>
> In some ways it's not really so far from your view. But here's my
> problem with what you say about the education of humanity: you say
> it's an 'individualist' theory rather than a holist or essentialist
> one. But it seems to me that you are always really talking about the
> old Humanity in general rather than actual people. It's Feuerbach and
> it's mystical.
The way things seem to you is a bit different from the way things actually are.
The position I was contrasting it with was Marx's, as elaborated, for instance (and as I pointed out), in the 6th and 7th theses on Feuerbach (where it's explicitly contrasted with Feuerbach's).
> VI
>
> Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.
>
> In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.
>
> Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled:
>
> • To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual.
> • Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as “genus”, as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals.
>
> VII
>
> Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.
Here it is being used to explain the "religious sentiment" of "actual people" as the outcome of the inconsistency of their "particular form of society" with those required for the development of mind, i.e. for "education."
"Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm
According to Marx, human history as an "educative" process ends in the "particular form of society" required for the full development of "free individuality" understood as "the universal development of individuals":
"Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first social forms, in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded on objective [sachlicher] dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage. The second stage creates the conditions for the third. Patriarchal as well as ancient conditions (feudal, also) thus disintegrate with the development of commerce, of luxury, of money, of exchange value, while modern society arises and grows in the same measure." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm
As an "economic structure" it's "the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm
The real mystery is how this, Marx's "historical materialism," let alone "the old Enlightenment idea that we can break out of received ideologies using reason and science," can be made consistent with Althusser's "crude, material fetishism ... where not only the difference between man and animal disappears but even the difference between a living organism and an inanimate object." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch21.htm
Ted