Differentia specifica of human species is symbolic communication and behavior - language and culture .
BY CHARLES BROWN
I write here a dialectical critique of Engels’ essay “The Role of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” in part based on Marx’s claim that human labor is differentiated from all other species “ labor by the role of imagination “! ( (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm ) Otherwise , in his anthropological _The Origin of the Family , Private Property and the State _ , Engels is profoundly correct on the difference between the Stone Age and Civilization and other issues.
My critique of Engels on this point is informed by the current biological ( human evolution) and cultural anthropological facts on origin of tool use , stone tool use ; and the nature of language and culture as SYMBOLIC communication and behavior . Origin of tool use and origin of language and culture is the issue Engels speculates concerning in “The Role of Labour in the transition from Ape to Man“. My basic difference with him is that language and culture allowed the invention of labor with Stone tools created by imagination; not labor created language and culture ( symbolic communication and behavior ; see definition of symbolic signs below ) ; I plead not guilty to the charge of philosophical idealism -smiles .
The origin of humans is the origin of language and culture , NOT the origin of bipedalism and hands freed from walking on all fours . ( see pre-human , habitually bipedal primates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecine)
“Engels never finished Dialectics of Nature. Haldane, in his preface to the 1939 publication of Dialectics of Nature, regrets that it remained unpublished for a long time, and writes, “Had his remarks on Darwinism been generally known, I for one would have been saved a certain amount of muddled thinking.” One of its unfinished fragments is on the role of labor in human evolution, more specifically the evolution of the hand. It is the evolution of the hand through the process of labor—creating tools—that distinguishes humans from apes. Engels writes, “Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour.” It is not the evolution of the hand that led to our evolution as a species but the coevolution of the hand and labor as a historical process.”
The bottomline of my critique in the blog below is : Language and culture , symbolic communication and symbolically guided behavior, originate 2.5 million years ago and enable homo habilis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_habilis) to make the first Stone tools . ( THE ORIGIN OF HUMANS IS IN THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURE , SYMBOLIC COMMUNICATION AND BEHAVIOR) It is NOT that the ancestral bipedal species (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecine)
to homo habilis started using its hands ( freed by bipedalism ; standing on two feet instead of four freeing the hands ) and that caused them to start symbolic communication and behavior as Engels speculates . ( this is not idealist philosophical error on my part ; I will explain why not below)
Here is Engels’ essay
The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/index.htm
The following is my blog item critiquing Engels‘ essay.
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2017/02/more-leisure-is-homo-sapiens-species.html
More Leisure is Homo sapiens species essence ; May Day demand
More Leisure ( than our ancestral primate species had) is our species essence ( See "The Original Affluent Society" by my anthropological mentor and senior anthro major advisor ,Marshall Sahlins , in _Stone Age Economics_ ) . Foraging is a mode of direct appropriation from nature , not a mode of production; making a living by gigging smart not working hard. It was not that bi-pedalism and the origin of hands originated a new labor that caused the invention of tradition , names and words . The invention of culture and language in childcare by mothers ( I’m saying mothers invented names , words , symbolic communication to improve childcare, reproductive labor ) was extended to making a living ( the Darwinian struggle for existence) ; language and culture revolutionized the human struggle for existence by making it smarter, wiser, because of accumulation of knowledge over many generations . Language gives humans the capacity for dead generations to leave communications about their experiences to future living generations) . Also More leisure gives more time to think and thereby work even smarter.
Symbolic communication allows :
Ancestor veneration
The difference between humans and all other species is that through symbolic communication , words and culture, dead generations have a certain immortality and are part of the society of living generations . Living generations share the experiences of dead generations . Thereby knowledge accumulates. All humans stand on the shoulders of giants , as the scientist Issac Newton put it concerning his scientific ancestors .
Engels is wrong in "The Role of Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man" when he says "First labour, after it and then with it speech ..."
CB : First long childcare , then names and speech invented by mothers to do better childcare , and then a transition to LESS toil in the struggle for existence , to smarter struggle for existence informed by ancestral experience , and more leisure as compared with primate species ancestral to homo habilis and the origin of the Stone Age . Stone tools were invented to allow making a living less toilsome and more efficient .
Perhaps the topic would be better named the transition in the struggle for existence in the transition from ape to man : the origin of imagination.
Stone Age society is Societas ( anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s term in _Ancient Society_ ) beginning 2.5 million years ago ; to circa 6,000 years ago with the beginning of Civitas ( Morgan ) private property, greed , slavery and heavy labor ( as Engels teaches in _The Origin of the Family , Private Property and the State _ ) . Slavery is the origin of Hard work , work ethic. With so-called civilization, hard work ethic comes to dominate cultural ideas . So, hard labour is not our Stone Age, species-being , but civilization-being, which is a small fraction of the full time of our species history.
I think Engels anachronistically projects the determining role of labor on ideas ( the historical materialist principle ) back onto the Stone Age origins of language and culture . In fact the invention of language and culture revolutionized the bipedal primates’ struggle for existence by making it less of a struggle . Toilsome struggle was introduced with _slave_ labor in so-called civilization where historical materialist determination originates.
Nonetheless , Marx and Engels do propose transition from the Kingdom of Necessity to the Kingdom of Freedom . Freedom is Leisure and smart work through technology . Jobs lost to technological invention should be translated into more leisure time for the masses, a May Day demand.
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
c b Thu, 27 May 2010 05:54:49 -0700
What about the transition in labor in the transition from ape to man ?
This essay uses "labor" in the sense that it is something that apes
do; it is their struggle for existence , for survival in the Darwinian sense . So, it is not the same "labor" ( or is it work ?) that produces
capitalist surplus value in _Capital_I, but the “labor “ more general to all animals
that Marx describes in Chapter so and so , where he says the
difference between the labor of spiders and bees and that of man is
imagining the project as a plan first ( this implies that spiders and
bees labor).
“en social conditions.
Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm
So, Marx’s implication ( contra Engels in “The Role of Labor “ ) is that in the transition from ape to man, labor
transitioned in part by taking on more mental labor, imagination and
planning , as a component. Imagination is a form of symbolic thinking . Symbolic thinking defines humans , differentiates humans from all other species despite the false and exaggerated claims for chimps and gorillas by some primatologists
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
c b Thu, 27 May 2010 13:32:42 -0700
Engels: “But the decisive step had been taken, the hand had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from generation to generation.”
^^^^^ CB: Ahhh but how ? How did the experience of repetition of use of _a_ hand by one individual get transferred to the brains of the next generation and the next , become the experience of _The_ hand ? If Patriarch uses his hands thousands of times his increasing dexterity is based on accumulated experience in that one individual's brain. The next generation's brains go back to "square one" at birth and childhood . The only way to accumulate the knowledge across generations is by mediating the learning experience with language, imagination, symbolic communication The only way to "stand on the shoulders of giants" is to receive messages from them through a system of symbols, words . ( as in those days there wasn't the technology to take enough pictures) "The" hand is not the hand of an individual, but The Hand, as a concept, an organ of the species.
( Symbolic signs - words being the best example - have an _arbitrary_ relation between the sign and the thing signified . They are using something to represent something that they are not.
In my class , I write my name on the board -Charles Brown . Then I point out that the marks on the board are not me; but they are used to represent me. So a name is using something to represent something it is not . There is an arbitrary relation between a name and the person named .
The opposite of a symbolic sign is an _indexical_ sign . There is a necessary ( not arbitrary ) relationship between the sign and the thing signified . A favorite example is smoke and fire . Smoke is an indexical sign of fire .
Only humans have symbolic signs . Humans and all other animals communicate or read indexical signs ; humans have both -despite the exaggerated claims for chimps and gorillas by some animals rights primatologists.
Symbolic and indexical signs are basic ideas of semiotics .( http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/)
The arbitrary relation between symbolic signs and thing signified gives humans a DISPLACEMENT capacity . Humans can communicate with each other about events that are not in their immediate sensory field , like things that happened a week ago , or things that are on the other side of town
See https://owlcation.com/stem/The-difference-between-animal-and-human-communication
I CLAIM TO HAVE DISCOVERED BY LOGICAL IMPLICATION THAT THE UNIQUE DISPLACEMENT CAPACITY OF HUMANS ALLOWS ACCUMULATION OF KNOWLEDGE OVER GENERATIONS BECAUSE A LIVING GENERATION CAN SHARE THE EXPERIENCE OF DEAD GENERATIONS , SHARE _DISPLACED_ EXPERIENCES .
Therefore , it was the ability to experience the displaced experiences of dead generations, symbolic thinking , that allowed the first humans to make Stone tools ( reverse of Engels’ idea)
Again , Symbolic communication allows :
Ancestor veneration
The difference between humans and all other species is that through symbolic communication , words and culture, dead generations have a certain immortality and are part of the society of living generations . Living generations share the experiences of dead generations . Thereby knowledge accumulates. All humans stand on the shoulders of giants , as the scientist Issac Newton put it concerning his scientific ancestors .
