[xmca] If all hopes are lost for establishing a more workable social system , then please tell me where A.N.Leontyev has gone wrong with his definition of his "personal meaning"

  Paul
  Your response to Lois of 14 Feb. 2008 indicating your defense of "socialism" gave me courage to post what I had previously gathered from reading and rereading A.N.Leontyev's "Activity and Consciousness" . Bold types are mine :
   
  [This side is revealed, however, only by analysis of the internal relations that link meanings with yet another “formative element” of consciousness – the personal meaning…
                                           
  At the early stages, when people participating in collective labour still have common motives, meanings as phenomena of social consciousness and as phenomena of individual consciousness directly correspond to one another. But this relationship does not endure in further development. It disintegrates along with the disintegration of the original relationships between individuals and the material conditions and means of production, along with the emergence of the social division of labour and private property. [Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] The result is that socially evolved meanings begin to live a kind of double life in the consciousness of individuals. Yet another relationship, another movement of meanings in the system of the individual consciousness is brought into being…
   
  Marx writes. This thought throws into relief a very important feature of consciousness at the early stages of development, namely the fact that objects are reflected in language and consciousness as part of a single whole along with the human needs which they concretise or “reify”…
   
  At the early stages of the formation of consciousness objective meanings merge with personal meaning, …
   
  It is these personal meanings that create what L. Vygotsky has called the “hidden” plane of the consciousness, which is so often interpreted in psychology not as a formative element in the subject's activity, in the development of his motivation, but as something that is supposedly a direct expression of the intrinsic, essential forces originally implanted in human nature itself…
  
   
  "It is the personal meaning that gives human consciousness its partiality…
  The embodiment of personal meaning in objective meanings is a profoundly intimate, psychologically significant and by no means automatic or instantaneous process. This process is seen in all its fullness in works of literature and in the practice of moral and political education.
  It is most clearly demonstrated in the conditions of class society, in the context of the ideological struggle…
  Picture the fundamental contradiction which this situation brings about. In contrast to society the individual has no special language of his own with meanings that he has evolved himself. His comprehension of reality can take place only by means of the “ready-made” meanings he assimilates from without – the knowledge, concepts, and views he receives through intercourse, in the various forms of individual and mass communication. This is what makes it possible to introduce into his consciousness or even impose upon that consciousness distorted or fantastic notions and ideas, including those that have no basis in his real, practical life experience. Because they have no proper basis they reveal their weakness in his consciousness, but at the same time, having become stereotypes, they acquire the capacity of any stereotype to resist, so that only the big confrontations of life can break them down. But even when they are broken down, the disintegrity of the consciousness, its
 inadequacy, is not removed; in itself the destruction of stereotypes causes only a devastation that may lead to psychological disaster. There must also be a transformation of the subjective personal meanings in the individual's consciousness into other objective meanings that adequately express them…
  If the individual is forced to choose in certain circumstances, the choice is not between meanings, but between the conflicting social positions expressed and comprehended through these meanings…
  Man's activity is the substance of his consciousness…]
   
  heidi
  heidizulfai@yahoo.com
   

       
---------------------------------
Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search.
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Sat Feb 16 13:39 PST 2008