Comments to selected extracts below.... At 01:43 PM 6/19/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
Ideality like spoken language is not one thing or another, but two things, the objectified notion in consciousness and its material representation by some form of language, united as a more concrete concept, the ideal. The ideal cannot just be a manifestation of consciousness (Dubrovsky's argument) in which case it would be a purely subjective product, at best the internal expression of the individuality of the thinker (whatever that might be). Nor can it be just the symbolic representation since this after all is ultimately just a thing, a material object. It is only when consciousness is given material form by symbolic representation and the material artefact is made significant by its embodiment of conscious reflective thought that the ideal can be said to exist.
Fascinating.
.........In short, ideality is expressed in a cultural artefact through human labour informed by the image of the object of his labour activity. For an idealist such as Hegel who regards human activity as beginning and ending with the ideal, the outcome of human labour is a simple materialization of the ideal.
I can see the Hegelian view that the empirical world is a materialization of Geist, but does Hegel make this specific claim about human labor?
For a Marxist materialist, labour practice involves far more than just the expression of the ideal in material form. Labour activity involves the interaction between men as creatures of nature (you know; arms, legs, hands, eyes and things like that.) and nature and therefore the "intervention" of natural laws and principles that are external to the ideal and are entirely indifferent to the social conventions of mankind. Thus the outcome of labour is a considerably more complex product than the idealists would have us believe it is.
OK, but is Hegel's view really contravene your characterization of labor?
"I would also add here that not only is production a unity of consciousness (ideality) and physical/sensual activity, but so too is the acquisition of labour skills. A person cannot pass the ideal as such to another person, as the pure form of activity. One can observe the activity of a painter or an engineer as long as one likes, striving to catch their mode of action, the form of their activity, but one can thus only copy the external techniques and methods of their work but never the ideal image itself, the active faculty itself. The ideal, as the form of subjective activity, is only masterable through active operation with the object and product of this activity, i.e. through the form of its product, through the objective form of the thing, through its active disobjectification. The ideal image of objective reality therefore also only exists as the form (mode, image) of living activity, coordinated with the form of its object, but not as a thing, not as a materially fixed state or structure." (Ilyenkov Dialectical Logic Chapter 8 paragraph 50)
Fascinating. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
