Julio Huato wrote:
> This is how: You decide the end ex hypothesi. It's as simple as this:
> Let x be a variable. Now x can be the stature of children in New
> Hampshire, the income of households in New Zealand, or the number of
> angels fitting in the head of a pin. You decide ex hypothesi what x
> is. Think of x as the entire framework of this formalization: You
> fill it out with the content that you stipulate.
""
The "end" that is a "good life" in Marx's sense can't be represented by such
"variables".
Such a life is creating and appropriating beauty and truth within relations of
mutual recognition. The relations and the other "goods" whose creation and
appropriation constitutes their content objectify universal ethical, aesthetic
and intellectual values. Their actualization in a good life requires the fully
developed capabilities that define the universally developed individual.
Here again is Marx elaborating the content of a relation of mutual recognition.
"Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us
would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my
production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character,
and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during
the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual
pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and
hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I
would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a
human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature,
and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's
essential nature. 3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and
the species, and therefore would become recognized and felt by you yourself as
a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself,
and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and
your love. 4) In the individual expression of my life I would have directly
created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I
would have directly confirmed and realized my true nature, my human nature, my
communal nature.
"Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our
essential nature.
"This relationship would moreover be reciprocal; what occurs on my side
has also to occur on yours.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/index.htm
This content cannot be represented as a "variable".
It's an internal relation. The good life of each is internally related to the
good life of the other. The relation constitutes the good life of each. To be
fully constitutive of a good life the objectification of the universal by one
requires the appropriation of the objectification by the other. Both the
objectification and the appropriation require fully developed capabilities. So
the "good life" for each can't be represented as a "variable" in the sense of
something that remains self-identical through changes in its relations. Its
essence is relational; it requires a relation of mutual recognition for its
existence.
Ted
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