Re: Old post; new comment

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Comrades,
    Charles Brown writes here,

Charles,
CB: I agree with this critique of individualism, empiricism and ethicism.
However, I am thinking of the role of mothers as an objective social
process. I don't think Marxism can procede with nothing whatsoever to
replace bourgeois "psychology" or the science of the individual. We have to
have materialist and practical alternative to these. One of the failures of
the history of Marxism is to develop a full alternative to bourgeois theory
and practice of the individual. This has made a difference in the struggle
between capitalism and socialism. For example, I would speculate that the
imperialists (CIA ,MI-5 et al) had more specific understanding of the Soviet
leaders as individuals than vica versa , in part because the Soviets
disparaged the role of the specifics of individuals at the level of concrete
historical struggle. It is important to have an excellent theory and
practice of the political economic factors first, but in the long run , the
theory of individuals becomes a f!
actor. I think next time we should have a comprehensive encyclopedia of the
bourgeoisie as individuals.

I guess this is a sort of negation of the negation of the big man theory of
history.

In other words, the socialization and childrearing process inputs political
content to masses of people , so we have to have a science of this process.
It is an active, material process. No idealism here. We might think of
Marx's thesis on Feuerbach when he asks who will teach the teacher ? (A
practical critical , or political question for Marx in this context). The
answer is the teacher's mother , of course.

Doyle
I agree with this statement in some ways, but the science of the individual
is not quite as you seem to express it above.  When one looks at the latest
stuff about psychology, which is called cognitive neuroscience mostly now,
not psychology, one gets a sense not of the individual at all.

Let me just flesh out this a little bit, much of the development in this
area is happening in neuro network theory on a broad front of capitalist
science.  The way they understand a neuro network is like this,

"The Mind Within the Net: Models of learning, thinking, and acting"  Manfred
Sptzer, MIT Press, 1999,

page 8,
..."Exactly what allows these specialists to detect essential features is
often unclear; that is, the meaning of experience and essential cannot be
precisely quantified and expressed algorithmically.  For this reason, it was
long believed that these capabilities could be studied only in a human
context; that is, by interpreting the activities of the human mind.  This
may not be so..."

Doyle
Nothing can be clearer than this simple introductory statement here about
brain science.  There is nothing unique about any given human intelligence.
Especially given the issue of the contingency of experience.

page 302,
"...We would expect that what are currently called affect and emotion in a
very broad sense will be disentangled into different subcomponents."

Doyle,
Which leads to proposing theories of Temperament, Character, and Personality
(page 303) which are really the characteristics of the individual in
bourgeois science.  Therefore the individual is being dissolved into the
brain structures which produce variation, and why this variation processes
are understandable then back out into a social structure that is concerned
with not how an individual is free, but with how networks can be constructed
with properties that reflect realistic means of interweaving many people
together into titanic social structures.  That is what capitalism is aiming
for, and certainly also what we ought to engage ourselves in.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor