Re: [xmca] Consciousness, Piaget

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

I don't know how I'm to have a heated debate with Andy when he keeps  
going to bed in the middle of the day!   This was written for/to him,  
and he can read it when he wakes up, but I need to send it before I go  
to bed, or the flux will leave me all washed up.


My sources inform me that MEC dates from 1908, when Lenin had read  
neither Hegel nor Kant. He had of course read Marx carefully and with  
insight, and he was able to get up to speed very rapidly when he did  
read Hegel's Logic. I am sure that MEC is full of rich insights - but  
I don't think this way of writing about Cs can get us very far.

Don't forget that in the Crisis LSV used Lenin's "epistemological  
formula" (that what is material is what exists outside Cs) to argue  
that Cs itself is material!  His argument is that "self-consciousness  
is the consciousness of consciousness. And consciousness can exist  
without self-consciousness." I am less impressed by the success of  
this application of the test than I am by LSV's goal. To argue that Cs  
is material is impressive and thought-provoking. I actually think that  
LSV was actually correct, but the fact that he could put Lenin's test  
to this use surely shows the latter's shaky nature.

For example, to write that material reality is what exists  
independently of Cs is really misleading. At the very least we need to  
add immediately "but Cs does not exist independent of material  
reality." Lenin writes as though Cs were not a property of material  
beings. Cs emerges in certain kinds of material organization; this is  
hardly its "independence."

I actually think Kant would have been proud of Lenin. After all, in  
Kant's view Cs can contain things-as-they appear; things-in-themselves  
must always lie outside Cs. As you well know, Hegel rejected this as  
specious nonsense.

I've tried to stay out of this thread, because it's a difficult topic  
and I'm no philosopher (though I can't seem to put their damned books  
down!). But my 2 cents, for what they'll buy, are that one needs to  
begin with an acknowledgement that Cs is, as I said in my last  
message, relational. I don't mean by this that it is a relationship  
between mind and matter, I mean that Cs is a relationship between  
matter and matter. I think we'd all agree that Cs is a property, an  
aspect, only of living organisms. I completely agreed with your  
earlier post, Andy, that Cs is not simply present or absent but is a  
matter of degree or type. My favorite Hegel is the phenomenology,  
which is a story about the education of Cs over time. So not all  
living organisms have the same kind of Cs, and humans don't all have  
the same kind, of have one kind all their lives. Cs develops. But it  
is always to be found in interaction between organisms (material) and  
other material stuff.

Martin
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca