----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Winslow" <egwinslow at home.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2001 3:49 PM Subject: Im Anfang war die Tat
> "Action" requires a subject. "Materialism" of the sort dominant in
> neuroscience has no logical space for a subject and hence no logical
space
> for "action".
===========
Well thoughtful neuroscientists do go after agency but not culturally
embedded agency per se. They'd be overwhelmed with the complexity of
the issues and at this stage of the game are happy to leave it to
philosophers and psychologists. [Psychology is bastardized ontology"
was my dean's favorite saying..]
>
> Action as a fundamental ontological category - Im Anfang war die
Tat - is
> the basis for action as a fundamental epistemological category, e.g.
Marx's
> idea of "praxis". Whitehead's process ontology gives it the same
> ontological and epistemological status.
============
Agency is too and, in all probability, information. Descartes was into
what would the world look like to God if God "saw" only atoms
[physico-geometrical omniscience]. It was up to Leibniz to ask what
would it be like *to be* an atom [monad]. Whitehead was a demigod, imo
and if people get the chance, read and argue with "Process and
Reality"-with it's "cell theory of actuality." Computer lovers,
biology lovers and cellular automatists take note at how prescient the
guy was..........
>
> "The conception of knowledge as passive contemplation is too
inadequate to
> meet the facts. Nature is ever originating its own development, and
the
> sense of action is the direct knowledge of the percipient event as
having
> its very being in the formation of its natural relations. Knowledge
issues
> from this reciprocal insistence between this event and the rest of
nature,
> namely relations are perceived in the making and because of the
making. For
> this reason perception is always at the utmost point of creation.
We cannot
> put ourselves back to the Crusades and know their events while they
were
> happening. We essentially perceive our relations with nature
because they
> are in the making. The sense of action is that essential factor in
natural
> knowledge which exhibits it as a self-knowledge enjoyed by an
element of
> nature respecting its active relations with the whole of nature in
its
> various aspects. Natural knowledge is merely the other side of
action. The
> forward moving time exhibits this characteristic of experience, that
it is
> essentially action. This passage of nature - or, in other words,
its
> creative advance - is its fundamental characteristic; the
traditional
> concept is an attempt to catch nature without its passage."
(Whitehead, An
> Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, p. 14)
>
> In the Preface to Process and Reality he describes this ontology as
"a
> transformation of some main doctrines of Absolute Idealism onto a
realistic
> basis." (Corrected Ed. p. xiii)
>
> Marx conceives of his own project in pretty much the same way. It
is a
> correction, in the light of "idealism", of the failure of "all
hitherto
> existing materialism" to allow for a coherent conception of a
"subject" and
> hence for human being as "sensuous human activity, practice".
>
> "The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of
Feuerbach
> included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived
only in the
> form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human
activity,
> practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to
materialism, the
> active side was developed abstractly by idealism - which, of course,
does
> not know real, sensuous activity as such."
>
> Ted
==============
"The experience of peace is largely beyond the control of purpose. It comes as a gift. The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anaesthesia...Peace is self control at its widest, - at the width where the 'self' has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality...At the heart of the nature of things there are always the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy. The Adventure of the Universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic Beauty." [Adventures of Ideas]
Ian