Re: [xmca] Re: Kant and the Strange Situation

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

I normally try to steer clear of the philosophical debates on xmca, out of sheer ignorance. But the name Spinoza (on eric's lips) is a siren song to me, so I'm going to take the plunge here. 
 
There are a couple things I like to keep in mind about thought and extension just being two sides of the same substance. They seem, in a weird way, related, at least to my semi-mystical brain (I think of myself as being artistic, but my wife says I'm just sloppy).
 
a) God is not "God". Deus sive natura, that is, "God, in other words, nature". They are just two names for exactly the same thing, not two different orders of infinity. HOWEVER...
 
b) There are indeed different orders of infinity and some of them are bigger than others. If, for example, you take the number of whole numbers and you place it in one-to-one correspondance with the number of odd numbers (or even numbers), you will find that at any one point the former is twice the latter. But both are infinite. Hegel makes this point to in the Logic, Section 94 of the Doctrine of Being, where he criticizes "the infinity of reflection". HOWEVER...
 
c) Just as God's identity with nature is the parsimonious position to take, monism should be the default position until we know otherwise. That's the whole point of that wonderful bit of Spinoza that LSV uses at the beginning of Psychology of Art:
 
"No one has hitherto laid down the limits of the powers of the body. ut it will be urged it is impossible that solely from the laws of nature considered as extended substance we should be able to deduce the causes of buildings, pictures, and things of that kind which are produced only by human art; nor would the human body, unless it were determined and led by the mind, be capable of building a single temple. However, I have just pointed out that the objectors cannot fix the limits of the body's power, or say what can be concluded form a consideration of its sole nature." (Ethics, 3.2).
 
Andy, in your wonderful 1997 article on Vygotsky and the Dialectical Method, you write, in the context of Chapter Five of Thinking and Speech:
 
"No doubt there is room for comparison, but one cannot help but admit that the stages of verbal thought just enumerated are quite different from the Divisions of Hegelʼs Logic - Being (Quality, Quantity, Measure), Essence (Existence, Appearance, Actuality), Notion (Subjective Notion, Object, Idea)."
 
Hegel's logic. What do you make of this?
 
Being
a)      Quality, that is, color and shape. In this case, green, orange, white, yellow and triangle, circle, half circle, hexagon, trapezoid.
b)      Quantity, that is, number and group. In this case, four groups of five or four blocks
c)      Measure, that is, height and diameter. In this case, tall or short, big or small.
 
Essence
a)      Ground, that is, the contrast between a figure and a background. In this case, the contrast between the blocks and the board, and the contrast between one block and other blocks.
b)      Appearance, that is, the contrast between various features in a single block. In this case, the contast between color and shape, or shape and height, or height and diameter.
c)      Actuality, that is, the contrast between one block and another. In this case, one block red and the other is green. One block is round and the other is triangular.
 
Concept 
a)      Subject, that is, the 'I', the ego, the being, in this case the child, 
b)      Object, that is, the 'it', the alter, the thing, in this case, the block
c)      Idea, that is, the idea that an 'it' is a kind of 'I', the idea of a being in the thing, in this case, itʼs the idea that there is a human idea, an idea that exists first for others and then for me, in the measurable qualities of various quantities of block (size and diameter)

 
We're still busy translating Chapter Five into Korean, and it occurs to us that the whole reason he's trying to shoehorn his data into these categories is that the experiment is based entirely on Hegel's logic. 
 
It's an attempt to show empirically what the Philosophical Notebooks show theoretically, that is, the logic works perfectly well if we turn it upside down and assume that (for example) word meanings (znachenie) are a kind of ideal residue from BILLIONS of practical, material, uses of language (smysl). 
 
It seems to me that Concept c) is precisely how Vygotsky provides for monism, no? If the idea is an "I" in the "it", then "it" and "I" can't be incommeasurable. I mean, why use two universes when you can fit everything you need into one? 

 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 
 


      
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