File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2002/bhaskar.0201, message 106


Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 20:27:03 -0500
From: Richard Moodey <moodey001-AT-mail1.gannon.edu>
Subject: RE: BHA: Species Being


At 04:19 PM 01/22/2002 -0500, Marshall Feldman wrote:


>In sense this is human nature, but "human nature" as the term is
>conventionally used, refers mostly to a set of psychological traits having
>to do with motivations and behavior (e.g., are people inherently
>acquisitive, as neoclassical economics supposes), whereas "species being" in
>Marx seems to refer more to ontological/existential conditions (e.g., humans
>transform nature to survive) and an underlying, collective self or being
>that is fulfilled when actual existence and species being are transparently
>related to each other and actual existence allows us to be as human as we
>can be. Such conditions are the absence of alienation.

Marshall,

I really like the idea that using "species being" might be a way of 
revitalizing the over-psychologized and individualistic conception of human 
nature.  We are, by nature, social.

>For this reason, I've always understood alienation in a way that differs
>with the ways some people have been discussing it on this list. I understand
>alienation to refer to a situation in which humanity lives a way of life
>(i.e., alienation is not a characteristic of an individual; it's applicable
>to humanity as a whole) that precludes it from realizing its humanity. In
>this sense, collective practices turn around and act back upon humanity,
>preventing it from realizing its potential. Thus, there's an inherent
>realism here in that humanity's possibilities and the defining
>characteristics of humanity qua humanity resonate with similar CR terms (CR
>rescuing the possible from the actual and finding necessity by virtue of the
>nature of things).
>
>I don't feel Marx himself successfully extricated the whole problematic of
>alienation and species being from its (speculative? idealist?) origins, but
>I always felt this particular reading of these concepts provided at least a
>start on how that might be done.

Yes.

Dick




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