PHIL3395: Marx

Novy SP09

Lee: Chapter 1 “Human Nature / Species Being

§ Species Being

“By creating a world of objects – intellectual, musical, artistic, [etc.] – human beings create themselves as the objects of intention, deliberation, and contemplation. One becomes the scholar, the musician, [etc.] through a process both dialectical and ecological. That is, “mere” Species being overcomes or transcends itself through the objectification of its material conditions – through making over its material conditions into its own image – for such is what it means to have a world, that is, to live a past, present, and future represented in the enduring objects of creative labor.”

§ Historicity and Freedom

“Through the creation of representations of ourselves which endure in the external world we not only duplicate, but advance the development of human personality conceived as embodied, experiential, rational, and – within the constraints of our material conditions – free.”

Mind/body dualism

1. “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life”

2. Freedom is created & achieved through praxis

3. “Dialectical materialism is the history of the humanizing transformation of the material world; its signal advance over mind/body dualism is that the former can provide what the latter cannot, namely a metaphysic or conceptual framework within which to account for both the embodied and the mental, the ecological and the social which animates the history of Sp.Being. Need it turns out, really is the mother of invention – as well as the mother of the collective ascent from earth to the heaven of human freedom”

§ Critique of Religion

1. Rel. has the capacity to convince us of the reality of the mind (soul) as an a priori substitute for the emergent self consciousness made possible through praxis

2. Genius of religion: elevation and redemption of the soul through mortification of the body

The task of philosophy

3. “The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act & fashion his reality as a man who has lost his illusions & regained his reason; so that he will revolve about himself as his own true sun”

4. “It is the task of history … to establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, is to unmask human self-alienation in its secular form now that it has been unmasked in its sacred form. Thus the criticism of heaven has been transformed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics”

§ Divisions of Labor

1. One’s consciousness “of the necessity of associating with the individuals around him is the beginning of the consciousness that he is living in society at all. [In the beginning,] man is only distinguished from the sheep by the fact that with him consciousness takes the place of instinct and that his instinct is a conscious one.”

2. Consciousness of the means by which we fulfill need, equips us to control the conditions under which it is met

1. Thus, we have the ability to surmount immediacy, to abstract & to conceptualize

3. We produce the whole of nature by becoming able to conceive “nature” and hence “self”

Reproduction

4. Claim: The most basic social relationship is man and woman with their offspring

1. The first division of labor is that “natural” to sexual reproduction

5. Is construal of the division of labor this way inconsistent with other aspects of M’s conception of species being?