Eric Franz Leher wrote:
>
>
>
> And now something to annoy you. You must infer relationships, but
> presumably can observe objects (my hand, the card). But that can't be
> quite right either - many objects are composites of other objects, so in
>
Not at all annoying. There are probably even stickier problems with the idea, and I have not replies to any of them. A note on history.
To someone living in feudal society, it _seems_ to be observable that a Duke is a Duke. Also, in any social order in which production is primarily for use, the inner reality of an act seems to be manifest in its appearance. Hence the vast analogies of Dante's Comedy, the Aristotelian concept of substantial form, and the more or less spontaneous acceptance of social hierarchy as simply given, not subject to critique. The slave rebellion of Spartacus did not aim at the elimination of slavery, but merely at an escape from the Roman Empire (to an area in which the ex-slaves themselves might become slave-owners). The chapter on Act in Kenneth Burke's _Grammar of Motives_ is illuminating here.
But when market relations become all-pervasive, the link between appearance and reality is snapped once and for all. The same act may have quite different realities (inner motive); different acts identical motives. Observing a peasant family harvesting its grain in 1200 one could _see_ the inner meaning of that action: food for the peasant family and its hierarchical superiors. Seeing a clerk wait on a customer in a 7-11 gives no information whatsoever on the meaning of that act (which in any case will only be established retroactively, by what the clerk's wages will buy, what "free" choices the clerk will make in the spending of those wages: perhaps to buy a new shirt, perhaps to pay an assassin to murder his/her spouse. "Science" (systematic knowledge) no longer can aim at "saving appearances." Relationships are invisible.
The view of the world encapsulated in the phrase "petty bourgeois individualism" is grounded in the small producer's (quite understandable) bitterness that her act fails to embody or manifest her reality.
Carrol