Jerry Monaco wrote:
> Ted, I have asked you before to please explain to me what you mean by
> determination and self-determination and how it can at all be applied
> to the issues that we are talking about in these threads. I think
> that the evidence is good that I-language is a biological faculty in
> an analogous way that vision is a biological faculty. What does this
> have to do with determination or self-determination? In what sense is
> vision "determined" or "self-determined" and what would have to do
> with the biological system of vision?
As I've said (more than once), "self-determination" in the sense I'm using the term means what Hegel calls a "will proper" and a "universal will". A "will proper" is:
"(a) pure indeterminateness of the Ego, which as such has no limitation or a content which is immediately extant through nature but is indifferent towards any and every determinateness. (b) The Ego can, at the same time, pass over to a determinateness and make a choice of some one or other and then actualize it."
The idea is inconsistent with this:
> the narrow hypothesis that societies,
> psychology, and "thought" are constrained and guided by our biological
> make-up
Moreover, what remains within the limits set by "our biological make- up" understood in this way isn't open to self-determination in the above sense. Our biological make-up in combination with our "environment" produces pure determinateness (as opposed to "pure indeterminateness") of the ego and so leaves no opening within which the ego "can ... make a choice of some one or other ['determiniteness'] and then actualize it."
You make nonsense of language, vision, argument, cooperation etc. when you attempt to understand them within this framework. The reason is that you then have no "subject" for these things.
In Marx, in contrast, human vision is potentially the "sense" of a "conscious species-being". This is essential to it's capacity to become a sense through which "beauty" can be perceived. This point is made in Marx's account of the development of the human "senses" as the actualization of a "conscious species-being".
"Obviously the human eye takes in things in a different way from the crude non-human eye, the human ear in a different way from the crude ear, etc.
"To sum up: it is only when man's object becomes a human object or objective that man does not lose himself in that object. This is only possible when it becomes a social object for him and when he himself becomes a social being for himself, just as society becomes a being for him in this object.
"On the one hand, therefore, it is only when objective reality universally becomes for man in society the reality of man's essential powers, becomes human reality, and thus the reality of his own essential powers, that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, objects that confirm and realize his individuality, his objects — i.e., he himself becomes the object. The manner in which they become his depends on the nature of the object and the nature of the essential power that corresponds to it; for it is just the determinateness of this relation that constitutes the particular, real mode of affirmation. An object is different for the eye from what it is for the ear, and the eye's object is different for from the ear's. The peculiarity of each essential power is precisely its peculiar essence, and thus also the peculiar mode of its objectification, of its objectively real, living being. Man is therefore affirmed in the objective world not only in thought but with all the senses.
"On the other hand, let us look at the question in its subjective aspect: only music can awaken the musical sense in man and the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers — i.e., can only be for me insofar as my essential power exists for me as a subjective attribute (this is because the sense of an object for me extends only as far as my sense extends, only has sense for a sense that corresponds to that object). In the same way, and for the same reasons, the senses of social man are different from those of non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature can the wealth of subjective human sensitivity — a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, in short, senses capable of human gratification — be either cultivated or created. For not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, the human sense, the humanity of the senses — all these come into being only through the existence of their objects, through humanized nature. The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history. Sense which is a prisoner of crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For a man who is starving, the human form of food does not exist, only its abstract form exists; it could just as well be present in its crudest form, and it would be hard to say how this way of eating differs from that of animals. The man who is burdened with worries and needs has no sense for the finest of plays; the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value, and not the beauty and peculiar nature of the minerals; he lacks a mineralogical sense; thus the objectification of the human essence, in a theoretical as well as a practical respect, is necessary both in order to make man's senses human and to create an appropriate human sense for the whole of the wealth of humanity and of nature." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/epm/ 3rd.htm>
Ted