Commentary on
Karl Jaspers Forum, Target Article 22, 2 November 1999
MENTAL ACTIVITY AND CONSCIOUSNES...
By Timo Jarvilehto
Responce 04
by T. Jarvilehto
CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES AND MARXISM
by Paul Jones
15 May 2000
I definitely do not consider the Organism-Environment Theory
as a Marxist one the word has long since become abusive in
the literature, and I would not do T.Jarvilehto an ill turn
by calling him a Marxist. I would not say I am a Marxist neither,
since my views differ from orthodox Marxism in many respects.
However, I consider Marxism as a huge source of powerful ideas
that, along with what the other thinkers have produced, could
bring the humanity closer to understanding many quite different
things, including consciousness.
Unfortunately, the development of Marxism in the XX century
was significantly hindered by the political circumstances of
the time, when one group of powers denied Marxism in a heap,
while some other countries considered it as a political tool
that did not imply any serious enhancement. As a result,
many ideas brought forth by early Marxist writers have
been left in an under-developed state, and their further
vulgarization has substituted the original Marxist views
with something far from Marxism, and even opposite to it.
Thus, Jarvilehto writes:
"Twenty years ago I regarded the solution of mind-body problem in
dialectical materialism (psyche not identical with, but a function of
the brain) as well-formulated, in contrast to the simple identity
hypothesis."
But it is absolutely alien to dialectical materialism to
suppose that psyche is a function of the brain! Phrases that
seem to support that vulgar view can be extracted from the
context of some works by Marx and Engels, with a strained
interpretation, but this reminds me our student game, when
we "proved" that Marx denied the very idea of communism
compiling fragments selected from the Communist Manifesto!
Marx, Engels, and later Lenin, wrote that human consciousness
is impossible without the brain but they never overestimated
its role; for instance, Engels wrote that the brain developed
along with the development of the hand, and it is the praxis
of material production that induced the changes in the both.
The "functional" definition of consciousness has appeared
on the edge of the XIX and XX centuries within the positivist
line of thought, and it was strongly criticized by V.Lenin,
who qualified such writings "on Marxism" as writings against
Marxism. Lenin wrote: "Thought is an attribute of highly
organized matter" this is an exact formula, which does not
imply that it is matter in the form of the brain that thinks;
on the contrary, the rest of book insists that it is the
social form of motion that can only be considered the carrier
of the ability of thought. Using the philosophical category
"attribute" rather than the terms like "property", "function" etc.
popular in that time was not accidental: it stressed that
the way of "implementing" consciousness in matter is not
important in the issue of the very inevitability of the
formation of consciousness on a certain stage of material
development.
Unfortunately, people were not prepared enough for dialectical
thought in those times and the positivist and mechanistic
trends have taken over with time, so that many textbooks on Marxist
philosophy confined consciousness to the brain, in an entirely
anti-Marxist manner. Nevertheless, there were scientists
and philosophers who felt the incompatibility of the statements
like that with dialectical materialism, and the Marx' theory
of the "non-organic body" of a conscious person has received
significant development in a number of works. Due to political
reasons, these works have never been widely known neither in
the countries of their origin, nor in the rest of the world.
T.Jarvilehto is quite right that the "functional" definition
of consciousness is nothing better than the "identity hypothesis"
of primitive materialism. It is a pity that he had to re-invent
what has been invented 150 years ago, instead of spending that
time and effort on further developing it.
The erroneous projection of the anti-dialectical principle that
consciousness is a function of the brain onto the classical
works by Leontiev and Rubinstein lead T.J. to a distorted view
ascribing them what they hardly ever meant. Thus, it would
be absolutely inconsistent with Leontiev's fundamental statement
that consciousness must be attributed to activity rather than
simple operations, and that the motives of any activity lie
outside the individual, remaining a part of his/her personality.
In neuropsychology, A.Luria, one of Leontiev's collaborators,
clearly demonstrated that conscious acts are only accompanied
by certain cerebral patterns, never being reducible to them;
his works also proved that there is no such thing as a neural
image of the outer world, but rather internal activities
serving to support definite patterns of social behavior.
Likewise, all the seven propositions ascribed by Jarvilehto
to Marxist psychology have nothing to do with it, rather
characterising its opposite, the psychology of metaphysical
materialism. Therefore, opposing those seven propositions,
Jarvilehto struggles against positivism and vulgar materialism,
shoulder to shoulder with dialectical materialism.
There is no need to assess Jarvilehto's particular objections
to the primitive mechanistic approach to consciousness,
since they largely reproduce what has been written in the
Marxist literature long ago. I would only indicate that
T.Jarvilehto has regretfully been captured by the same lack
of dialectical thinking that he is trying to criticize.
His attempt to oppose his "one-system" approach to the
"two-system" approach of metaphysical materialism (which,
I stress it once again, has nothing to do with Marxism) suffers
of the same disease: why should one prefer one-, two-,
three- or infinitely many-system approach instead of applying
the appropriate formalism where needed? Some problems
require dichotic thinking, some other problems may demand
triads or tetrads, while keeping the fundamental principle
of the integrity of the world in the background as a necessary
implication. Dialectical materialism states exactly that:
any formal scheme is applicable for the description of
specific forms of material motion, since these schemes
are nothing but reflection of the world's regularities
in certain social processes that are called consciousness.
As for Jarvilehto's opposition to hierarchical ideas,
I could only explain it by insufficient understanding of
that a hierarchy is not identical to mere hierarchical
structure, and the same hierarchy can unfold itself
into different hierarchical structures in different
context, depending on where the boundary between it and
its environment is placed; the dialectical approach
demands that such boundaries have to objectively appear
from time to time, albeit in a relative rather than
absolute way. While Jarvilehto gets eventually stuck in the
unproductive abstraction of one organism-environment system
without any further development (which would imply evolving
distinctions), dialectical materialism helps to attribute
the diversity of approaches in consciousness studies to the
socio-economic situation of the time and the level of the
development of the humanity as a carrier of reason.
As for the political considerations about violence and
self-violence, I could recall the well-known Marx' phrase
that, digging the grave for the bourgeoisie, the proletariat
digs the grave for itself. This is a trivial dialectical
scheme, and I can add to Jarvilehto's discourse that the same
reasons contributed to preventing dialectical ideas from
ever becoming an official ideology, in reality rather in
public declarations. Yes, violence to another person
(and, in general, any product of human activity, including
future thinking "machines") means violence to one's self;
however this does not imply anything about the admissibility
of violence as such, since, in many cases, violence is the
only path to the world with much less violence, and refusal
from violence in such a situation would be much worse.
If I kill a killer it makes me less a conscious being and
more an animal; however, this would give a chance to become
more conscious to those who have not been killed by that
killer since I have killed him. This is a remarkable aspect
of the universality as the determinative principle of
consciousness: it is universal to the extent of possible
self-restriction and self-sacrifice to the well-being of
the humanity.
|