Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
> this has me thinking of alasdair macintyre's _dependent rational animals_. i
> taught this book once in an intro ethics class. his argument (or anyway a
> large part of it) is essentially that human beings are not built (not to say
> "designed") to be completely independent. we can't be. and so ethical/moral
> models that take independence (and particularly with a certain kind of
> rationality as part of that indendence) as an absolute ideal set us up for
> failure. at best.
>
We had an extensive thread on "dependency" ('good' or 'bad') many years ago, begun by Catherine Driscoll and Yoshie.
Here is Yoshie's post:
Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu Mon Feb 12 18:11:23 PST 2001
Maureen criticizes Zizek for not taking a Lacanian hint:
[zizek]>>In other words (and pace Steven Pinker), there is no inborn "language instinct." There are, of course, genetic conditions that have to be met for a living being to be able to speak; but one actually starts to speak and enters the symbolic universe only in reacting to a traumatic jolt. And the mode of this reacting - the fact that, in order to cope with a trauma, we symbolize - is not "in our genes."
[maureen] >And this is where I foolishly hoped Zizek might satisfy my Desire. The Lacanian virtuoso actually waves his wand over the terrain of biology; so rather than lightly hopping from biology to psychoanalysis, I hoped he'd say something more provocative about links between the two. Because one thing that's always interested me about Lacanian analysis (and why I don't think the whole project can just be dismissed "from a materialist perspective"), is the theory's grounding in the uniqueness of human biology.
The Real is based on the anatomical incompleteness, the biological "prematurity" (compared to the present-from-birth instincts of other species) of human babies; on the motor unco-ordination, unease, organic dependence on others etc. experienced by these not-yet-subjects, these aggregates of organs, sensations, impulses, zones, etc.
Baby humans are of course born this way as the product of their species having biologically evolved into "naturally" symbolic, social, creatures. This symbolic evolution made humans more open and "undetermined," and made their childhoods exceptionally long, more biologically and psychically "traumatic" and more deeply dependent on the social/family formations they're born into. [end quote]
Why should dependence necessarily be experienced as "traumatic," though? Isn't it the capitalist ensemble of social relations (which make "Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham" the rule) that makes dependence -- which in itself can be a _pleasurable_ condition -- "traumatic" for many? In other words, isn't the "trauma" (or stigma) of dependence a historically-bound experience? These are questions that have important implications for feminism & disability rights.
Have you read Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych"? How about Jane Austen's _Mansfield Park_? Yoshie ---------
Here is Catherine's response:
Catherine Driscoll catherine.driscoll at adelaide.edu.au Mon Feb 12 19:04:49 PST 2001
I've been reading many posts lately but usually way too late to feel like I had a present-tense reply, but...
Yoshie writes:
Maureen] > >Baby humans are of course born this way as the product of their species having biologically evolved into "naturally" symbolic, social, creatures. This symbolic evolution made humans more open and "undetermined," and made their childhoods exceptionally long, more biologically and psychically "traumatic" and more deeply dependent on the social/family formations they're born into.
Yoshie]> Why should dependence necessarily be experienced as "traumatic," though? Isn't it the capitalist ensemble of social relations (which make "Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham" the rule) that makes dependence -- which in itself can be a _pleasurable_ condition -- "traumatic" for many? In other words, isn't the "trauma" (or stigma) of dependence a historically-bound experience? These are questions that have important implications for feminism & disability rights.
Have you read Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych"? How about Jane Austen's _Mansfield Park_?
Catherine] I'm prepared to bite here. What's great about dependence? Accepting that dependence is not a bad thing or an error, and that it can relieve one of less than wholly pleasant things -- like responsiblity for example [god i sound like sartre... well i don't care... it's not incomprehensible we might agree on *one* thing] what would be good about dependence?
babies are not, for me, dependent, because that's a relinquishment (precisely what's pleasurable about it)... they have a different engagement with others, but why make that a hierarchy? And don't tell me only the Satreans of the world make that a hierarchy -- to depend is to hang from, lean on, be determined by ...
And then, what does Mansfield Park have to do with this? Catherine
-------------------------
And a long thread took off from there - not well done, I think, by any of the participants, and I regret that we never got back to the topics of "dependency" and _Mansfield Park_. For mthe whole thread, beginning with Doug's posting of Zizek's article, see
Carrol
P.S. The metaphor of "hardwired" (which someone invoked) is obscurantist: no animal is "wired," hard or otherwise, for the simple reason that animals, including humans, are not computers, and computers do not make even an acceptable rough-&-ready model of human thought or the human brain (or for the brain of any other species).