I zero in on two items in the exchange of ideas between Keith and Ray --->
REH >> It seems to me that you all are arguing the superiority >> of your own particular system as nature. Keith claims >> nature for trade KH > I certainly do. We now know that notions of fairness are > instinctive -- and long before man came on the scene, too. ... REH >> I also believe that assigning nature to human >> activities is always a very dangerous proposition. >> That is not our gifts as animals compared to the rest of >> the animals. The silliest thing of all is the concept >> of property. KH > Why? Even animals defends their property. REH >> The only property is Intellectual property that you >> arrive and leave with. Everything else belongs >> here. Everything else is about negotiation, wisdom and >> the courage to be who you are to the best of your >> potential and to find your peace with your fellow >> humans. KH > Fine words butter no parsnips, as we say over here. I hear > what you say, but (I hope you don't take offence) I really > don't understand this sort of language, I'm afraid. Here again is a topic on which I am always inclined to intervene in order to clarify what is at stake and, where I think necessary, to modify or correct claims which seem to me to be wrong-headed. Re: the exchange above, I think that my learned colleague Professor Thomas Hobbes can be of great help. Hobbes enters the discussion most definitely on the side of "science", committed as he is to the materialism of the "New Science" (of Galileo, et al). On these grounds Hobbes sought to develop a "political science": to explicate the human, political, & moral consequences of the premise that *nothing* exists but matter and its modes of motion: that there is nothing but matter/energy, one might say. In "Of Man" - the 1st of the 4 'Books' in LEVIATHAN (1651) - Hobbes offers a detailed sketch of those natural creatures, humans, and argues that, like all other "living things", human beings are naturally existing complex arrangements of matter possessed of certain internal states of motion in which consists their "life" - in mammals, for example, heart pumping, breathing, digestion - which motions are maintained by the mechanical re-deployment of energy in-puts appropriated from the external world (especially in lungs and gut, although, of course, originally *solar*!). This living thing, this organic automaton, is so constructed that a share of these energy in-puts can be re-deployed as energetic out-puts (as is found in walking, hunting, gathering, fighting, chasing, speaking, arguing). Thus Hobbes can develop an account of "man" (and other creatures) in the "state of nature", a state which Hobbes famously described as *bellum omnium contra omnium" - a war of all against all. Why a war? Because *in principle* every natural creature has a "right" to everything and a "right" to exclude any others, with no exceptions. Most famously of all, TH puts it this way: "Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." (I hasten to point out that Hobbes is not denying that men [sic] in the state of nature are necessarily alone; as in the streets of Baghdad, they may well make use of "their own strength and their own invention" to organize groups, gangs, associations, tribes, clans. Hobbes's point is that in a [civil] war, any such alliances are necessarily insecure and uncertain. ) Now we get to the point I invoke Hobbes to secure. TH continues ---> "To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power [no Sovereign], there is no law; where no law, no injustice... Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses and passions. They are qualities that relate to men in [civil] society, not in solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thine distinct; but only that to be every man's that he can get, and for so long as he can keep it." Here and elsewhere Hobbes is claiming that notions of JUSTICE or FAIRNESS as also notions of PROPERTY or "what is legitmately *MINE*" are, literally, "works of ART" (artifacts, *techne*, artifices) - intentional *constructions* of human intelligence/intellect which only have a place in the context of that PRIME Artifact, the Commonwealth, the Sovereign Power (Leviathan), which *we* bring into existence by mutual implicit and explicit covenants (futures contracts). These convenants, says Hobbes, have the form: "I hereby promise to transfer *all* my natural rights and powers to this 3rd and artificial entity, the Sovereign (the Parliament, say), if you will also so promise." If this is right - and I'm prepared to argue more fully if necessary that it is right - then no animal can defend its property. An animal can do its best to obtain and hang onto whatever it *wants*, but it has no claim whatsoever against another animal who wants that thing also. If animal A says to invading animal B, "Hey! You can't have that; it's MINE!" animal B is perfectly right to say, "What's that to ME?" Without the common "intellectual property" of an established Commonwealth and its laws preomulgated, the word "mine" has no meaning whatsoever beyond "what I want". By a similar argument, the word "just" or "fair" can have no meaning in the state of nature beyond "what tends to maintain or enhance my vital motions". Needless to say, this can be given the appropriate neo-Darwinian spin by saying, or adding, "what tends to maintain or enhance my vital motions by conferring survival advantages". Let's be as clear as possible about this: Animal A may well be *behaving* with respect to other animals B, C, and D in ways that *we* construe as fair or just or equitable. Indeed, we might even find ourselves saying that "Animal A is acting according to principles of justice." But this *cannot* be what it is, what's going on, *for the animal* since, after all by the same argument, the animal is behaving "instinctively", just doing what Darwin has arranged for it to do. For it genuinely to be acting according to justice, it would have to be able to choose *not* to do so; it would have to be intentionally obedient to some law(s) of equity. Hobbes and I would be inclined to argue that no animal but the human *in civil society* can do such a thing. And such a human is living in an artificial world, not strictly just a natural world, because justice and property only exist as items in a commonwealth, a means whereby we move beyond, lift ourselves out of, the world of mere nature. As Hobbes puts it (continuing from the above) ---> "And thus much for the ill condition which man by mere nature is actually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the passions, partly in his reason. "The passions that incline men to peace are: fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace upon which men may be drawn to agreement. These articles are they which otherwise are called the laws of nature, whereof I shall speak more particularly in the two following chapters. [Bk I, XIV, etc]" THe crucial thing, I guess, is that the "articles of peace" upon which reason may compel us to agree, are fundamentally *intellectual* items, ideas carried in and expressed by means of *language* - the means whereby we bring ourselves fully into being as creations of the *polis*, "social and political animals". (This is what Ray is alluding to, I think). These thoughts concerning justice, property, and so forth are parallel to a similar set of thoughts about language, mind, and consciousness. The neo-Darwinians (like Steven Pinker) push very hard on trying to understand everything human in categories of nature and the "natural" (evolutionary this and that). Those critical of and opposed to this program - what should they be called? "humanists"? "neo-romantics"? ... not really - wish to make a point about the special categories of *intentionality*: awareness, consciousness, the reflectiveness of *language*, and the positive existence of choice, that is, *politics* - things which cannot be reduced to or understood in terms of matter in motion or evolutionary advantages. Hobbes is useful in showing how one might talk coherently and inclusively about *both* nature and art, both the natural and the artificial (civil, political) without getting occupied by just one side, one aspect, of the human condition. Does Hobbes** help? Stephen Straker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Vancouver, B.C. ** from: Thomas Hobbes, LEVIATHAN (1651) CHAPTER XIII: OF THE NATURAL CONDITION OF MANKIND AS CONCERNING THEIR FELICITY AND MISERY. http://www.reasonworks.com/library/historical/thomas_hobbes/ Copyright ©Internet Infidels 1995-1999. All rights reserved. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
