[lbo-talk] Democracy Now 5/26

[Ted Winslow]

  Carrol Cox wrote:

> Obviously I was wrong. Neither 30 pages nor 18 months were necessary.
> Miles did it nicely in one post and just four paragraphs.
>
> And I agree strongly that Gould's hierarchical analysis (levels of
> causation) is a powerful tool for social as well as biological
> understanding. His and Lewontin's concept of spandrels is equally
> powerful. In biology and history as in church architexture, many
> features/events are side-blows as it were. If they have a function, 
> that
> function played no role whatever in their appearance but was "added" on
> later.

How do you and Miles explain the emergence of a "soul," i.e. not merely 
self-determination and final causation but forms of these consistent 
with the development of a "will proper" and a "universal will," from 
the aggregation of material interpreted in terms of conventional 
"materialism" as "vacuous bits of matter with no internal values, and 
merely hurrying through space" i.e. in terms of an ontology that by 
assumption explicitly excludes any role for self-determination and 
final causation?  In any event, "materialism" of this kind and 
"structuralism" explicitly deny we are "subjects" - "agents" - in this 
sense, don't they?

Lewontin and Gould don't understand "dialectics" as "internal 
relations."  They substitute for this "holism" in the sense of "wholes" 
possessing properties independent of and separate from their "parts."  
This leads to the attribution of agency - self-determination - and the 
realization of value - final causation - to social "wholes" e.g. to 
"social structures" and "classes."  The "internal relations" conception 
of part/whole relations, in contrast, doesn't permit this.  Agency and 
the realization of value can only be attributed to individuals, 
individuals whose "essences" - including what, for Marx, defines the 
human "essence" - are understood as the outcome of their relations.  
It's this latter feature of the "individualism" involved that limits 
the applicability of arithmetic.  One thing plus another thing doesn't 
always make two things e.g. a spark plus gunpowder (one of Whitehead's 
illustrations).

Ted