Talk:Marx's theory of human nature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Philosophy Portal This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Philosophy, which collaborates on articles related to philosophy. To participate, you can edit this article or visit the project page for more details.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received an importance rating on the importance scale.
Additional information: Related task forces (core areas): Social and political philosophy Related task forces (major traditions): Marxism Related task forces (periods): Modern philosophy

Gattungswesen is not identical to human nature, and Marx of course criticized the conception of an eternal and universal human nature (concerning reversal of recent edits). Regards, Santa Sangre 22:39, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Furthermore, you can't extrapolate from Norman Geras' book (no matter how good it is) and claim that's all that can be said. It is not generally admitted that Marx conceived of an eternal & universal nature! Santa Sangre 22:43, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] removed text

I removed this paragraph from the "Humans as free, purposive producers" section:

Can Marx's claims be substantiated? Allen Wood wrote that 'Marx gives no real argument for identifying labour or production as the most basic or essential human function' but that ‘human history (on Marx’s theory) is best made intelligible in terms of [the assumption that there is something such as] the fundamental human aspiration to develop and exercise the productive powers of society. Consequently, we have good evidence for regarding this as the fundamental or chief human good’. This claim seems to rely on the premise that the expansion of the productive forces in history can be attributed to the creative nature of humans. It's debatable whether this characterisation should be allowed though - see the below section on historical materialism. However, many of Marx's contentions are fairly strong intuitions for many people. It does seem to be characteristic of humans to make plans for what they build and what they do. And it does seem that humans do have a tendency to create which transcends the manufacture of what is necessary for survival.

It seemed to me that this was more critical analysis/discussion than encyclopaedic explanation, so I was bold and took it out. I was a little unsure about removing such a large block of text, however, so I'm putting this here. --superioridad ^(discusión) 02:40, 15 December 2007 (UTC)