Ted Winslow wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > You can't escape history, which precludes appealing to a morality
> > outside history.
>
> This may be so on your understanding of "history". I don't think it's
> so on Marx's.
This whole post exhibits the great debt I owe Ted for what I've learned from him over the years. But it does _not_, I thin, show that my statement above was false but merely that it must apply to Aristotle and Hegel as well as to the posters on ths list. Aristotle was himself not outside history, and his assumptions are grounded not in any reality outside history but in the reality of social relations in 5th/4th-c Athens. "Desire" in the quotation from Aristotle below, for example, is a label (more or less useful) that one can apply to human activity _after_ the fact, but as an attempt at causal explantion it is redundant, that is, merely a label that can be attached to an action _after the fact_ but adds nothing to our knowledge of the act itself.
> His understanding sublates a tradition running from the Greeks through
> to Hegel that treats values, including ethical values, as objective
> and knowable.
I would grant that Marx owes much to this tradition, but what ist at issue is not the tradition but what Marx added and subtracted from that tradition, what it came to mean, concretely, in his mature thought. We can know, _after the fact_, through historical analysis, the 'values' that humans use under given conditions to explain and/or justify their activity, but the relations generate rather then stem from those values.
>
> Thus Aristotle defines "man" in terms that make this assumption.
>
> "What affirmation and negation are in thinking, pursuit and avoidance
> are in desire; so that since moral virtue is a state of character
> concerned with choice, and choice is deliberate desire, therefore both
> the reasoning must be true and the desire right, if the choice is to
> be good, and the latter must pursue just what the former asserts, Now
> this kind of intellect and of truth is practical; of the intellect
> which is contemplative, not practical nor productive, the good and the
> bad state are truth and falsity respectively (for this is the work of
> everything intellectual); while of the part which is practical and
> intellectual the good state is truth in agreement with right desire.
And right desire, of course, was that desire which justified limiting if not liquidating the rule of the _demos_ in Athens.
> "The origin of action-its efficient, not its final cause-is choice,
> and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end.
> This is why choice cannot exist either without reason and intellect or
> without a moral state; for good action and its opposite cannot exist
> without a combination of intellect and character.
I hope to get back to more of this fascinating post, but these sentences, with their abstract (_detached_) "intellect" and "character" do not seem to me to be relevant eithr to this thread or to the question of Marx's historical understanding. The separation of though and action implied is simply unacceptable.
Carrol