Jerry Monaco wrote:
> On 5/31/06, Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> wrote:
> >So the answer to the following question:
>
> > Is there a biological component in the unique human capacity to form
> > relations of mutual recognition ?
>
> > is "no" where, as in the following, you mean by "biological" not
> self-
> > determined in the above sense.
>
> I am not sure I understand what he is saying. If our capacities to
> make choices are not biological capacities then what are they?
> Where do they come from? Are we not biological in some very broad
> sense? Just because we cannot make a biological theory to describe
> what ever Ted is calling "self-determination" does not mean that
> whatever it is is something other than part of our brain/mind/body.
The question at issue was the meaning of Marx's idea of ideal human relations - relations of mutual recognition.
You've cut the passage from Charles referred to by "in the following". That passage was:
> The human species name should be _Homo communis_, not _sapiens_.
> "Sapiens"
> softly implies that it is individual brain capacity to reason that
> is the
> evolutionary change to humans. No, it is capacities and
> inclinations of
> individuals to work as a group, to live socially, to live
> communisitically
> that is the _revolutionary_ leap to the species human.
So by the idea of a "biological component in the the unique capacity to form relations of mutual recognition" I understood Charles to mean a determinant (e.g. instinct) of these relations other than reason (i.e. other than self-determination in Hegel's sense of a "universal will"). It's through this interpretation that he reaches the conclusion that primal human relations could have been relations of mutual recognition.
As the passages I quoted demonstrate, this is a misinterpretation. Thus:
"Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history."
Marx calls the idea of capitalist relations as "a spontaneous, natural attribute inherent in individuals and inseparable from their nature (in antithesis to their conscious knowing and willing)" an "insipid notion".
The passages also contradict your interpretive claim that:
> there is not contradiction between Marx's basic
> insights into human history and the narrow hypothesis that societies,
> psychology, and "thought" are constrained and guided by our biological
> make-up and thus to some large extent are a result biological
> evolution.
Ted