<< I might point out that Singer's little book on Hegel is an absolute beauty
(I admit this the enthusiastic recommendation of a non-philosopher, but the
clarity of Singer's prose is to be seen to be believed - a bit of an
advantage when discussing Hegel ... ).
I am, or was, a professional philosopher and a Germanist in a sort of way, though more on the Marx end than the Hegel end. Still I taughta lot of Hegel, though I never wrote on him. I don't think Singer's Hegel book is one of his better efforts. Putting Singer, with his gift for flat-headed utilitarian lucidity and extremism together with Hegel, who has a rather different set of gifts, struck me as an odd notion. The best general intro to Hegefor the nonspecialist is still Charles Taylor's Hegel & the Modern State.
Anyway, you quote Singer thusly:
For Marx, it is the "ensemble of social relations" which makes us the
people we are, and so, as Singer points out, "It follows from this belief
that if you can change the ‘ensemble of social relation’, you can totally
change human nature."
This is an example of why Singer's not good oin the Germans. What Marx says is not that the ensemble of social relations makes us the people we are, but that the human is essense is no dumb abstraction had by each individual but the ensemble of human relations. The point is at least in part to emphasize that the human essense is social in nature and not something fixed by presocial whatsits (e.g., today we'd say biology) that people bring to their social relations. Singer moves swiftyly from mischaracteruzing Marx's critique od Feuerbach to reading it,a s too many Marxusts do,a s a statement about the absolutely amlleability of 'human nature," as if we just changed the social relations (poof!, no problema, I'll do it at lunch when I'm finished with this part of the brief) and we could make people absolutely anyway we wanted. Nois uch thing follows from anything Marx says,a nd he does not draw that that conclusion in the 6th Thesis or anywhere else.
> Well, you can get that impression from *The German Ideology*,
>From where in the GI? Cites, please.
>but you can
get a very different one from the brilliant young (25ish) bloke who wrote
the *Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts*.
Or perhaps the cranky old guy who wrote about the associated producers arranging necessary labor to be worthy of their human nature (ihrer menschliche Natur) in Capital III.
> For instance, in *C*1, the 'older' Marx is pretty unambiguous on this:
'To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog nature. This nature
itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this
to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc,
by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general,
and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.' (page 668
of the Charles Kerr Chicago 1906 edition)
Thanks,a nother useful cite.
>I think the following Singer quotelet is pretty important stuff, hence its
gratuitous repeat.
'First of all, we have evolved not to be ruthless proto-capitalists, but to
"enter into mutually beneficial forms of co-operation."
Why not both?
>To say a
certain type of behaviour has evolved is not to say it is morally right. To
accept a need to understand how our minds evolved is not to endorse every
human trait with an evolutionary origin.'
There''s tension between the secoind part of the quote and the first.
--jks