Needs

JKSCHW at aol.com JKSCHW at aol.com
Wed Oct 4 20:29:10 PDT 2000


We can agree to differ about Geras, whom I often disagree with, but whom I always respect. I haven't read the new book, and I listed his Marx and Human Nature book among a number of others. I left out Sebastioano Timpanrio's On Materialism.

Geras and the other writes I listed all insist, with Marx, that human needs are not exogenously given but are constructed in a network of social relations, so it's strawman satlking to say otherwise. But they also argue that Marx thinks, correctly, that the cinstruction doesn't go all the way down, that it has a biological and with respect to psychological needs, a mental basis in what people are like.

I didn't use the term "natural need," and I don't know what it means. I do know that if my caloric intake falls below a certain level for a certain period time, it will cause weakness, then death, and thsi is not something that can be avoided by talk about forks. I also know that if a normal person is made to do dull, repetitive, mechanical work day in and day out for many hours, she will not be happy under any circumstances. I take it these are facts about human nature--not abstracted from any social relations. of course, but within any social relations.

--jks

In a message dated 10/4/00 12:10:11 PM Eastern Daylight Time, jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk writes:

<< I never really rated Geras that much, a view confirmed first time when I

saw him debate Sean Sayers (I think, at a Radical Philosophy

conference), and secodn when I read his latest miserable book, the

'contract of mutual indifference'.

As to 'natural needs', I think this is a bit of a myth to. Man himself

is an artificial creation, his own. Without labour (like early

agriculture and hunting), man would never have remade himself from ape

to man.

Our basest beggars are, in the poorest things, superfluous

Allow not nature more than nature needs

Man's life's as cheap as beast's

Such a poor, bare forked creature is unencumbered man

(all Lear, from memory)

Food is a natural need? Well, maybe, but isn't that what Marx is getting

at when he says hunger is hunger, but the hunger that is satisfied with

teeth and claws is different from that that is satisfied with a knife

and fork.

The ambition to uncover the natural substratum of human nature is a bit

of a fool's errand (best sort to set Lear and Norman Geras). I think it

is the same error as looking for the intrinsic human essence, when, as

Marx says, the human essence is nothing more than the ensemble of social

relations.

The food component of expenditure says it well. It is just a tenth of

the average Brit or yank household's shopping basket. Imagine if people

only ate what was nutritionally necessary: it would fall to a single

percentage point.

Charles asks some good questions. I think the reason that the British do

not see health care as a basic need is because they already have it

guaranteed by the state, and tend to assume it.

The proposition that the telephone or television is an 'essential' tells

us that we value our ability to communicate just as much as our eating.

>>



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