On 2002.05.28 08:05 AM, "Carrol Cox" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I can't find the or original post you are responding to. And where does > the Marx quote come from? > > Carrol > > Sabri Oncu wrote: >> >>> reads like Humean instrumentalism to me............. >>> >>> Ian >> >> That should be your expertise so I make no comments about this. >> My only concern is with Marx's writing style. I find him very >> difficult to read. For example, this sentence: >> >>> If, therefore, industry is conceived as the exoteric >>> revelation of man's essential powers, we also gain an >>> understanding of the human essence of nature or the >>> natural essence of man. >> >> What exactly this sentence says, I am not sure. Maybe, partly >> because he wrote the original in German and this is a >> not-so-great translation and partly because to me English is a >> code I am decoding. Nevertheless, it is a difficulty I have to >> live with I suppose. >> >> Best, >> >> Sabri > Again I cite Marx's manuscript about natural science MIYACHI TATSUO Psychiatric Department Komaki municipal hosipital 1-20.JOHBUHSHI KOMAKI CITY AICHI PREF. 486-0044 TEL:0568-76-4131 FAX 0568-76-4145 [EMAIL PROTECTED] The natural sciences have developed an enormous activity and have accumulated an ever-growing mass of material. Philosophy, however, has remained just as alien to them as they remain to philosophy. Their momentary unity was only a chimerical illusion. The will was there, but the power was lacking. Historiography itself pays regard to natural science only occasionally, as a factor of enlightenment, utility, and of some special great discoveries. But natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, although its immediate effect had to be the furthering of the dehumanisation of man. Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the exoteric revelation of man's essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man. In consequence, natural science will lose its abstractly material — or rather, its idealistic — tendency, and will become the basis of human science, as it has already become — albeit in an estranged form — the basis of actual human life, and to assume one basis for life and a different basis for science is as a matter of course a lie. <The nature which develops in human history — the genesis of human society — is man's real nature; hence nature as it develops through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature.> Sense-perception (see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science. Only when it proceeds from sense-perception in the two-fold form of sensuous consciousness and sensuous need — is it true science. All history is the history of preparing and developing "man" to become the object of sensuous consciousness, and turning the requirements of "man as man" into his needs. History itself is a real part of natural history of nature developing into man. Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science. Man is the immediate object of natural science; for immediate, sensuous nature for man is, immediately, human sensuousness (the expressions are identical) — presented immediately in the form of the other man sensuously present for him. Indeed, his own sense-perception first exists as human sensuousness for himself through the other man. But nature is the immediate object of the science of man: the first — object of man — man — is nature, sensuousness; and the particular human sensuous essential powers can only find their self-understanding in the science of the natural world in general, just as they can find their objective realisation only in natural objects. The element of thought itself — the element of thought's living expression — language — is of a sensuous nature. The social reality of nature, and human natural science, or the natural science of man, are identical terms. <It will be seen how in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy come the rich human being and the rich human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human manifestations of life — the man in whom his own realisation exists as an inner necessity, as need. Not only wealth, but likewise the poverty of man — under the assumption of socialism — receives in equal measure a human and therefore social significance.
