Greetings Economists, Hello Melvin, I'll draw a distinction in my terms which are related to your conceptualization below. On Oct 15, 2006, at 10:15 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
believe alienation refers to more than the loss of emotional ties but the loss of soul or life - species, essence. This species essence is a real thing and the meaning of beauty for me.
Doyle; Alienation in your terms in the word, soul, does sound in common usage more than emotion. I would say it's the sense of the whole being shattered in a life if I were to put that in my own words. Having said that, I'll apply my view here. Carrol's comment about psychology draws upon not getting into personal evaluations which can't be known. This is not what I am talking about. And your comment above better illustrates to what I am pointing. Emotions can shared between people and they can be communicated. Our tools for communicating are more and less able to reproduce emotions. This ability to communicate emotions and utilize that as material information is not psychological. And it can be thought of as a framework in the sense it shapes how we communize to people we know. Alienation in the sense you use is an inner sense of the complete whole of the person as soul means to many people. There are characteristic examples in vision that give us a sense of what that means to 'know' the whole. Given the tools of communication we have, this wholeness is not communicable and this lack of communicability is to what Carrol is arguing. This does not mean in my view you are imagining something even if that is how you say in your own words how you take this debate. This goal of wholeness to socialist society is a basic communist vision in my view. This is the sort of opinion Engels had in talking of what he liked in novels. Back to emotions as a content for communication. Emotional expression is in parallel to words and speech. Text does not well represent emotional expression. Further, any system that develops a framework for communicating the information of emotional connection means 'sharing' information. So fundamentally emotional information matters only in the sense that we share our feelings. The oppression of society, the inequality, of society is most known through the pain it inflicts and this emotional framework is how workers best understand their class identity. So to finish this thought, a realistic expression of emotional content is not psychological in so far as the means of communication can reproduce it. Secondly, we know our alienation by how we feel about the inequality of our lives in a class system. I would say then yes, alienation is not just how we feel, as alienation is the whole of the community by which it is equal or unequal. But at the same time how we feel better expresses how community really holds together into a whole. No one who loves can say mere words can express that love. Finally, this structure of emotion to which great advances are being made to understand and communicate, is the foundation for how we would oppose racism, and sexism. For none of those structures can be fought without a systemic emotional equalization of society. Were a socialist framework of emotion developed it would be in the context of a Socialist Cultural Revolution. thanks, Doyle
