LRB on AS

[Mark Jones]

What motivated Cassirer was presumably not any interest in the psychology
of perception but the 'problem of knowledge' itself and the inherent
idealism of Kant's transcendental dualism. However far-reahcing his
results, he never solved the question of the origin of the structure of
knowing: Kant's question still remains, ie, the ned tgoe xplain the origin
of immanent cognitive categories. How does the brain acquire (through
evolution) the abstract categories of Euclianian space-time? Since
Cassirer, who was the best neokantian, failed to answer the question
despite a lifetime spent trying, one is forced to conclude that Hegel's
transformation of the Kantian dialectic was a historical and theoretical
necessity. The thread that runs from Kant to Hegel and then Marx is a
clear one.

Mark

Chuck Grimes wrote:


> Now people are critiquing Althusser's metaphors.
>
> Does anyone have an opinion on Levi-Strauss'
> claim to have isomorphism from Group Theory
> algebra in his "structures" ? I guess Althusser
> was a structuralist too .
>
> Charles Brown
> ------------------------
>
> Well, well.
>
> What do you? No one, ever, in my hearing or reading has ever asked
> that question, and I've been waiting twenty years! Gawd damn.
>
> Sure, I've got an opinion. The whole foundation of structuralism as
> L-S and Piaget put it together was based on ideas they drew from their
> understanding of Group Theory. Guess where they got the idea? No one
> will know. Any votes?
>
> They got it from Ernst Cassirer, in his last collection of essays
> written in about 1944-5 just before he died. The essay is called,
> "Reflections on the Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception",
> found in _Symbol, Myth, and Culture, Essays and Lectures, 1935-1945_,
> Yerene, DP ed. Yale Uni Press, 1979. (The essay was published about
> 1950 and appeared in other collections. This just happens to be the
> one I have)
>
> Cassirer's point was that there seemed to be something innate about
> perception, particularly the basic cluster that comprises the
> kinesethic perception of the body that shares a primary affinity with
> some spatial representations of abstract finite groups, in particular
> the Euclidean Group or E(8). The eight designates the eight possible
> motions of the square on a plane. For three dimensions, that becomes a
> subgroup of what's called the full symmetric group or S(24). These are
> the twenty-four motions or mappings of a basic tetrahedron--a
> symmetrical four cornered pyramid, rotated and reflected about a fixed
> center. In order to find these and make a multiplication table, you
> label the four vertices and imagine them rotating from vertex to
> vertex about axis through each vertex and then through the center of
> each face. The most important aspect is not the motions themselves, by
> the operations or transformations or 'rules' that turn one motion into
> another. All of this mathematical hardware, just reduces down to how
> the body can move and map space--say as in dancing.
>
> Cassirer goes on to say that the invariants, those things that remain
> unchanged by such motions become in some sense critical to both our
> perception and knowledge of space. Though extending or depending on
> this idea of invariants it is possible for us to make sense out of the
> world of perception. This abstraction from perception forms a primary
> foundation for knowledge, and in essence solves the epistemological
> (Kant) riddle of the manner in which we develop knowledge from
> perception.
>
> IMO, this is a pretty neat little theory, especially for 1945. What
> L-S and Piaget did with this interesting and undeveloped idea is
> another matter. If anyone is interested, we could go on.
>
> Chuck Grimes

--
Mark Jones
http://www.geocities.com/~comparty