
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> --------------------
> > Applied Cognitive Science
> > MacLaurin Building A567
> > University of Victoria
> > Victoria, BC, V8P 5C2
> > http://web.uvic.ca/~mroth
> > <http://education2.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/>
> >
> > New book: */The Mathematics of Mathematics
> > <https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/new-
> directions-in-mathematics-and-science-education/the-
> mathematics-of-mathematics/>/*
> >
> > On Thu, Dec 14, 2017 at 3:32 PM, Andy Blunden
> > <ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
> >
> > Actually Michael, I think "movement" is an
> > abstraction
> > from contradictions between interactions. For
> > example, I saw
> > that car there a moment ago, now I see it here. The
> > contradiction is cognised as movement. That's why
> > "trajectory" is not a legitimate concept in
> > quantum physics.
> > Hegel expresses this in the very well known aphorism:
> > "contradiction is the root of all movement."
> >
> > https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/
> hl/hl431.htm#HL2_955
> > <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/
> hl/hl431.htm#HL2_955>
> >
> > Andy
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > Andy Blunden
> > http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> > <http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm>
> > On 15/12/2017 9:54 AM, Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:
> > > ... The smallest unit of movement still is
> > > movement, and within it, there is change, so
> > that the different parts are
> > > not the same but themselves in movement. Michael
> > >
> > >
> > > Wolff-Michael Roth, Lansdowne Professor
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
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