> Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> wrote:
>
> For instance, is it true
>> that human being
>> is the being whose "nature" is the potential to
>> become fully
>> rationally self-determined?
>
> Chris responded:
>
> I don't think the concept of being fully rationally
> self-determined makes any sense outside of a Kantian
> or Absolute Idealist ontology, and in the latter case
> it folds into the self-determination of God.
> *********
>
> We create God. Perhaps when we realize that, we'll dispense with
> the need
> to look to outside, imagined, Ideal authority to tell us what to
> do...we'll become "rationally self-determined". Perhaps then, we'll
> realize that expanding the realm free-time is at the core of the
> social revolution.
I pointed some time ago to the relation between Hegel's idea of "god" as, translating the language of religion into the language of thought, the “Unity of the Universal and Individual” and Marx's idea of the "universally developed individual," i.e. of the fully rationally self- determined individual.
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2007/2007-September/018381.html>
Marx's idea of penultimate social arrangements, including their distribution principle, as arrangements from which all barriers to full individual development have been eliminated requires, on the part of their creators, knowledge of what would constitute full human development and of the conditions such development requires.
It's not clear how individuals who perceive their own interest as consistent with exploiting others and who are given to feelings of resentment towards those who do exploit would have the requisite knowledge.
Rational "interest," according to Marx, involves a wholly positive interest in relations of mutual recognition as the ethical essence of a good life. These exclude exploitation, i.e. the treatment of others as means rather than ends.
His own understanding of the conditions required to develop rational interest, "true individuality," is set out in the following:
"If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity. If man is unfree in the materialistic sense, i.e., is free not through the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individuality, crime must not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social sources of crime must be destroyed, and each man must be given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being. If man is shaped by environment, his environment must be made human." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_3_d.htm
>
Ted