I'm trying to make sense what this more than the sum of it's individual parts the general will is meant to be.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htmIn Hegelian philosophy, however, the problem was stated in a fundamentally different way. The social organism (the “culture” of the given people) is by no means an abstraction expressing the “sameness” that may be discovered in the mentality of every individual, an “abstract” inherent in each individual, the “transcendentally psychological” pattern of individual life activity. The historically built up and developing forms of the “universal spirit” (“the spirit of the people”, the “objective spirit”), although still understood by Hegel as certain stable patterns within whose framework the mental activity of every individual proceeds, are none the less regarded by him not as formal abstractions, not as abstractly universal “attributes” inherent in every individual, taken separately. Hegel (following Rousseau with his distinction between the “general will” and the “universal will”) fully takes into account the obvious fact that in the diverse collisions of differently orientated “individual wills” certain results are born and crystallised which were never contained in any of them separately, and that because of this social consciousness as an “entity” is certainly not built up, as of bricks, from the “sameness” to be found in each of its “parts” (individual selves, individual consciousnesses). And this is where we are shown the path to an understanding of the fact that all the patterns which Kant defined as “transcendentally inborn” forms of operation of the individual mentality, as a priori “internal mechanisms” inherent in every mentality, are actually forms of the self-consciousness of social man assimilated from without by the individual (originally they opposed him as “external” patterns of the movement of culture independent of his will and consciousness), social man being understood as the historically developing “aggregate of all social relations”.
It is these forms of the organisation of social (collectively realised) human life activity that exist before, outside and completely independently of the individual mentality, in one way or another materially established in language, in ritually legitimised customs and rights and, further, as “the organisation of a state” with all its material attributes and organs for the protection of the traditional forms of life that stand in opposition to the individual (the physical body of the individual with his brain, liver, heart, hands and other organs) as an entity organised “in itself and for itself”, as something ideal within which all individual things acquire a different meaning and play a different role from that which they had played “as themselves”, that is, outside this entity. For this reason the “ideal” definition of any thing, or the definition of any thing as a “disappearing” moment in the movement of the “ideal world”, coincides in Hegel with the role and meaning of this thing in social human culture, in the context of socially organised human life activity, and not in the individual consciousness, which is here regarded as something derived from the “universal spirit”.
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Hegel proceeds from the quite obvious fact that for the consciousness of the individual the “real” and even the “crudely material” – certainly not the “ideal” – is at first the whole grandiose materially established spiritual culture of the human race, within which and by the assimilation of which this individual awakens to “self-consciousness”. It is this that confronts the individual as the thought of preceding generations realised (“reified”, “objectified”, “alienated”) in sensuously perceptible “matter” – in language and visually perceptible images, in books and statues, in wood and bronze, in the form of places of worship and instruments of labour, in the designs of machines and state buildings, in the patterns of scientific and moral systems, and so on. All these objects are in their existence, in their “present being” substantial, “material”, but in their essence, in their origin they are “ideal”, because they “embody” the collective thinking of people, the “universal spirit” of mankind.
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As a result of this process which takes place “behind the back of the individual consciousness”, the individual is confronted in the form of an “external thing” with people’s general (i.e., collectively acknowledged) representation, which has absolutely nothing in common with the sensuously perceived bodily form in which it is “represented”.
For example, the name “Peter” is in its sensuously perceived bodily form absolutely unlike the real Peter, the person it designates, or the sensuously represented image of Peter which other people have of him. The relationship is the same between the gold coin and the goods that can be bought with it, goods (commodities), whose universal representative is the coin or (later) the banknote. The coin represents not itself but “another” in the very sense in which a diplomat represents not his own person but his country, which has authorised him to do so. The same may be said of the word, the verbal symbol or sign, or any combination of such signs and the syntactical pattern of this combination.
This relationship of representation is a relationship in which one sensuously perceived thing performs the role or function of representative of quite another thing, and, to be even more precise, the universal nature of that other thing, that is, something “other” which in sensuous, bodily terms is quite unlike it, and it was this relationship that in the Hegelian terminological tradition acquired the title of “ideality”.
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It is here that we find the answer to the riddle of “ideality”. Ideality, according to Marx, is nothing else but the form of social human activity represented in the thing. Or, conversely, the form of human activity represented as a thing, as an object.
“Ideality” is a kind of stamp impressed on the substance of nature by social human life activity, a form of the functioning of the physical thing in the process of this activity. So all the things involved in the social process acquire a new “form of existence” that is not included in their physical nature and differs from it completely – their ideal form.
So, there can be no talk of “ideality” where there are no people socially producing and reproducing their material life, that is to say, individuals working collectively and, therefore, necessarily possessing consciousness and will. But this does not mean that the “ideality of things” is a product of their conscious will, that it is “immanent in the consciousness” and exists only in the consciousness. Quite the reverse, the individual’s consciousness and will are functions of the ideality of things, their comprehended, conscious ideality.
Ideality, thus, has a purely social nature and origin. It is the form of a thing, but it is outside this thing, and in the activity of man, as a form of this activity. Or conversely, it is the form of a person’s activity but outside this person, as a form of the thing. Here, then, is the key to the whole mystery that has provided a real basis for all kinds of idealistic constructions and conceptions both of man and of a world beyond man, from Plato to Carnap and Popper. “Ideality” constantly escapes, slips away from the metaphysically single-valued theoretical fixation. As soon as it is fixed as the “form of the thing” it begins to tease the theoretician with its “immateriality”, its “functional” character and appears only as a form of “pure activity”. On the other hand, as soon as one attempts to fix it “as such”, as purified of all the traces of palpable corporeality, it turns out that this attempt is fundamentally doomed to failure, that after such a purification there will be nothing but phantasmal emptiness, an indefinable vacuum.
And indeed, as Hegel understood so well, it is absurd to speak of “activity” that is not realised in anything definite, is not “embodied” in something corporeal, if only in words, speech, language. If such “activity” exists, it cannot be in reality but only in possibility, only potentially, and, therefore, not as activity but as its opposite, as inactivity, as the absence of activity.
So, according to Hegel, the “spirit”, as something ideal, as something opposed to the world of corporeally established forms, cannot “reflect” at all (i.e., become aware of the forms of its own structure) unless it preliminarily opposes “itself to itself”, as an “object”, a thing that differs from itself.
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Consciousness only arises where the individual is compelled to look at himself as if from the side – as if with the eyes of another person, the eyes of all other people – only where he is compelled to correlate his individual actions with the actions of another man, that is to say, only within the framework of collectively performed life activity. Strictly speaking, it is only here that there is any need for WILL, in the sense of the ability to forcibly subordinate one’s own inclinations and urges to a certain law, a certain demand dictated not by the individual organics of one’s own body, but by the organisation of the “collective body”, the collective, that has formed around a certain common task.
But there is apparently reason to make a distinction between the social and the collective, where collectivity is characterized by a correlation of what is the same in all individuals whilst ignoring their differences (abstract universal). But as expressed above in Ilyenkov's summary of Hegel on par with Rousseau's general will, it is not the sum of the same but something different.
[url]https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1925/art1.htm[/ur;]
Bekhterev claims that “... obviously, the psychology of individuals is not suitable for explaining social movements. ...” The same view is held by other social psychologists (like McDougall, Le Bon, Freud, et al.), who regard the social psyche as secondary, originating from the psyche of the individual. They assume that there is a special individual psyche and that from the interaction of individual psyches or psychologies there arises a collective psyche or psychology common to all individuals Thus, social psychology is regarded as the psychology of a collective individual, in the same way that a crowd is made up of single individuals, even though it has a supra-individual psychology. We see that non-Marxist social psychology has a primitive empirical approach to the social entity, regarding it as a crowd, a collective entity, a relation between individuals or persons. Society is taken to be an association of people, and it is regarded as an accessory activity of one individual. These psychologists do not admit that somewhere, in a remote and intimate corner of his thought, his feelings, etc., the psyche of an individual is social and socially conditioned. It is easy to show that the subject of social psychology is precisely the psyche of the single individual. Chelpanov’s view, frequently quoted by others, according to which specifically Marxist psychology is a social psychology that studies the genesis of ideological forms according to a specifically Marxist method, involving the study of the origin of given forms based on the social economy, is incorrect. Equally incorrect is his view that empirical and experimental psychology cannot become Marxist, any more than mineralogy, physics, chemistry, etc., can. To corroborate his view, Chelpanov refers to Chapter VIII of Plekhanov’s Fundamental Problems of Marxism, in which the author expounds the origin of ideologies. The exact opposite is more likely to be true, namely that only the individual (i.e., the empirical and experimental) psychology can become Marxist.
Indeed, how can we distinguish social psychology from individual psychology if we deny the existence of a popular soul, a popular spirit, and so forth? Social psychology studies precisely the psyche of the single individual, and what he has in his mind. There is no other psyche to study. The rest is either metaphysics or ideology; hence, to assert that this psychology cannot become Marxist (i.e., social), just as mineralogy and chemistry cannot become Marxist, is tantamount to not understanding Marx’s fundamental statement which says that “man in the most literal sense is a zoon politicon (social animal – Aristotle), an animal to whom social intercourse is not only peculiar but necessary in order to stand out as a single individual.” To assume the psyche of the single individual (the object of experimental and empirical psychology) to be as extrasocial as the object of mineralogy, means to assume a position diametrically opposed to Marxism. Of course, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, and so on, can be either Marxist or anti-Marxist if we take science to be not only a bare listing of facts, a catalogue of relationships and functions but a systematized knowledge of the world in its entirety.
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The difference becomes self evident if we consider the psyche of the single individual as the subject of social psychology. It is obvious that the subject of individual psychology coincides with that of differential psychology, the task of which is the study of individual differences in single individuals. The concept of general reflexology, as opposed to Bekhterev’s collective reflexology, also completely coincides with this. “In this respect there is a certain relation between the reflexology of the single individual and collective reflexology; the former aims at clarifying the peculiarities of the single individual, tries to find differences in the individual mentalities of persons, and show the reflexological basis of these differences, while collective reflexology, which studies mass or collective manifestations of correlative activity, is essentially aimed at clarifying how social products of a correlative activity are obtained by the correlation between single individuals in social groups and by smoothing away their individual differences.”
It is obvious that we are dealing here with differential psychology in the precise acceptance of that term. What, then, is the subject of collective psychology as such? There is a simple answer to this question: Everything within us is social, but this does not imply that all the properties of the psyche of an individual are inherent in all the other members of this group as well. Only a certain part of the individual psychology can be regarded as belonging to a given group, and this portion of individual psychology and its collective manifestations is studied by collective psychology when it looks into the psychology of the army, the church, and so on.
Thus, instead of distinguishing between social and individual psychology, we must distinguish between social and collective psychology. The difference between social and individual psychology in aesthetics appears to be the same as that between normative and descriptive aesthetic because, as shown quite correctly by Münsterberg, historical aesthetics was connected with social psychology, and normative aesthetics with individual psychology.
My impression is that in Ilyenkov's 'Concept of the Ideal' which expresses that Hegel takes a novel/different approach to the idealism vs materialism difference of that which exists only in consciousness and that which exists outside it also. I don't yet really comprehend Ilyenkov's work nor Hegel, but it excited me greatly when I read it and I can tell there is some rich content in it to be drawn out if we're to make a sensible conception of Rousseau's general will.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics