From: "Jukka Laari" <jlaari-AT-dodo.jyu.fi>
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 1997 18:33:31 EET+200
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: self-other


James, 

I see your point. It's o.k. with reference to history of ideas. I'm 
not questioning historical nature of thinking and discourses. 

However, "sie wissen es nicht, aber sie tun es": they don't know it, 
yet they do it, as Marx said in Capital. That applies to our problem, 
too. People don't have to develop *concept* of self as based on 
'dialectic of self and other', they can either think of themselves 
materialistically as 'me, this body', or idealistically as 'me, this 
thought'. Yet they have went through certain developmental stages. 
That is, all homo sapiens individuals develop into humanity only in 
social relations. Put a new-born baby in a box for 10 years and then 
(provided it's still alive) try to teach it for example language. We 
don't have to be aware of some specific function or process in order 
it to work. It's just more or less accidental that it was just Hegel 
who was able to logically analyze the significance of social 
relations (as *we* call them now) and theorise that into his general 
schema. 

Yours, Jukka L 

> That's the bit that stretches credulity for me. 
> 
> Much of what we take for granted as faculties of the biological 
> human are really things that have been developed over time. (...)  
> Richard Rorty makes the point that mind is a relatively recent 
> invention (Philosophy and thre Mirror of Nature).
> 
> I guess I am saying that Hegel inserts selfhood right back into the
> beginning of his ideal history to let it teleologically unfold, where
> the material might not support that idea. The one thing that we have
> learnt from Hegel, that each age should be understood as having its own
> special modulations and conditions, can be turned against the elongated
> genesis of self-other in Master-slave.


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