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228 NOTE on THINKING and GROUP ACTIVITY the Essence Of NOTES NOTE ON THINKING AND GROUP ACTIVITY The essence of group activity is revealed in that the member of a group is, first and foremost, a participant of interdependent situations. He can create the ‘I-images’ as a result of either a cognitive or emotional blockade of communi- cation and, precisely because of this, he starts to realize that he is an object of a motivational control. Self-control is an inner acceptance of a role. It conventionalizes behavior and protects it from impulses that lead to unbalanced behavior. Self-control is directly linked to such behavior. The unbalanced behavior could be altered by confronting with a position of a joint activity ascribed to other members of group. In other words, the ‘I-role’ includes the acceptance of a picture of the world developed by a group. The major functional unit of norm-creation then becomes meaning which, after all, appears to be equivalent to an objective norm as an aspect of its inner experience. From a position of the theory of behavior, meaning reveals that an individual is linked to objects. He lives his life sur- rounded by meanings that are determined by what people do with objects. Meaning, as it seems, has two aspects: first, a characteristic of behavior directed by other members of group to an acting individual (meaning as a ‘promise of a certain reaction’), and, second, a specific property of an object (an ‘expression of reaction’). However, only within an abstraction of the second aspect, objec- tified as a sign, can meaning be regarded as a generalization of orientations of co-members of group activity into a norm, which does not depend upon an object of orientation: V —— N A special position is reserved for meanings of categories, i.e., for classes of objects and events. Although these meanings can be intentionally posited only by means of evaluative representations, which employ images in an exten- sional sense, categories of knowledge perform as an independent source of meanings. Categories are generalized forms of assertions about existence and, 228 NOTES 229 in their very organization, carry a trace of intention of a categorizing con- sciousness. Their ‘mythological essence’ is hidden not in a content of trans- ferred material, but in their structural organization which appears to be an immediate source of deontic influence occurring within an assimilation of a norm in an aspect of meaning. Every category, thus, represents a meaning or a norm of certain pre-dispositions to action which are clearly organized and established. In his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life Durkheim was the first to attempt to generalize this characteristic of categories in a culturological sense, although the original idea belongs to Kant. A degree of awareness of consciousness in meaning as compared to non- meaningful fragments in a field of experience immediately determines its [mean- ing’s] value. A subjective aspect of meaning is revealed in its expectancy. Expectancy presupposes a symbolic form of the appearance of meaning that makes its social ratification possible. What people see in a certain situation (i.e., grasp as a sign) depends on what they expect to see, while what they expect [to see] is linked to the meanings with which they enter this given situation. The region of perception within group activity should be organized in such way that it allows for the perception of as many signals related to meaningful sentences as possible, and not for reaction to other signals. From here a difference between norm and value within a culture becomes evident. Norm correlates with mean- ing that is always directed to a subject of group communication, whereas value corresponds to a sign that emanates from such a subject. And even if objective and subjective sides of value are distinguished as well, the latter is always objec- tified, not in valuable, but in normative aspects [ ...] Meanings, as well, as norms, are models [patterns] of activity residing in deontic modality. Taken in different situations and determined by social reasons they can be presented either as patterns of potential activity (and can thus be transferred into hypothetic modality) or as patterns of actual activity (and can thus be transferred into apodictic modality). In the first case, they are trans- formed into signs-values, since value in its essence always presupposes (‘hypoth- esizes’) an aspiration to it from a subject, because it can be realized [off-thought objectively] only within such aspiration. In the second case norms-meanings are converted into representations of knowledge. Human ideas [images] of reality compose an independent projection of a social process. What is called a reality for or by a psychological subject is a cer- tain operative orientation [of actions] to which a high degree of concord exists that should be known to a subject; otherwise, he would not realize [presence of] reality as such. In an anthropological sense, a symbolic organization of human experience forms a genuine environment of human existence, the since realm of spontaneous perceptions is organized according to configurations of systems of meanings extracted from this environment. From a sociological point of view, culture is a product of symbolic communication. Pictures of the world are organized by means of symbols, and those who master these symbols, acquire a similar image 230 ANALOGY IN INDIAN AND WESTERN PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT of this world. Every social world is a cultural region whose borders are determined not by territory or formal membership, but by the limits of effective communica- tions. But in order to become aware of these limits we need certain criteria shaped as regulative ideas of collective consciousness. A goal of traditional philosophy has consisted of working out of the concepts of these ultimate ideas (such was, for instance, Kant’s definition of the goal of philosophy). However, these concepts, and methodological conclusions created on the basis of their foundation, always appear to be limited by the reality of [a certain] culture. NOTE ON TIME AND SPACE / .../ Consciousness and, linked to it, planned behavior is a non-spatial form of behavior connected to an idea of causality and to the placing of an event within time. Consciousness does not have anything as its exterior motif. This is exactly what Kant meant when he called time a condition of an inner experience. Two major conditions of experience - an exterior (space) and an interior (time) - are linked to the two channels or varieties of means of transference of tradition men- tioned above. The acoustic channel that permits us to separate and objectify a con- dition of a subjects is associated with a ‘gestalt of space’, whereas an eidetic channel, which does not allow such separation, [is linked] to a ‘gestalt of time’, when a subject is not in a position to leave its stream. It seems, then, there is a con- tradiction here: an eidetic representation is simultaneously posited in space and time, whereas an acoustic, on the contrary, develops in time’s succession and is never actually present in all its elements. In fact, everything is contrariwise: in an eidetic representation a sense of correlation between elements and an entity is achieved as the result of a consecutive ‘looking round’ and a placing its evaluations into a temporal axis. This is why a logical connection is usually associated with a genetic one when notions of cause and action are under scrutiny. Any visual object perceived in its totality cannot be a sign. On the contrary, an idea of the integrity of a fragment of phonation can be achieved only as a result of ‘placing’ its elements on a non-temporal screen of ‘Space’ (see the image of eternity in William Blake’s interpretation). Quite remarkable seems to be the difference between two types of logical thinking established within two cultures where an acoustic or eidetic type of tradition appeared to be predominant: Indian and Hellenic correspondingly. Logical thinking developed because of the participation [of individuals] in social groups. Logic combines rules of persuasion, which make thinking more effective. Formal deduction is verification according to conventional categories, i.e., to principles of reference accepted within a certain group. Logical proce- dures are formed under the influence of group approval or disapproval. Logical thinking is rational because [it is] social. These general ideas can be presented differently depending on the type of tra- dition. In the Hellenic case, where group relations are based on transformation V—I, it resulted in the Aristotelian syllogistic; predicates are placed there on the NOTES 231 foundation of a formal gender-specific principle, according to which a particu- lar judgment is subjected to the jurisdiction of a more general one. This pre- supposes a unity of time with a subject of a judgment, as well as with a reflecting subject which analyses [establishes] this linkage. Such a relation can never be real in a spatial sense, only in a temporal one. For instance, ‘horse’, ‘cock’, and ‘animal’ cannot simultaneously be placed in space, whereas they can in time: e.g., when someone first makes an assertion about animals, and then about horses or cocks. Eidetic Greek thinking is genuinely reflective. Moreover, because it also simultaneously possesses ‘gestalt of time’, nothing can prevent a Platonic eidetic hierarchy, where a relation of particular and general is not dis- tinguished from a relation of cause and effect, from transforming into a foun- dation of a theory of formal deduction. Contrariwise, in India, where thinking is not reflective (because it is not subjective) but constructive, a development of logical form is slowed down, since additional efforts to place judgments in a sys- tem of successive elements not connected by a factor of time become necessary.
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