> Pretty incoherent stuff, meaningless gibberish in fact. It must
> require amazing perseverance to read this sort of thing? But of course
> one can't expect those who reject a materialist conception to make
> much sense I suppose. An inability to think clearly is an essential
> prerequisite for such a philosophy.
This is one possibility.
The idea is that, in the case of an ideal human occasion of experience, the goodness of the experience - its emotional content - is the feeling arising from appropriating and creating beauty and truth within relations of mutual recognition. These relations are internal relations, i.e. others through their creations are immanent in me via my internal relations to them and I through my creations will become immanent in them through their internal relations to me. This is what is meant by describing the occasion as an "activity of concern."
Marx repeats the same "meaningless gibberish" in his description of how we would produce if we "carried out production as human beings."
> Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings.
> Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other
> person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality,
> its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual
> manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at
> the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my
> personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power
> beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would
> have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied
> a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's
> essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding
> to the need of another man's essential nature. 3) I would have been
> for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would
> become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own
> essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently
> would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love.
> 4) In the individual expression of my life I would have directly
> created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual
> activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature,
> my human nature, my communal nature.
>
> Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our
> essential nature.
>
> This relationship would moreover be reciprocal; what occurs on my side
> has also to occur on yours.
>
> Let us review the various factors as seen in our supposition:
>
> My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of
> life. Presupposing private property, my work is an alienation of life,
> for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means
> of life. My work is not my life.
>
> Secondly, the specific nature of my individuality, therefore, would be
> affirmed in my labour, since the latter would be an affirmation of my
> individual life. Labour therefore would be true, active property.
> Presupposing private property, my individuality is alienated to such a
> degree that this activity is instead hateful to me, a torment, and
> rather the semblance of an activity. Hence, too, it is only a forced
> activity and one imposed on me only through an external fortuitous
> need, not through an inner, essential one.
>
> My labour can appear in my object only as what it is. It cannot appear
> as something which by its nature it is not. Hence it appears only as
> the expression of my loss of self and of my powerlessness that is
> objective, sensuously perceptible, obvious and therefore put beyond
> all doubt.
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/
Elsewhere Marx points to musical composition to illustrate "really free working" as an "activity of concern" in Whitehead's sense. He contrasts this with "labour" which, though also "real freedom" when it is the labour of a "universally developed individual," obtains its measure from the outside," i.e. is not activity as an end in itself:
"It seems quite far from Smith's mind that the individual, 'in his normal state of health, strength, activity, skill, facility', also needs a normal portion of work, and of the suspension of tranquillity. Certainly, labour obtains its measure from the outside, through the aim to be attained and the obstacles to be overcome in attaining it. But Smith has no inkling whatever that this overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity - and that, further, the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits - hence as self-realization, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labour. He is right, of course, that, in its historic forms as slave-labour, serf-labour, and wage-labour, labour always appears as repulsive, always as external forced labour; and not-labour, by contrast, as 'freedom, and happiness'. This holds doubly: for this contradictory labour; and, relatedly, for labour which has not yet created the subjective and objective conditions for itself (or also, in contrast to the pastoral etc. state, which it has lost), in which labour becomes attractive work, the individual's self-realization, which in no way means that it becomes mere fun, mere amusement, as Fourier, with grisette-like naiveté, conceives it. Really free working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion. The work of material production can achieve this character only (1) when its social character is posited, (2) when it is of a scientific and at the same time general character, not merely human exertion as a specifically harnessed natural force, but exertion as subject, which appears in the production process not in a merely natural, spontaneous form, but as an activity regulating all the forces of nature. " Grundrisse p. 611
Wordsworth pointed out about the fragmentation of the universe into "vacuous bits of matter with no internal values, and merely hurrying through space" that "we murder to dissect."
Ted