Ian wrote:
> Fair enough, but they too would still need a definition of
> non-self-estrangement on which to base claims to compel-persuade
> others to
> cease the behavior that they assert results in said self-estrangement.
> If
> there are irreducibly conflicting meanings to the term
> self-estrangement,
> all we've done is gone in a circle. Sadly, the historical record shows
> that violence is then resorted to.
>
> This is my beef with Hegel and Marx, they assert that the societies in
> which they-we live are fairly well saturated with self-estrangement,
> yet
> they do not provide us with the relevant counterfactual on
> non-estranging
> social relations which would entice-secure majoritarian or unanimous
> consent sufficient for their societies to come to individual-collective
> recognition that estrangement was ubiquitous and overcomeable. Their
> virtue is that they invite us to imagine that such non-estrangement
> must
> surely be possible, yet in the absence of such *concrete definitions*
> or
> examples of large scale sustainable individual-collective performances
> of
> non-estrangement we have no way of knowing whether their claims of
> ubiquitous estrangement are true.
It's not true that we can't find in Marx an account of an ideal community from which self-estrangement would be absent. I've more than once elaborated this, with a great deal of supporting textual evidence, as the idea of a community of universally developed individuals creating and appropriating beauty and truth within relations of mutual recognition. To see that I've done this, all you need do is go to the list archives and search for "universally developed individuals," "mutual recognition," "sensus communis," "beauty," "art," "wealth," "realm of freedom," etc.
I've also more than once pointed out that this idea of the "good" can't be brought into being through coercive imposition. A defining feature of relations of mutual recognition is that they are completely free of any and all forms of coercion. If individuals can't be persuaded that such relations would be ideal, such relations, by definition, can't come into existence.
There are, as I've pointed out just recently, obviously "conflicting meanings to self-estrangement." Heidegger claims that authentically the human being is "one who needs to use violence - and does not just have violence at his disposal but is violence-doing, insofar as using violence is the basic trait not just of his doing but of his Dasein." He also claims that though we now live in self-estrangement, we lived authentically at the beginning of human history. According to Zizek, Ernst Jünger "recalling the trenches of the first world war ... celebrated face-to-face combat as the authentic intersubjective encounter." These conceptions of authenticity are inconsistent with Marx's.
You claim, I gather, that there's no rational way of deciding between these alternatives. You often seem to state this as if it were "an irrefutable assertion of fact." It's not. It's a corrigible claim about reality and experience. This is also true of your assertion of the necessary "theory ladenness of observations."
It's quite possible to conceive of human experience as having a character that would enable it to provide rational foundations on which to base claims about the rationality of the love of money and about whether life as universally developed individuals creating and appropriating beauty in relations of mutual recognition would be better than life as face-to-face combatants in the trenches of WW I. The question is whether it does have this character. This can't be adequately answered by dogmatic assertions about the nature of reality and experience.
> It doesn't. But his mere assertion that chrematistics is somehow
> inferior
> to his vision of the good life as laid out in the Nicomachean Ethics,
> without providing an incorrigible argument for the virtues of the
> latter
> vis a vis the former, along with his position in Greek society makes
> his
> views look more like ideology than anything else. Barry Allen's
> "Knowledge
> and Civilization" cogently juxtaposes Aristotle's view with that of the
> earlier Greek reverence for knowledge as action and artifice and finds
> it
> wanting:
>
> "The lauded contemplation of philosophical Truth is the antithesis to
> this
> older culture of knowledge. Aristotle does not speak for immemorial
> tradition when he says 'those to whom contemplation more fully belongs
> are
> more truly happy, not as a mere concomitant but in virtue of the
> contemplation, for this is in itself precious.'" Allen goes on to show
> that A's view has no room for a Prometheus or a Daedalus, nor does
> Hegel
> and Heidegger and all those other thinkers who have thinly disguised
> anxiety and contempt for uncertainty, unpredicability, technological
> change and the wealth that comes in their wake yada yada.
Marx sublates Aristotle. Aristotle's idea of "substance" and his related idea of the ideal life as a life of contemplation is rejected. For Marx, all being, including human being, in activity within internal relations. His conception of ideal human activity within internal relations of mutual recognition - of the "realm of freedom" - owes much to Aristotle, however. The idea of "mutual recognition" sublates Aristotle on friendship in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics. The developmental approach to the sense of "beauty" to which I've previously pointed (<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2003/2003-March/009354.html>) sublates the following (also from Nicomachean Ethics):
"Again, inasmuch as each of the senses acts in relation to its object, and acts perfectly when it is in good condition and directed to the finest of the and objects that belong to it (for this seems to be the best description of perfect activity, it being assumed to make no difference whether it be the sense itself that acts or the organ in which the sense resides ), it follows that the activity of any of the senses is at its best when the sense-organ being in the best condition is directed to the best of its objects; and this activity will be the most perfect and the pleasantest. For each sense has a corresponding pleasure, as also have thought and speculation, and its activity is pleasantest when it is most perfect, and most perfect when the organ is in good condition and when it is directed to the most excellent of its objects; and the pleasure perfects the activity.
"The pleasure does not however perfect the activity in the same way as the object perceived and the sensory faculty, if good, perfect it; just as health and the physician are not in the same way the cause of being healthy.
"(It is clear that each of the senses is accompanied by pleasure, since we apply the term pleasant to sights and sounds; and it is also clear that the pleasure is greatest when the sensory faculty is both in the best condition and acting in relation to the best object; and given excellence in the perceived object and the percipient organ, there will always be pleasure when an object to cause it and a subject to feel it are both present. )
"But the pleasure perfects the activity, not as the fixed disposition does, by being already present in the agent, but as a supervening perfection, like the bloom of health in the young and vigorous.
"So long therefore as both object thought of or perceived, and subject discerning or judging, are such as they should be,there will be pleasure in the activity; since while both the passive and the active parties to a relationship remain the same in themselves and unaltered in their relation to one another, the same result is naturally produced." (Nichomachean Ethics, 1174b-1175a)
And there is this in Capital about Aristotle on the relation of technology to human development and the realization of "the realm of freedom":
"'If,' dreamed Aristotle, the greatest thinker of antiquity, 'if every tool, when summoned, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it, just as the creations of Daedalus moved of themselves, or the tripods of Hephaestos went of their own accord to their sacred work, if the weavers' shuttles were to weave of themselves, then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers, or of slaves for the lords.' [73] And Antipatros, a Greek poet of the time of Cicero, hailed the invention of the water-wheel for grinding corn, an invention that is the elementary form of all machinery, as the giver of freedom to female slaves, and the bringer back of the golden age. [74] Oh! those heathens! They understood, as the learned Bastiat, and before him the still wiser MacCulloch have discovered, nothing of Political Economy and Christianity. They did not, for example, comprehend that machinery is the surest means of lengthening the working-day. They perhaps excused the slavery of one on the ground that it was a means to the full development of another. But to preach slavery of the masses, in order that a few crude and half-educated parvenus, might become 'eminent spinners,' 'extensive sausage-makers,' and 'influential shoe-black dealers,' to do this, they lacked the bump of Christianity." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S3c>
Ted