>>> Ted Winslow writes
Doesn't Marx's materialism differ fundamentally from Darwin's?
Marx's retains essential aspects of idealism. These allow for logically coherent inclusion of self-determination and final causation as essential aspects of human being and development. The materialism underpinning both the original and the modern Darwinian accounts of evolution doesn't allow for this. _____________ Charles: My thought on this is that Marx and Darwin are not dealing with the same things. Marx is dealing with human history and Darwin is dealing with natural history. There is some connection between these, but human history is an emergent level from natural history. "Self-determination and final causation" exist in human history, but not in natural history. ___________
An illustration of the difference is provided by their respective treatments of the formation of human character. The Darwinianian kind excludes self-determination. Though there is an debate within modern Darwinism about the the relative weights to be assigned to genetic and environmental influences in the formation of character, all sides adopt materialist premises which implicitly exclude any role for self-determination in this process. ________________
Charles: Darwinians should adopt Marx's method when treating human character and society. ____________
Marx, in contrast, gives self-determination an essential and ultimately predominant role. His account of human development treats it as a process of "education," of "bildung," which has as its end point the "universally developed individual," a concept taken from Hegel and designating an individual with a fully free will, a "Universal Will," a will which is "in accordance with Reason." This individual is the basis of the fully developed "realm of freedom" characteristic of an ideal society.
In the Theses on Feuerbach (a summary statement of the ways the kind of materialism underpinning Darwinian accounts of evolution must be altered so as to incorporate the positive content of idealism) Marx points to a logical problem faced by any attempt to understand education in terms of this kind of materialism.
"The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
"The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice." ________________ Charles: This is the Thesis that asks, "who shall teach the teacher ?" I agree that the Darwinian approach unmodifiedly applied to human society has the fault of all "hitherto existing materialisms, that of Feuerbach included" . It has not activated subject, no practical-critical, that is revolutionary, activity. Darwin, Feuerbach and Kautsky were evolutionists, objectivists. Marx was revolutionary, with a subject acting in objective reality.
Charles Brown
Detroit
Workers of the West, it's our turn.