I have been reading with interest the interlocking (at least I
believe they are interlocked) discussions of ideality/materiality and
prolepsis. My apologies, since Peter brought my own fuzzy thoughts
Folks:
>From Nic Sammond
Ilyenkov, Evald. "The Concept of the Ideal." In Philosophy in the USSR:
problems of dialectical materialism. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977.
" 'Ideality' is a kind of stamp impressed on the substance of nature by
social human life activity, a form of the functioning of the physical thing
in the process of this activity. So all things involved in the social
process acquire a new 'form of existence' that is not included in their
physical nature and differs from it completely--their ideal form" (86).
Summary:
In this piece, Ilyenkov, following Marx, sets out to demonstrate that the
ideal is not in opposition to the material (does not exist in a realm
separate from the material--either in the brains of individuals or in a
separate metaphysical realm), but that the ideal may only be found as
embodied in the material world. This is not the experienced world of Kant,
nor the world acted upon of Hegel, but a world that has form only in the
reified social activity of human beings.
As Ilyenkov is an historical materialist, he doesn't simply present his
explanation of the ideal, nor how he derived it from Marx's writings.
Rather, he presents a genealogy of thought on the subject which begins with
Kant and procedes through Hegel and then on to Marx (with mentions of Plato
and Berkeley). This geneaology is not a straight line, however; it moves
between the different positions in order to illuminate their strengths and
weaknesses, and so that they may critique each other. Since I will no doubt
be doing violence to Ilyenkov's argument anyway, I will be presenting them
chronologically.
After laying out the problem, that the ideal is seen--both by western
philosophers and by vulgar (or silly) Marxist scientists--as operating in a
realm utterly separate from the physical world, Ilyenkov looks to Kant for
the origins of this seeming dichotomy. For Kant, things take on existence
only through perception. We experience the material world and from it shape
ideal conceptions of it. Neither the material nor the ideal can exist
without our experience. We know that the material exists, but the moment we
experience its existence, we give it shape in an organization of ideals.
Nothing exists that we do not perceive. (72-73)
The problem with this is, it assumes that there exists a material world
waiting to be perceived by us. In this formulation both the world and the
perceiver are relatively passive and isolated. Furthermore, those ideals
which the individual uses to organize perceptions of the material world are
considered universal and transcendent (such as 'truth,' 'beauty,' 'space,'
or 'time'), acting as filters through which the perceiver runs the material
in order to make sense of it. (79-80). The individual, then, stands between
the ideal and the material, forming a bridge between the disembodied and
eternal (the ideal) and the temporal and embodied (the material) in the
form of individual consciousness. The sum of all individual consciounesses,
in Kant's view, may be considered to repeat this operation, in isolation,
bonded by the innate universal nature of the ideals used.
Hegel attempts to correct Kant by describing the relation of the ideal to
the material as an historical process grounded in human activity. In doing
so, he is questioning the notion of human beings as passively perceiving
the world and translating those perceptions through the use of innate,
timeless forms. For Hegel, the ideal is realized in the material world
through the activity of human beings. But it still exists separate from the
material world (for Hegel hasn't broken from the church, as Marx will). The
ideal may exist separate from humans, but it can only be realized through
the activity of people of the world. The ideal is the 'universal spirit' or
'spirit of the people,' which has a will (of its own) to be manifest
through our existence and operations on the material world (80-81). But,
since we are imperfect beings, our activities in the world never reproduce
this spirit in its ideal form in the material world. Every description of
the world we create, every form of the state, every ordering of the world,
is imperfect. But we recognize this and press on, we progress, each time
correcting our previous mistakes. Thus, the ideal isn't constant, but
historical, and its forms change as we change, in a dialectical process of
expression and correction. Every time we are conscious of the presence of
the ideal in the material world, it disappears, because it is appearing in
a particular activity, and thus is not expressing its totality (in that it
would appear different in another activity). (81, 87) [I confess that the
above may be my (mis)reading of Hegel as much as Ilyenkov's.]
Even though Hegel has linked the ideal to the material as necessarily
interdependent, he still offers the ideal as existing prior to and outside
of the material (82). For Ilyenkov, this is a problem. Hegel imagines the
process by which the material and the ideal necessarily interact as in the
consciousness of the material world and in the alienation from that
consciousness--an awareness that the representation is not the thing, and
that they are imperfectly related--but he doesn't make the leap that Marx
does: that the representation doesn't represent the thing represented, but
the social human activities embodied in the thing (84-85). This is the
difference between the consciousness <of> human activity and consciousness
<as> human activity.
This is where Ilyenkov takes up Marx by following Marx's directive to
'stand Hegel on his head.' For Marx, the material precedes the ideal. It is
not that the ideal is a sign we us to represent a thing in our
consciousness, but that idealization is a tool we use to change a social
human activity into a thing. "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....'Ideality' is a kind of stamp impressed on the substance of
nature by social human life activity, a form of the functioning of the
physical thing in the process of this activity. So all the things involved
in the social process acquire a new 'form of existence' that is not
included in their physical nature and differs from it completelyÑtheir
ideal form" (86).
How are we to understand this? Via Marx, Ilyenkov is claiming that
consciousness isn't the process of perceiving the material world and
matching it to (relatively stable but incomplete) ideals which we have
internalised from our culture. Rather, he is saying that consciouness is
social human labor occurring in historically specific larger social human
activity. The ideal proceeds from the material because we make ideal
objects out of social processes (as in commodities) that are particular to
our time and place and the labor we are performing (94). In short, we make
the ideal in order to interact with and change the material world.
To do so, we must be conscious, both of the world and of ourselves in the
world. Here, Ilyenkov takes up Marx's distinction between humans and
animals. Animals, he says, aren't conscious of themselves or of their
activities; they are only aware of the external world. Humans, on the other
hand, have the awareness of both the external world and of themselves in
that world; we are aware that we transform the world and are transformed by
it in the process of transforming it. Ilyenkov argues (and I do not fully
understand this) that we have this double-consciousness <because> we
participate in goal-directed activity. We have biological needs, but we
learn socially specific ways of responding to those needs (we need to eat,
but we learn to use a fork to do so). As a result, the ideal doesn't exist
outside of human activity, and the objects we use in that activity (forks,
chairs, words) have ideality, not because we can abstract them in our
minds, but because we need them as tools in order to meet the goals of our
activity (92-93, 96). The ideals we learn aren't simply transmitted to us
as abstractions by our elders when we are infants, but are given to us as
tools in social human activity, goal-directed activity, that we learn to
use in those activities, which necessarily happen in and on the material
world. In Ilyenkov's view, consciousness--the idealisation of the material
world--occurs as we learn to act as social beings; we become aware of
ourselves as we are given roles in collective activity, and we develop a
will in order to suppress our 'animal' urges in order to complete that
activity. Without goal-directed labor, we would develop neither
consciousness or will, hence would have no use or experience of the ideal;
like animals, we would exist solely in the material world (95).
[Here, briefly, are my problems with this. First, there are animals that
use tools in order to conduct goal-directed labor. One could look at
domesticated beasts and see that they learn how to use tools, and develop a
will to complete a task in order to be fed or cared for by their owners. Of
course, the reply might be that they have entered into <human> activity,
and therefore have begun to participate in the ideal. And, one would argue
that the animals cannot, without humans, sustain that activity--although it
is equally true that without other humans, our infants will not develop
'culture' as we know it. Leaving that aside, we can look to animals such as
the sea otter of the Pacific Northwest, who use rocks to open shells,
passing this skill down through generations. Does not this activity require
consciousness and will? Finally, it raises that old question that, if
consciousness and will arise from the division of human labor, what caused
that division. Marx seems to claim that it arises from the division of
labor in reproduction--but that claim is increasingly called into question.
Likewise, can we not claim that the same divison of labor arises in other
species? And if we do admit of the presence of consciousness and will in
other species, what happens to the limitation of the ideal to human beings?
Or, why is it important, in Marxist theory, that this limitation exist?
Does it call into question the progressive nature of our goal-directed
activities, which Marxist theory, despite its repudiation of metaphysics,
shares with its Hegelian predecessors?]
Finally, Ilyenkov, having demonstrated that the ideal cannot exist separate
from human activity, and stressing that such activity is always
transformative, both of the materials used and of the persons using them,
asserts that therefore the ideal exists--not simply in the human mind, but
in the human body. The body, he asserts is what interacts with the material
world, and with the ideal representations we create in order to act in that
world. (98-99). This, I believe, is in response to various Soviet
scientists who were pushing for a neuroanatomical model of consciousness,
placing it, and its representative processes, in the brain. However, his
final emphasis returns us to Marx's admonition that we are not outside of
the system of commodities, that as we enter into labor we are commodities
in the systems through which we actualize that labor. Thus, it is important
to recall that the very notion of the self, of ourselves as indivuals, is
an historically specific embodiment of the social and material relations
within which we operate. The very shape that our bodies take embodies these
relations, and we are signs that are transformed as well as creatures who
use signs to transform the world.
[I will raise one more question that I hope is more directed to our study
here. If consciousness and will are the products of goal-directed activity,
and we understand goals to be other than meeting our immediate animal
needs, from whence do these goals derive? Another way of putting this,
perhaps, is to ask whether the goal we assign to any given activity is
indeed the only goal of that activity. Freud's solution is to say that the
goals of any activity are actually sublimated drives for sensual/sexual
union with the parent. Marx would label that an historically specific
bourgeoise sentiment. But it leaves the question: if the goal of an
activity is not the satisfaction of some specific need (the realization of
a use value), what is it? I suppose this is a paraphrasal of Vicky's
question of whether there is unproductive goal-directed labor.]
I hope this doesn't confuse more than the original.
--Nic