Subject: RE: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2003 11:27:27 -0500
From: "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu>


Hi Howard,

Since I raised the same issue, I have read your reply to Tobin as constituting a reply to me, also.  I still have some further comments.

You wrote:

"First, the object of Marx's analysis is "individuals producing in society" -- this is the second sentence of the Grundrisse.  Remember that it is only individuals that do anything, and society exists in virtue of the activity of individuals."

I reply:

Although it is true that individuals act, most of our actions are "interactions."  I prefer to say that individuals exist in virtue of the society into which they are born, and in which they develop (though interactions with significant others).

You wrote:

"Second, the idea is to get beyond the idea of the autonomous individual marked off by private property and bourgeois right and thereby reduced to undifferentiated and homogeneous abstractions of equality.  From each, to each places a radical emphasis on concrete individuals -- it looks to the unlimited unfolding of the capacity and potential of each." 

I reply:

This still seems to me to be a kind of "bourgeois individualism."

You wrote:

"If association generates more wealth than the simple aggregate sum of its parts, then social wealth is not just a question of individual unfolding but a question of more or less rich social arrangements as well.  So this too has to be taken into account in thinking of the flourishing of all as a condition for the flourishing of each."

I reply:

It seems to me that you take back in the second sentence what you conceded in the first.  That is, by saying that "the flourishing of all [is] a condition for the flourishing of each," you have gone back to an image of a "simple aggregate sum of its parts."  Why not say that "the flourishing of the collectivity is a condition for the flourishing of its members"?

Best regards,

Dick


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