On 17 May 00, at 14:05, Ted Winslow wrote:
> Marx has appropriated idea of "practical-laboring activity" as
> self-determination from Kant and Hegel.
in the process transforming its meaning and, as Habermas would
say, reducing it to "techne", and though there is a critical reflective
aspect to Marx, it is still strictly in terms of class consciousness.
Kant:
> "By right we ought only to describe as art, production through freedom, i.e.
> through a will that places reason at the basis of its actions. For although
> we like to call the product of bees (regularly built cells of wax) a work of
> art, this is only by way of analogy; as soon as we feel that this work of
> theirs is based on no proper rational deliberation, we say that it is a
> product of nature (of instinct).
> "If, as sometimes happens, in searching through a bog we come upon a bit
> of shaped wood, we do not say, this is a product of nature, but of art. Its
> producing cause has conceived a purpose to which the plank owes its form.
> Elsewhere too we should see art in everything which is made, so that a
> representative of it in its cause must have preceded its actual existence
> (as even in the case of bees), though without the effect of it even being
> capable of being thought. But if we call anything absolutely a work of art,
> in order to distinguish it from a natural effect, we always understand by
> that a work of man." Kant, Critique of Judgement (Bernard translation),
> p.145-6
This is one cognitive faculty among two others; Marx goes too far
in his reduction of Kant's practical (ethical) judgement to bourgeois
consciousness; it is true that this is a form of judgement *that has
developed* and is not the self-expression of an abstract ego, but I
think it is important that we understand that the French
revolutionaries were actually realizing this rational moral agent.
Hegel:
> "Man is not only immediate and single, like all other natural things; as
> mind, he also reduplicates himself, existing for himself because he thinks
> himself. He does this, in the first place, theoretically, by bringing
> himself into his own consciousness, so as to form an idea of himself. But
> he also realizes himself for himself through practical activity. This he
> does by reshaping external things, by setting the seal of his inner being
> upon them, thereby endowing them with his own characteristics. Man's
> spiritual freedom consists in this reduplicating process of human
> consciousness, whereby all that exists is made explicit within him and all
> that is in him is realized without. Here not only artistic making but all
> human behaving and explaining whether in the forms of political and moral
> action, religious imaginative awareness, or scientific knowledge--has its
> ground and necessary origin." (Hegel, Aesthetics, pp. 3-4)
Hegel thought that Kant's three forms of judgement could be
reconstituted under Reason...runnning out of time, see below for a
bit more.
> In the third thesis on Feuerbach, Marx explicitly rejects the "materialism"
> which excludes any role for self-determination and which implicitly
> underpins the idea that "good" people can be "constructed" through
> coercive imposition.
That's just one sentence about which too much fuss has been
made due to a religious reading of Marx. But I think Lenin was right
that the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat is already
there in Marx: you have to be naive politically to think that the
radical policies which Marx is calling for - as in the Manifesto - can
be accomplished without coercion.
The concept of self-determination in Faust has to be sublated, and
it in fact was sublated later in European thinking, as Hegel showed
in the Phen.
>
> The nature of "autonomy" is such that individuals can only attain it through
> their own efforts. This is, by the way, also the ultimate insight to which
> Goethe's Faust is brought by his own process of "bildung".
>
> I work that millions may possess this space,
> If not secure, a free and active race.
> Here man and beast, in green and fertile fields,
> Will know the joys that new-won region yields,
> Will settle on the firm slopes of a hill
> Raised by a bold and zealous people's skill.
> A paradise our closed-in land provides,
> Though to its margin rage the blustering tides;
> When they eat through, in fierce devouring flood,
> All swiftly join to make the damage good.
> Ay, in this thought I pledge my faith unswerving,
> Here wisdom speaks its final word and true,
> None is of freedom or of life deserving
> unless he daily conquers it anew.
> With dangers thus begirt, defying fears,
> Childhood, youth, age shall strive through strenuous
> years
> Such busy, teeming throngs I long to see,
> Standing on freedom's soil, a people free.
> Then to the moment could I say:
> Linger you now, you are so fair!
> Now records of my earthly day
> No flight of aeons can impair -
> Foreknowledge comes, and fills me with such bliss,
> I take my joy, my highest moment this.
>
> Faust, Part 2, pp. 269-70 (Penguin translation by Philip Wayne)
>
> Ted Winslow
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