Seth Ackerman wrote:
>
>
> ...in the same sentence. How can our ability to engage with the world be
> "completely" socially determined, yet at the same time this
> determination can be "by no means total"? I understand the difficulty
> with this point, since it's a variation on an old philosophical
> conundrum that is hard to answer definitively. I'm content with the
> observation that the extent to which our ability to engage with the
> world is socially determined is "by no means total."
Wherever and whenever we find ourselves we are always already enmeshed in an ensemble of social relations: we simply have no existence independent of or autonomously of those relations. This seems to me part of the ABC of hisotrical materialism. Another way to put it is that we do not _have_ a history; we _are_ our history; there is no isolated "self" to undergo a history independent of it.)
I had worked this out by reading Marx before I had ever even heard the word "postmodern" except in reference to some trend sin musical composition!
Carrol