Carrol # 1 insists, in the form of his adoption of a classical mind-body dualism, that body is prior, ontologically and logically, to mind. Carrol # 2 maintains that the primacy of social relations, derived apparently from an ontological premise about the social nature of humanity, means that you can not separate mind and body, and that thought is implicit in every action. These are not logically consistent positions.
Are human being always involved in action? Of course.
Does our thought take off from that action? Of course.
But what Carrol refuses to recognize, in his refusal to understand the relationship of mind and body dialectically, is that action also takes off from thought. He might do well to go back to the famous line in Capital where Marx notes that what distinguishes the architecture of humans from the rather impressive 'architectural' creations of ants and bees is that human beings conceive of the work in their minds before they execute it. In his reduction of human action to the instinctual mating of other species, Carrol entirely misses this fundamental distinction of Marx. This vulgar materialism is, indeed, the 'materialism of fools.'
> Leo probably doesn't know any better, but Doug should. It isn't only (or
> even mostly) a matter of neuroscience or chronology -- those matters (as
> with the ritual) being cited as illustrations. It is a matter of social
> relations. What does it mean to find ourselves involved in social relations
> (always already so find ourselves)? It means that we are _always_ in the
> midst of an action, and our thought takes off from that action. So if
> anyone here is indulging in the materialism of fools it is Leo and Doug.
> They mechanically separate "motion" from the thing that moves. Then they
> have to get involved in one sort of mysticism or another to explain how an
> unmoving object can move. And they start out with the isolated individual,
> separated from all social relations, thinking about how to enter into those
> relations from the outside. As to ritual it goes back at least to the
> mating behavior of some insects -- obviously "brainless" except in the most
> mechanical sense. If one accepts this sort of vulgar materialism, as Doug
> and Leo do, then one must either deny that thought actually exists (it's an
> illusion of some sort) or that it has a mystic or instinctive source. And
> social relations disappear, to be reduced to a mere exhaustive account of
> individual facts. (In this particular thread Doug apparently chose to deny
> the existence of thought, in his claim that the topic had no relevance to
> politics.) Doug has sometimes claimed that the _Grundrisse_ is his favorite
> book -- but he either hasn't read it very carefully or the stress of
> composing the one-line zingers that he substitutes for conversation he
> forgets everything he ever learned from it.
>
> Anyone who affirms the reality of relations will seem a fool to those (like
> Doug and Leo) caught up in what Marx called the "dot-like" isolation of
> workers in bourgeois society. It is also this dot-like isolation which is
> partly at least the source of the pathological obsession with communication
> so characteristic of capitalist thought. Thought, of course, can (roughly:
> thought never catches up with actuality) reconstruct and understand the
> action (social relations) humans person always find themselves in, and on
> the basis of that reconstruction project further actions -- which always go
> beyond the plan or thought, thereby again placing the individual in the
> situation I describe as action prior to thought. Carrol
>
>
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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