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Re: [xmca] Consciousness: Ilyenkov



He means that if you deny the categorical difference between your consciousness and the world outside your consciousness, then you are an idealist. The fact that you do so by saying your thoughts are matter rather than by saying that the sun and the moon are thoughts, makes no difference.

Andy

Martin Packer wrote:
Andy,

He says we shouldn't take the middle path, for sure. I completely agree, and I'm not taking a middle path. It seems to me that *you* are trying to take a middle path! And when I opt for materialism, you tell me it's empty! Ilyenkov is also saying we should not select the incorrect path from the two that remain, but what you've copied here does not include his characterization of these two paths. I will download this chapter and take a look.

Martin

On Sep 25, 2009, at 10:12 AM, Andy Blunden wrote:

You can buy it, with all Ilyenkov's essays from http://www.erythrospress.com/ or you can get it a chapter at a time from http://marx.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/positi.htm

it continues:

"The difference and opposition of materialism and idealism is thus very simple, which, on the part of the idealists of various shades, serves as the basis for reproaches directed at materialism, such as 'primitivism', 'grade-school sophistication', 'non-heuristic nature', 'banality', 'being self-evident', etc. (Such a reproach was directed at Lenin as soon as his book was published: 'In general, even if one acknowledges as correct the materialist propositions of Mr Ilyin about the existence of an external world and its cognoscibility in our sensations, then these propositions can nevertheless not be called Marxist, since the most inveterate representative of the bourgeoisie hasn't the least doubts about them,' wrote M. Bulgakov in his review of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.)"

I stopped before that because it gets rather tedious at this point. And the point had been made already. What he is saying is that if you try to choose a middle way between materialism and idealism, then you find that in fact you are continuously faced with the same choice at every step. In other words there is no middle road. The first step you take along what appears to be middle road immediately faces you again with a choice to go this way or that way. Ilyenkov is saying: take the path of materialism.

Andy

Martin Packer wrote:
Andy,
I don't have this text. It seems to me you stop too soon; Ilyenkov says we have to take one of two paths, not a middle way. He is presumably about to describe the alternatives. What comes next?
Martin
On Sep 24, 2009, at 11:52 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:
P. 302 of "The Ideal in Activity," by Ilyenkov:

"Here, then, is the question: take your thought, your consciousness of the world, and the world itself, the complex and intricate world which only appears to be simple, the world which you see around you, in which you live, act and carry out your work - whether you write treatises on philosophy or physics, sculpt statues out of stone, or produce steel in a blast furnace - what is the relationship between them?

"Here there is a parting of the ways, and the difference lies in whether you choose the right path or the left, for there is no middle here; the middle path contains within itself the very same divergences, only they branch out within it in ever more minute and discrete proportions. In philosophy the 'party of the golden mean' is the 'party of the brainless', who try to unite materialism with idealism in an eclectic way, by means of smoothing out the basic contradictions, and by means of muddling the most general (abstract, 'cellule') and clear concepts.

"These concepts are matter and consciousness (psyche, the ideal, spirit, soul, will, etc. etc.). 'Consciousness' – let us take this term as Lenin did - is the most general concept which can only be defined by clearly contrasting it with the most general concept of 'matter', moreover as something secondary, produced and derived. Dialectics consists in not being able to define matter as such; it can only be defined through its opposite, and only if one of the opposites is fixed as primary, and the other arises from it."



Andy Blunden wrote:
Oh I don't doubt that the various strands of abstract empiricism and so on are full of non-material representational systems and non-material all-sorts-of-things. I think you are just making a point about your not subscribing to Platonism or some dualist philosophical system. But in the meaning *you* give to "material" aren't you making a tautology by saying that representational systems found in history are material? Or are there representational system which *you* say are not material?
Andy
Martin Packer wrote:
Andy,

Well, the (putative) representational systems studied by cognitive science, which are taken to be mental functions, properties of thought, which are not doubted to have a material substrate (the brain) but which are assumed not to be material themselves but ideal, in Plato's rather than Ilyenkov's sense. Chomsky's generative grammar is a good example. Piaget's theory of the mental actions and operations going on 'inside the head' of child is another.

Martin


On Sep 24, 2009, at 9:09 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:

Martin, tell me a representational system which is *not* material.

a

Martin Packer wrote:
humans have evolved to use an ordered series of "representational systems." The sequence is as follows: the episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretic. I won't go into the details, but crucially important, I think, is that these systems are material.

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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden http://www.erythrospress.com/
Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov, Ilyenkov $20 ea

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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden http://www.erythrospress.com/
Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov, Ilyenkov $20 ea

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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden http://www.erythrospress.com/
Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov, Ilyenkov $20 ea

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