Michael Perelman quoted Marx:
> Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a
> knife and fork
> is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid
> of hand, nail
> and tooth. Production thus produces not only the object but also the
> manner of
> consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively. Production
> thus creates the
> consumer.
Marx, however, is here appropriating a philosophical tradition from Aristotle through to Hegel in which the end point of human development is a "universal will" i.e. a will self-determined by reason alone and not by "instinct".
The idea of moving beyond instinct to rational self-determination of the means used to satisfy hunger comes from Kant's "Conjectural Beginning of Human History" (in _Kant On History- ed. Lewis White Beck.
New York: Macmillan, 1963. pp. 53-68)
Here it is "conjectured" that starting from a position in which human willing was determined by "instinct" “soon reason began to stir”. The first instinct to be affected was the "instinct for nourishment." This led us to "enlarge knowledge of foodstuffs", "the first attempt at free choice."
“He discovered in himself a power of choosing for himself a way of life, of not being bound without alternative to a single way, like the animals.”
“reason has this peculiarity that, aided by the imagination, it can create artificial desires which are not only unsupported by natural instinct but actually contrary to it.”
“He discovered in himself a power of choosing for himself a way of life, of not being bound without alternative to a single way, like the animals.”
As conjectured by Kant, the second step in this development concerned the "sexual instinct".
“Next to the instinct of nourishment, through which nature preserves every individual, the most preeminent is the sexual instinct, through which it cares for the preservation of the kind. Once reason had been stirred, it did not omit to demonstrate its influence on the latter too. The human being soon found that the stimulus to sex, which with animals rests merely on a transient, for the most part periodic impulse, was capable for him of being prolonged and even increased through the power of the imagination, whose concern, to be sure, is more with moderation, yet at the same time works more enduringly and uniformly the more its object is withdrawn from the senses, and he found that it prevents the boredom that comes along with the satisfaction of a merely animal desire. The figleaf (Genesis 3:7) was thus the product of a far greater manifestation of reason than that which it had demonstrated in the first stage of its development. For to make an inclination more inward and enduring, by withdrawing its object from the senses, shows already the consciousness of some dominion of reason over impulse and not merely, as in the first step, a faculty for doing service to those impulses within a lesser or greater extension. Refusal was the first artifice for leading from the merely sensed stimulus over to ideal ones, from merely animal desire gradually over to love, and with the latter from the feeling of the merely agreeable over to the taste for beauty, in the beginning only in human beings but then, however, also in nature. Moreover, propriety (Sittsamkeit) an inclination by good conduct (guten Anstand) to influence others to respect for us (through the concealment of that which could incite low esteem), as the genuine foundation of all true sociability, gave the first hint toward the formative education (Ausbildung) of the human being as a moral (sittlichen) creature. A small beginning, which, however, is epoch-making, in that it gives an entirely new direction to the way of thinking -- and is more important than the entire immeasurable series of extensions of culture that followed upon it."
In Marx, as here in Kant, we find a conception of “reason as a power which can extend itself beyond all limits to which all animals are confined”.
The idea that "production thus produces not only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively" is part of this conception.
"Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man's essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form - in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.) in a word, human sense, the human nature of the senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.
"The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract existence as food. It could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of animals." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
Ted