On Tue, 1 Jun 2004, Ted Winslow wrote:
> 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?
Huh? The soul's not a necessary component of any theory of the subject. I'm not really interested in theology, so I don't say much about the soul.
>
> 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).
I don't quite get your point. Yes, an individual person is an agent. However, at another level of analysis, a society is an agent, and the agency of a society is just as "real" as that of any specific individual. Going the other way, genes are agents with measurable effects (e.g., the heritability ratio for height in humans is about .90). I don't really see any need to prioritize the agents working at any one of these levels as the true, "essential" agent of history or social change.
I've said this before, but I think the real reason why the individual person is glorified as an autonomous agent is ideological: capitalist social relations require us to think of ourselves and each other as atomic units. Both consumption and production in capitalism require this ideology that people are individual, self-willed agents who buy what they like, work at whatever jobs they prefer, and create successful businesses with their perseverance and dealmaking acumen.
Miles