[Xmca-l] Re: The Anatomy of the Ape

[David Kellogg]

Thanks, Andy--that's the answer I was looking for. T. Carver argues that
what Marx is really saying in this passage is that our appreciation of
ancient Greek art is a kind of nostalgia for slave times. That's certainly
true in some places (it explains Mussolini's neo-classicism, the
appreciation of Classical culture in the slave-owning South, etc.). But
nostalgia really is teleological: it is a longing for naivete, innocence,
and temps perdu. I think this passage says something very different: any
language contains its own history. That's all. It doesn't imply that a
language is reducible to a history or a history can be elaborated into the
whole language. Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida "contains" Homer, but
that doesn't mean that it is Homer for grown-ups.

David

On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 8:19 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> The aphorism was reproduced in
> https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/
> critique-pol-economy/index.htm
> , Appendix 1, published in German in Berlin in 1859, most of
> which is found verbatim in The Grundrisse.
>
> Andy
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 22/11/2017 10:08 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
> > Vygotsky cites, in the Historical Meaning of the Crisis of Psychology,
> > Marx's rather cryptic remark in the Grundrisse about human anatomy
> holding
> > the key to the anatomy of the ape. He uses this elsewhere (in his
> > discussions of psychotechnics and pedology) and obviously finds it an
> > important remark. More, he is perfectly aware of its non-teleological
> > character: he knows that saying that humans developed from apes is not
> the
> > same thing as saying that apes are fated to become humans.
> >
> > But how did Vygotsky know this? As far as I can figure out, the
> Grundrisse
> > wasn't published until 1939, five years after Vygotsky's death. Did
> > Vygotsky have privileged access? Or is there some other place where Marx
> > says this that I don't know about?
> >
> > David Kellogg
> >
> >
>
>