RE: End.Gr.-Engels (Long post - 600 words)

[winslow@xxxxxxxx (Ted Winslow)]

While I was away last week, the following interchange took place between
Heinz Kurz and Jim Devine:

Heinz:

>>What is Engels' definition of an "educated person"?

Jim:

>I'm sure he didn't have one. Most people don't, including myself.
>It's hard to decide where to draw the line, especially since some
>people are very wise without having gone to college.
>

There is a usage of "educated person" in Marx/Engels that has important
implications both for the use of mathematics and for growth theory in
general.  Marx adopted Hegel's " very heretical views" on the
specialization and division of labour (_Capital_, Penguin p. 485).
Hegel's views are found in his idea of the "educated person".

"By educated men we may prima facie understand those who without the
obtrusion of personal idiosyncrasy can do what others do.  It is precisely
this idiosyncrasy, however, which uneducated men display, since their
behaviour is not governed by the universal characteristics of the
situation.  ...  Education rubs the edges off particular characteristics
until a man conducts himself in accordance with the nature of the thing."
(Hegel, _Philosophy of Right_, p. 268)

Educated individuals "determine their knowing, willing, and acting in a
universal way." (Hegel, _Philosophy of Right_, p. 124)

What has this to do with the use of mathematics and with growth theory in
general?

Mathematics is not universally applicable.  Its use is often inappropriate
because it does not accord with "the nature of the thing".  For example,
many forms of mathematics implicitly require that relations approximate to
external relations, that is, their use to describe a process requires that
the identities of the things related remain unchanged through the process.
Take arithmetic.  One thing plus another thing doesn't always make two
things.  For example, a spark plus gunpowder doesn't make two things.  (The
illustration is taken from A.N. Whitehead, one of the most important modern
philosophers of internal relations.)  The educated person will take care to
ground the use of mathematical methods in "the nature of the thing".

The concept of the "educated person" has a more fundamental implication for
growth theory.  Marx can be read, I think, as treating human history as a
process of development, of _bildung_, through which we, by means of our own
efforts as the only real subjects of that history, become a community of
educated persons in Hegel's sense - a community of, to use Marx's phrase,
"universally developed individuals".  "Forces of production" are the index
of this development; they are the "cunning of reason" as Marx, citing
Hegel, puts it in _Capital_ (p. 285).  Consequently, to fully understand
the process of human development - including, as an essential part of this,
the development of forces of production - we must understand the process
through which embodied mind develops to rationality and hence to
"universality" and freedom.

A key aspect of this is understanding the ways in which each of a
succession of progressively less and less authoritarian relations of
production at first promotes but then fetters this development.  These
relations themselves undergo a process of development internally related to
the development of the individuals embedded in them.  The process is aimed
at fully self-consciously constituted absolutely free relations of mutual
recognition between universally developed individuals.

Those who think _Capital_ has nothing to do with ideas of this kind, need
to explain passages such as the following:

"This possibility of varying labour must become a general law of social
production, and the existing relations must be adapted to permit its
realization in practice.  That monstrosity, the disposable working
population held in reserve, in misery, for the changing requirements of
capitalist exploitation, must be replaced by the individual man who is
absolutely available for the different kinds of labour required of him; the
partially developed individual, who is merely the bearer of one specialized
social function, must be replaced by the totally developed individual, for
whom the different social functions are different modes of activity he
takes up in turn." (_Capital_, p. 618)


Ted Winslow                             E-mail: winslow@xxxxxxxx
Division of Social Science              Phone: (416) 736-5054
York University
North York, Ont.
CANADA M3J 1P3