John Dunn

In repeating the experience of humanity’s creation of spiritual and material culture, the individual follows the same laws and forms as the impersonal ‘universal spirit’ of humanity.

This is the prefabricated world into which the individual is born, the materialised thought of humanity or alienated thought in general.

The individual has to de-objectify and arrogate this world of collectivised humanity or it will remain as given in contemplation and counterposed to thought as an independent reality existing outside it. Aggregation should be coterminous with education.

Misguided or fraudulent education leads to a naive acceptance of the available concepts of science, the norms of morals and justice, the forms of the state and political system, as if they existed without the involvement of thought.

Spiritual and material culture is believed uncritically in the name of science, the state and God. Concepts of the divine arise in which people think they may have a participative role.

Hegel shattered such passively accepted illusions by introducing practice into logic.

He considered practice, actions upon sense objects that altered things in accordance with subjective thought, to be just as important as subjective reasoning expressed in speech.

Thought can be judged much better ‘by its fruits’ than by the notions that it creates about itself. Thought realised in people’s actions proves to be the true criterion of the correctness of subjective acts, which are otherwise expressed in words, speeches and books.

Failure to arrogate this world of collectivised humanity (hampered by misguided or fraudulent education) transforms the individual into a slave, a ‘speaking tool’ of alienated universally human forces, activity personified as money and capital, and further as the state, law, religion, and so on.

(Notes taken from a reading of E. V. Ilyenkov’s Dialectical Logic.)

© John Dunn.