----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Winslow" <egwinslow at rogers.com>
This ignores the fact that Marx has appropriated, partly directly and partly through German idealism, the ancient idea that the "good" is something objective and knowable. On this basis, he distinguishes between rational and irrational "needs," i.e rational needs are those arising from knowledge of the "good." The ultimate "goods" in this sense are intellectual, aesthetic and ethical. The first two provide the communicative content of the third. The developed "individual" with the capabilities required to know and actualize the "good" in this sense is the "universally developed individual" who is a "social human being" both because social relations as relations of mutual recognition constitute the essence of the "good" for such a being and because such social relations are required for her full development.
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Man that sure is a lot of scare quotes. I notice they're around terms that are incredibly and irreducibly vague, as well as implying some kind of monism; as if we have a shred of evidence that the grammar of "the good" is even coherent.
http://www.giffordlectures.org/Browse.asp?PubID=TPETGT&Volume=00&Issue=00&ArticleID=02 Lecture Fourteenth
The Final Results of the Aristotelian Philosophy
IN the last lecture I sought to illustrate the doctrine of Aristotle that contemplation is higher than action, and that it is through the former alone that we enter into conscious relation with the divine, by contrasting it with the opposite doctrine of Kant and his disciples, that it is only the postulates of practical reason, the beliefs which are bound up with the consciousness of duty, which free us from the narrow limits of scientific knowledge and cast some light upon the higher destinies of man.
[snip]
The central thought of this tractate is, as I have indicated, that God must be conceived as living a life of pure contemplation. To him, as a being beyond all the limitations of finitude, we can ascribe only an activity, which is free from all unrest, because it is conditioned by no matter, and has no object but itself. Thus God's life is not like man's, a process of development from potentiality to actuality; it is the out-going of an unimpeded energy, which yet rests for ever in the joy of its own completeness. Such an activity must be purely ideal.
[snip]
“The life of God,” says Aristotle, “is like the highest kind of activity with us: but while we can maintain it but for a short time, with him it is eternal; for it is an activity which is at the same time the joy of attainment. What other reason can be given for the fact that the modes of our waking consciousness, sensation and thought, are the keenest of pleasures, from which also the secondary pleasures of hope and memory are derived? Now, pure thought is thinking of that which is essentially good, and the highest thought has the highest object. And if we ask what that object is, the answer must be that the intelligence thinks itself when it lays hold of that which is intelligible: in other words, the intelligence itself becomes intelligible when it comes into immediate contact with the intelligible object and thinks it, so that subject and object are identified. For the faculty which can receive into itself the intelligible, which is also the real, is the intelligence, and its activity implies that it has its object in itself. Hence it is in this activity rather than in the mere capacity for it that the intelligence shows its divine nature. Contemplation is thus the best and happiest of activities, and if all we could say were that God's life is like our life in the highest moments of contemplative thought, it would be worthy of our admiration: but if it be better with him than with us, it must be still more worthy of it. And so it is indeed. In him is life: for the activity of intelligence is life, and He is that activity. Thus his essential activity constitutes a perfect and a blessed life. We speak of God, therefore, as a living being, perfect and eternal: for to him is ascribed a life which is continuous and eternal: or, we might rather say, He is life eternal.”2
As if Darwin and Einstein and many other moderns, let alone plenty of schools of ancient thinkers, didn't demolish the crap quoted above?
Ian