----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Winslow" <egwinslow at rogers.com>
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.
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Well the archives show we went round and round on just what the content of the meaning of 'universally developed individuals' and couldn't even agree on how to determine whether his definition was even valid. Does that mean we're self-estranged? Clearly we're in the realm of mutual recognition all the time; communities are always already sensuous; there is a riot of beauty in the world, "any part of experience can be beautiful" -Whitehead; people will always have petty disagreements over what is art; it's hard to think of the one true definition of wealth; and one person's idea of freedom may be another's idea of oppression, no matter what way we organize instutions to mediate and co-create human experiences.
>
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.
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Which of course begs the question of who gets to define what coercion is:
"The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names, liberty and tyranny. The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a *liberator*, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as a destroyer of liberty...Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agree upon a definition of the word liberty" [Abraham Lincoln at the Sanitary Fair, Baltimore MD April 1864]
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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.
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Well, just what is inauthentic? The problem of defining authenticity is like the problem of defining false consciousness. I've no more seen a non question begging analysis of the latter than I have of the former. Perhaps that means I'm a fake and suffer from false consciousness?
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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."
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I'll totally agree all my claims are corrigible.
>
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.
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Oh gosh, not the foundation metaphor again. We're not going to resolve thousands of years of philosophical disputes on this list. Come to think of it, why haven't they been resolved? Why do language using creatures disagree at all about an enormous variety of issues if there are final, true answers regarding love, beauty, money, universality, rationality, truth, ethics, authenticity.....the indefinite list.
I don't think for one second there's a person on this list that would assert life in the trenches in WWI would be better than enjoying a cold beer on a hot day watching the sun set. But I can't make heads nor tails of how using the term authenticity, universally developed individual etc. adds one iota to enabling me to reach the judgement that the latter is preferable to the formerr. Nor can I understand why I, or anyone else, needs rational foundations -in what?- to make the claim that the beer at sunset is better than machine gun bullets on a rainy day at Somme. Both are equally real experiences. What does the term authentic and inauthentic add to them? J.B.S. Haldane enjoyed the heck out of blowing up people in WWI; aesthetic delight internally related to horror. Equally authentic.
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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):
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Careful, or Michael Dawson will get upset with your Hegelese. :->
There is not any historical evidence that internally related mutual recognition by universally developed individuals can overcome intractable conflicts over norms, subjectivities, insitutions and their agent' produced prerogatives etc. To the extent that KM's terms, or Heidegger's or Aristotle's or Keynes' are non-contestably valid, they are nothing more than grand sweeping predictions. It does not follow that even if they were non-contestably valid, we, who do not live in the future, suffer from indefinite self-estrangement, inauthenticity, semi-criminous love of money etc. relative to them.
"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)
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In heaven Aristotle and Wilfrid Sellars are in fisticuffs over their doctrines of perception and theory. :->
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
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See the Lincoln quote above. Grand sweeping prediction; there will be no sublation of zoon politikon and deep conflict even in a society filled with authentic people engaged in mutual recognition and acting as universally developed individuals.
Yours in pluralism and solidarity,
Ian