BrownBingb at aol.com wrote:
> CB: I'm not sure how the quotes from Marx suggest "individual
> explanations", except in the sense that they are "social individual"
> explanations. ( sorry that gets to be convuluted). These passages ,
> and a lot of the EPM are pretty thick to think through, I always find.
>
> The five senses as products of (human) history are senses as social
> products. They are different from the senses of animals which much
> less social products and much more products of biology. The human
> social includes the social connection to dead generations in the form
> of history.
>
> Doesn't universally developed mean many sided social development ? The
> _richness_ of the subjective human sensibility is socio-historical in
> origin, no ?
>
> I don't mean to contradict your assertions. I just see them as more
> supporting the notion of "social explanations" rather than individual
> in the senses these are used on this thread.
To begin with, as Marx uses the term "social", the social individual is a particular kind of individual. Thus "the senses of the social man differ from those of the non-social man". The social individual is that individual for whom the "essential powers" (whose existence as a potential define all human individuals) exist "for themselves" as realized "subjective capacities". This idea of "human nature" as a set of "essential powers" and of history as a process through which this "in itself" is realized (becomes "for itself") is taken from Hegel. This human "in itself" is elaborated by Marx, on the basis of Hegel's idea of an "educated person", as "the universally developed individual".
"That man is free by Nature is quite correct in one sense; viz., that he is so according to the Idea of Humanity; but we imply thereby that he is such only in virtue of his destiny - that he has an undeveloped power to become such; for the "Nature" of an object is exactly synonymous with its "Idea". ... Freedom as the ideal of that which is original and natural, does not exist as original and natural. Rather must it be first sought out and won; and that by an incalculable medial discipline of the intellectual and moral powers. ... To the Ideal of Freedom, Law and Morality are indispensably requisite; and they are in and for themselves, universal existences, objects and aims; which are discovered only by the activity of thought, separating itself from the merely sensuous, and developing itself, in opposition thereto; and which must on the other hand, be introduced into and incorporated with the originally sensuous will, and that contrarily to its natural inclination." (Hegel, Philosophy of History, pp. 40-1)
Such individuals have developed "senses" which are able to perceive things as the actually are. Thus they have a "sense" both for "the most beautiful music" and for "the finest play".
This enables them to truly perceive human products as human products. In particular, they perceive their "social structure" - their social relations - as their own product. This is true of all social relations, but where these are incompatible with "social man", the "non-social man" associated with them will reify them i.e. fail to see what is in fact a human product as a human product. Indeed, they may reverse the subject/object relation and see themselves as the creature of what is in fact their creature e.g. as the creature of language or of the social structure.
"Hence the rule of the capitalist over the worker is the rule of things over man, of dead labour over the living, of the product over the producer. For the commodities that become the instruments of rule over the workers (merely as the instruments of the rule of capital itself) are mere consequences of the process of production; they are its products. Thus at the level of material production, of the life-process in the realm of the social - for that is what the process of production is - we find the same situation that we find in religion at the ideological level, namely the inversion of subject into object and vice versa. Viewed historically this inversion is the indispensable transition without which wealth as such, i.e. the relentless productive forces of social labour, which alone can form the material base of a free human society, could not possibly be created by force at the expense of the majority. This antagonistic stage cannot be avoided, any more than it is possible for man to avoid the stage in which his spiritual energies are given a religious definition as powers independent of himself. What we are confronted by here is the alienation [Entfremdung] of man from his own labour." (Marx, Capital, vol. 1 [Penguin ed.], p. 990)
The idea of the "social structure" as an independent entity working in accordance with iron "laws" to produce the ideal society is, among other things, a secularized version of Providence.
In the case of the "social" individual, the social structure is a human product in a very particular sense. It is the rationally self-determined creation of universally developed individuals. As such, social relations in both the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom are the self-conscious realization of the ethical ideal; they are relations of "mutual recognition".
In so far as we mean by "individual explanations" the explanation of social phenomena as the product of rational fully self-determined individuals, such explanations encompass all the products of a community of "social" individuals.
Ted