This can't be pointed out. Becker's model (which you've mischaracterized - it assumes individuals are everywhere and always concerned with "maximizing utility" not with simply surviving) is historically false. The passage I quoted itself points to an alternative approach to understanding human behaviour that demonstrates this - psychoanalysis. The model ignores the obvious fact of irrationality.
The approach also misunderstands rationality. Its conception of this ignores, for instance, the fact and implications of internal relations, a point made by Keynes who gives as one of the key grounds for rejecting the model its ignoring of "the whole complication and fascination (and truth) of the ethical doctrine of organic unity". (Keynes as quoted by Skidelsky in John Maynard Keynes, vol. 3, p. 361)
> Nowhere does he limit reason to some delimited
> instrumentality; there's aesthetics, play, pleasure, and much much else
> besides. His point is, this survivalism isn't something to be denounced
> morally, but to be analyzed historically -- and thereby changed.
>
It's the "economic approach" he endorses that does this. It's not clear to me, however, that he himself understands "reason" in a way that allows it to determine the content of the will. Is it reason, for instance, that authorizes pursuit of "the wilder forms of consumption available in the postmodern"?
>> Some of this - labour in the realm of necessity as instrumental labour
>> requiring to be minimized - is consistent with Marx. Reason in Marx's
>> sense, however, is essential rather than antithetical to freedom; it isn't
>> merely instrumental reason.
>
> Not quite. Reason for Marx is class praxis -- but the emancipated society,
> whatever else it may be, would not have classes or class divisions, ergo
> its praxis would be unimaginably different from anything we denizens of
> prehistory suffer through.
My understanding of this differs from yours.
Reason is connected to "praxis" by the fact that the kind of "sensuous activity" the word designates enables the being whose activity is praxis to form and rationally ground beliefs. Marx adopts an internal relations ontology in which (a) being is activity and (b) human being is praxis. As found in Marx, the concept sublates earlier ideas, e.g. it preserves what is positive in Aristotle, Kant and Hegel's idea of it.
Class enters via sublation of the role Hegel assigns to labour within particular relations of production in the development of mind to rationality. According to Hegel, the slave forced to work in conditions of deferred desire develops an increased capacity for rationality in the form of a more developed consciousness of the future. This development is essential to the full development of human activity as praxis since it is a defining characteristic of a being whose activity is praxis that it be able to build the structure in the mind before building it in reality. This requires consciousness of the future and the ability to "wait" i.e. defer satisfaction of desire. These are key features of conscious activity able to provide rational grounds for belief and action, i.e. key features of "praxis".
The development of "tools", of "forces of production", is the main expression of this development of mind. They express the "cunning of reason" mediating desire and its satisfaction; they are "the power of knowledge, objectified". The role of relations of production in this development explains why the hand mill gives society with the feudal lord and the steam mill society with the industrial capitalist.
Understood in this way, therefore, class creates conditions conducive to the development of rational mind and through this of knowledge.
For Marx, this includes the development of knowledge of aesthetic and ethical values. This is necessary to effective action, i.e. to action effective in realizing value in this ultimate sense. So to explain the laws of motion of capitalism you need to explain how capitalism facilitates the development of this and other knowledge by a subject who can then, acting on its basis, transform society in a progressive way.
Here is a passage from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in which Marx has the "self changing" of communist artisans - understood as the development of their knowledge of ethical value as "mutual recognition' - result from the "change of circumstances" - the change of their "sensuous existence" - produced by "revolutionary praxis." It illustrates his alternative to the conventional materialist conception of the relation between "sensuous consciousness" and "sensuous existence": "The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary praxis."
"When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need - the need for society - and what appears as a means becomes an end. In this practical process the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist workers are seen together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring them together. Association, society and conversation, which again has association as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies." Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 313
On the preceding page the same point is more explicitly illustrated:
"The extent to which the solution of theoretical riddles is the task of practice and effected through practice, the extent to which true practice is the condition of a real and positive theory, is shown, for example, in fetishism. The sensuous consciousness of the fetish-worshipper is different from that of the Greek, because his sensuous existence is different. The abstract enmity between sense and spirit is necessary so long as the human feeling for nature, the human sense of nature, and therefore also the natural sense of man, are not yet produced by man's own labour." p. 312
The belief that, in some unimaginable way, a not merely imaginable but predictable with certainty future apocalyptic catastrophe will produce an unimaginable ideal society strikes me as a vestige of belief in providence.
An ideal society is the most complex of entities. It's creation requires extremely skilled architects. If it isn't possible to first build it in the mind before building it in reality it will never be realized.
This, by the way, is one of the insights contained in the ending of Goethe's Faust. What enables Faust finally to say stay to the moment is the imagining of the true nature of the ideal and the related knowledge that the only way this ideal can be realized is through individuals developing through their own efforts the knowledge and ability required to imagine and build it. In particular, the process of "bildung" leading up to this moment has enabled him to win through to the insight that its creation is beyond the powers of Mephistopheles, i.e. impossible as a work of providence.
I work that millions may possess this space,
If not secure, a free and active race.
Here man and beast, in green and fertile fields,
Will know the joys that new-won region yields,
Will settle on the firm slopes of a hill
Raised by a bold and zealous people's skill.
A paradise our closed-in land provides,
Though to its margin rage the blustering tides;
When they eat through, in fierce devouring flood,
All swiftly join to make the damage good.
Ay, in this thought I pledge my faith unswerving,
Here wisdom speaks its final word and true,
None is of freedom or of life deserving
unless he daily conquers it anew.
With dangers thus begirt, defying fears,
Childhood, youth, age shall strive through strenuous
years
Such busy, teeming throngs I long to see,
Standing on freedom's soil, a people free.
Then to the moment could I say:
Linger you now, you are so fair!
Now records of my earthly day
No flight of aeons can impair -
Foreknowledge comes, and fills me with such bliss,
I take my joy, my highest moment this.
As the passages from Marx I've quoted show, he certainly felt able to imagine key features of an ideal society.
> freedom and necessity
> are Kantian concepts, bounded by the limit-point of 18th century
> causality; push freedom to its limit, and you get necessity; push
> the concept of necessity to its limit, and you run into freedom. This is
> why Marx himself pushed beyond the realm of causality altogether, into the
> realm of social vs. natural history; and politically, from the notion of
> the instantaneous revolution in the "Manifesto" to the carefully
> delineated class struggles of "Capital".
Marx has not "pushed beyond the realm of causality". He's reconceived it by sublating the Newtonian conception of nature - a determinist external relations conception having no logical space for a coherent idea of freedom of any kind let alone of human freedom (or for a coherent conception of "causation" for that matter - see Hume). How do you imagine a "tool" would be possible if "causation" had the character given to it in scientific materialism?
Though a very significant part of their content comes from Kant, e.g. the idea of "art" as ""production through freedom, i.e. through a will that places reason at the basis of its actions", Marx's ideas of freedom and necessity aren't identical with Kant's. They "sublate" Kant's ideas.
Marx's also sublate Hegel's ideas of the will proper and the universal will. They are consistent with his conception of "nature", i.e. Marx can without self-contradiction associate human freedom with making and using tools.
"The Will Proper, or the Higher Appetite, is (a) pure indeterminateness of the Ego, which as such has no limitation or a content which is immediately extant through nature but is indifferent towards any and every determinateness. (b) The Ego can, at the same time, pass over to a determinateness and make a choice of some one or other and then actualize it." Hegel, The Philosophical Propaedeutic p. 2
The "Universal Will" is "the Will which is Lawful and Just or in accordance with Reason." Philosophical Propaedeutic p. 1
The universal will is "freedom" as "necessity".
Ted -- Ted Winslow E-MAIL: WINSLOW at YORKU.CA Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054 York University FAX: (416) 736-5615 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario CANADA M3J 1P3