Re: [xmca] More on Martin: Consciousness vs knowledge?

Hi David,
it is not so complicated as your opening statements appear to make
it, because the generalized other is already implicated in simple
things such as sensing something as pain, sadness, etc. If I can say
"I am sad" or "I am angry," this already presupposes the stance and
perspective of the other (see, for example, the analyses Didier
Franck did about the implications of Husserl's work). This
implication of the other in the Self is the core of Ricœur's study
"Oneself as another," and, as you recognize, central to Vygotsky and
Bakhtin (Volosinov). Vygotsky says at the end of Thought and Language
that practical consciousness is consciousness-for-the-other as it is
consciousness-for-oneself. (last page of text or so I recall)

Michael

On 10-Mar-08, at 11:35 PM, David Kellogg wrote:

Exactly! But if this consciousness of the self is only about ME,
there isn't much I can do with it. The point is that it comes about
through taking the viewpoint of the OTHER. And that viewpoint turns
out to be central, even to my view of myself.

   For both LSV and Bakhtin, one of the most important ways this
happens is through the learning of foreign languages. LSV says that
it is through the learning of foreign languages that we learn that
concepts, which come into being and are shared through language, are
at least partially independent of any one specific language, and that
is what makes them scientific.Bakhtin says that it is really through
the concatenation of other languages within one language (other
viewpoints within a narrative viewpoint) that the novel is born.

   But LSV and Bakhtin are also distinct. For LSV, the important
thing is the journeying forth to the viewpoint of the other; this is
what makes it posible to understand one's own language not as
synonymous with social reality but simply as one instance of human
meaning-making. (Thinking and Speech, especially Chapter Five) For
Bakhtin, the important thing is not so much the journeying forth to
the viewpoint of the other, but the return to one's own point of
view. Simply sharing the suffering of another is not enough; you must
return to your own point of view and respond to that suffering as a
man. (Art and Answerability)

   LSV has a parable (from Fet but also from other sources) about the
soldier who is discussing the various words for "knife" (or water).
He goes through a whole list: in Russian it's nozh, in French,
couteau, in German, Messer, in English, a knife...but you and I know
it's really a nozh, and this shows that Russian is the most correct
language. To return to one's own point of view utterly is to have
learnt nothing. (Thinking and Speech Chapter Seven)

   Mike and Karl Levitin have a marvelous article about the teaching
of the blind and deaf in Russia. They argue that mediated and
unmediated (less mediated) perceptions FAIL to coincide and we
"notice the gap". We then fill it in with imagination.

   Of course, the same principle works with concepts as well, but
here other languages are the mediators (it is no accident that
scientific concepts in all languages are expressed in a foreign
language, e.g. Latin in English, Chinese in Korean, English and
Russian in Chinese, Hindi and Greek in Arabic.).

   When we compare other languages with our own, we notice the gap
and fill it in with imagination; this creates a three dimensional
perspective on the very stuff our self narratives are made of, namely
our native language, which for obvious reasons cannot be conveyed by
our own everyday word meanings alone.

   We MUST have the perspective of the other; more, we must have a
gap between that perspective and our own sense of self. And once we
have that understanding, we discover that the apparent means to that
end, the foreign language, has become an end in its own right.

   In Tchaikovsky's final one-act opera, Iolantha, a beautiful
princess is born blind and is kept in a secret garden by her father
and surrounded by sycophants who are forbidden to speak of anything
visual. She is rescued by an Arab necromancer and a handsome prince
who use, of course, the mediation of language, to help her "see" her
own blindness and in seeing it, to see beyond it at last.

   David Kellogg
   Seoul National University of Education

---------------------------------
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

_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Tue Mar 11 05:52 PDT 2008