Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 17:14:47 -0600
Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.




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 creation 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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