Steve and Ralph,
Thanks for all the help.
Oudeyis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and
thethinkers he inspired" <marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu>
Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2005 21:31
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst
This 6/26 post by Victor seems like a good
stopping place for the moment - I need to put our
discussion about ideality aside for just a little
while to tend to other projects, but I am
certainly interested. I will follow up. Victor
is perfectly correct, I must show what I claim.
BTW, for anyone trying to follow this discussion,
two different essays by Ilyenkov are quoted in
Victor's post, both available on the internet at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/index.htm
The main essay Victor and I have been debating interpretations of is:
The Concept of the Ideal
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm
This essay appeared in the book Problems of
Dialectical Materialism; Progress Publishers,
1977 and was scanned by Andy Blunden. The
numbering both Victor and I have been using
refers to the sequence of 142 paragraphs in that
essay. In Victor's 6/26 post, he quotes from paragraphs 49, 50 and 51.
I have an important side point to bring up about
this essay. In my scrutiny of this on-line
version, the only version I have, I believe there
are some scanning errors and possibly some
original translation errors to contend
with. There is also some reason to wonder if the
original Russian that the translation was based
on may also contain editorial errors. In other
words, this version must be read with caution,
and if something does not make sense, it may not
be Ilyenkov's original writing. I bring this up
because there are a handful of places in the
essay where publishing errors like these seem to
contribute to confusion over what Ilyenkov was really saying.
In his 6/26 post Victor also quotes Ilyenkov
using paragraph numbers 57, 58, 59,
60. However, these are from a different essay -
chapter 8 in DIALECTICAL LOGIC (1974), Part Two
Problems of the Marxist-Leninist Theory of Dialectics
8: The Materialist Conception of Thought as the Subject Matter of Logic
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay8.htm
The scanned book is Dialectical Logic, Essays on
its History and Theory; Progress Publishers,
1977; English translation 1977 by H. Campbell
Creighton; Transcribed: Andy Blunden; HTML Markup: Andy Blunden.
BTW, these paragraphs (found on pages 285-288)
are from the same essay Victor mentioned on 5/26
and I quoted from on 5/30, and which were
discussed a little on this list. The question of
the ideal is a major topic of this essay and I
agree with Victor that it should be discussed in
conjunction with the Concept of the Ideal essay
when we take this topic up again.
The philosophical work we are doing here is to
try to untangle the ideal and the material,
closely studying Ilyenkov's work on this complex
question in doing so. In the process, it seems
we should also seek to keep untangled which
citation by our philosopher-teacher we are talking about.
:-))
Best,
~ Steve
<end of my post>
_______________________________________________________________
At 07:32 PM 6/26/2005 +0200, Oudeyis (Victor) wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and
thethinkers he inspired" <marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu>
Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2005 12:40
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst
I am responding to a 6/22/2005 post from Victor, which I quote from.
The quote below is a good example of where I think Victor gets Ilyenkov
wrong 180 degrees. In the general section of Ilyenkov's 1977 essay "The
Concept of the Ideal" that Victor quotes from, I believe Ilyenkov is
making just the opposite point that Victor attributes to him.
Victor quotes Ilyenkov:
"Paragraph 53: It is this fact, incidentally, that explains the
persistent survival of such "semantic substitutions"; indeed, when we are
talking about nature, we are obliged to make use of the available
language of natural science, the "language of science" with its
established and generally understood "meanings". It is this,
specifically, which forms the basis of the arguments of logical
positivism, which quite consciously identifies "nature" with the
"language" in which people talk and write about nature.
Paragraph 54: It will be appreciated that the main difficulty and,
therefore, the main problem of philosophy is not to distinguish and
counterpose everything that is "in the consciousness of the individual"
to everything that is outside this individual consciousness (this is
hardly ever difficult to do), but to delimit the world of collectively
acknowledged notions, that is, the whole socially organised world of
intellectual culture with all its stable and materially established
universal patterns, and the real world as it exists outside and apart
from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of "experience".
(Ilyenkov The Concept of the Ideal 1977)
Victor comments:
The delimitation of what Ilyenkov calls the "whole socially organised
world of intellectual culture" and the "real world as it exists outside
and apart from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of
"experience." can only be based on the distinction between the socially
learned and confirmed concepts or ideas of the tribe and the concepts
formulated by reflecting on practical material activity, i.e. labour
activity: the operations carried out, the physical and material response
of the instruments and material of production to these activities and
finally the effectivity of the operations relative to their purposes.
Victor says the delimitation that Ilyenkov makes (I am adding ...'s to
make Victor's complex sentence a little more readable) "can only be based
on the distinction" .... "between the socially learned and confirmed
concepts or ideas of the tribe" ... and ... "the concepts formulated by
reflecting on practical material activity, i.e. labour activity: the
operations carried out, the physical and material response of the
instruments and material of production to these activities and finally the
effectivity of the operations relative to their purposes."
But this is decidedly *not* the distinction Ilyenkov makes.
The essential discussion we are having here is over this question: where,
precisely, is the boundary between ideality and materiality?
Victor draws the boundary between socially learned concepts, on one hand,
and conceptualizing practical activity/carrying out practical activity/the
consequences of practical activity - on the other.
Ilyenkov draws a very different distinction. Ilyenkov is investigating
the distinction - and he refers to this as the "main problem of
philosophy" - between the "whole socially organised world of intellectual
culture" and "the real world as it exists outside and apart from" this.
I believe I can draw on Ilyenkov, and: a) show where Ilyenkov makes his
distinction between the ideal and the real and b) demonstrate that Victor
is committing the very idealist error that Ilyenkov criticizes Hegel and
Bogdanov for making. In the essay "The Concept of the Ideal," my
annotations offer the subtitles "Hegel's Concept of the Ideal" to
paragraphs 45-49, "The Secret Twist of Idealism" to paragraphs 50-53, and
"The Distinction Between the Ideal and the Real" to paragraphs 54-57.
Interestingly, my reading of Victor's writings on the question of the
ideal, such as in the quote above, is that his concept of the ideal is
much closer to Hegel's than Ilyenkov's or Marx's, he is actually
performing the same kind of "secret twist of idealism" that Ilyenkov
attributes to Hegel and others, and Victor's distinction or boundary
between the ideal and the real is not consistent with Ilyenkov's.
It's not enough simply to say that Victor is making the same error as Hegel
and Bogdanov. You have to show it to be so.
What does Ilyenkov actually say about Hegel and Bogdanov?
49. In other words, Hegel includes in the concept of the "ideal"
everything that another representative of idealism in philosophy
(admittedly he never acknowledged himself to be an "idealist")A. A.
Bogdanov - a century later designated as "socially organised experience"
with its stable, historically crystallised patterns, standards,
stereotypes, and "algorithms". The feature which both Hegel and Bogdanov
have in common (as "idealists") is the notion that this world of "socially
organised experience" is for the individual the sole ,,object" which he
"assimilates" and "cognises", the sole object with which he has any
dealings. Ilyenkov 1977 Concept of the Ideal.
So how does Ilyenkov describe the real in contrast to the ideal? In truth
he does not describe the real as such in The Concept of the Ideal, but in
another work, Dialectical Logic (1974):
57 While Hegel's recording of these facts led him to idealism, Marx
and Engels, having considered the real (objective) prototype of logical
definitions and laws in the concrete, universal forms and laws of social
man's objective activity, cut off any possibility of subjectivist
interpretation of the activity itself. Man does not act on nature from
outside, but 'confronts nature as one of her own forces' and his objective
activity is therefore linked at every stage with, and mediated by,
objective natural laws. Man 'makes use of the mechanical, physical, and
chemical properties of things as means of exerting power over other things,
and in order to make these other things subservient to his aims .... Thus
nature becomes an instrument of his activities, an instrument with which he
supplements his own bodily organs, adding a cubit and more to his stature,
scripture notwithstanding'. It is just in that that the secret of the
universality of human activity lies, which idealism passes off as the
consequence of reason operating in man: 'The universality of man appears in
practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic
body - both inasmuch a nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the
material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is
man's inorganic body - nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself the
human body.'
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The ideal refers to the collective intellectual activity of men; social
thought, its formation, its operation and its transmission.
Reality on the other hand is not a function of ideality, consciousness or
of will. It precedes all these as it does humanity itself. In labour
activity when man "confronts nature as one of her own forces' and his
objective activity is therefore linked at every stage with, and mediated
by, objective natural laws." The distinction between ideality and reality
emerges in labour activity, in the absolute participation of man, with all
his faculties (not only his thoughts but his physical and material body and
the physical and material artifactual extensions of his body) in the
production and reproduction of the means for his existence. Objective,
natural laws are indifferent to the history and character of the
intellectual activities and constructions of human kind for they represent
conditions (even of mankind) that precede all human ideation. They are
universal to all human activity in nature and to the extent that men must
cope with the same natural conditions to realize the same goals, they must
conform to the same laws and principles relevant to the interaction.
THAT IS THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE IDEAL AND THE REAL!
58. The laws of human activity are therefore also, above all, laws of
the natural material from which 'man's inorganic body', the objective
(material) body of civilisation, is built, i.e. laws of the movement and
change of the objects of nature, transformed into the organs of man, into
moments of the process of production of society's material life.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Now then, the laws of human activity are functions of mans total or
absolute participation in productive process and are the laws and
principles of "the natural material from which'man's inorganic body', the
objective (material) body of civilisation, is built." These laws can and
are conceptualised by men, but they are also assimilated by human faculties
that are remote from his intellectual activities.
59 In labour (production) man makes one object of nature act on
another object of the same nature in accordance with their own properties
and laws of existence . Marx and Engels showed that the logical forms of
man's action were the consequences (reflection) of real laws of human
actions on objects, i.e. of practice in all its scope and development, laws
that are independent of any thinking. Practice understood
materialistically, appeared as a process in whose movement each object
involved in it functioned (behaved) in accordance with its own laws,
bringing its own form and measure to light in the changes taking place in
it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The logical forms of reason are most explicitly described by way of
conceptualization, but their roots lie at the very foundation of life
activity. Any natural form that acts consciously, unconsciously or a
consciously to realize some object exhibits rational activity. Rationality
then has far deeper origins in nature than thought. The stages of
rationality (understood materially of course), mapped and described by
Hegel's categories of thought, model the ascent of the abstract rationality
of life as a universal to the very concrete rationality of men.
60 Thus mankind's practice is a fully concrete (particular) process, and
at the same time a universal one. It includes all other forms and types of
the movement of matter as its abstract moments, and takes place in
conformity with their laws. The general laws governing man's changing of
nature therefore transpire to be also general laws of the change of nature
itself, revealed by man's activity, and not by orders foreign to it,
dictated from outside. The universal laws of man's changing of nature are
also universal laws of nature only in accordance with which can man
successfully alter it. Once realised they also appear as laws of reason, as
logical laws. Their 'specificity' consists precisely in their in their
universality, i.e. in the fact that they are not only laws of subjectivity
(as laws of the physiology of higher nervous activity or of language), and
not only of objective reality (as laws of physics or chemistry), but also
laws governing. the movement both of objective reality and of subjective
human life activity. (That does not mean at all, of course, that thought
does not in general possess any 'specific features' worthy of study. As a
special process possessing features specifically distinguishing it from the
movement of objective reality, i.e. as a psycho-physiological faculty of
the human individual, thought has, of course, to be subjected to very
detailed study in psychology and the physiology of the higher nervous
system, but not in logic). In subjective consciousness these laws appear as
'plenipotentiaries' of the rights of the object, as its universal, ideal
image: 'The laws of logic are the reflections of the objective in the
subjective consciousness of man.'
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Practice, human practice at least, is the unity of ideation and reality,
of particularity and universality. Like ideality it can only be understood
as a concept joining contradictions. On the one it is a fully concrete
process of absolute involvement of the labourer in productive activity, on
the other hand it is informed by concepts that impart to it the social aims
and means, at varying degrees of abstraction, that give it direction and
some measure of effectiveness. The material outcomes of practical activity
are neither ideal nor real, but both containing the imprint of ideality but
in material forms whose forms and substance are completely independent of
the idealities that guided their production.
And now for the "Idealist twist" Here are the two paragraphs referred to by
Steve.
50 But the world existing before, outside and independently
of the consciousness and will in general (i.e., not only of the
consciousness and will of the individual but also of the social
consciousness and the socially organised "will"), the world as such, is
taken into account by this conception only insofar as it finds expression
in universal forms of consciousness and will, insofar as it is already
"idealised", already assimilated in "experience", already presented in the
patterns and forms of this "experience", already included therein.
51 By this twist of thought, which characterises idealism
in general (whether it is Platonic, Berkeleian, Hegelian or that of
Popper), the real material world, existing before, outside and quite
independently of "experience" and before being expressed in the forms of
this "experience" (including language), is totally removed from the field
of vision, and what begins to figure under the designation of the "real
world" is an already "idealised" world, a world already assimilated by
people, a world already shaped by their activity, the world as people know
it, as it is presented in the existing forms of their culture. A world
already expressed (presented) in the forms of the existing human
experience. And this world is declared to be the only world about which
anything at all can be said.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve's interpretation of the offending paragraph (included below for
comparison) does contain an error, but it's not the error of "the Idealist
twist."
What I do here is describe two kinds of ideation. Ethical Ideal and
Practical Scientific, the former, representing the idealisms and fetishisms
of unreflective social conformism, the latter, the practical thinking of
creative labour. If anything, I argue that the idealist conception is
mystical illusionism while the real world is only conceptualised in
reflection on practical activity, just the reverse of the "Idealist twist
(it has more in common with Korsch's somewhat misplaced critique of
Lenin)."
In truth, I don't much like this dichotomy. For one thing it suggests two
kinds of ideals which is not justified by distinctions in the origins,
development and form of ideality whatever its contents. Second it tends to
obfuscate the dialectics of practice, i.e. some ideality unites with the
real in practice while other idealities do not. Third, it tends to treat
the ideal and the real as material equivalents, something they surely are
not. The ideal is an emergent property from out of the real, and not a
metaphysical variant of Ahura Mazda opposing Angra Mainyu or vice versa as
you so wish.
Despite the necessity of avoiding the dichotomy described above (whether
with an idealist or materialist twist), it's important from the research
point of view to realize that idealism and fetishism exerts a powerful
presence in human activity, not as a philosophy, but as a way of regarding
the world. Considering that most of the people most of the time and some
of the people all of the time generally concieve of their activity in
ethical or cultural terms, the integration of idealism and fetishism into
theory as common and even prevalent intellectual practice is important to a
scientific understanding of the laws of human history.
None of my opinions or claims, of course, negate Victor's good advice and
inspiration to me to study and make copious notes about the other books
Ilyenkov has in English, as well as study relevant writings by Marx,
Lenin, and Hegel. Nor do my philosophically sharp criticisms of what I
perceive as erroneous interpretations by Victor of Ilyenkov's theory of
the ideal take away from the respect and admiration I have for Victor's
many intellectual accomplishments, which I have been privileged to learn
much from in various internet venues. In all worthwhile discussions,
there are points where it is best to step back and just agree to disagree.
This discussion is certainly one that can be continued at later dates.
None of Ilyenkov's writings, nor the ideal, nor any of our concepts of it
are likely to go away any time soon.
In solidarity,
- Steve
Right on and thanks,
Oudeyis
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