Paul H. Dillon has given an essential summary of how Ilyenkov thinks
ideality is part of our world. I am to steeling my other duties
another hour or so to comment upon (to me) crucial points. [It was
more in the end, but a high gain in my understanding by writing out
in a hopefully comprehesible way a lot of my feelings and insights.]
I leave out at this time all reference concerning "consciousness" and
keep to Ilyenkov's claim that "ideality" is beyond consciousness. To
which I agree when "ideality" can find a reasonable understanding.
So I mainly deal, expanding my second question and my
mind-body-ramblings of yesterday widely, with
>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.
My underlinings of key phrases throughout (please tell me if the
underlining should produce display problem with anybody that cannot
be mended by adjustment of one's mailer settings). Paul writes:
>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.
These statements are very concise. So I for one think to understand
the role given to "absolute ideality" and its relation to truth and
meaning, in principle, I mean, and open to amendment. I also have an
answer here to my philological question of yesterday's as to the
mixup of "idea" and "ideal" which turns out be the poodle's core. For
ideals are far enough away from reality that they cannot be checked
and revised re facts (I mean by comprehensible ways, barely they are
factually); ideas better stand some probe in the real world if one
should adventures to base one's actions upon them. So I miss in fact
the pragmaticist's stance, Paul claims; in words there is some
kinship. However, Peirce and Lenin probably thought of entirely
different time scales for truth to become manifest and never would
Peirce have nurtured the idea of making a mission of imposing (his or
any) truth upon the people; he explicitly enough warned of founding
politics and ethics in science; ethics for him, like phenomenology or
phaneroscopy, was a precondition of science, not a sequel. Of course,
in our text, this is the Hegelian legacy; also in Peirce, who
envisioned the universe going from firstness to thirdness, i.e. from
pure potentiality to the fixed lawfulness of the behavior of
everything which equals the ultimate interpretant or "truth". I tend
to see this as the metaphysical (at times religious) horizon of
Peirce's thinking who is otherwise one of the very few realists among
philosophers and scientists alike. At least on this planet, almost
solely pertinent for humans, the longer and more scientists and
technicists (tech-nology mostly lacking since they restrict their
reflecting to what their competitors are doing in order to outmatch
them rather than to brake the nonsense; whereas the scientists appear
more and more to become scientologists since they claim to know what
is good for humanity and for themselves) throw their laws and
products out the less predictable things behave; which contradicts
Peirce's metaphysics in fact.
>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.
Concrete universals: I would claim with Peirce that concrete generals
are (near!) replicas of each other (such as in biotic procreation) or
of models (such as in cultural objects) or effects inherent in
constellations (such as the pendulum under gravity); when they are
reals, they more or less differ from each other. So I'd prefer to
speak of concrete or real generals and reserve the term "universals"
to the domain of symbols propers since the real universe appears to
be an open process and only universa of symbols can claim the
required closeness to assure orderly behavior of the elements. The
relations of the symbols to the reals they are made to represent is
too subtle to leave it to the experts (think of the desaster of
"operational definitions" in practically all modern sciences!),
whether to the experts of symbols who don't care for the represented
or to the experts of subject matter who have a naive way of dealing
with symbols, usually by taking the symbols for reals in their
content rather than in their symbol character. I am still in need to
better understand how Ilyenkovs notion of the idea(l) relates to
symbols. Would welcome pointers to pertinent text passages. His
preferred example of the reified idea(l) seems to be words and text.
Is he victim of the problematic idea that real things could really be
fully represented in some symbol text? Which is in my view the key
error of Baconian, i.e. is modern science (see below).
Movement from the abstract to the concrete: In my opinion perhaps the
most ill-conceived endeavor ever undertaken. (At times I feel it was
an attempt to bring eternity to earth endeavored by some who could
not wait until paradise; obviously a real general replicated all the
more the less trustworthy the paradise promise would become in
secularized times -- ;-) End of cynical remark.) Obviously any
abstraction brings a loss in relation to what the abstraction is made
from; otherwise abstraction would be nonsense and we would better
deal with the object(s) of abstraction themselves. In addition
abstraction adds or brings in its own perspective because you can
only abstract in a certain respect. So abstraction is both attrition
and specification.
Logically a return from an abstraction back to its original real is
thus impossible; it cannot but generate fiction. Unfortunately this
has become the essential strategy of the sciences. See the quote of
Heinrich Hertz at the end of this message: an often quoted phrase
long into the 20th century; of recent I have seen it rarely; but it's
still the strategy of the sciences, including psychology! I myself
believed in it when writing my Ph.D. thesis and used it as a chapter
motto. The statement enlightened me as to what is good for atoms and
gases, necessities and chance, may be nonsense for people in culture.
Or would you believe it possible for example to re-enact some stretch
of real events on the basis of the history of those events? First
problem: which history to base it on; second problem: what is
accounted for in general in history has almost certainly occurred in
varieties: you have to re-invent the variants; third problem: how to
deal with pre- and framing conditions of all sorts not mentioned in
the history; etc., etc.
>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.
Whether there is an inherent TELOS in history: If the answer is yes,
Ilyenkovs "solution" is another Platonian or Leibnizian version of
(mis)understanding the human condition: a inclusively preprogrammed
world in the true, though hidden reality whilst the shadows impinging
on our senses are nothing but illusion. But even the scientists saw
themselves forced to introduce chance into the real thing in spite of
making their formulas so much more complicated. Only they declared it
as progress instead of admitting the bankruptcy declaration it in
fact is of the notion of absolute truth.
Whether we can have objective knowledge of human history and culture
(like the objective knowledge of physical matter): What is physical
matter? You'd have to distinguish at least three levels: the
physico-chemical itself; its mineral sequels such as evident in
cosmological and in geological data: clearly evolutive, i.e.
unforeseeable and not ended or ending; its organizational varieties
in the genuine evolutions including living beings of all kinds, their
products of all kinds and all cultural products from stone axes to
byte constellations on hard disks). The latter two are evolutive and
totally dependent on the constancy of the first; if physico-chemical
structures and processes would change even in a minor quality, the
next evolutive trees would in all probability become impossible,
would have been essentially different in the beginning on another
chemistry. When the earth core and our sun become cool enough, the
mineral and the three genuine evolutions will stop.
>Marxist theory holds that we can [have objective knowledge of human
>history and culture in the same way as of physical matter] 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.
Who is the "we" in "we can"? What an arrogance in view of some 8000
discerned cultural forms known to have found expression on this
planet, most of them now not only extinct, but destroyed by the
wicked and atrocious nefariousness of humans who say they possess the
objective truth. Obviously the originator of this thought (I assume
it is Ilyenkov, as interpreted by Paul Dillon) is admitting
bioevolution but instead of seeing the evolutive character of
cultural traditions he regresses to a Platon-like Telos of history,
to "absolute ideality" which implies, I cannot help but remark, has
been so often claimed as known to some and unknown to others, with
all the ensuing consequences of class clash. I am reminded of that
French psychologist who, if I remember correctly published a book on
"personality" in the mid-seventies in which you could read such
candid statements to the effect that "truth" was dwelling in the
cadre politics of the central committee of the communist party of the
SU. (I cannot remind his name with a dominant "e" as second letter
and my respective notes are deeply buried in boxes.) And let me add
that I equally abhorr with contempt attitudes of "we know better" or
"we shall know for sure soon" wherever and by whomever they arise.
There are plenty fropm the so-called "right" side, too. What
scientists should do instead is to invite: please look at these
things this or that way; I hope you will be more careful with the
things then, and more.
>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 comparable 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
I agree very much with the caution you add. I may be a victim of
simplification in reading Ilyenkov. Certainly not, however, on the
level you give examples of in the subsequent paragraph. For these
are, inmho, minor, nondecisive details in relation to the overall
picture that I'm placing emphasis upon. But you mention only
bioevolution in the paragraph above and appear to assume that history
does not grow an open yet (self-)regulated tree but rather is
unfolding its inherent law in culture, within and among the cultures
of the world. If I understand Ilyenkov correct I wonder how he can
think that the openness of bioevolution has been (or is it perhaps to
be?) constrained in the ensuing cultural evolutions. And what about
the mediating individual ontogenetic evolutions? A question of sorts,
I think. I keep telling and repeating that Herder in the later 18th
century conceived of humans as the first "Freigelassenen" (those
(animals) let free) of the "creation" and for the continuation of the
"creation", as he says in a jargon acceptable then, He even said God
will not interfere, otherwise humans would not be free. And in a
very prominent place of his writings he says: the inclined reader may
be astonished to often find the word "nature" where she will expect
the word "
God; she should not be irritated because he, Herder, hesitated to use
so high a word in any of those trivial contexts; he clearly meant
what he wrote and the informed readers understood well. Herder also
clearly conceived in which ways the freedom of individuals enables
the explosive yet constrained innovation and freedom of cultural
evolutions. His phrase "humans as creature and creator" of their
world summarizes the essence most elegantly.
Strange enough that Kant is still seen as one of the major ethics
theorists, of enlightenment and for today, in spite of his statement
(in "Idea towards a General History in Cosmopolitan Intent" of 1784,
which is a retort to Herder's "Ideas towards a Philosophy of History
of Humankind", the first volume of which had appeared earlier the
same year):
"Der Mensch ist ein Tier, das, wenn es unter andern seiner Gattung
lebt, einen Herrn nötig hat. Denn er missbraucht gewiss seine
Freiheit in Ansehung anderer seinesgleichen [...]" -- "Man is an
animal which, living among others of his kind, needs a master.
Because he abuses certainly his freedom in respect to others of his
kind."
To which Herder replied without naming his former master (when he was
his student 20 years earlier at the university of Koenigsberg) in the
second volume:
"Kehre den Satz um: Der Mensch, der einen Herren nötig hat, ist ein
Tier; sobald er Mensch wird, hat er keines eigentlichen Herren mehr
nötig. [...] Im Begriff des Menschen liegt der Begriff eines ihm
nötigen Despoten, der auch Mensch sei, nicht: jener muss erst schwach
gedacht werden, damit er eines Beschützers, unmündig, damit er eines
Vormunds, wild, damit er eines Bezähmers, abscheulich, damit er eines
Strafengels nötig habe." -- "Reverse the sentence: A (hu)man in need
of a master is an animal; as soon as he becomes a human, he has
escaped the need for a veritable master. [...] In the concept of
human no concept of a mandatory despot to him is enclosed who should
also be a human: the former firstly has to be thought weak in order
to need a protector, minor to need a warden, savage to need a
domesticator, horrid to need an angel of retribution."
No need to add that in the Herderian concept of the human
responsibility for what humans do in using their freedom is indeed
genuine part of the concept of human itself. Responsibility is simply
the other face of freedom and vice versa. Whereas the churches, old
and new, aspiring and installed masters of any kind, so often want
humans ignorant, blind, sheepy, etc. following the law imposed upon
them by their masters.
To me it as is terrible a simplification to treat of the various
kinds of evolutions in the same manner as it is to select or evade at
one's liking the evolutive or the necessary worlds. Here are reasons
why we cannot and should not transfer from one evolution to another
or to non-evolution when we do not comparatively understand what they
have in common and in what they differ. Is it not something akin to
the original sin to start with a belief of humans being different a
priori instead of looking comparatively at what's really the case.
Both is a break, from God an his rule or from our embeddedness in the
world. Both makes us miserable and needy of salvation. Indeed animals
symbolize rarely in the free, recombinant way humans are capable of;
but they have been "symbolizing" both within (by hormones, neurons
etc.) and without (by pheromones, gestures, sound, matter placement
etc.) richly long before some became honminides, only especially
expansive when language was attained, late indeed. Yet animals,
already plants and their shared forerunners, semionize abundantly (to
use my broader term of which symbolizing may be understood as a
subkind); otherwise they were simple, indeed, machines. This is
simply prejudice which to resolve science has needed more than five
centuries now and still not succeeded to draw the obvious
consequences for their understanding life and the human condition.
I just read the very informed and informative background note of
Peter Jones, many thanks. Do you or anybody on the list have an idea
for possibly good reasons why these fellows, so strongly victimized
and under threat of victimization, did sort of deliver philosophical
justification for their master's church-like attitudes and deeds. I
mean you convincingly show they criticized many details of their
prison; but at the same time volunteered to enter the prison of
historical law. Their desire for certainty must have been greater
than that for freedom, in spite of this certainty being very virtual
only in their minds and words.
Please note, my critique of their thought does not subtract from
their often admirable qualities as humans; it pertains to their ideas
in the context of 2 1/2 millennia of history of ideas. And better
thoughts we need. I'd wish more would, but I'd oblige nobody to act
as a hero; to think keen is no great risk, I hope. Oh yes, I know it
is. Or do I completely misunderstand Ilyenkov & Co.? Don't forget, I
am looking from another platform. Arrived at where Ilyenkov has, the
question is: how is this or that reified "ideal" capable of producing
what's done in the cultures and how does it get reified in the first
place the way it gets. Did Ilyenkov deal with these questions? Did
Vygotsky deal with the question how the social came about that then
was internalized in development?
History does not "transcend over human individuals('s
consciousness)"; rather individuals transcend history. Otherwise
history had halted for long and there were no humans. And because of
individuals transgressing, history becomes capable of transcending
itself. For heavens sake, how can Ilyenkov live with the belief that
his fate and the life of his friends and family is preplanned, some
random moment mixed in? And even the terror of his masters:
preplanned? Masters therefor innocent and not accountable?
Oh, this post is again much too long! Alfred
Heinrich Hertz, 1894, im Vorwort zu "Principles of Mechanics"
Das Verfahren aber, dessen sich die Naturerkenntnis zur Ableitung des
Zukünftigen aus dem Vergangenen bedient, besteht darin, daß wir uns
'innere Scheinbilder oder Symbole' der äußeren Gegenstände machen,
die von solcher Art sind, daß die denknotwendigen Folgen der Bilder
stets wieder die Bilder sind von den naturnotwendigen Folgen der
abgebildeten Gegenstände.
Heinrich Hertz, 1894, in the preface to "Principles of Mechanics"
The procedure, however, which [scientific] cognizing of nature uses
to derive future from past events is this: that we fabricate to us
'internal phantom images or symbols' of the external objects, images
which are of such a kind that the sequels necessary in thought of the
images are forever the images of the sequels necessary in nature of
the imaged objects.
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Alfred Lang, Psychology, Univ. Bern, Switzerland --- alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch Website: http://www.psy.unibe.ch/ukp/langpapers/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------
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