As we all know, there are several very tricky and slippery aspects to this discussion, which is now probably at least 6,000 years old, or maybe even as old as oral language. Part of what makes CHAT so interesting to me is how it takes certain relatively unique and exciting approaches to psychology and subjectivity on these kinds of issues.
The questions before us could be identified as three: 1) How to differentiate materiality and ideality; while figuring out2) how to grasp what the two are both simultaneously part of; while also figuring out
3) how to take into account ALL of reality.I think David is trying to deal with all three of these questions in his discussion of reality and materiality, which I think is heading in just the right direction.
Ilyenkov explained that Descartes solved questions 1) and 2) by suggesting that what we are now calling ideality and materiality are two disconnected forms of reality. In Descartes' terms, thought and extension do not interact, except through God. It is through God that humans are able to think and act on the world. But this dualist solution is untenable for modern natural science, and has been largely abandoned. We do still see it, often in disguised forms in the modern social sciences, in the form of debates over the relationship of the subject and object.
Ilyenkov in another essay explained that Kant answered the Cartesians and solved question 1) by differentiating what is inside people's heads from what is outside. This is a familiar and popular solution today - it is plain, everyday, common sense materialism. The ideal is that which we think in our heads, the material is everything else. In fact, Ilyenkov points out that even everyday idealism agrees on this boundary. But this solution leaves question 2) unsolved. How do we grasp what the ideal and material are both part of?
Hegel came up with a new and brilliant solution to 2). Materiality and ideality, according to Hegel, are simultaneously and integrally components of human activity and history. They **develop**. By posing the concept of development as fundamental, he showed ways of differentiating ideality and materiality. In doing so, he showed ways of answering how to **differentiate** ideality and materiality in question 1) while also grasping their **unity** in question 2).
But Ilyenkov explains, like all idealists, Hegel could not see or explain a reality beyond the ideal, beyond the collectively created consciousness (representations, reflections, etc.) of humanity. Ilyenkov called this limitation the "secret twist of idealism." Unlike Descartes, Kant, Plato, and most of the great idealist philosophers before him, Hegel could see ideality and materiality **developmentally**. He could see ideality in a **historical** way. But ultimately, like all idealists, at the level of theory he could not clearly differentiate materiality from ideality. He could only explain reality in the limited bourgeois, Eurocentric terms of human history as he understood it, and human history in the mystical terms of the Absolute Idea. Hegel through his philosophical system could not articulate the nature of materiality itself. Hegel could only see the world in terms of standing on the human head.
Marx and Engels, owing many of their insights to Feuerbach, French and English materialists, the many accomplishments of bourgeois science, and of course, to Hegel, offered an entirely new solution to all three questions. 1) Yes, as the materialists argued, materiality and ideality are differentiable; 2) and, yes, as Hegel began to discover, ideality is an historical product; and also, in a new contribution to social theory, 3) ideality is a specialized form of material reality, which is the essence of all reality (being), including consciousness. They also added to social theory still another new idea, still being debated by many Marxists, that 4) nature, like society and thought, is itself dialectical and developmental.
Marx and Engels thereby helped transform the traditional problems of philosophy into modern problems of science, history and politics. They contributed to shifting the objects of philosophy from abstract topics discussed by the owning classes to the concrete challenges of working people becoming the subjects of history. They began a monumental shift in the axis of human thought from owning to acting, from capital to labor.
These, more or less, if you will forgive my injustices to them with my homespun terminology, are the methodological and philosophical bases upon which the Vygotsky school and the cultural-historical tradition were founded, and which help make CHAT unique in the social sciences.
In this viewpoint, ontologically speaking (that is, with regard to the nature of existence), the terms reality and materiality are synonyms. At the same time, epistemologically speaking (that is, with regard to the nature of consciousness) ideality is a complex form (representation, reflection, etc.) of materiality, or reality.
In human historical development and cultural activities, ideality and materiality are opposites because humans - through the means of labor and activity, which are inherently bound with ideality (roughly speaking, forms of meaning-making) - are constantly transforming reality (materiality). According to this perspective, in all human processes, macro and micro, this opposition between ideality and materiality is always in play.
In this outlook, part of the challenge of psychology in general and cultural psychology in particular is to discover and explain the very complex ways and forms by which ideality figures into each and every material action of humans, and the ways materiality figures into each and every subjective (ideality-based) process humans engage in. This requires tons of subtle terms and distinctions from all disciplines (such as perhaps distinguishing signs versus tools, or household utensils versus industrial tools, or signs versus symbols). Taking into account the dialectical relationship of ideality and materiality is only a way to get started.
I believe, as I think did Vygotsky, that this is a solid methodological and philosophical foundation to get us started which can help us explore all the fascinating things we do - including opening packs of peanuts with our teeth, or perhaps training pet crows to sit next to us on airline seats to do it for us.
- Steve On Oct 18, 2010, at 8:19 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
Sure, Jenna.But the way my head works, I think in EXAMPLES. And the first example that springs to mind is almost always a WORD. It drives my poor students crazy.WORD VALUE sense-value signification-value ("I", "it", "and") ("elephant", "kick", "time")You can see that words like "I" and "it" and "he" and "she" and "but" and even "because" depend almost entirely on circumstances for their interpretation. That's not true of words like "elephant" and "kick" which can be put in dictionaries.We tend to think of languages as being made up of signification- values, partly because these are more official. But historically, and also in every day life, sense-values are much more frequent and are historically the source of signification-values.Of course, it's true that we make our individual sense-values with the help of signification-values. For example, we ask "What time is it?" more or less the same way every time we ask, and we can answer in the same way exactly twice a day even though the true answer is, by definition, never the same. Sociogenetically, sense-value produces signification-value, just as microgenetically signification- value produces sense value.We see (more or less) this relationship with use value and exchange value, and that is where the distinction between utensil-artefacts and tool-artefacts really comes into play.ARTEFACTS utensil-artefacts tool-artefacts (chopsticks) (screwdrivers)The former is an implement for personal consumption; it's a "sense- artefact". The latter is a tool for production; it's a "meaning- artefact". So the former is really concerned with use, and the latter with production and exchange.The distinction between signals and symbols is not really mine; it's something Vygotsky uses in his struggle with behaviorism (which involved, if we read "Psychology of Art", both internal strife and external).When the leaves turn red, that is a signal of winter, and it was before humans ever existed. A footprint in the sand is the sign that somebody has been walking on the beach, whether you are a speaker of English or Korean. Signals are older, and much more common, than signs.When you say the word "red" or when you spell the word "foot", that too is a sign. But it is means absolutely nothing unless you are speaking to somebody who knows English. So we say it is a symbol. Symbols seem much more "typical" of signs, but they are in reality merely more official, more formalized, more systematic and less context bound.And that brings me to reality and ideality. But here I am really going to catch it from Andy, because "real" means something quite different to him (in Hegel it includes the idea of rationality, of what it is that gets "realized" when we realize something).But I do feel the need for a superordinate category, and since I am a materialist, that superordinate category is in the final analysis material. That means I need something to counterpose to the ideal, the potential, the past and the future. I could call it the "hic" and "nunc" but I prefer "real" because...well, because it rhymes with "ideal".David Kellogg (correcting midterms at) Seoul National University of EducationPS: Larry--I just read your post, and I have to get back to these midterms. But like you, like Martin, I am working on the problems between Piaget and Vygotsky right now (I'm retranslating and commenting on Piaget's riposte to Chapter Two and Chapter Six of T&S).I think you are ABSOLUTELY right--part of the real difference, the real distinction, the break that cannot be denied between Piaget on the one hand and Vygotsky on the other is that Piaget believes that the sociocultural is really only important in the history of science.For him, everything else is interpersonal, or as you put it, relational. That's the weird, wordless, undialectical way he thinks. But the interpersonal is not the sociocultural, any more than the words that we get still warm from each other's lungs and lips are reducible to the ones we find printed in dictionaries, or the words we still read in Vygotsky's books have faded away with the "crumbly, yellow voice" that Vygotsky supposedly had (according to one of his patients).dk --- On Mon, 10/18/10, Jenna McWilliams <jennamcjenna@gmail.com> wrote: From: Jenna McWilliams <jennamcjenna@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu> Date: Monday, October 18, 2010, 7:30 PMDavid, for those of us trying desperately to cling to this thread, can you add some explanation to help with interpreting those categories?On Oct 18, 2010, at 10:20 PM, David Kellogg wrote:Nothing, Andy. That's why I want to oppose the ideal to the real, and not to the material.ARTEFACT: Tool-artefact Utensil-artefact (mass production) (personal consumption) SIGN Signal-sign Symbol-sign (thing-thing) (meaning-meaning)] MATERIALITY Reality Ideality (percepts) (concepts) David Kellogg Seoul National University of Education --- On Mon, 10/18/10, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote: From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> Subject: Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu> Date: Monday, October 18, 2010, 7:02 PMWhat would be an example of something which is ideal but not also material, David?andy David Kellogg wrote: ...It seems to me that if we follow Steve and Ilyenkov, and we see problem after problem as a matter of establishing the interaction of "ideal" and "material", we will need some kind of super- category for the indivisible whole which both ideal and material make up. Otherwise we really do fall into the worst kind of Cartesian dualism. ...__________________________________________ _____ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca __________________________________________ _____ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca__________________________________________ _____ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca __________________________________________ _____ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
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