Subject: RE: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2003 12:22:12 -0500


Hi James,

After having read ch 1 of "Deals and Ideals," and McIntyre's review of the whole book, I have a much better sense of how to respond to your post.

You wrote:

"It seems to me that "individualism" in the sense of MacPherson's "possessive individualism" is egoism, selfishness, the hypertrophy of the particular, and is what is intended in the term "methodological individualism". But Marx and Kierkegaard followed Hegel (using concepts which in this sense originate in Kant) in defining the individual as the reconciliation of the particular and the universal."

I ask:

Do I misread you as attributing an ontological assertion to M, K, and H?  If so, how do that assertion differ from the Aristotelian and Thomistic notion of the particularization of universal forms by matter? 

You wrote:

Marx was in the classical philosophical tradition which saw (Isaiah Berlin's "negative") freedom as the bourgeois "Right of Man" to exploit, but (Berlin's) "positive" freedom as both individual and communal self-government by (not instrumental but spiritual) reason, directed to the common good (justice), which includes individual rights. That would require Aristotle's philia or friendship between the citizens. For Athenians that did not include metics (immigrants from other Greek city states, often merchants), women or slaves. The idea of total human inclusiveness in moral equality was a spiritual (rational) achievement of stoicism, and the idea of justice as requiring political equality for all (democracy) is a spiritual achievement of modernity, but one corrupted by the very rights of possessive individualism of capitalist property relations in terms of which it arrived (and which Proudhon wished to extend and equalise materially).

I reply:

This seems like a brief history of the expansion of the "civic sphere."  But doesn't the problem of "too big" or "too absract" emerge with the Stoic ideal?  How can there be more than a "pseudo-solidarity" among "all humans"?  How can we speak realistically of right-duty relationships among those who have no real social relationhips?

You wrote:

"There is a parallel between the usage of the terms "individual" and "individualism" and the terms "nation" and "nationalism". Competitive nationalism was particularistic great power chauvinism, but Marx saw the freeing of oppressed nations, of Poland from Russia and Ireland from England (including of the Irish working class from domination by the English working class -- even in the First International itself), as particular parts of the universalist (spiritual) international struggle for emancipation from capitalism."

I reply:

I think this is a dangerous parallel, often involving the false attribution of the characteristics of persons to collectivities.

You wrote:

"Each individual's quest for discovery of the universal essence which is our reality is part of the work and struggle for humanity's enlightenment and emancipation which must include relations of production from each according to ability and to each according to need. Roy makes this clear in all his latest books."

I reply:

I do regard myself as having been, and being, on a "quest," but I cannot agree that my quest has been for the discovery of the "universal essence" which is "our reality."  Does this mean that I suffer from false consciousness, that I am unenlightened, or just that I march to the tune of a different drummer?  But, admitting the last alternative seems to put is all into the chaos of the relativism of the Sophists.

Best regards,

Dick


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