Andy,
Now this helps a lot! Let me see where to take this. To avoid reifying the
thing-in-itself I need to see it as a process, not as static, and as in
relation, not in isolation, right? So the thing (seemingly-in-itself) is
developing, appearing, as for-others, that's to say in relation to the
activities of other things and people? For example, the economic crisis is a
real phenomenon, but one which was created, brought into existence, through
and in the material actions of real people and institutions. Alan Greenspan
said in Congress yesterday that no-one yet truly understands the crisis,
that no-one knew enough to predict it. Leaving aside the prediction of
open-ended social processes, this still suggests that we could make progress
in our knowledge of this current object...
Or (another example) the objects that scientists deal with and try to know
and understand come into existence in their practical activities, in a
scientific paradigm, understood as a matrix of practices for the conduct of
research and the education of researchers (rather than knowledge in the
head, which is a common misunderstanding of Kuhn's position). Again, the
object is really for-others, but seems to be in-itself. (I could rant about
supercolliders *creating* the so-called 'elementary particles' which it is
claimed they merely *discover*, but I'll resist the temptation.)
How am I doing, dialectically speaking?
Martin
On 10/23/08 7:28 PM, "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
> "conceptual thinking can become adequate to the
> thing-in-itself": I don't think you can really put it like
> that. You are yourself reifying the "thing-in-itself" in
> this expression. For Hegel "thing-in-itself" and "concept"
> are both moments of the development of the idea. And
> actually he would put the concept higher (more real) than
> the thing-in-itself.
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Fri Oct 24 11:22:54 2008
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Fri Sep 18 2009 - 07:30:00 PDT