From: rgroff-AT-yorku.ca
Date: Wed,  5 Nov 2003 08:50:58 -0500
Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.


Hi all,

I that see my nefarious plan to get you to talk about Marx and Aristotle and the
reconciliation (or not) of individual and social has worked!  Hah!

I pretty much agree with how Mervyn and Howard have presented Marx's position,
and I think that Carroll's friend who says that Marx is Aristotle with an
attitude is exactly right.

So Mervyn said:
I think
> Marx's conception is one which completely dispenses with illusion of
> social atomism, as Howard suggested (which is the ontological
> presupposition of methodological individualism, which therefore can't
> apply) as well as the 'oversocialized' conception of individuals (social
> fusionism), transcending the opposition of individual and social in a
> conception of social individuals who embody and freely affirm 'the life
> of society' (Hegel), i.e. their social relations (which no longer
> dominate them but are the ones they want, and of course confer civic
> duties and obligations as well as rights and freedom).

This is right, about Marx, I think, and nicely put.  

My original parenthetical point was that Marx undertheorizes the political
expression of this.  I don't think that this is an especially controversial or
brilliant point.  He theorizes the social conditions of possibility of it
magisterially.  And there is an internal reason for not doing what I want, which
is something like the fact that, for Marx, our being *is* so shaped (here,
distorted) by historically contingent social relations.  So one can argue that
it's speculative in a really serious and problematic way to try to sort out how
real freedom/flourishing will actually work, politically.  I had said that I
wondered if the fact that Marx doesn't seem to see a need for a state, in
communism, contributes to his not undertaking to theorize the specifically
political issues related to the conception of freedom.  In this limited sense,
Marx would seem to part ways with Aristotle and other republicans, in that the
we-ness, if I can put it that way, at the heart of republicanism, is not, for
Marx, to be mediated through, or fostered by, of the raison detre (sp?) of, the
state.  It is shifted, conceptually, onto a state-less social.  In part because
Marx more or less agrees with Locke that the role of the state is not to
promote, or mediate, flourishing in accordance with the Good of realizing our
specifically human form, but rather to maintain stable private property
relations.  In virtue of what the state IS, for Marx, the other stuff will
happen outside of it.

I guess what I'm saying is that even if you're working within Marx's theoretical
framework, it's not clear that he's right about what the state is necessarily,
and its possible that the reconciliation of individual and social needs to be,
and can legitimately be, further theorized at the level of moral and political
(if we think that there *will* still be a state) theory.  This is the sense of
my saying that it is harder, philosophically, than the beautiful and compelling
neo-Aristotelian conception of freedom with which Marx works might suggest.  At
a minimum, one thing that you get from Aristotle is the idea that there is
always going to be all kinds of moral conflict.  I think that that drops out,
once the Aristotle goes through Hegel and you get the reconciliation problem in
its modern form.

Yikes!  I gotta run.
Ruth

 


     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---