[Xmca-l] Re: Necessities and Necessariness

[Andy Blunden]

David,

The text you have discovered is indeed 20 years old. At that
time I knew nothing about Hegel, and nor could I find anyone
to learn from, and there were very few philosophical texts
available on the nascent internet. So I started copy-typing
Hegel texts on to my web site and encouraging people to
discuss them. This was my own do-it-yourself university. And
I have preserved this old discussion in case they are of use
to others.

Now, the text you discovered is written *all* by my old
friend Davie MacLean, who was in those days a big fan of
Heidegger but an avid student of all philosophy. The first
part is addressed to me and the second part copied from a
letter from Davie to Cyril Smith, my star participant in
that discussion. Davie and I were both enthralled with
Cyril's new book, "Marx at the Millennium" and Cyril's
participation was an attractor for people to join in the
discussion.

Here are some messages from Cyril to give you context:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/txt/cyril25.htm

Much as I enjoyed my debates with Davie, I did not emerge
from them as a fan of Heidegger. During the past 6 months I
have been spending a lot of time studying Hegel's Philosophy
of Right. I certainly do not see the question, and nor did
Hegel, in terms of "reconciliation to one's fate," which is
indeed much closer to Spinoza's view.

Andy

------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 9/06/2018 8:00 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
> Andy has an amazing on-line discussion, going back almost
> exactly two decades, on "Freedom as the Recognition of
> Necessity", which was Engels's exaptation of a Heglian
> formulation (which in turn comes from Spinoza.
>
> https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/txt/davie07.htm
>
> As I understand it, Andy is arguing that freedom as the
> recognition of necessity in Hegel and Spinoza is a kind of
> philosophical resignation to one's fate, but in Marx and
> Vygotsky it is a kind of active realization of one's own
> labor and hence one's own selfhood in the transformation
> of the environment.
>
> The Soviet model of Marxism is a negation of both of
> these.  On the one hand, externalization is active in
> nature, because it really involves turning the tables on
> the environment and forcing it to adapt to human
> necessities. And on the other hand it has very little room
> for "one's own labor" and still less for "one's own
> selfhood": "One" is not a statistically significant, hence
> not a necessary, number.
>
> I think one way to reconcile this view with Andy's view is
> to make a distinction between externalization as the
> recognition of the necessariness of necessities, and
> externalization as the recognition of both one's own
> necessariness and that of others. These seem to me to be
> two distinct processes, belonging to two different stages
> of development (and to the deveopment of tools on the one
> hand and signs on the other). But perhaps "seem" is the
> word I should be stressing.
>
> (In the article linked below, which I did with my
> wife, there is this four year old girl who is trying to
> learn the times tables. She keeps getting stuck: Why can't
> you just put three and five together and get thirty five?
> Her grandmother is old school: your solution counts for
> nothing: Your presumed necessariness is not as important
> as instrumental necessity. And of course at one stage of
> development that is true; but "sustainable development" is
> everywhere and always a contradiction in terms: no
> development can ever sustain itself against itself.)  
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New in /Early Years/, co-authored with Fang Li:
>
> When three fives are thirty-five: Vygotsky in a Hallidayan
> idiom … and maths in the grandmother tongue 
>
> Some free e-prints available at:
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7I8zYW3qkEqNBA66XAwS/full
>
>

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