I haven't received Peter's paper. Was it sent out on the list?
And is Peter Jones the same Peter Jones I met in England c. 1984/5?
Andy Blunden
At 13:45 05/06/2000 -0700, you wrote:
>Peter,
>
>In reading the paper my interest was directed toward
>your emphasis on the ideal and concepts. I could
>accept the argument on lets say a philosophical level
>that concepts differ from notions in certain regards.
>Where I had more difficulty was concepts embedding an
>essential or non-essential aspect of the "thing"
>separate from cultural experience or practice.
>
>If we take the Aristotian essence of a triangle or
>Spinozo's circle they seem to be essences that are as
>much cultural-historical as knowledge of the object
>perse. In particular when you state,
>
>"Within Materialist epistemology, the process of
>cognition is just the reflection in knowledge of what
>is above all a practical process in which the social
>body of humanity must learn to use the forces of
>nature in accordance with the objective properties of
>the latter. In the struggle to make these forces serve
>our vital ends, a process unfolds in which these
>forces ultimately dictate the necessary lines along
>which thinking must go to arrive at knowledge adequate
>to our aims. Practice ultimately reveals what part of
>our ideas belongs to our bodies and what part belongs
>to the body external to us. The standpoint of
>objective truth - the "God's eye view" as it were -
>coincides with the standpoint of purposeful practical
>transformation of reality."
>
>My concern here is with "social concepts" and how they
>tend to invoke "nature" if its biological or the "body
>external to us" to legitimize certain
>cultural-historical practices. Here (the quote above)
>thinking -higher forms of thinking - (concepts) seems
>less cultural-historical and more structured by the
>logic of the world. In contrast I would tend to see
>the structure on the cultural-historical level which
>incorporates or appropriates aspects of the world to
>legitimize certain practices.
>
>I would be interested in how your argument would
>extend to social concepts that often invoke that the
>world is organized in a way that supports a particular
>ideology. One example being the chimp post awhile back
>where supposedly their social structure is an emerging
>form of capitalism.
>
>I enjoyed your dealing with the embodied view of the
>the governor very much. Could you touch on the "ideal"
>a little more. My understanding is it is a community,
>cultural model rather than an individual one.
>Ilyenkov's example of the artist seems to assume a
>more or less direct relationship as in comparing a
>tree to the canvas of a tree, but much art is not so
>direct. Vygotsky in *Psychology of Art* had an
>interesting discussion of this relationship in which
>at times we use cultural processes (genres) to create
>"new content" and at other times we use cultural
>content to create "new genres". In either case there
>appears to be a dialectic in that we never create
>something new out of nothing, but on the other hand
>the canvas example appears overly simple in that an
>important aspect of art is looking at things in a new
>way.
>
>In the paper you focused on the ideal and concepts as
>dictated, structured by the objective properties of
>the world, but I am curious about how both would
>relate to social concepts. It seems social concepts
>are often given weight or a degree objectivity by
>invoking aspects of the world. Ratner, for example,
>holds that concepts can be less than desirable and
>appropriated by certain practices such as capitalism,
>which could be argued as being structured or
>legitimized by the properties of the world (e.g.
>chimps expressing a social structure of emerging
>capitalism).
>
>Nate
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