Respectfully Martin: I still consider myself to be a student of his
writing and by no means consider my understanding to have achieved the
level of explanatory summaries. Perhaps it would be fair to say that he
sides with neither of you as the premise of existance is founded completely
in God. If one can then move into the infinity of God and understand that
besides infinity there are increments to infinity then one can start to
grasp Spinoza's philosophy. For instance read the following from
Proposition 15: "
Extended substance, in so far as it is substance, consists, as they think, in parts, wherefore they
deny that it can be infinite, or, consequently, that it can appertain to God. This they illustrate
with many examples, of which I will take one or two. If extended substance, they say, is infinite,
let it be conceived to be divided into two parts each part will then be either finite or infinite.
If the former, then infinite substance is composed of two finite parts, which is absurd. If the
latter, then one infinite will be twice as large as another infinite, which is also absurd.
Further, if an infinite line be measured out in foot lengths, it will consist of an infinite
number of such parts; it would equally consist of an infinite number of parts, if each part
measured only an inch: therefore, one infinity would be twelve times as great as the other.
Lastly, if from a single point there be conceived to be drawn two diverging lines which at
(Embedded image moved to file: pic21538.gif)first are at a definite distance apart, but are
produced to infinity, it is certain that the distance between the two lines will be continually
increased, until at length it changes from definite to indefinable. As these absurdities follow, it
is said, from considering quantity as infinite, the conclusion is drawn, that extended substance
must necessarily be finite, and, consequently, cannot appertain to the nature of God. "
So there is the infinite that is separate from finite. Inifinite being able to be grasped by the
substance of human thought but never attainable. Much in tune to the dialectic yet separate and
not defined by Ilenkov's dialectic.
If I am steering off course I would appreciate a navigator. Sasha, I believe you have leaked your
mastery of Spinoza on this forum before, if it is not you I am thinking of please forgive me.
eric
Martin Packer
<packer@duq.edu> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent by: cc:
xmca-bounces@web Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: Kant and the Strange Situation
er.ucsd.edu
01/27/2009 11:01
AM
Please respond
to "eXtended
Mind, Culture,
Activity"
Eric,
Can you offer us a summary of Spinoza's position? And does he end up on my
side, or Andy's? ;)
Martin
On 1/27/09 10:11 AM, "ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org" <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org> wrote:
>
> Hello all:
>
> Having been away from a computer for a matter of days it appears I have
> missed a spirited debate : ( What strikes as most remarkable is that
much
> of what has been debated and discussed is addressed in Spinoza's
"Ethics".
> Right down to the example of two mirrors placed at 90 degrees may be
> theoretical but in practice quite difficult. My favorite example from
> Spinoza is that both a triangle and two right angles contain 180 degrees
> but that does not make them equal.
>
> eric
>
>
>
> "David H
> Kirshner" To: "eXtended Mind,
> Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> <dkirsh@lsu.edu> cc:
> Sent by: Subject: RE: [xmca] Re:
Kant
> and the Strange Situation
> xmca-bounces@web
> er.ucsd.edu
>
>
> 01/25/2009 05:35
> AM
> Please respond
> to "eXtended
> Mind, Culture,
> Activity"
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> How do you read this as a statement of a purely technical limitation?
>
> Because the project of gaining an exact picture is presented as
> conceivable, just impossible in practice.
>
> David
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
> On Behalf Of Martin Packer
> Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2009 6:09 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: Kant and the Strange Situation
>
> David,
>
> Marx wrote that the proposal that humans can obtain an exact picture of
> our
> social system (let alone the natural universe) is "an absurd idea, pure
> nonsense." How do you read this as a statement of a purely technical
> limitation?
>
> Martin
>
>
> On 1/24/09 6:59 AM, "David H Kirshner" <dkirsh@lsu.edu> wrote:
>
>> One could use these quotes to contrast Ilyenkov as a structuralist and
>> Marx as having poststructural tendencies. But Marx's objection to an
>> exact picture of the world is a technical one regarding the
>> impossibility of marshalling all of the requisite data as history
>> continues to unfold. This is quite different from a poststructural
>> critique which regards the presumed fixed point of view from which to
>> view the data as fictitious.
>> David
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
>> On Behalf Of Martin Packer
>> Sent: Friday, January 23, 2009 8:14 PM
>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: Kant and the Strange Situation
>>
>> Andy, thanks for adding to the height of my reading pile! :)
>>
>> Until I complete the assignment (at least partly) I will merely
>> juxtapose
>> here two quotations whose contrast gives me pause for thought. The
> first
>> from the first page of the book by Ilyenkov you've provided:
>>
>> "And only materialist dialectics (dialectical materialism), only the
>> organic
>> unity of dialectics with materialism arms the cognition of man with
> the
>> means and ability to construct an objectively-true image of the
>> surrounding
>> world, the means and ability to reconstruct this world in accordance
>> with
>> the objective tendencies and lawful nature of its own development."
>>
>> The second from Carlos Marx himself:
>>
>> "The formulation on [in? MP] thought of an exact picture of the
>> world-system
>> in which we live is impossible for us, and will always remain
>> impossible. If
>> at any time in the evolution of mankind such a final, conclusive
> system
>> of
>> the interconnections within the world... were brought to completion,
>> this
>> would mean that human knowledge had reached its limit, and, from the
>> moment
>> when society had been brought into accord with that system, further
>> historical evolution would be cut short-which would be an absurd idea,
>> pure
>> nonsense" (A Handbook of Marxism, 1935, p. 234)
>>
>> Martin
>>
>>
>> On 1/23/09 5:56 PM, "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Martin, I have converted to PDF Ilyenkov's book defending
>>> Lenin's "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism":
>>>
>>> http://marx.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/positivism.pdf
>>>
>>> I think you can agree that if such a renowned Hegel
>>> interpreter as Ilyenkov can defend "reflection" and Lenin's
>>> book, then there has to be something in it. The above is
>>> much shorter and easier to read than Lenin's book, BTW.
>>>
>>> Sidney Hook is far from alone in the sentiments he
>>> expresses. But you have to take Lenin and Engels and the
>>> Russian CHAT people *as a whole* and this criticism (which I
>>> sympathise with) of the notion of "reflection" as "passive"
>>> is, as you have remarked yourself, constantly contradicted
>>> by the "change the world" notes constantly and discordantly
>>> accompanying every mention of "reflection."
>>>
>>> This is the point: humans change the world, but only
>>> according to its own nature. The aeroplane actually obeys
>>> the laws of nature as it flies across the sky. Hegel has a
>>> great bit on this:
>>>
>>> "So also when someone starts building a house, his decision
>>> to do so is freely made. But all the elements must help. And
>>> yet the house is being built to protect man against the
>>> elements. Hence the elements are here used against
>>> themselves. But the general law of nature is not disturbed
>>> thereby. The building of a house is, in the first instance,
>>> a subjective aim and design. On the other hand we have, as
>>> means, the several substances required for the work - iron,
>>> wood, stones. The elements are used in preparing this
>>> material: fire to melt the iron, wind to blow the fire,
>>> water to set wheels in motion in order to cut the wood, etc.
>>> The result is that the wind, which has helped to build the
>>> house, is shut out by the house; so also are the violence of
>>> rains and floods and the destructive powers of fire, so far
>>> as the house is made fire-proof. The stones and beams obey
>>> the law of gravity and press downwards so that the high
>>> walls are held up. Thus the elements are made use of in
>>> accordance with their nature and cooperate for a product by
>>> which they become constrained. In a similar way. the
>>> passions of men satisfy themselves; they develop themselves
>>> and their purposes in accordance with their natural
>>> destination and produce the edifice of human society. Thus
>>> they fortify a structure for law and order against themselves."
>>>
>>> http://marx.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/introduction.htm
>>>
>>> Andy
>>>
>>> Martin Packer wrote:
>>>> At risk of actually killing the horse I'm flogging, I want to return
>> one
>>>> more time to the debate over 'reflection.' Mike asked me why I would
>> be sad
>>>> to hear that Vygotsky was significantly influenced by Lenin. I've
>> been
>>>> reading some of the work in the 1920s and 30s by Sidney Hook, on the
>> topic
>>>> of Marx and Hegel. I'm copying below a fairly long excerpt in which
>> Hook
>>>> takes to task both Engels and Lenin (in 'Materialism and
>> Empirio-Criticism,'
>>>> at least) for viewing ideas as "reflections" of reality - exactly in
>> the
>>>> sense of mirror images or copies. That Lenin did this was the sense
> I
>> have
>>>> got from reading other comments on Lenin, though I haven't read
> Lenin
>>>> myself.
>>>>
>>>> The problem, as Hook points out, is that the reflection view treats
>> thinking
>>>> as a passive process, that solipsism and skepticism cannot be
>> avoided, that
>>>> in this view knowledge cannot be creative, and consequently
> knowledge
>> of the
>>>> world cannot change the world. This, as he notes, is a long way from
>> Marx.
>>>>
>>>> Martin
>>>>
>>>> The excerpt is from:
>>>> Hook, S. (1928). The Philosophy of Dialectical Materialism. II. The
>> Journal
>>>> of Philosophy, 25(6), 141-155.
>>>> [ http://www.jstor.org/stable/2014691 ]
>>>>
>>>> "He [Engels] presents the "dialectic" as the method which
>>>> corrects the limited and ossified character of classificatory
>> thinking
>>>> and claims that it enables one to avoid the predicament of English
>>>> empiricism which is peculiarly addicted to this way of thinking.
>>>> But Engels failed to understand the real weakness of English
>>>> empiricism. Otherwise he would have realized that his uncritical
>>>> reference to ideas as reflections, pictures, or images (Abbilder,
>>>> Spiegelbilder) of things made him fall into an epistemological trap
>>>> whose mazes lead into the cul-de-sacs of solipsism and nominalism-
>>>> the very positions he was anxious to avoid. Since sensations,
> accord-
>>>> ing to Engels, gave immediate knowledge, the organizing activity of
>>>> thought becomes purely ancillary to classifying and relating sensa-
>>>> tions. Practice and experiment, which he later says must serve as
>>>> the criteria of truth, are introduced by a double inconsistency. For
>>>> if our sensations are copies, we can never know anything of the
>>>> originals or even know that there are any, while if sensations give
>>>> immediate knowledge there is no sense in trying to check up upon
>>>> them by experiments which only give other sensations, just as im-
>>>> mediate. The disastrous consequences of the belief in the cognitive
>>>> character of sensations comes to light in Lenin's fanatical
>> insistence
>>>> upon accepting every word of Engels literally. According to Lenin,
>>>> sensation is "a copy, photograph, and reflection of a reality
>> existing
>>>> independently of it." He takes Plekhanov to task for regarding
>>>> sensations as "signs" or "symbols" of what things are, instead of
>>>> adhering to the crude formula, "(sensations) are copies, photo-
>>>> graphs, images, mirror-reflections of things" (p. 195). He adds
>>>> further on, "the idea that knowledge can 'create' forms and change
>>>> the primeval chaos into order, is an idealist notion. The world is
>>>> a uniform world of matter in motion, and our cognition, being the
>>>> highest product of nature, is in a position only to reflect this
>> law."
>>>> But if knowledge only "reflects" the laws of the world, how can it
>>>> change the world? A mirror or a lake reflects the natural scene,
>>>> but neither knows nor changes it. This is, indeed, a far cry from
>>>> the functional and experimental theory expressed in Marx's gloss
>>>> on Feurbach and strange words from one who believed that by "mass
>>>> action" and the creation of new machines and forms of distribution,
>>>> a better social system will be evolved." (p. 149-150)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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