People:
I'm continuing to appreciate these careful chapters (essays, if we include
Ilyenkov) that seem to take such time to assemble each idea, set one after the
other, and at last arrive somewhere.
This is a writing style that's very different from the US academic writing
style which is loaded with citations and disputes with or nods to
contemporaries. This style seems to simply go back to Marx, or in this case
Lenin, and then move ahead towards a comprehensive portrait of a vast idea.
From this second chapter ("Psychic Reflection") the ideas that stay with me
are, once again, that perception is active; the senses perform perception (even
the ears) actively just as the hand touches and explores and creates knowledge
of the shape or feel of something; that the senses do not act in isolation from
each other nor separately from past perception (experience) nor separately from
collective, social experience.
"...the basis for cognitive processes is not the individual practice of the
subject, but "the totality of human practice." Not only thought, but also man's
perception, to a very large degree, surpass in their riches the relatively
poverty of his personal experience.' This is on page 7 out of 10 of the
chapter, on my page.
So now of course I want to find out how this "totality" is aquired, or learned.
I also want to think about how, if, for example, one is an artist, a painter or
a musician, one goes about creating an object the purpose of which is to be
perceived but which will tease the expectations of the proactive perceiver and
possibly link to the "totality" in some new way so that in order to succeed in
seeing this object, the perceiver will have to acquire or learn more ways of
seeing.
Helena Worthen
Nate Schmolze wrote:
> Paul said,
>
> An important thread moves through this entire discussion, one that refers
> back in terms of the philosophical theory of reflection to Kant's
> "perceptive judgment" through Hegel's presentation of the three stage
> process of reflection to Marx's statement that the "human organs are
> theorists"
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 01 2000 - 01:01:13 PST