Re: [Pen-l] I want to know

[Ted Winslow <egwinslow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

c b wrote:

> On these issues, Freud commits vulgar materialist (smile) and
> individual reductionist error. Money grubbing, greed ,is cultural or
> socio-historical , not natural. It is not an instinct.

When he explicitly considers "ontology", Freud is a "vulgar  
materialist", as, ironically, are many "Marxists", particularly those  
who think Foucault is "quoting Marx without saying so".

His psychology can, however, via "sublation", be made consistent with  
"historical materialism".

For the latter, history is a process that substitutes "reason" for  
"instinct", a substitution extremely difficult to accomplish.

Marx's view of this sublates Aristotle and Hegel (who also sublates  
Aristotle).

"one can be frightened or bold, feel desire or anger or pity, and  
experience pleasure and pain in general, either too much or too  
little, and in both cases wrongly; whereas to feel these feelings at  
the right time, on the right occasion, towards the right people, for  
the right purpose and in the right manner, is to feel the best amount  
of them, which is the mean amountâand the best amount is of course  
the mark of virtue. And similarly there can be excess, deficiency, and  
the due mean in actions. Now feelings and actions are the objects with  
which virtue is concerned; and in feelings and actions excess and  
deficiency are errors, while the mean amount is praised, and  
constitutes success; and to be praised and to be successful are both  
marks of virtue. Virtue, therefore is a mean state in the sense that  
it is able to hit the mean.  Again, error is multiform ïfor evil is a  
form of the unlimited, as in the old Pythagorean imagery, and good of  
the limited, whereas success is possible in one way only which is why  
it is easy to fail and difficult to succeedâeasy to miss the target  
and difficult to hit it; so this is another reason why excess and  
deficiency are a mark of vice, and observance of the mean a mark of  
virtue:

Goodness is simple, badness manifold.â
<http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0054%3Abekker+page%3D1106b 
>

"Freedom as the ideal of that which is original and natural, does not  
exist as original and natural. Rather must it be first sought out and  
won; and that by an incalculable medial discipline of the intellectual  
and moral powers. The state of Nature is, therefore, predominantly  
that of injustice and violence, of untamed natural impulses, of  
inhuman deeds and feelings. Limitation is certainty produced by  
Society and the State, but it is a limitation of the mere brute  
emotions and rude instincts; as also, in a more advanced stage of  
culture, of the premeditated self-will of caprice and passion. This  
kind of constraint is part of the instrumentality by which only, the  
consciousness of Freedom and the desire for its attainment, in its  
true - that is Rational and Ideal form - can be obtained. To the Ideal  
of Freedom, Law and Morality are indispensably requisite: and they are  
in and for themselves, universal existences, objects and aims; which  
are discovered only by the activity of thought, separating itself from  
the merely sensuous, and developing itself, in opposition thereto; and  
which must on the other hand, be introduced into and incorporated with  
the originally sensuous will, and that contrarily to its natural  
inclination.â
<http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history4.htm>

When sublated, Freud's ideas point to many more obstacles in the way  
of the development of "reason" (Freud's "ego") and the introduction of  
its truths into and their incorporation with the originally sensuous  
will, i.e. the will dominated by instinct.

Such a sublation also substitutes the ontological and anthropological  
ideas that constitute "historical materialism" for Freud's "vulgar  
materialism".

It also sublates Nietzsche whose insights into the hidden root of  
mistaken ideas about "reason", e.g. its misidentification with  
axiomatic deductive reasoning, and "morality", e.g. morality as "super- 
ego" morality, in instinctive sadism were appropriated by Freud.

Ted

"Historical materialism" is "individualist".  It constitutes the  
"individual" as the only locus of agency and the realization of value.

The "individuality" of individuals is conceived, however, as the  
outcome of their relations understood as "internal relations" and as  
developing to "freedom", in the senses specified in the passages from  
Aristotle and Hegel, through an "educational" process of internally  
related historical stages that substitutes rational self-determination  
("reason") for instinctive determination of feeling, thinking, willing  
and acting.

Here too psychoanalysis can add insight since, within the limits of  
its vulgar materialism, it makes the relative degree and form of  
irratiionality understood as psychopathology the product to a  
signficant extent of the particular social relations, particularly the  
family relations, within which individuals develop and live.

This will explain why Marx's claims about the positive effects of the  
capitalist labour process and of the Russian peasant commune on  
"integral development" turn out to have been mistaken.





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