On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 13:53:34 -0500 "Charles Brown"
<cbrown at michiganlegal.org> writes:
>
>
> http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=11
> http://reason.com/0012/rb.the.shtml
>
> Claiming Darwin for the Left: an interview with Peter Singer
> Interview by Julian Baggini
>
> -clip-
>
> So once again, what Singer really wanted to say was overshadowed by
> his
> reputation. Which is a pity, because in his LSE lecture, A Darwinian
> Left?, which formed the centrepiece of his visit, Singer challenges
> a
> rather different taboo: the exclusion from left-wing thought of the
> ideas of Charles Darwin.
>
> ^^^^
>
> CB: This seems substantially false. Marx and Engels said Darwin's
> work
> represented their method as applied in natural history. J.B.S.
> Haldane. Marx
> had a concept of species-being.
I don't know where Peter SInger gets off in claiming that Marx denies the existence of a specifically human nature. The young Marx's critique of capitalism in terms of alienation presupposed the existence of a human nature from which we could become alienated from. And as Charles correctly points out, both Marx & Engels followed closely the work of naturalists like Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel.
>
> Even for all historically revolutionary changes in the ensemble of
> social
> relations, Marxists would affirm that many characteristics of homo
> sapiens
> as taught by biological anthropology would persist, comprising a
> human
> nature - long childhood, bipedal, mammalian, unique genome,
> language, et al.
> Marxism considers humans an animal species, in Darwin's sense.
>
> Culture operates as a LaMarckian-like mechanism, i.e. allowing
> cultural or
> extra-somatic/non-bodily inheritance of acquired characteristics..
> In this
> sense, human history goes beyond Darwinian natural history. But
> culture
> doesn't obliterate human au naturelle history.
That's true, although I would add that culture also has its own Darwinian-style selection mechanisms too. Engels seems to have had some awareness of this. Later on, Marxists like Plekhanov and Trotsky discussed the role of variation and selection in human sociocultural evolution, and in more recent times, writers like Gerald Cohen, Eliott Sober, and Alan Carling have all addressed this issue, even to the extent of offering selectionist versions of historical materialism.
>
> ^^^^^^^^
>
>
>
> Singer argues that the left's utopianism has failed to take account
> of human
> nature, because it has denied there is such a thing as a human
> nature. For
> Marx, it is the "ensemble of social relations" which makes
> us the people we are, and so, as Singer points out, "It follows from
> this belief that if you can change the 'ensemble of social
> relations',
> you can totally change human nature."
>
>
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>
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