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

[ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org]

Thank you David for clarifying Spinoza's use of God in his text.  It is
interesting the parralels I see in the Gospel according to Thomas and
Spinoza's philosophy.  Both writings rejected by church officials.  Just a
tangent of a thought.

eric


                                                                                                                            
                      Andy Blunden                                                                                          
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1997 was a long time ago, David. I think I have learnt far
in the 11 years *since* 1997, than I did in the 52 years of
my life before 1997. So while my understanding of Vygotsky
and Hegel has moved a lot, I still find it intriguing that
there is no point of contact between the 10 or so stages of
development of the concept in Vygotsky's schema of ontogeny,
and the 444 stages of development of the concept in Hegel's
Science of Logic, and yet I remain more convinced than ever
of the closeness of their respective views. It only
emphasises how wise Vygotsky was in the 1929 comments about
"Marxist psychology" not being built by grabbing quotes from
"Dialectics of Nature" etc. And also, that ontogeny is not a
replication of either the historical evolution of concepts
or the development of an existing concept in the course of
its acquisition by an individual. But, and this is recent
news for me, Davydov's teaching method *does* follow a path
which quite well mirrors Hegel's approach, and does in many
ways follow the sequence of the categories in the Logic.

Re God, Nature and Spinoza: It was a Revelation for me when
I realised that Spinoza's God was Nature, and completely
reorganised my understanding of what "believing in God"
meant and how almost all atheists completely miss the point.

Andy



David Kellogg wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ +61 3 9380 9435
Skype andy.blunden
Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
http://www.marxists.org/admin/books/index.htm

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