<HTML> <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px"> From: Ted Winslow <egwinslow@rogers.com> BrownBingb@aol.com wrote wrote: > The idea is that politics and economics are social phenomenon, and > that therefore must have social , not individual explanations.  This > is not vulgar materialism or economism. It is applying Marx's famous > maxim that the human individual is a social individual. or even > Aristotle's "man is the social animal', Ted: The idea of the "social" individual is not an abandonment of "individual explanations".   </BLOCKQUOTE> 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. CB ^^^^^^ Ted:  Such an individual is a "universally <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px"> developed individual", an individual who, among other things, embodies "the richness of subjective human sensibility".  This individual is "social" for two reasons: (1) her development requires particular social relations - the development of a subjective capacity for beautiful music, for instance, requires beautiful music as an object, in general the development of subjective aesthetic capacities requires a relation to beautiful objects  -  universal development also requires a relation to universally developed subjects;  (2) her self-realizing activity as a universally developed individual, activity in "the realm of freedom", is also necessarily "social", as in Marx's conception of "art" as "production through freedom," as how we would produce if "we carried out production as human beings." -clip-</BLOCKQUOTE> .  The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.  </HTML>