Wow! So many contributors old and new in such a short day, perhaps fittingly: Labor Day here in the USA.
Looking at the series of exchanges it seems that several nuclear themes emerged, some leading into an internal understanding of Ilyenkov's position, some leading away to other points of contact that apparently utilize a very different conception of consciousness that has little relation the problem of the ideal itself.
Several of these especially attract my attention and lead me to a greater understanding of Ilyenkov, who, in contrast to what Phil seems to imply, didn't simply situate his analysis in the marxist tradition because of political pressure, but rather struggled under political pressure to restore an interpretation and approach to marxism that had been suppressed during the Stalinist period and the Cold War. There can be no doubt that Ilyenkov was struggling against marxist dogma for a return to the original problematic that Marx inititated and that gave birth to, among other areas of knowledge, Vygotskyan psychology and activity theory.
In particular, I think that Jan's comment about the Spinozist position that ideality is not separate from matter but an aspect of matter deserves serious consideration. I see two issues here that might produce fruitful discussion: one concerns the fundamentally pragmatistic definition of truth (cf, Peirce's distancing of his theory of truth from Dewey's) found in Lenin's statement that Nate cited: ""The practical activity of man, " notes V. I. Lenin, "must have brought the consciousness of man a million times to the repetition of various logical figures in order that these figures might acquire the significance of axioms". The other concerns the difference between the objectivity of phenomena perceived directly with the five senses and the objectivity of ideality itself. Ilyenkov points to this as the fundamental problem of philosophy. The models of modern science, which form the backdrop against which the entire framework of marxist theory develops especially in Lenin's critique of Machism to which Ilyenkov devoted his last major work, can be seen from the Ilyenkovian framework to be actualization of the ideal structure of physical matter. The question remains however, and this to me seems to be the source of many of the other issues that have come up (e.g., Nate's reflections on the transcendental character of history and Judy's outright rejection of this possibility), how is this objectivity is to be understood if at all. And we see that even accepting the ideal as an aspect of matter, not as simply something that happens in the central nervous systems of different animals, it's difference from the physical aspect of matter raises the question of whether it is singular or multiple, whether we can determine necessity in the ideal aspect of matter .
This issue perhaps forms a segue to another theme that developed in exchanges between Judy and Andy concerning the relationship between ideality and the division of labor. For Ilyenkov, and Leont'ev as well, consciousness emerges in the division of labor. Marxist theory distinguishes the social division of labor, class society, from the technical division of labor, that which emerges from the exarticulation of actions. The original division of labor, in marixst theory, is sexual division of labor and there has always been a debate as to whether or not this constitutes a form of class divsion. But in any event, the development of class society is clearly not the beginning of ideality which would be found in the subordination of the identity of the individual subject's object and motive in specific activity systems. Perhaps my background as an anthropologist simplifies viewing these issues since I'm constantly thinking of how they apply to societies at different levels of development of productive forces; e.g., technical adaptations to specific ranges of ecological systems, ranging from paleolithic hunting and gathering bands through our present global society based on the exploitation of non-human/non-animal sources of energy Perhaps the absence of this mesogenetic framework leads to the confusions Judy admits to having and that appear in such notions as "the ideal" being based on the separation of proletariat and bourgeosie. The separation of intellectual labor and physical labor is characteristic of all state societies, societies that originally emerge with the exarticulation of religious activities and the development of religious/ritual specialists. Certainly it is in the development of these special groups that KNOWLEDGE per se begins to be accumulated independently of direct productive activities, although it is clearly related to the maintenance of social relations of production; i.e., defintions of property and control of the redistribution of the social product. The archaelogical record shows quite clearly that the development of writing and state co-occur. But such specialist knowledge does not constitute "the ideal" and their specific characteristics, relationship to the development of objective knowledge in general, would seem to constitute a separate discussion. Furthermore, it is not until the development of capitalist social relations of production (private property in the means of production) that such specialist knowledge is applied to the technical systems of production. Bourgeoisie and proletariat are themselves ideal types, in the Weberian sense, that correspond only to the capitalist and not other modes of production.
The point about ideality is not that different social practices create different "idealities" but that collective human activity actualizes (to use Jan's most appropriate term) the ideality of matter. Since ideality involves all of the questions of meaning and truth, one cannot talk of "absolute ideality" without reification, ie, without taking into account that human activity as a form of ongoing historical process does not have an "end", and here the Leninist and Peircean conceptions of truth come to have extreme relevance. Human activity is progressively approximating the truth of matter, matter in the end being nothing more nor less than the sensual form of existence, ideality being its reflected and therefor abstract form. And here the notion of concrete universals and the movement from the abstract to the concrete assumes its fundamental place in the marxist theoretical framework that Ilyenkov developed.
Two other issues concern me from yesterdays exchanges, one of which I'll deal with here; that is the question of history's transcendence over individual consciousness. At the most immediate level, I don't see how anyone can seriously doubt the FACT of the transcendence of HISTORY, by which I understand the temporal unfolding of human culture. Any individual is totally determined by the coincidences of their birth into a specific culture at a specific point in time and the details of every element from which their personality and sense of self are developed are given to them. To me the real question concerns whether there is an inherent TELOS in history and whether, in the same way that our actualization of the ideality of physical matter through our collective activity leads us to progressive objective knowledge of physical matter, we can likewise have objective knowledge of that form of matter which is uniquely ours as human beings and which would not exist without us, although the stars, the mountains, the rivers, and the seas would continue to exist without us. That is human history, human culture.
Marxist theory holds that we can and proposes that the historical forms of existence that humans create in the course of satisfying their needs through the modification, not just of the environment, but of their own way of relating to the environment, has an objective existence with its own laws of motion that can be known and understood. This historical form of existence constitutes the important difference between humans and other animals -- we show little evolutionary adapatation of genetic mutations to econiches (lung size, sickle shaped blood cells, etc. yes) , but quite major and significant conscious (ie collective) adaptation of the patterns of adaptation themselves -- the tools, the artefacts that mediate the relationship to the environment, the forms of social organization, the personality traits, etc -- allowing humans to be the only species that inhabits, without species level genetic variation, every ecological zone on the planet. When we look at the archaeological and historical records, the process of objective patterns of development of human society, within comparable ecological frameworks with comparables systems of technological adaptation, are undeniable.
But there is a tremendous danger of simplifying this statement which is not so much an answer as a question. The idea that there are objective laws of history is simply derided by most people and this part of marxist theory considered the most dubious and the clearest evidence of the untenability of the theory as a whole. My feeling is that most people think Marx has been shown to be wrong since socialism and communism didn't develop out of capitalism as he predicted. But I myself find that Marx only made the prediction of the success of the proletarian revolution in the pamphlets that had organizational and popularizing purposes. The prediction that Marx made in Capital concerning the inevitable penetration of commodity relations into all aspects of human existence has certainly come true. Furthermore, Marx stated that socialism would only emerge from capitalism. But there has never been a socialist revolution in an advanced capitalist society. Lenin believed, and argued strongly against the Russian agrarian socialists (Chayanov, et al.) that capitalism had developed in all branches of the Russian economy as of 1900 but in fact the Chayanovians could account for the actual behavior of Russian peasant agriculture much more precisely than Lenin. Thus one might well argue that the failure of soviet socialism confirms Marx's original position and that Marx's own belief in the inevitability of a proletariat revolution in the advanced capitalist countries was based on his failure to take into account the importance of the international division of labor that became the focus of the dependency school, Samir Amin, and Immanuel Wallerstein beginning in the 60s and 70s (yes Baran and Sweezy prefigure this) and that now is presented to us as globalization.
The question of objective determinate patterns in history (the temporal unfolding of human culture) deserves to be handled separately but in contrast to Judy's and Nate's reservations concerning this, I myself think that it is the only consistent position that one can maintain once the objectivity of the ideal is granted.
Judy, I have some comments to your important point about the relationship between needs/desire and will but will postpone these. Similarly, with respect to the Bergson reference. While writing this Alfred Lang's post came up so I'll read that now and wait to see how this discussion leads on. BTW, it seems as though the Leont'ev reading is in the queue. What's the exact timing being thought of for that?
Paul H. Dillon
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