On Apr 21, 2012, at 9:32 AM, Ted Winslow wrote:
...important aspects of the idea of "science" dominant since Newton, the idea that fragments all being, including human being, into inanimate bits and has, therefore, no logical space for the distinction Marx drew between the human activity that created medieval cathedrals (and, in a much higher form, would be required to create a socialist labour process) and the activity of bees constructing bee hives...
Except that the Marx passage you are so fond of citing, and which I criticized as 19th century ideology unworthy of Marx, did not speak of human or apian "activities" but of "the worst" architect and "the best" bee. Singulars. Individuals. And that is the fundamental error of Newtonian-Leibnizian science and its mechanical materialism-- that nature, including the nature of human activities, is to be conceived as a mass of individuals (windowless monads, elementary particles, beings). What this mechanical materialism has no logical space for is the existence, the "being," of *collective* consciousness. It admits only the pathetic notion of interaction between individual consciousnesses mediated by a system of symbolic (oral or visual) tokens. In reality no (medieval) cathedral had an "architect" good or bad--they were constructed by human communities to "live" (conduct human activities) in. Just as a beehive has no architect--it is constructed by a family of bees to "live" (conduct apian activities) in. Humans like bees are social animals and human, like apian, consciousness is inherently collective with a necessary individual dimension. The real distinction between humans and bees is that the apian hive-mind is very highly developed while the human hive- mind, reflecting our brief and very incomplete evolutionary maturation, is so full of confusion and poisonous ideology that our very species-existence (and that of so many other species) is threatened by our collective incompetence.
Note, please, that Marx asserts (correctly) that humans are capable of creating according to the "laws of beauty." But where did we discover those *laws*? How are they to be found? Not by reasoning from empirical data, you can be sure (that is why Kant's Critique of Judgment could never escape from aporia). We learned of the beauty of sound from the birds, we learned of the beauty of color from the trees and the grasses, and we learned of the beauty of structure--from the bees! And we learned long before there was such a thing as an individual painter, an individual architect, an individual musician.
Shane Mage This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures." Herakleitos of Ephesos
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