the origins of cultural historical activity theory talk by andy blunden, april 2010
TRANSCRIPT
The Origins ofCultural Historical
Activity Theory
Talk by Andy Blunden, April 2010
Descartes and Consciousness
Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
“I think, therefore I am!”
?
Mind/matter: Ontological distinction
Subject/Object:Epistemological relation
Descartes
Herder and CultureThe Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment
Johann Gottfried Herder
(1744-1803)
God/Nature is Active
Everyone has their Schwerpunkt !
Herder
Goetheand Romantic Science
Gestalt
(1749-1832)
UrphänomenGoethe
Hegel(1770-1831)
Thought-object / Artefact
Subject-Object
• Way of thinking
• Way of Life
• Constellation of artefacts
The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
Formation of Consciousness
Concept
““I/Me dialecticI/Me dialectic”
Hegel’s Psychology
Hegel’s Idealism
Readings
The full text of this talk can be found at http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/origins-chat.htm
Recommended readings are at:• Ilyenkov, E., (2009) “Dialectical Logic,” The Ideal in
Human Activity, Erythrós Press and• Hegel (2009), “Hegel’s Logic” with a Foreword by Andy
Blunden, Erythrós Press.Selections from Classical German Philosophy are at
http://www.marxists.org/subject/philosophy/german.htmQuestions and discussion with the author are welcome with
Andy Blunden: [email protected]
Marx and Activity
Part Two of talk by Andy Blunden on the Origins of Cultural Historical Activity Theory, April 2010
Marx’s Critique of Hegel
(1818-1883)
Feuerbach and Hegel
Theses on Feuerbach
Herder – Fichte - Hess
“Practical-critical Activity”Theses on Feuerbach
The German Ideology
• The Real Individuals
• Their Activity, and
• the Material Conditions
The Method of Political Economy
“The concrete is the concentration of many determinations ...It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality.”
Preface to Capital
“In bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour — or value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell-form.”
The Commodity
18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
*
Men make their own history, but under circumstances given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. ... they anxiously conjure up spirits of the past, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes.
*
In Conclusion
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/Genealogy-CHAT.htm
Readings
• The full text of this talk can be found at http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/origins-chat.htm#marx
• The recommended readings from Marx are at http://marx.org/archive/marx/works/sw/course/xmca.pdf
• Questions and discussion with the author are welcome with Andy Blunden: [email protected]
• Further reading on these ideas are found in “An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity,” by Andy Blunden