Helen, Nate, Jan,
Thanks for getting to ball rolling on this discussion of Ilyenkov's paper.
When the idea of discussing it first began to be considered I was very
positive but in attempting to prepare comments my thoughts kept seeming to
run away from me and I couldn't organize any direct statement or summary and
felt repelled at the idea of declaiming about the piece with historical
background, references to other works, and relation to affine theories.
Bakhurst stated that Ilyenkov's "philosophy of activity" as presented in
the "the problem of the ideal" was "a theory with far reaching implications
of immediate contemporary relevance". As I understand Bakhurst's statement,
the context of immediate contemporary relevance concerns the validity of
modern materialism, including AT, as a framework for an objective
understanding of culture and history. Bakhurst claims that "A materialist
position is defined by its account of the nonmaterial, and stands or falls
by the plausibility of that account."
It seems to me that this is the case because materialism inevitably founders
on how it handles the problem of consciousness and the seemingly indubitable
reality of the self that is given as a concommitant of consciousness. Ideal
objects, meaning, are always (as Husserl insisted) given in a conscious
experience of which the self constitutes one of the poles. Theories of
culture and history that do not develop a 'plausible' account of ideality
fail to address the very object that requires explanation and in a certain
sense are always self-negating since those theories themselves are "ideal".
Simply to call ideal representations by another name, eg. a model, a sign,
a conceptual artefact, or whatever, and ascribe them the role of a thing,
the totality of whose properties can be accounted for in the same language
that is used to account for other material things in the system fails for
similar reasons. If culture and history have objective qualities that can
be known, cognized, underestood, and explained the ideal cannot be simply
discarded in a way we have seen on the list in the recent past.
It wouldn't be too hard to discuss the relevance of Ilyenkov's solution of
the problem of the ideal to AT but my aim has been a little broader in
wanting to show situate it within the entire range of social theory. . The
closest I've come to this is to produce a series of questions . I'm putting
these out for those who've read the paper to see if there is any agreement
that the answers to these questions might not only provide an internal
understanding of the Ilyenkov's ideas but also an appreciation for its
relevance toward evaluating the merits of other theoretical positions
concerning culture and history. In other words, I'm looking for feedback
concerning the approach to the reading itself rather than feedback on my
particular interpretation of this or that aspect of what Ilyenkov wrote.
That can come later if there's some agreement about what the important
questions are. Some of these questions are straightforward, others based on
prior acquaintance with the material. I have only partial responses,
inklings of directions in which to proceed to perhpas answer some of these
questions but would like to know whether these, or similar questions have
occurred, to the others who have read the piece, what other questions might
have occured to them, and of course what answers/responses they have to
both.
Here goes..
1. What is Ilyenkov talking about when talking about the ideal? What is
included? I think that Jan's comment to Helen's apparent restriction of the
ideal to language is an example of the kind of issue here.
2. Why is the problem of the ideal important at all? Is this a problem
of local importance, only relevant within the discourse of dialectical
materialism and activity theory, and if not how does it provide a critical
perspective on other theories that propose explanations of cultural and
historical problems. Can we just dispense with the problem of the ideal, is
it a pseudo-problem as positivists and others claim?
3. How in fact does Ilyenkov propose to delimit the ideal. world of "
collectively acknowledged notions . . . the whole socially organized world
of intellectual culture' from 'the real world as it exists outside and apart
from its expression in these socially legitimized forms of experience'? Is
this delimitation sustainable?
4. Ilyenkov uses Marx's theory of value to show how human activity is
embodied in material objects in the form of ideality (value) but Marx
himself referred to this as a form characteristic of capitalist society, and
the substance Marx claimed to be incorporated in objects for his analysis of
the capitalist system was "socially necessary labor time". How can
Ilyenkov's proposal that ideality is the form of human activity incorporated
in material things be expanded to other (non-economic) cultural and
historical phenomena. What, if any, substance other than abstract labor
time is embodied in material objects that endows material objects with
ideality? Ilyenkov points to other bases for the recognition of "one thing
in another" in the processes of socialization when "the human individual is
obliged to subordinate his own actions to certain "rules" and "patterns"
which he has to assimilate as a special object in order to make them rules
and patterns of the life activity of his own body." In this discussion
Ilyenkov alludes to Leont'ev and also grounds the basis of the possibility
of individual consciousness so it would seem to me to be very relevant to
the general interest in activity theory.
5. If the ideal form of social activity presents itself to individual
consciousness as a relation between things, the basis of the relation being
the idealized substance (eg. labor as the substance of value), is this
socially necessary? that is, do we have to believe in the objective powers
of the gods, the "laws of the market", the "world historical mission of the
proletariat", etc. in order to maintain the possibility of representation,
knowledge, etc.? What happens when we demystify the relationship? Ilyenkov
writes "The riddle and the solution to the problem of "idealism" is to be
found in the peculiar features of the mental activity of the subject, who
cannot distinguish between two fundamentally different and even opposed
categories of phenomena of which he is sensuously aware as existing outside
his brain: the natural properties of things, on the one hand, and those
otheir properties which they owe not to nature but to the social human labor
embodied in these things, on the other." What reasons are there to assume
that we can or can't separate out the different categories of phenomena.
6. If Ilyenkov is correct that, "The objective reality of 'ideal forms'
is no mere invention of the idealists" and that implicitly, understanding
the real structure and function of these collective ideal forms is therefor
or practical significance for humanity as a whole, what implications does
this have for the real work in the various domains of human activity; e.g.,
education, health care, , etc. Are we left with nothing more than critique
of politics, religion, art, literature, etc. some kind of Monday morning
quarterbacking on human history or does such knowledge provide a basis for
actively intervening in those activities?
I'm not even sure that these questions are totally coherent. As I said at
the outset, in the interest of seeing a deep discussion of Ilyenkov's
proposal and perhaps as a prolegomena to reading Leont'ev, formulating and
sharing these questions -- to which I do not claim to have any more than
partial responses myself -- has seemed the best contribution I could make at
the outset.
Paul H. Dillon
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