Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 13:36:22 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.


Hi Carrol,

>Perhaps we are naturally free. Perhaps we are
>naturally slaves. Who knows? And I would add, seriously and not
>flippantly, who (outside the philosophy seminar room) cares or should
>care?

As I pointed out before, but you ignored it, it is a presupposition of 
your own emancipatory discourse that we aren't slaves by nature. So we 
have a performative contradiction -- unseriousness in fact: what you 
affirm in theory you deny in your own practice.

>this freedom that
>Melvin (and/or Bhaskar) claims exists prior to history. (To argue that
>it is _mediated_ historically is to argue that it _exists_
>ahistorically.)

Nonsense. We carry our human nature with us, in history, where else 
could it be? Since you don't accept a notion of a common human nature, 
take our common biology, I'm sure you don't deny that (well grounded in 
genetics as it is). That is socio-culturally 'mediated' is it not? It is 
however always ontologically distinct from that which is 
historico-specifically constructed (even when the social shapes our very 
brains) and has evolved and continues to evolve at a different (much 
slower) rhythm than the socio-cultural. It is the 'without which not' of 
any society, just as socio-cultural is the 'without which not' of it, so 
the shoe is on both feet -- you don't say that the socio-cultural 
doesn't exist or is ahistorical (let alone asocial!) because it always 
depends for its existence on the human biological organism.

Now the notion of a core universal human nature is grounded precisely in 
the notion of our common biology plus common practical engagement with 
the (enduring) laws of nature (without which we wouldn't be able to 
communicate cross-culturally) plus philosophical and theoretical 
arguments about basic human needs and potentials, among which the need 
for some kind of autonomy is well recognized.

Freedom now!

Marvell




<cbcox-AT-ilstu.edu> writes
>
>
>Marshall Feldman wrote:
>>
>> Mervyn,
>>
>> This argument worries me. If we turn it around and note that some people
>> support their own subordination -- as slaves, serfs, or housewives -- would
>> this be a legitimate argument against treating equality as a right? Some
>> people do struggle for the "return of the King." I read yesterday that
>> there's a political tendency in Guatemala hoping to return a former dictator
>> to power by electing him President. Paraphrasing Marx's comment on Adam
>> Smith, could we not turn this argument around and equally well maintain that
>> humans are essentially unfree, classed, etc.? Surely history makes this
>> argument plausible.
>>
>
>This is better than the reply I was considering. It is also another way
>of expressing Hannah Arendt's argument that if there _is_ a human nature
>we can never know it. Perhaps we are naturally free. Perhaps we are
>naturally slaves. Who knows? And I would add, seriously and not
>flippantly, who (outside the philosophy seminar room) cares or should
>care?
>
>Moreover, I do not see how we can reach any shared agreement (by we I
>mean the number of people whose collective action is the necessary
>precondition of enhanced freedom at any given time) -- I do not see how
>we can reach any shared agreement on the nature of this freedom that
>Melvin (and/or Bhaskar) claims exists prior to history. (To argue that
>it is _mediated_ historically is to argue that it _exists_
>ahistorically.) And the collective action that is a precondition of
>enhanced freedom requires such shared agreement on the freedom that is
>being fought for.
>
>And the next seems to me profoundly wrong: 'To collapse a right to the
>historical conditions of its recognition, realization or exercise is to
>commit some ethical form ... of the epistemic fallacy, grounded in the
>actualist collapse of anthropology.' I don't claim that freedom is
>_discovered_ (known) in history. I claim that it is _created_ through
>human action, and that it has no existence in abstraction from that
>activity. (Human freedom certainly would never have come into existence
>had that asteroid not destroyed the dinosaurs, for then there would have
>been no humans to be either free or unfree.)
>
>In fact, it now occurs to me that I really don't have the slightest idea
>what Melvin even means by the _word_ "freedom" as he has used it in this
>thread. Consider the phrase that started or appeared early in this
>thread, "the free development of each as a condition of the free
>development of all." That is part of Marx's _very_ scattered and _very_
>brief discussion of the "communist future," and in Melvin's terms
>(freedom as existing prior to its creat
>ion in history), I suspect we
>would have to make that the goal (i.e., motive) of struggle. But the
>very difficulty encountered in its construal marks it as an unacceptable
>_motive_ for struggle. (And after all, no one on this list is ever going
>to live in a classless society, and only the youngest have much of a
>chance, though slight, of living to see even the preliminary collapse of
>capitalism.) Marx's slight etching of a future classless society was not
>to posit a motive but to offer a perspective for the understanding of
>the present. And that perspective is useless to anyone who is not
>already, in some sense, involved in a struggle to destroy capitalism,
>for only involvement in that struggle can generate the need to see the
>present as history, that is, to look back on it from a communist future.
>
>I really don't see where the notion of freedom posited by Melvin is of
>use either to understand or to change the world. Any attempt to define
>that freedom will either be a mere echo of capitalist notions of the
>free and abstract individual existing prior to and autonomously of
>history, or it will be utopian in the negative sense, of imposing an
>abstract "good" on a humanity too stupid to realize what they really
>want.
>
>None of us knows what we really want except as that goal flows from out
>present collective action.
>
>Carrol
>
>
>
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