> "The absolutely isolated individual has always been an
> illusion. The most esteemed personal qualities, such
> as independence, will to freedom, sympathy, and the
> sense of justice, are social as well as individual
> virtues. The fully developed individual is the
> consummation of a fully developed society."
>
> - Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason
Marx's ontology is an ontology of "internal relations."
This doesn't mean it's not "individualist." In fact, it treats "individuals" as the only locus of agency and the realization of value.
The "individuality" that defines human "individuals" is, according to Marx, the potential to develop and actualize the full rational self- determination elaborated by Engels in theAnti-Duhring passage summarizing and endorsing Hegel's idea of full rational self- determination as "the unity of the universal and individual," the identity of "freedom" and "necessity."
An "individuality" with this potential is itself "social" in the sense that its existence requires a specific set of internal relations including the historical set from which the set required for the existence of individuals with this potential derives.
According to Marx, this potential (the human "in itself") becomes actual ("for itself") through al set of internally related "educational" stages ending in the "fully developed society" that (a) both provides the developmental relations required for the full development and actualization of the "fully developed individual" and (b) is itself the fully rationally self-determined creation of such individuals, i.e. of "educated" individuals who "determine their knowing, willing, and acting in a universal way." (Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 187).
This "internal relations" sense of "social" and of human being as a "social being" is, therefore, and contrary to what Carrol claims, not merely consistent with the ideas of "individualism" and "self- determination," it's an essental aspect of Marx's historical materialist version of these ideas.
The ontological idea of "externally related" and, in this sense, "absolutely isolated" individuals is, therefore, a particular kind of "individualism," not "individualism" per se. In the form it takes as one of the ontological ideas that define scientific materialism, it's found in Russell's "retained" belief (which, as he says in "Beliefs: Discarded and Retained," he retained in spite of Whitehead having demonstrated to him that his criticism of Hegel's idea of "internal relations" was mistaken) that:
"the world is made up of an immense number of bits, and that, so far as logic can show, each bit might be exactly as it is even if other bits did not exist.” <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2007/2007-September/017757.html>
"Knowledge" understood as rationally self-determined belief has its ground in the self-consciousness of the rationally self-determined individual.
In the Theses on Feuerbach Marx is objecting not to this idea but to the failure to perceive the self-consciousness of such an individual as self-consciousness of "sensuous activity." It's this conception of "self-consciousness" that's meant by the word "praxis" in these theses, i.e. praxis is self-consciousness of the embeddedness in internal relations that constitutes the "individual" as an "activity" - a "process" - within "internal relations" as opposed to an "absolutely isolated" "substance" within "external relations." "Experience" as direct self-consciousness of "sensuous activity" in this sense then explains how we "know" reality. "Reality" as a reality of activities in internal relations is directly knowable through self-consciousness as self-consciousness of this activity, through self-consciousness as "praxis." "Essence" can be reached through "appearance" because, through internal relations, appearance signifies essence.
This re-conception of experience, a re-conception grounded in a "phenomenology" of the object of rational self-consciousness, is also Husserl's answer to the "solipsism of the present moment" implied by the interpretation of experience found in Kant and Hume. In his Dialectics of the Concrete, Karel Kosik shows this to be the case and uses this Marx/Husserl version of "phenomenology" to critique Heidegger's.
Marx, in this as well sublating a tradition in thought running from the Greeks through to Hegel, claims that ideally good relations are "eudaimonic" relations of "mutual recognition" between "fully developed individuals." Such relations objectify the "universal," e.g. objectify the "laws of beauty" where the content of such relations is the "composition" and "appropriation" of "the most beautiful music" or "the finest play."
It's the extent to which the "relation of man to woman" is a relation of "mutual recognition" in this sense that it "sensuously manifests" "the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man."
This idea of "love" as "mutual recognition" is also found in the passages from Dante and Milton I've previously quoted, e.g.
"Yet not so strictly hath our Lord imposed Labour, as to debar us when we need Refreshment, whether food, or talk between, Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse Of looks and smiles; for smiles from reason flow, To brute denied, and are of love the food; Love, not the lowest end of human life. For not to irksome toil, but to delight, He made us, and delight to reason joined. " http://www.readprint.com/chapter-7369/John-Milton
Marx's representation of the "products" (e.g. "the most beautiful mustic," "the finest play"), whose creation and appropriation constitute the content of such relations, as "mirrors" ("Our products would [if 'we had carried out production as human beings'] be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.") is taken from Dante.
"That Good, ineffable and infinite, which is above, directs Itself toward love as light directs itself to polished bodies. Where ardor is, that Good gives of itself; and where more love is, there that Good confers a greater measure of eternal worth. And when there are more souls above who love, there's more to love well there, and they love more, and mirror-like, each soul reflects the other. " Purgatorio, Canto XV (Mandelbaum translation)
In the article "Giving an Account of Oneself" to which Robert Wood recently directed attention, Butler ignores the ontological and anthropological ideas incorporated in this idea of "mutual recognition" both in her interpretation of Hegel's version of the idea and in her attempt to elaborate a version incorporating her own ideas.
Ted