Caught Between a soul in every stone unturned under the inexhorable Goldman's Sack

[Ian Livingston]

> Man
> gives birth to himself in the process of history. The essential factor
> in this process of self-creation of the human race lies in its
> relationship to nature. Man, at the beginning of his history, is
> blindly bound or chained to nature. In the process of evolution he
> transforms his relationship to nature, and hence himself.

I think you are nearly right, Alice, only the logic of the assertion
becomes difficult. To say that what is is self-created suggests
inherently deistic qualities. I do not make myself. My body, cns and
all, exists before my awareness of it, or simultaneous with its most
rudimentary awareness of itself at best. However, humans do create
their own importance, the idea of themselves, via the stories they
tell about the past. Some historians think the past is immutable, and
that their job is to discover the facts and relate those facts to
future generations. I don't know who said it, one of the noted
historians of the modern era, possibly Toynbee, but that nothing
changes more frequently than history is becoming ever more evident.
Orwell ran a lively riff on the idea. It is true that we are bound to
nature at the beginning of history, and that the beginning of history
is always specifically now, when we are telling the importance of our
being here and behaving in accordance with that set of beliefs. Our
"historical metanarrative" inclines us to believe what we do about
ourselves, so our psychological "self" is the result of that history.
Man, therefore, gives birth to his "self" in the process of history.
Is that history arbitrary, then, or is it bound by impetus to follow a
trajectory? (Isn't this the tension in Slothrop's struggle, the
tension between what happened and what he believess about the past?) I
do not believe we can simply say something different about our past
today and thereby change the nature of our importance. We have to
believe what we say about ourselves for it to be meaningful, and even
that proposition falls apart in the case, for instance, of the
pathological liar who actually believes his lies once he creates them.
But, taking into account complexity and, maybe the Buddhist ideas of
interdependent origination and dependent arising, etc., we might say
that, if we tell the story of our selves more accurately, it might
change the way we respond to future data, future situations, etc., and
so on. Thus, yes, "In the process of evolution man transforms himself
and his relationship to nature, and hence himself."

On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 8:49 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Vibe is a free will capitalist and the workers are free will laborers.
>
>  Or are both detemined by some forced or unforced Willer Unseen? If
> so, is this force of Man's making? Even if it is God?
>
>
> Does Charles Montgomery "Monty" Burns make the Plant? Is he free to
> make it in his own image? Or does the Plant, or some Force That
> through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower, drive him and his Plants?
> Are the workers either Waylon Smithers or Homer? Or are the Workers
> Free to exercise their will? To muder and create? To make themselves
> and make themselves free?
>
> Erich Fromm 1961
>
> 2. Marx's Historical Materialism
>
>
>  It is very important to understand Marx's fundamental idea: man
> makes his own history; he is his own creator. As he put it many years
> later in Capital: "And would not such a history be easier to compile
> since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in
> this, that we have made the former, but not the latter." [15] Man
> gives birth to himself in the process of history. The essential factor
> in this process of self-creation of the human race lies in its
> relationship to nature. Man, at the beginning of his history, is
> blindly bound or chained to nature. In the process of evolution he
> transforms his relationship to nature, and hence himself.
>
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch02.htm
>
>
> On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 10:18 PM, Michael Bailey
> <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  alice wellintown wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Even in deterministic works, like Melville's or Pynchon's or Hellers,
>>> where a grander and more powerful force (Marxian, Freudian,
>>> Nietzscheian ...) is set in an agon with the creative principle (or
>>> Free will), a kind of dialectic functions or a paradox titilates. It's
>>
>> so Vibe represents free will?
>> I sort of like the guy, in some ways, but I don't see a lot of
>> freedom as his lot
>> he's just jacked into a way of life that has as many limitations
>> and irritations as any laborer in "his" mines
>>
>>>
>>> only art after all. Art for art's sake and for the sake of those who
>>> need a romantic escape from the brusing heel of free will and take
>>> solace in forced beyond.
>>
>> forced beyond - typo?  or genius concept?
>> I'll go with the latter: Art as a reaction to stress, in which one
>> is forced beyond, Art is the beyond into which one is forced?
>>
>>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."