Shane Mage wrote: > > Note, please, that Marx asserts (correctly) that humans are capable of > creating according to the "laws of beauty." But where did we discover > those *laws*? How are they to be found? Not by reasoning from empirical > data, you can be sure (that is why Kant's Critique of Judgment could never > escape from aporia). We learned of the beauty of sound from the birds, we > learned of the beauty of color from the trees and the grasses, and we learned > of the beauty of structure--from the bees! And we learned long before there > was such a thing as an individual painter, an individual architect, an > individual musician. >
Marx's distinction of the activity creative of human "art" - e.g "the finest play" - from the activity of bees sublates Kant in the Critique of Judgment. "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), and as Art only ascribe it to their Creator." http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1217&chapter=97543&layout=html&Itemid=27 The sublation transforms Kant's idea of "empirical data" by moving to an ontology and philosophical anthropology having logical space for the existence of "universal" aesthetic principles - "the laws of beauty" - knowable through human "experience" conceived in terms of these very different foundational ideas. This is a sublation of Greek thought, partly directly and partly indirectly via Marx's sublation of Hegel. They also have logical space for a particular idea, different from Kant's, of "universal" ethical principles again knowable directly through human experience. These are the principles found in Marx's accounts of how we would produce if we produced as "human beings," i.e. as "universally developed individuals." This too sublates Greek thought, partly directly and partly indirectly through Hegel. They have, however, no logical space for the idea of "'collective' consciousness." As is indicated by the idea of "true individuality," "free individuality," "fully developed individuals," "universally developed individuals," etc, Marx's ontological and philosophical anthropological ideas are "individualist" in the sense that the "individual" is the only locus to which consciousness, agency and the realization of value can reasonably be attributed. What distinguishes individualism in this sense from the individualism of "mechanical materialism" is the conception of "individuals" as internally rather than externally related, i.e. the conception (as set out, for instance, in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach) of the human essence as "the ensemble of the social relations." The "true individuality" of human being is the individuality of the "universally developed individual" able to create and appropriate the aesthetic content objectified in, for example, "the finest play." It requires particular social relations for its full development and actualization, relations themselves requiring fully human activity for their creation. The individuality and the relations are the product of human history. "Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities. In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness [22] as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois vi! ewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.)" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm Ted _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
