Nate, I’m not sure whether I have understood what you meant here by ideal
activity focusing solely on its positive side. I also find it difficult to
express in the written word what I have understood from reading Ilyenkov.
But here goes;
There is no sense in Ilyenkov that the meaning, that we incorporate in
matter via our activity, is positive in the way that you seem to mean by
excluding negative. Our activity in this world of matter (materialised as
meaningful, as significant via centuries of human activity – such that our
very engagement with matter is never without significance and meaning and
this is what allows our knowledge of it) can be individual, as we continue
to take as significant what is meaningful to ourselves.
How we move within this space of meaningful matter varies, involving
positive and negative sides if you put it like that. (When you refer to
negative, I was thinking of Vygotsky and Freud saying something like ‘a
brake is a drive on development’ – that something negative can have a
positive effect.)
I don’t know if I have understood what you were getting at here.
On the issue of transcendentalism; Bakhurst discusses in detail how Ilyenkov
offers the possibility of dealing with epistemology in a way that overcomes
many philosophical problems, but at the same time he raises the possible
implication of transcendentalism in Ilyenkov’s argument. However he argues
that this is one reading of Ilyenkov and it is possible to take his
arguments as avoiding transcendentalism in the sense you suggest.
There can be no spirit “guiding” reality because Ilyenkov is working with a
way of conceiving matter that does not leave the ideal as a separate realm.
There is only matter (Spinoza’s one substance of which thought and extension
are attributes) and the human form of matter has the ability to interact
with matter in a way that actualises matter as meaningful - (positions,
locates, constructs, makes noticeable through purposive activity, works on
certain aspects and ignores others through scientific models, intervenes
rather than represents etc.).
There is a similarity here with Dewey’s point that our knowing participates
in forming or altering the world and in this sense reality possesses
practical character. Jan
Jan Derry
www.edu.bham.ac.uk/SAT/Derry.html
Nate wrote;
jan, While I agree with what you said about individual construction, I am
still left wondering if "ideal activity" or the ideal as material activity
focuses solely on its positive side. It seems to me there are ways of
reasoning, thinking, acting that we have access to because of previous and
current material activities that have a negative side. In regards to ideal
activity I am still left with the feeling that there is this "invisable
hand" or "absolute spirit" guiding ideality. It seems to me ideality emerges
from social practice at a certain point in time and becomes materialized in
language, artifacts, buildings etc. That is how we have access to it at
another place and time. I guess what I am really wondering is if this takes
us beyond Kantian transcendentalism except for it being located in history
rather than the head, god or whatever. It seems one thing to argue that the
ideal is of importance in understanding consciousness, reasoning etc, but
quite another to give it solely a positive face.
Nate
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